Jesus X. Christ

Something Hit the Wolf Man Today That Affected Him Like That Searchlight Affected the Fabulous Apostle Paul of Antioch on the Road to Damascus--Praise the Lard! and Pass the Biscuits and Jelly
Holy Mary Magdalene! I've been in her church (the Church of the Holy Whore) in Marseilles--she's supposed to have a little more divinity than good ole Mamma Mary to that city's faithful; yes, I mean that Holy of Holy mothers, that Mary, the underage Jewish chick married to an old carpenter named Joe, that, holier than any thou on earth mother from whose free-from-semen eggs miraculously hatched the beatific lil' baby Joshua ben Joseph--"Let's see you top that, whore!" Mamma Mary was once heard spewing like a aroused cat as she riffed with Jesus's favorite babe, if you believe Coppola or Harrison Ford, whichever one of those plebian artists it was who said Jesus had a little bastard with Mary Maggie of the Streets, and I certainly do believe that since I can transcend over into Hollywood reality every now and then without contaminating my sinless messianic nature. But that has only to do with my expletive (isn't blaspheming Jesus and precious Mother Mary a death sentence?--"OH, shit, Lard, I'm gonna die? Really; I believe in Buddha's reincarnation bullshit, so now what'd'a I do?" "I am the fruit of the vine," saith the Lard. That beats my logic. I look over and see Daffy Duck sitting at a stool on the far end of the bar--I'm quoting myself--that's the first line to a novel I was once writing.

After I graduated from college, I was a Master of the Arts, baby, a social observer, a social rationalist, a tolerant, fun-loving, Chevrolet-drivin' fool, me and my roommate for my last two years in college, a dime-novelist, published, pretty well known among the cheap-thrill trailer house trash readers who look upon him as their Hemingway--or maybe more like their James Jones--but hell, nobody remembers James Jones now just like nobody remembers my roomate now (I once worked for a vanity press here in NYC and by God I swear one day in one of their sales brochures they mentioned my roommate as one of their most successful writers--so that bastard had paid to have his damn novels published, but then, shit, I know he got money for two of his novels, especially one called Trailer House Camp Tramp or something like that--I'm sure that was published by Fawcett or somebody--who the hell cares, I stop myself...and he and I were headin' home, him to his hometown just north of Fort Worth and me to my hometown out on the West Texas prairie, and when we got to the cutoff to his hometown, he said, "You wanna go to L.A.?" and I said, "Why not?" We had credit cards. I got about 7 credit cards on graduating from college, from Mobil, from Gulf, from Phillips 66 ("fill up with Phillips 66"--my dad always told me it started out as a airplane gasoline--Phillips headquarters was just a few miles down the road from Enid, Oklahoma, where I was growing up, over in Bartlesville in the Price Tower, an architectural marvel of Frank Lloyd Wright himself--a beautiful building sitting like a majestic American castle in this otherwise hayseed north-central Oklahoma town--can you call it a city?), and an early MasterCard, and I started using them the minute I got 'em--payin' for them! hell, I was a Master of Arts, baby, headin' for the big time (actually I was heading for the US Army, though I didn't have to report until September and it was late June), so why not L.A., Hollywood if I could and by God I could. so out there we went.

And after we had wined and dined and Disney-ed it up in L.A. (I met my future bride in the DisneyLand parking lot in Anaheim on this trip), we headed back to Texas, the credit cards maxed out, though I had one gasoline card, from Sinclair, I think it was, I had saved so we had money to buy gas and oil to get home on. We got out of California and back through Arizona, climbing up out of Phoenix toward the Zuni Reservation in New Mexico via Show Low and St. John, Arizona.

We were pulling into Show Low, just across the city limits, when POW one of my thinned down retreads I'd bought in L.A. blew out; I couldn't afford brand new tires and retreads were like $7 a piece, sometimes really good ones were $11, so that was chicken feed to me, besides most filing stations let me put these purchases on my credit cards, so I had four new retreads on it when we left L.A. and all was going well until the left back one gave up the rubber ghost as we pulled into Show Low, actually flopped and flapped into Show Low.

Hey, wow, St. Christopher be damned, right there to our left was a Sinclair filing station with a god-damn tire repair sign big as Dallas outside the garage area. We put the car up on the rack and I picked out the guy's best retread and then we popped over to a bar we had spotted, just off the highway next to the Sinclair station. It was called Buck's Buick Bar, a little white-painted wooden structure with a big neon sign and beer neons all over its front windows. We went in. Boy was it strange. It was semi-dark in there, smokey, but once our eyes adjusted to it, it was cozy, decorated in Zuni and Hopi stuff, bows, arrows, a tomahawk, some staffs, a warbonnet--a huge one--full of eagle feathers, Buck told us, though my friend and I joked about 'em lookin' more like turkey feathers to us; why there was even a wooden Indian back by a pinball machine. The bar was semi-packed, the front end the bar full while the deep end of the bar was empty except for one dude sitting at the far end of the bar out of the light so out of sight, though his silhouette showed he was humped over, was smoking a cigarette, was turning up a bottle to his lips every now and then, and was wearing a cowboy hat.

We ordered some cold Burgies--we'd come to love Burgermeister beer out of L.A. of all the beers we sampled on this trip--Lucky Lager, A-1 (an Arizona beer), Little Burgies (7 oz. cans--perfect for the road), Ranier from up in Seattle, Anchor Steam from San Francisco, Coors--before it went national, Walthers--another Colorado beer, Berghoff--another Colorado beer, so many I can't remember them all, though I do definitely know Burgermeister became our favorite.

Buck of Buck's Buick Bar was from New York City. He'd been driving his brand new '47 Buick 8 cylinder lickity-split, he thought directly from NYC to LaLa Land with his GI monies in tow, just out of the U.S. Army--he'd done his basic training at the army base in my hometown--and he said just as he got to Show Low, that new Buick broke totally down. Cussin', he got out of the Buick, kicked it a couple'a times, looked up and saw a bar, decided to have a drink, saw a for sale sign in the window of the bar as he went in, and before he'd finished a couple'a shots of Fleischmann's, he owned the bar--Buck's Buick Bar. He still had the Buick; it was parked out in the back; he was savin' up to have it mounted on the roof--a crane out of Phoenix to get it up there was the biggest expense about it, he said, but, dammit, one day he was gonna do it.

Drunk as Lards, my friend and I left Buck's and soon we were headin' away from the setting sun back on the highway to head east into that desolute darkness that led us toward the Zuni Reservation and the highway to Gallup, Albuquerque, Tucumcari, Amarillo, and then home sweet home.

We got just outside the city limits going east, when POW, dammit, another tire blew, this time the front right one. We rimmed it back to the Sinclair station and ended up back in Buck's just as the sun shot down in a blaze of tuscan red to leave the world under a veil of pitch darkness, cold darkness, a deep desert dark.

The bar was still semi-dark, it didn't matter to it whether it was high noon or midnight; it was still as though it were lit by wagon trail lanterns.

Suddenly, the silhouette at the end of the bar got up and came slowly toward us. We were back to drinking Burgies. And then this dude was right by us whispering, "Yanquis want to buy horned toad?" Whaaa! I turned and square-faced him; he was a Hopi or a Zuni Native American, sharp chisled features in hard glistening red stone, wearing a straw cowboy hat whose brim left a shadow over his face that expanded his nose to the point it looked like a duck bill.

Buck said, "Chief, Chief, leave these folks alone now, come on...." then to us, "...he's wantin' money so he can buy another pint of Santa Fe wine; that's his favorite--if you want that horned toad, you like 'em, give him 75 cents for it...." "How 'bout I buy him a bottle of this Santa Fe wine instead? I played with horned toads as a kid; my brother got hit square-dab in his eye from one of 'em when he was a kid--they spit blood out their eyes you know...." "Oh yeah, the Chief has 'em spit blood for the patrons some times, 2 bottles of Santa Fe wine he charges for that, so you see, he never really 'sells' you the toad; it's his pet; but he's been on a 7-day drunk and he needs to get back to the reservation and the bus'll pick 'im up in a couple'a minutes so he needs the bottle for the bus. You boys want'a spend the night here in Show Low?...Miss Dolly up past the Sinclair station has some nice rooms, classy, the Show Low Lodge...." "Naw we can't afford it; we're runnin' low on bucks. In fact, we're gonna try to get the Sinclair guy to give us some cash back on our credit cards if he will so we can get back to Texas at ease."

We drank another hour or so and then the Chevvie was reoutfitted with a new retread and off we went into the pitch-dark night with only the light of the millions of stars visible up in the highest sky in the world it looked like to me and our high-beam headlights to light our way through this thick black nothingness we drove into headin' for the Zuni Reservation--every now and then our headlights picking up a huge white cross (like Jesus was nailed up on except in miniature) glaring back at us along the side of the highway. Around one curve there were four crosses by the road. We knew from Buck these crosses marked a place where people had been killed on this stretch of Arizona highway. I must confess--I think I'm pretty safe, but remember we were drunk and adventurous and at one spot where there were 3 crosses, we couldn't resist. We got out and tried to dislodge one loose from the ground, but it was planted deep in a gravel-packed hole to the right ditch side of the road. So I took the Chevvie and eased it down the sort'a steep ditch and gently ran into the big sign; the car knocked it over enough we were then able to dislodge it whole and set it free to travel with us as a sacred icon. Trouble was it was bigger than our eyes had measured. Jesus, it was as long as the Chevvie and weighed near a ton, but by God, by Golly, by damn, we were determined and by nudging the cross end into the backseat by pushing it in through the window of the front right door, we got one arm of the cross out the far back window and the other fitted comfortably up in the back window. Then by my friend climbing into the car, positioning the foot of the cross through the front door right window, then closing the door, we had it.

I was fine on the driver's side, but my friend was kind'a jammed up on the right side--but it was exciting and worth it for the childish pleasure it gave us, and then after we were on the road again, he said he wanted the cross 'cause he had the perfect spot for it in his mother's garden back home.

All the way home we jived back and forth about that cross, about the poor old soul we were carting away from Arizona all the way over to Texas, to just north of Fort Worth. Later I was to learn that my friend's mother died unexpectedly a year or so afterwards and my friend put this cross at the head of her grave in his hometown cemetery--I wonder if it's still there to this day? I don't really care; but if any of you folks who know the area north of Fort Worth, say up around Jacksboro, and have ever seen a big white cross in a local graveyard up there, that's it, that's our poor soul's memorial we shipped all the way to Texas from over in Arizona, just down the highway from Buck's Buick Bar.

When I got back home, in July, Hemingway shot himself, blew the top of his head off with a prized Belgium-made big game shotgun, splattering his brains all over a mirror just in front of where he did it--was he watching himself? That death and the coverage of the funeral in Life magazine inspired me to start writing a novel--and that novel started off, "I entered this tiny bar on the edge of a nowhere desert as a sun dipped its fire into the blue-swallowing water of the horizon, and after my eyes adjusted to the dundrearied half-light of the joint, I swear I saw Daffy Duck sitting at the far end of the bar by himself, looking woeful, looking defeated."

Yep, the bar at the end of time; the bar at the end of world--and that's when I began seeing existence as a cartoon--a Loony Toons, a Merry Melodies.

I don't know what happened to that novel. I wasn't any good. I remember my character in it going down to the end of that bar and talking to Daffy. The cartoon duck star said he'd just been fired from Warner Bros. They said he was too old now; cartoons had changed, gotten slicker, faster, and Daffy's kind of humor just didn't get to the kids in these new times. "Fuck it all," Daffy said, "Just over there, just one step away, is the end of the world--just one little step out that backdoor and you're gone; you disappear; you vanish. All that's left of you is what there is left in the cans at Warner Brothers--all that celluloid you made, that rotting, disintegrating celluloid." "Don't worry, Daffy," I told him, "I'll make sure you're remembered; I'm writing a book about you and life and shit." That's all I remember. I ran out of frames. No one was laughing at what I intended as a comedy. Couldn't finish it; it was too reel--oops, I'm reeling, reality is a comet sailing around my old wolf head.

And what was this sudden realization that hit me today like that sword of light that hit old heathen executioner Saul of Tarsus on that road to old Damascus? Bingo!--I suddenly realized my time had been all wrong for a damn long time; I had regressed over the years to the point where I started my beats on the wrong breath, on the wrong foot, going down when I should've gone up; it's as simple as that. And-a-one-and-a-two....and let me tell ya, folks, suddenly I started composing again--HUH, a blessed miracle? Nope, just a release of a block in my mind that perhaps has been there since I was a piano-student lad of ten and studying the several composition lesson books I had to learn to use in order to read more difficult sheet musics, those they call concert studies, like Books 1 through 10 of the John Schaum course (I have an autographed photo of John Schaum hanging over my keyboard as I type this).

The beat. It's all about time...and as Charles Parker played, "Now's the Time." NOW is the only time there is.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler