Torn Bits of Paper, Dead Elvis, and a Clove-Mouthed Man Freed My Mind, but I Didn't Realize it Until Now

By Birdie Jaworski

SANTA FE, NM-

One summer I collected Monarch butterflies and pinned them to an old walnut board in the family barn. I was eleven and chubby with a Dorothy Hamill haircut. My younger sisters and I built endless Mexican blanket forts in our battered living room and dressed our long-suffering dog in my dad’s blue boxer shorts. My mom decided she couldn’t take one more minute of our endless muggy summer, and she signed us up for the one-week August hell known as Arts and Crafts camp at the Town Hall.

The Town Hall in my New England hometown, from the perspective of a wedge-haired spastic 11-year-old girl, now 41, now two thousand miles away.

We marched the two blocks to the hall, and opened great mahogany doors to a building more than 200 years old. It housed Selectman offices, the hunting and fishing commission, and a hall with a sagging scratched wooden floor and wire-covered windows where town meetings and middle-school physical education classes met. We waited, my feet nestled in Dr Scholl's, my two sisters in matching brown suede clogs. We didn’t want to spend a week painting and sculpting. We called it Farts and Craps and waited with five other dirt-poor town children for our teacher.

C'mon my fellow middle-aged friends, you know you wore 'em too, those "exercise" sandals that left angry calloused ridges along the sides of your toes...

He told us to call him “Charlie.” He said this as he paced the gym, white t-shirt with a hole two-thirds down his back stuck to his skin with sweat, faded photo of Elvis on the front. He seemed so old to me, to my sisters, to the five other squirmy kids in our camp class. He must have been twenty-five, maybe thirty, we thought. And rich! He must be rich, he collected three dollars from each of us, and he used big words like “disenfranchised” and told off-color jokes we didn’t understand. He set a beat-up black tape player on the floor and flicked on a Fleetwood Mac cassette.

Charlie never gave us paper and old watercolors and told us to paint pictures of our parents like our school art teacher. He slapped old magazines with strange names like Ebony and American Film and Cinefantastique on long folding tables, and showed us how to cut out random eyes and words and legs and cigarettes and paste them on poster board. Make a message! Change the world! Charlie spoke in exclamation marks and shook his hands like they were coated with water. His breath smelled of tobacco and lemon and a shock of hair like blonde heat lightening stuck out from the right side of his head.

We used school glue - the kind you could sniff for hours, lick off your grubby fingers.

“You gotta use your ART to CHANGE society, man! You gotta give a voice to the disenfranchised! You gotta bring down the MAN, you hear me? You hear me?” We said yes, we hear you, and we continued gluing dark brown fingers and ice cream cones on bright orange cardboard, shrugging our shoulders at each other, our moms sitting home watching Days of Our Lives in blissful peace.

Charlie started each class with a relaxation exercise. We lay on our backs; legs cool against the polyurethane, and listened to him recite a litany of energy and body parts.

“Power to your toes, power to you toes!
“Power to you feet, power to your feet!
“Power to your legs, power to your legs!
“Power to your knees, power to your knees!
“Power to your thighs, power to your thighs!”

We jiggled each piece in unison to the chant, synchronous child art jellyfish, knowing our Farts and Craps days were numbered if our parents knew we played hippy games like this with our clove cigarette teacher, knowing they would call the Selectmen and demand a refund, demand a sturdy woman in polyester with a portfolio of landscapes and pet portraits. We loved that exercise, loved Charlie, jiggled and oscillated, upstream salmon revolutionaries, knowing these days were diamond rare special, life changing, crazy art life-changing.

I pasted a thousand wandering eyes on a piece of red poster paper, kaleidoscope eyes, made them match the songs on that looping tape, arranged them in a circle around a photo of a perfect plastic hot fudge sundae. Charlie grabbed my poster and held it over his head with one hand, smoking another clove cigarette with the other.

“Look! Birdie’s got it! She’s got it! Look! This is such a fanfuckingtastic statement on society, man, can you see it? Can you see it? Look at those hungry eyes. Look at that fucking plastic ice cream, man, that’s the fucking United States. Far out. Far out, Birdie. You’re an artist now, congratulations.” Charlie placed the poster on the table, swapped his smoke from one hand to the other and extended his right hand, shook mine, blew sweet smoke in my face. I didn’t dare smile, the moment seemed to serious, but I relished that compliment more than any other I ever received, replayed the words in my mind the rest of the day, and carried my art home as if I was carrying the Lord’s Supper at mass. I hid it in my closet, didn’t dare show my parents, didn’t want to face questions, have to make up answers, and couldn’t rat on Charlie.

I left my masterpiece behind when I ran away from home at 16, but bits of discarded paper, poster board, and shellac are never far from my fingers.

The last day of class one of the girls arrived late for class. She lived next door to me, in a rotting Colonial home like ours, and carried a red bamboo purse everywhere she went. She walked into the hall, no purse in hand, eyes inflamed from crying. Her skin shone pale from shock, and the endless bruises on her arms looked darker than usual. She sat against a radiator, tears falling over her face, arms, legs, onto the floor.

“Why are we here? Why are you here? Elvis died. We just heard it on the radio. They found him dead. Elvis is dead. Please, we can’t have class. Charlie, Elvis died.” She stared into the space between us, as if Elvis’s new ghost walked the hall, and let those tormented tears run, run like the river Styx.

“Man, no way. No way. It can’t be. You’re right. No class today.” Charlie whispered, the first soft words he ever uttered, and he picked up his carpetbag of magazines and glue and left. We walked into the sunlight, followed Charlie out the door, watched him slump to the bus stop. We sat on the cement steps and cried for the poor bruised girl, for Elvis, for Charlie, for our lost poster revolution.

Birdie Jaworski blogs at Beauty Dish and La Pajaro. She grew out her hair, but would suffer the Dorothy Hamill gladly if she could take one more summer Farts and Craps camp with Charlie.

A Friend I Never Met, an African Grey Parrot, and a Mexican Man with Teeth Sharp and True Conspired Against Me, Against My Universe....I Can Only Offer Deep Thanks

By Birdie Jaworski

SANTA FE, NM-

The Sunday before last I mixed fine gray illegal powder with a shot glass of orange juice. It didn't dissolve. The silt eyed me from the bottom, thick, resolute. It lifted its shoulders in smug ennui.

You're a poser, girl. You don't know what the hell you're doing, mixing us with frickin' orange juice? Geeze. Get a grip. Go back home, little girl. You're outta your league. This will end in death.

I gulped it. The talking powder, my depression, the last four hundred days of sidewinder pain, swallowed it whole.

Iboga, African plant, ethnobotanical wonder, she calls you to drop your emotional addiction, your grief. 

While I waited, my young sons skied on five feet of powdered snow. Their dad led them down double diamond slopes, fed them greasy burgers and Cheetos, let them sleep in a double feather bed, held them willing captive in a Taos alpine lodge.

"Please take the boys this weekend. Please. I have to do something. Go somewhere. Okay? Please. Please."

He did as I asked, even though it meant canceling a job, a chance to exchange music for money. We had been married for five years, divorced for eight. It was the first time I ever asked him for anything. He breathed into the phone, frustrated with my usual lack of information. He agreed, drove twenty-three hours into the bleak winter desert separating his ocean from my mountains.

I waited for the substance to shake my body, to give me the swollen tongue, the scratchy skin I knew would come first, would signal the start of my journey. I sat in bed, on top of a brown faux-fur throw, a green Tupperware basin ready to catch vomit between my legs.

Be sure to have a sitter when you take the iboga.

I ignored the cardinal rule, the instructions written in careful Spanish. I sat alone, me and one stainless-steel barf bucket, waited for death, for life. The man who sold me the African drug mocked me from the window. I could see him, a thousand miles and two years away, a Tijuana Shaman, suspended in hot sidewalk ice. I handed him fifty American bucks for a tiny baggie filled with a bitter ground shrub said to open the gateway guarding one's secret motivations.

Welcome to Tijuana. I was not a well-behaved tourista...

"Señorita, you need to sneak it across the border. Maybe hide it in your body. You don't want the Border Patrol to know."

He smiled, his teeth straight and narrow.

"Lady, I tell you the truth. This is not an easy drug. There is enough in this bag to let you see your ancestors, but not enough to join them. Be safe."

He faded. My tongue swelled.

Fourteen months ago my mom died. She died at home. I held her hand. She died. Her spirit fled her body, but when it happened I would have told you I denied the existence of it, that her spirit was nothing, was talk and memory, talk and fear. She died. I squeezed her fingers, let my mouth say "I love you," but my heart said something else, said "Forget it" said "I don't believe in anything."

My dad died, too, the phone close to his chest, a 9-1-1 operator pleading him to wait, to breathe. He died eleven months later, while I plotted ways to get him out of my daily life, to scrape his mind from my mom's bleached bones. He died. My mom died. I held the bucket between my legs. I vomited.

The Thursday before last a friend emailed me.

"C'mon, Birdie, tell me something interesting. I don't have a question, you have to make up your own question. Just tell me something good."

I groaned. I wanted to be kind, but he didn't know that grief saturated my eyes, optic nerve, brain stem, impulse, fingertip.

You're a kind man, but I have nothing to say to you! I don't even know you, haven't met you, know nothing, know only that the last year has been death, death in my lap, in my throat. I breathe it like cigarette smoke, eat it, slices of orange death, full of mold citrus, full of invisible gallows flavor. I live death. I have nothing to say to you. Everyone wants me to smile, to hand them trinkets from my pocket. I only carry dust.

Waiting in line at the US/Mexico border crossing

I remembered the baggie, the iboga I purchased on a whim two years in the past, hid in the wheel well of my rusted minivan as I crossed the border, the powder I thought I'd take with a man, with a new boyfriend, perhaps on a sailboat, on the sea, hours after making salt-driven love. Tabernanthe iboga. A substance used in initiation rite by traditional tribesmen and women in the African Congo, a substance said to introduce travelers to the ghosts of their past.

No boy captured my difference, wanted to know me beyond his needs. No boy took me on the sea, gave me reasons to toss the kelp covering my body. They all had their own troubles, their own kelp to keep salted, keep shrouded in tide-churned water.

I removed the goods from a locked cabinet, placed it on my dresser.

The Friday before last I hesitated. I don't want to be hasty. This drug is strong. It might be dangerous. That Tijuana man might have lied. Maybe it's not iboga. Maybe it's poisonous.

I held the plastic in one hand, stared at the fine spray of gray pressing against the bag. My parrot saw my grief, knew the year of trial, knew I fed him peanuts and mango, caressed the undersides of his wing. He knew me better than any man, any animal. He whistled. He spoke a phrase he knew.

"Birdie. Bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird birrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd."

Ramses, African Grey parrot, Birdie's constant companion, true emissary for all that needed to happen.

A truck rattled the windows, almost slid on black ice as it passed my house, my place of indecision.

My bird comes from the Congo.

I lifted the phone, called my ex.

The vomiting stopped. I breathed deep, smelled snow, the dead coffee left cooling on the kitchen counter, smelled the orange my stomach couldn't process. The night began, though it was eight in the morning, though my boys were shifting cold butt onto poma lift, skis trailing in morning snow. The night began, and I saw my ancestors, my favorite gramma, my mom, my dad, the silhouette of a man I knew still loved me.

"Birdie."

My gramma moved toward me. Her Cherokee skin shone like abalone, blue, green streaks of ivory inlaid in something hard, precious, eternal.

"Birdie."

My body flew above the bed, the Tupperware forgotten.

"Birdie."

All of my dead relatives chanted me home, blew me toward Taos, toward my living boys. My house shrunk to a pinpoint, to an elapsed monument of grief. Forgotten. Old, as pallid as my mom's November body, as buried as her coffin. I flew. I flew. My parrot flew beside me. Death flew behind me, tried to reach me with his wingtips. I felt my arm, my wing, my body lose feathers, lose weight. A black cloud fell beneath me, dropped like lead lightening. I escaped.

This is the way of my world. I live. I die. Nothing lasts forever.

It's a week later. It's the first week of February. It's the weekend. My parrot rests, eats a salted peanut. My boys build a snow fort. The men I've loved do what they do, watch the Super Bowl, click mouse against pad. I stand in my kitchen, consider whether to toss the empty baggie in the trash. I resist, stick it in the junk drawer with the birthday candles, with the postcards I bought  on the old Route 66. I sit, ready to tell my friend, my parrot they saved my life. My mouth forms a smile, the first genuine motion in fourteen months.

Thirty-six Days Past Solstice at a Cryptic Circle of Dead Refrigerators

By Birdie Jaworski

SANTA FE, NM-

I shifted from fourth gear to third as I ditched a Santa Fe strip-mall street for the steep grind of uneven asphalt that split a west-side mesa into two snowy halves. My young son, 9, leaned against the door, sketch pad on lap. His hand knew the routine, knew our unkempt roads meant his spaceships sported jagged edges. His eyes didn't waver. I didn't have to check the rear-view mirror to know this, to know my son's vision sprayed inward, watered vein and synapse, a whirlpool of hidden message only the raw shuttle of charcoal pencil against paper could decode.

Just like Stonehenge, I thought. We may tag heavy stones with intention, set them into wet earth, try to channel the core. We can't reach that center. Not with stones, not with art, not with sheer will. We are the same as our mesquite bees; busy, noisy, mindful of our next meal, our position in the desert hive. Who watches the center?

It wasn't Stonehenge I sought, but a cryptic circle of dead refrigerators called Stonefridge. Ten years ago conceptual artist Adam Horowitz fought city and vandal, placed 140 forgotten fridges in "atomic alignment" meant to spit on the Los Alamos Laboratory. He gathered local volunteers - the poor, the hip, the Santa Fe Barbie, the Ken - more than he needed, made them wear loincloths in a statement of consumer slavery. They hoisted hefty food box upon box using teepee poles and donated rope. He lost his freon palace once to bulldozers, then twice. He rebuilt. Discarded appliances come easy.

I shifted to second as my car groaned over the ridge. A steady gust of frigid air blew over the car, into the open vents and my legs felt January, felt cold and alone. The small stucco subdivisions lay behind us, the city fourteen blocks forgotten. I counted a rumtumble shack, a wind-scarred mobile home, until they, too, disappeared. We turned with the road and the mesa turned to red mud covered in heavy splotches of crystalline snow, turned to a deep dip in the earth, and I slowed to ten miles per hour, kept the car from sliding too fast down the steep hill.

"Mom! Mom! Stonewhatever! The fridge tower!"

9 saw it first. Stonefridge stood alone, stood cranky, uneven. I pulled off the road and my car cycled silent. I grabbed camera, notebook, keys. We stepped outside, into twenty degrees farenheit, into crusty snow covering the good red clay that defines New Mexico. The formation looked unfinished. Half the 100-foot diameter circle eyed the landscape, eyed the distant hill protecting Los Alamos; proud, defiant, its watchful columns reaching eighteen-feet above the mesa. The rest lay shattered, pushed back to earth.

9 shivered, the hood of his ski jacket tightly pulled past his forehead. We were alone. A few old bootprints led the way, but the thin layer of ice covering them told me it was weeks since anyone else visited. My long coat cracked around my legs in the unrelenting wind.

9 approaches the fallen circle.

I stopped to snap a photograph of the vandalized portion. Fridges littered the ground as if some perverted god cast a mana fury of coil and cupboard, every appliance, here in winter's silence, as chilled and ready as the cool gleaming state-of-the art models gracing every Santa Fe yuppie home. A lone pigeon escaped an open cabinet, westing, house filled with bird pitch and a thousand cigarette butts. 9 turned to me with a grimace.

This wasn't the spiritual treat I promised. I snapped another photo, this time of 9 peering between the legs of a tower, his hands stuffed in his pockets for warmth. What is this strange place? We build these places, capture picture, give story, tell the world we pull energy from the earth. It all lasts a moment, a month, perhaps, a year. Then we fall, we forget, we set jackal upon our work. Is our vision that fragile? I could smell a faint whisper of pot, as if some stoned ghost general, electric cord in hand, watched us with suspicion.

"Mom?"

9 ran between the fridges, ran past me, until he reached the curve of solid henge, the "good" part of Stonefridge still steady and true. His shadow played with the unhinged doors half-covered in winter mud. I pictured my own refrigerator, the way it rules my kitchen, aids us with yummy treats, its double doors, the magnets supporting my son's art so much like the constant graffiti etched and spray painted on every visible surface here.

The sun plays with the curve of Stonefridge.

"Mom? Is the real Stonehenge like this? Is it tipped over? Is it in the middle of nowhere?"

I laughed, realized he knew a secret message I couldn't see myself.

"Yeah, it's just like this. Only made of stones. If the stones weren't so heavy, I bet more of it would be missing or tumbled over just like this. I wish people wouldn't mess up art, though, don't you?"

9 took his hands from his pockets for the first time. He threw them in the air, twirled like a figure skater, a silly grin across his face.

"Mom! It's our nature! It's the same as Legos. We just like to make stuff and then we just like to take it apart. Remember when you told me nothing lasts forever?"

The wind shifted. Thirty-six days past solstice. I nodded. 9 leaned against an avocado wonder. Almost a month into the new year and I've touched secrets. I sat on a horizontal fridge, traced gang graffiti with one finger. A hawk circled overhead, traced the formation with the dip and spread of his wings. We didn't move for a long time.

You can see all my Stonefridge photos here.