Thick White Crust - SEPTEMBER
August 21st, 2008by N.L. Belardes
BAKERSFIELD, CA-
It’s time for a breakdown.
The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake.
Update: Listen to GSpot Interview: Nick Belardes - Magic Realism, Bugs and 9/11
S E P T E M B E R The next morning was September 11th.
I had given up on the idea of hitchhiking and now wanted to take a Greyhound bus from the Plaza Hotel in downtown Las Vegas across the Mojave Desert to Bakersfield.
A Canadian friend of mine with visions of her own drove me to a bus station that seemed built right into the side of a casino. There were no planes flying. Hundreds of people had arrived. They formed a confused line that stretched out of the building and far onto the sidewalk along Main Street. Suitcases stood next to wrinkled hips. The jet-set crowd was in forgotten transportation territory. Gamblers walked from their penny machines just to see the people gathering in hordes around the dirty bus depot. Bums even looked at them like foreigners. Occasionally, people gazed into the flightless desert air and dropped their cigarette butts.
The wind had picked up from the day before. Gusts came and went. Dusty plumes coated downtown as if something kept falling in the nearby desert. I saw several beer bottles roll into gutters. Glass smashed from the sudden strong winds and piled like bone fragments.
The Canadian had spent many years in Rochester, New York. She cried because she hadn’t heard from her friend who might have been at ground zero during the plane attacks. Although I consoled her, I had my own worries about getting across the desert. “These lines are two days long,” I said. Thoughts of wandering like a dust-covered zombie across the wind-storm desert suddenly seemed reasonable again. “Please take me to the outskirts of town over where the 215 meets with the 15. I will hitchhike to California.”
I must have looked like one of the depot transients the way I grimaced at the Canadian. She was short, Irish, had reddish pale skin and sometimes laughed with a frowning smile. Full of tears, she constantly wiped her eyes. She had a strong accent, one you would expect from a New Yorker: “No, you can’t hitchhike. That’s dangerous. There are killers out there.” She had fought off rapists in New York City. She slummed in buildings where men and women moved like shadows. To her, skeletons lurked everywhere. Even in the Las Vegas daylight she held tightly to a can of pepper spray.
“I’m not worried,” I said. I carried two bags. I had left my girlfriend who now lived by herself on the second level of a white two-story Hollywood-looking home. It had a stucco-covered outdoor staircase with turret-like curves that curled beneath a Spanish tiled roof. It was art deco with a hardwood floor painted black with a deep red border around it. There was a polyurethane coat over the top that shone with blue reflections in the desert mornings. I would sit on the bare floor with my guitar and play for a border collie, cockroaches, black widows and wolf spiders. The music echoed outside and down the stairs while crutch-using bums limped past on their way to the bright Las Vegas Strip.
I wanted to hitchhike. I wanted to take the risk. I yearned for it, for the taste of uncertainty, for the kindness of strangers, for the unknown journey one can take to a faraway place. I wanted the strangeness of exiting the desert for the familiar taste of Bakersfield, where home had been for so many years. “I need to go home,” I said. “And I will walk tonight if I have to.”
“I’ll drive you,” she said.
“In this car?” Her old Mazda’s name was Mr. Meeka. She had driven it from New York all the way to Las Vegas just a few months before. The license plate had a large Statue of Liberty on it. But I was more terrified of her car than hitchhiking. I thought it would die on the freeways surrounding Las Vegas. I would have rather walked. But I stopped complaining. I couldn’t argue with her tears. We ended up driving very late that night to Bakersfield. She cried a good portion of the way. She cried for the ciudadanos de los rascacielos. She cried for an hour and I thought we were sure to die in a car wreck. I asked her not to cry, but she continued to sob even as we headed into Baker just before Barstow where fiery demons dance at the gate of Death Valley. A few hours later she let me out at a coffee shop in downtown Bakersfield, not far from the Padre Hotel. I figured I would sit in a restaurant near the bus station. It was a holy place. I sat up the rest of the night and wondered where the next day would lead me. I wondered about my family that didn’t exist anymore.
As I sat there staring at the coffee shop window reflections, I had another vision. I sat on a bed at my grandmother’s house in San Jose, California. I was nine years old.
Grandma Benita often wore imitation leopard skin jumpsuits. She wore wigs too—many different wigs. Often they were orange, yellow, black, or blood red—and in many different styles. I never saw her real hair. I think I would have been terrified if I had. I imagined her outside of the room and in the kitchen preparing menudo. She poured her soul into filling the soup with chunks of cow stomach lining and hominy.
I had been hiding in the bedroom. I think it was grandmother’s room. I don’t even know why we were in San Jose. I didn’t want to visit my relatives. I was afraid of them, afraid of their skin that was darker than mine. Father had raised me to be white. Ignoring my dual-ethnicity he never wanted me to speak Spanish. He hated the word “Chicano” because it meant some kind of liberation and non-assimilation. I feared their loud voices, their tight hugs and their slang Spanglish that was different than my own ghetto-talk from living in Bakersfield’s poor south side. I was afraid of grandmother even when she simply said, “How are you, mi hijo?”
And so I imagined myself as I sat on the bed with mother on one side of me, while the circus elephant sat on the other. They both changed their shirts at the same time, and sat on the edge of the bed in their bras. I was shocked—mother had always been so modest. She would always keep the bathroom door locked. She never spoke of sex, or in any sexual manner, nor of innuendoes around the family. For many years she had kept her innocence with me. And here I saw these two women nearly nude. Suddenly I was filled with hate for the both of them. I despised sitting there but was petrified and couldn’t move. The women didn’t even speak to one another. I could see mother was tight-lipped, embarrassed and filled with hate for father, his machismo, and the circus elephant. Yet I hated mother that day; and I hated that moment because I wanted to melt away but couldn’t, especially when I realized I was a part of it all; because I suddenly realized father had been boasting to his own family about his women.
Mother had looked so terrified. I sat and drank coffee in Bakersfield and could see her scared face, her angry face in the very cream-filled coffee cup where my lips sipped—it was the vision of what led up to her not removing the stains from father’s work shirts. I remembered as if I had sat there in grandma Benita’s house angry with mother. I remember I suddenly wanted to grab a knife and kill the circus elephant beast and penetrate to her very laughing skull. Those were dark memories: a young boy awake each night, filled with a loathing to smash the elephant’s head with a baseball bat. It was pure hatred for the beast that could cause so much destruction in a family.
Later, mother would sit and watch television in her constant bouts of unhappiness. That went on for hours on end, days on end, from early in the morning until very late at night. She didn’t sleep much. I know she feared to be in bed with father. His machismo reeked from the very door of his bedroom. I would walk past, and he would be inside playing with himself under the covers. I knew what he was doing. But what can a boy do when anything related to family life is supposed to be normal? It was all normal—father playing with himself, toying with his own manhood; or mother and father in their room arguing, mother crying, father slamming the door, opening it, slamming it again. Mother groaning.
Mother was honorable. She had a sense of family. I think she had been arguing for a new beginning for all of us. I’ll never know. He was probably in there raping her. That’s what my mind sees now, and what I saw that night in the coffee cup: mother held against her will. He with the mad red look in his eyes, face red too, heaving and panting, and moving as she cried and whimpered beneath his machismo, only to rebel once again and not wash his shirts.
Read More of “Thick White Crust”:
Part One: H A U N T
Part Two: B O N I F A C I O
Part Three: S E P T E M B E R
Part Four: L E G A C Y
Part Five: G R E A T G R A N D M O T H E R ‘ S B U L L E T
Part Six: N O N - M I G R A N T S
Part Seven: D I A d e L O S R A S C A C I E L O S
Part Eight: T H E G A T H E R I N G
Part Nine: W H I T E F L I E S A N D W I D O W S
*************************************
N.L. BELARDES is a journalist, blogger and videographer. He writes several media blogs, including Noveltown’s Paperback Writer and Nick 2.0 (Formerly on ABC23). His work has appeared on the homepage of CNN.com and other news sites all over America. You can purchase Lords: Part One, which describes the infamous Lords of Bakersfield. They still creep the city long after they and a 1977 Central California dust storm ravaged the area. N.L. welcomes humorous notes and news tips to his MySpace or Twitter.
Tags: 9/11, author, California Writer, casino, Chicano fiction, day of the dead, Death, dia de los muertos, Las Vegas, Latino, magic realism, N.L. Belardes, September 11, sugar skulls
Hey, good stuff. I’m really digging this story and some of the parallels it has to my own and 9/11. Magic(k) Realism indeed!
So ironic that you commented first. Enough said. Mystery.
Mystery=Magi(k)=Realism
But will you tell more?
Not for now. When I have time how to figure out how to tell it and not divulge the players, then maybe. I keep my word when I give it.
Damn, I’m looking forward to the next installment. This was awesome.
The next installment is magic realism to the fullest extent of the law.
Oof, heavy man, seriously heavy.
So is your gravatar’s feather boa.
I imagine that trying to travel on 9/11 was a nightmare! But to travel away from your family to leave everything behind in the wake of such national tragedy when people were pulling together must have left you feeling even more alone with your two bags and no way to get home to Bakersfield. No real feeling of where or what your home was anymore. Does 9/11 have a bigger impact on your life because of the significance of the changes that happened in your life on that tragic day?
I love your memory of your father’s machismo and your hatred for what it had done to your mother and your family… so very sad and tragic and yet so relatable. The scene with your mother and the circus elephant changing clothes in front of you is very visual, it’s almost horrifying! I can definitely relate to your mother not cleaning the stains in your father’s work shirts once her fairy tale had been shattered. Such a simple metaphor as stained laundry really paints a picture of your parents marriage! It’s such an interesting detail for you to remember did you find your mother’s actions back then so significant at the time?
I think everyone was connected to 9/11 no matter what they were doing that day. This is just my story. I believe there’s always this unseen web of connectedness between people, spirituality and events. And I don’t think people acknowledge the impact of such on the world around them…
As for your question about my mother. Nothing was said. I think I just understood. Most kids would. Kids are smart!
Kids are definitely a lot smarter than we give them credit for…
Your Canadian, Mazda driving friend sounds so genuine and protective it’s very sweet. The tears and driving across the desert must’ve been so horrifying. I’ve been in cars with crying drivers…I’m with you, I’d rather walk…. but it was very kind of her to see you safe. That sounds like that alone was an adventure.
I think as a boy witnessing what you have taught you pride and strength as well as tolerance at a very young age. Nietzsche said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” You were able to and discovered your strength so early in life. So sad to have to go through such passion and emotion… such anger… yet so empowering.
Do you stop and reflect about your life as well as those strangers we lost every 9/11? Do you feel ghosts and haunts even more so on 9/11 than you do regularly? What do you think about or reflect on the most on every anniversary of this day?
I think the only comment on what you said about 9/11 anniversary has nothing to do with the actual day, but a time. Later in the novel I make a philosophical statement about 9/11, that it was fixated in a point in time and space. It’s no longer in New York. It’s moment was left somewhere in space–an empty, timeless void of an interstellar point. But with that comes reminders, and the main reminder I see, I share with one of my kids. We both always look at a clock when it’s 9:11.
Time. It is of the essence. Precious yet so many take advantage of it and don’t appreciate what they have.
I look forward to the next chapter.
Hey N.L.
Here I am in NYC, home of 9/11. The other day I happened upon the site completely by accident. So strange to see those magnificent towers as just a huge hole in the ground now. Along those lines, I’ve been spending some time with a friend who’s been telling me all kinds of interesting stories about 9/11. On first take, some of the stories almost verge on conspiracy theory. But the more questions I ask, and the more I listen, the more it all seems to make sense. And the more I realize that, the sadder and scarier it all becomes.
Anyway, great work, N.L. Can’t wait to read more, my friend.
I went to L.A. with a news cameraman recently from N.Y. He was in college there at the time in a video production class. He made some interesting comments to me about the time just after 9/11 that he said included an intense sense of racism on two fronts. He said the media ignored it. On one hand he said people hated anyone remotely appearing Arabian. Then he said that many people in NY were celebrating the falling of the towers, which he said never came out in the media… I think there are many many untold 9/11 stories. Thanks Rich for taking the time in between your travels there to reflect.
you’re so freewheeling.
and you totally look like a depot transient. maybe not all the time, but i can see you going there. for sure.
also. the idea of someone’s machismo reeking really makes me gag.
Let’s go depot hopping.
I forgot to mention I love the grandma who wears leopard skin jumpsuits and crazy wigs! I think everyone needs a grandma who walks to the beat of her own fashionista drum!
My favorite story my grandma ever told me was about the time after my uncle was murdered. She said she was going into bars looking for the killer. She had a gun in her purse and was going to shoot the guy. Needless to say, she had style. I wish I had known her better.
I once sat at the coffee shop in the Greyhound station. The old gal behind the counter chuckled about how things start to fall off when you get old. I liked her crazy bee-hive and watched her carefully move about in a way that told me she’d been doing this for years. She served me hot cocoa and told me it taste better with creamer in it. It was 3 am, I was maybe 13, I had no idea where I was going to end up.
This was a great chapter - and they way you’ve written each one so far is a great read that has just enough color and visual I’m completely absorbed, rather than frustrated with too much information - I have a wandering mind. I’m loving it!
I was reading this earlier today in front of whirring washers and driers. Nick, what a great read, I was consumed.
9/11 was a really odd time for me. I’m not American, so, from a foreigners point of view, it was all very surreal and the aftermath of it all was even moreso. I remember that morning, I was sleeping in (college) after a wasted night and thought I was watching a movie or something. I just remember a really hopeless feeling.
I can definitely relate to some of the cultural stuff. My parents still can’t utter the word sex, a mere miracle that they popped me out! And I was eating cow tongue like it was chicken by the time I was like 6, a Nigerian delicacy.
Can’t wait for the next installment. Really moving stuff. I read HAUNT as well and my eyes got a little wet. (but I was in public, so slipping into a blithering puddle wasn’t an option).
That would have been the ultimate author compliment had you turned into a puddle. Just means I have to work harder!
Here in Bakersfield there are several Basque restaurants where people lo-o-o-ove to eat cow tongue. I’m a wimp. But maybe now I should try it. Besides, so many people like it.
Thank you for your foreign view of 9/11. I think my west coast perspective is kind of a foreign view too…
I understand that every story is solipsistic but this is pretty far out there. No goodbye even for the friend; she just vanishes.
You’re assuming she never appears again… but then, maybe she was a ghost. Kind of like your avatar…
And thanks for teaching me a new word: solipsistic. I had to go look it up. I think to answer more clearly, there was no big emotional farewell with me and the friend. She dropped me off. There was a hug and that was that. She took off back to Vegas. I didn’t feel it helped the story at all to put that line in there.
Nick, just to get you started, cow tongue is the same thing as seasoning a rubber band basically. Takes a bit of getting used to and now that my mother’s not looking over my shoulder at the dinner table it’s not something I’d eat on the regular if you know what I mean…!
And crumpling into a wet ball at the laundy would have raised an unnecessary amount of suspicion…but I was crying on the inside.
Really good stuff as I said, actually inspires me to get my arse in gear with my writing.
Can’t wait to see what you’re working on. Rubber bands? Well you did say “seasoned.” Yum!
Check your inbox later.
I am also always fascinated with the relationships people I know have with their grandparents….almost envy in a way. I grew up in Europe mostly and saw my grandparents once every couple of years maybe and it was so odd when I did. None of them (the Kenyan side and Nigerian side) spoke English…and I don’t speak my native languages, Swahili and Yoruba, except conversationally because my parents never spoke it to us growing up (you’d have to ask them why).
So everything was lost in translation and not much physical contact (hugs and kissed were out of the question), so it was never that fuzzy relationship my friends speak of, I never really got to know them in a true sense.
But I do remember my grandma always wearing Nike sneakers. It was the one thing she wanted us to bring her. In pictures, she’s always in beautiful traditional garb, purples and blues…and brown Nike’s circa 1986. It’s my most vivid memory and always makes me smile so hard. She’ll always be cool to me, just cool.
Grandma fashionistas! They’re everywhere and we love them. I want to see a pic of your grandma. I don’t speak Spanish worth anything. You’re not alone.
You inspired me to write this, thanks~
Tamra Hated Flying.
I recorded in summer at Uptone Studio thanks to Jack Endino, Rick King of Guitar Maniac let us borrow treasures like an original Fender Nocaster. Uptone was a time warp from it’s carefully collected kitsch seventies decor to it’s Mellotron owned by The Moody Blues. Analog heaven.
It was the summer I invented the Tacoma Speedball (a mocha grande from Kickstand, a shot of Patron gold, classic mint Shermans and purple blue organic).
Practiced martial arts in the tall grass behind the studio overlooking Tacoma harbor. Tacoma, a lovely town, but the paper mill makes it smell like ass.
At the helm Wes Weresch, first time an engineer played me like a piano and got the best performances from me. one example: saw me staring at the abandoned ruin of a building next door. waited a long time in the cool night air under the full moon standing there watching me. then quietly said you know what that used to be? a school house for Japanese kids. one day the soldiers came and took them all away. about twenty years later we broke in to see what was left inside. everything was exactly where it had been. every book on every desk, every pencil at its side. every chair in place. all under a coat of dust inches thick. later it was a squat where Nirvana played their first Tacoma show.
The result was a song and a 32 song CD named Tacoma Ballet (and another song called Manzanar Recess). A record improvised, words and music, beginning to end.
Returned in fall to mix. When we got to the song Tacoma Ballet Wes pulled out an old sound effects CD he said he’d been keeping for years in the hope that a band would write a song that deserved its use. He banished us from the studio, when we returned our song was punctuated by poignant cries of children and barking dogs, so carefully placed, it could only be described as a musical performance. We finished mixing on September 10, 2001.
We were supposed to fly home from Sea/Tac to LAX on 9/11. I was awakened by a phone call from my bass player staying at my house. Something about a plane and a building. She called me about any little thing like an uppity raccoon I was used to ignoring it. But something made me switch on CNN.
Stuck in Tacoma for ten days. No friends. they all went loner. Went hiking on Rainier. Ran off to distant art shows. The hotel switched us from our bargain rate to full rate. The friendly restaurant was full of brooding hostile locals. Tacoma is a military town. Gloom and the cuckoo sound downtown echoing among the gray buildings on the suddenly empty streets. A transient freaked out on a record store owner. A peculiar silence. Later they would find a body back behind Uptone, some drug deal, local gang thing. The place closed.
Don’t know how my guitarist Ronnie did it but he found a plane leaving Portland and we got the hell down there past the over-passes where red eyed citizens dangled flags and shook their fists. I had flown to Tacoma as I always flew before, white knuckled, doped up, drinking, and convinced I was about to die. Not so on the way home. I didn’t feel nervous at all. The Southwest flight was pretty much empty, last flight to leave the Northwest for southern California for another week.
The pilot with a notably Texan twang announced take off and suggested the doors be shut quickly. Those bitches scrambled. That redneck hit the gas like he was driving a GTO in oil country in the sixties. The plane tires squealed. I swear he pulled a u-turn. It was the fastest flight from Portland to Los Angeles possible. The drinks were free and we were proud Americans taking flight again.Even the stewardesses were amazed at how quickly we arrived.
Never been so glad to get home. But home was never the same. Our parties got somber and thinned out. Bands stopped touring. The scene had already been deeply damaged when all the all ages venues in America closed one after the other, but new scenes were busy birthing until 9/11. Alcohol that made them giddy and flirtatious now made them angry and opinionated. The peace punks all turned into vandal anarchists. Like that smoke took the light out of everything, like the dust has never gone away.
Tacoma Ballet, which turned out to be teeming with lyrical foreshadowing of the tragedy, without a tour or publicity, by word of mouth, reached number one on New Music Weekly’s U.S. college radio chart Christmas 2001. There was no joy in it. I haven’t flown since. I’m on the no fly list, but that’s another story.
Tamra… your story is far more amazing than mine. But then that’s the thing. I want to inspire people to tell their stories: west coast, east coast, midwest, southern, Pacific island stories. I don’t care what they are or where they’re from. Let’s get them out and share. I’ve already read yours more than once… you inspire me.
All this mutual inspiration - its a beautiful thing.
Loved your story too Tamra.
Hey Nick
This is a really great piece. Writing about 9-11 is tricky. Its so easy to slip into writing sentimental b.s. But I think you really captured a kind of dust-blown restlessness, and you managed to turn 9-11 into a backdrop for a much more interesting story (you should email Safran Foer and show him this. Because when he tackled the same event, he made me wanna puke).
This great stuff…..
T
cool stuff
I always wanted to make it back to CA but never have
elliott
N.L. — if more Americans would write nicely about Canadians we could move faster towards the inevitable North American Union. Glad to see you doing your part. Also, I love grandmothers who wear imitation leopard skin jumpsuits.
Me too! I encourage people to be a little daring with their fashion. You think there will be a North American union currency? Who or what would be on the $5 bill?
nice, belardes. tone. voice, all that. i agree with megan: more yanks should write more kindly about canadians. you nailed this one. great storytelling. now get your ass to vegas. downtown is calling. shrimp cocktail at the golden gate?
r
I’m smelling a Vegas road trip and oddly enough I was just thinking about the shrimp cocktail at the GG. I remember one day while working just up the street for the Fremont Street Experience some bastard chased his girlfriend or wife down into the Golden Gate. In fact, I think she was a worker there. He gunned her down in a bathroom. Oddly, though he was blasting his way through that tiny casino, he didn’t injure anyone else but the woman he sadly killed.
“Later in the novel I make a philosophical statement about 9/11, that it was fixated in a point in time and space. It’s no longer in New York. It’s moment was left somewhere in space–an empty, timeless void of an interstellar point.”
I was there that morning. My office was in Tribeca, and I’m not sure of the timing but I think I was in the Chambers Street/WTC subway stop when the first plane hit. I saw the hole in the side of the North tower and heard the second plane hit - a sound I recall as being like the the galaxy’s largest dumpster having its lid slammed.
The whole day, and weeks after were surreal. But since then, I’ve found that my memories have been supplanted by the group narrative of the event. As if my actual experiences have been sucked into that void you describe.
Now I just feel bad talking about it. Guilty, somehow. Like I’m raising my hand and shouting “Ooh! Ooh! I was there! I was there!” It took me a long time to even type this comment.
Hi Jay. I appreciate that you wrote your comment, even though it was difficult. Your description of the second plane makes me imagine the event from a new perspective: “a sound I recall as being like the the galaxy’s largest dumpster having its lid slammed.”
Haunting and achingly brilliant prose. To say more would be to ruin the impact.
i was asleep when the first plane hit, and then my boyfriend at the time came home and told me to turn on the television. i called my parents and told them to turn on the television, too. then i felt all cool because i knew about this huge thing before my parents knew about it.
i was speaking to my dad when the second plane hit, and he said to me: “well, it’s pretty clear now. we’re under attack.”
we were scared because my sister and her husband lived down there, and her husband worked right around there. but they’re okay. yay.
then i watched the news for about three weeks straight like a zombie. i got into a fight with a friend who said we deserved the attack. that bothered me.
i wish i was, like, riding a unicycle when 9-11 happened. that would be more interesting.
How come when you’re on my posts you write like a puppeteer on prozac? Just joking. I mean, wasn’t most of America glued to some television or radio? I won’t ask what your parents were doing when your dad said that on the phone (See previous Lenore comment on Two-Bed post)
i’m commenting on your comment on my comment.
ZING
Is this supposed to be about 9/11, what I was doing, etc? Well I was driving to the VA outpatient clinic in Stockton for a routine checkup and had my car radio on. When I heard the news it excited me. I never did live in that world of American exceptionalism that Louis Lapham former editor of Harpers talked about so much. Dirt is dirt basically. Anyway, I got to the clinic and watched more on TV. I wasn’t very surprised really. When I went in to see my female East Indian doctor she asked me in a very untypical way for her what I was feelings. Sensing there was more to the question than met the eye I asked her what she meant … maybe there was a waterborn epidemic breaking out I hadn’t heard about. And she said she was referring to the WTO. I said, “Well America is an Empire and out to rule the world. Then added that if you live by your guns you die by your guns” She was nonplussed and had no scripted lines. She looked down at the desk and muttered some thing like “I see.”
Later I thought about a famous Cheyenne Chief. The cheyennes called the white man “veho” or spider. And in a poem I wrote, this famous chief of the Cheyennes sees the WTC coming down and says “Ho! The fly has torn a hole in the web of the spider” Then Crazy horse of the Oglalla Sioux sees it and says I told you this would happen!
I thought the reaction was totally out of proportion. Had it been 4000 black dock workers in Chicago, say, I don’t think the nation would have gone nuts with adolescent patriotism, everybody shoving flags out their windows like gangs wearing their colors. Jesus. And it just what the neo-cons needed to sow fear like Simon Sundale. Heh, heh, heh!
Joe: I guess my model of the Lords of Bakersfield can be applied just about anywhere there’s the potential of societal manipulation. Media manipulating stories, government taking in the innocent under their wings, mass hysteria in a giant dust storm… and so on… Simon Sundale. He’s Uncle Sam, right? I never realized there were parallels. And the wolf spirit… can’t forget that.
For anyone wondering, I’m talking about my book, Lords, which is about media and government corruption in Bakersfield in the late 1970s.
How strange…we grew up in almost the same neighborhood at the same time (we moved to white lane and monitor area in 1966 when I was 6 years old) and similar problems, but such different worlds. My dad and stepmother were dysfunctional in a completely different way and everything had to be kept a big secret for appearances sake.
I was kicked out of the house at age 21 for wanting to date a Latino. Stupidest thing they could have ever done, it pushed me towards him and I wasted 3 years of my life living with him, where if they had just left me alone I would have figured out he wasn’t right for me and moved on. One of the reasons I refused to marry him is because he refused to promise to be faithful. It’s difficult to deal with the machismo you mentioned when you are not from that culture.
My current fiance is Latino, but was raised in a white neighborhood and while the machismo is there, it is very watered down, thankfully, or I would not be with him. It is one thing to be a man, it’s another to be a cheating jerk. That’s something I would not tolerate.
I was glad to see your mother’s rebellion in her own way. It’s sad she had to tolerate the circus elephant at all. I’m glad things are changing a bit now and most women will not abide by those conditions.
Great writing, thanks for sharing