We Don’t Call It The Rock Anymore

Quicksand or sandstorm, made into meth-muck or candy that suck the cheeks from your face, not blizzard when the snowflakes land and cover all with beauty, but shrapnel that makes wounds, holes, oversized neutrinos that bounce around the celestial arcade of the body ripping the skin of kidneys like a fork piercing a red bean or the guts till hunger leaks into the entire body or the heart where new holes dampen the thrum and life leaks out the side. It is the devil’s shadow always waiting behind the corner of a building.

Squatting in a house being razed from the inside without a sawz-all or a sledgehammer, fleshless fingers working with table knives and forks to peel and pry whatever’s fixed into the unfixable, wire until the house is wireless, every gadget, doo-dad, and fixture dragged and stuffed into leaf bags with the one available car to an empty roll-up-doored maw in an abandoned mushroom storage warehouse with more illuminated letters on the outside than Middle Age manuscripts.

One week with a fear that I would smoke once and a tornado would abduct me like Dorothy, and I would travel in Oz like the Scarecrow looking for my brain, but unlike Dorothy, I would never find my feet and never make it home again. Things like that happen. Hard to think a homeless man could fear never making it home again.

Hector knew. He’d been chained to the bed of meth like a raging dog you try to forget you picked up off the street and you throw in meat through a quickened door that’s not really a door but part of the jail cell of addiction. Why call it a door if you never walk out? When he got busted, I don’t mean by the cops. Still, by six fists from three men who thought since Hector was large, that he must be stealing the food they didn’t have in the first place, they fell upon him, to make it sound Biblical, and wrecked his jaw, broke it in four places, knocked out seven teeth, cut his tongue so severely he needed to be intubated for eleven days and then his jaw wired shut for eleven weeks. Still, in that time he kicked it, like a soccer ball, you give leverage to that keeps on flying and goes over the scrub madrone down a ravine into the rocks. When you look, you can’t see it, that type of kicking, though you wonder if the ball maybe secretly got caught in the brush and will come out of hiding one day when you least expect it. That kind of fear, the way a child fears the jack-in-the-box when she hears Pop Goes the Weasel as an adult.

That week I stole, not stole from the house, which I thought alternatively was either a museum of the old people that owned it but were living in Europe, or a mausoleum because of the way everything seemed dead, or perhaps a cathedral in the way light entered the house high in the morning and left late in the afternoon well before night, not necessarily holy, but empty like cathedrals are, God gone because there aren’t two or more gathering in his name.

I stole from the stealers, saw two Japanese ornamental vases the size of large peaches in a duffel bag and filched them before the bag left the house, sold them at the flea market for ten bucks and watched a few minutes later the trader get fifty. It’s all about location. He had one, I didn’t.

The last night I found old comic books stuffed in a wall in a small bedroom, a board that had been removed so many times I could slip it over and off the nails and back on again, the nails with no heads. I imagined the boy of the room, a Nisei in a stoic house in the 60s, hiding the vibrant colored action-celled drama-draped sex-is-possible rags, pulling off the board in the dark of night, not quite of pornographic age. To me, they were like printed money, and I sold them for forty dollars, but when I returned that night, all the other squatters looked like hyenas, looked like famished vultures, and I was their carrion, panting toward death on the desert floor. All night I listened to the men rage about the next house they knew was unoccupied, the women plead for more smoke and give up their scraping hips and joyless breasts before their wish was granted.

When you live with fear long enough, when you live not with darkness but inside of darkness, when you find you travel from one dark spot to another through tunnels of darkness and savagery, it is not that you become fearless, or accepting of fear and like a boxer in the later rounds simply begins to take the body blows waiting for the final upper cut to end the punishing, it is that you become fearful of the light, or a corner you will turn and the sun warms you and the birds sing and a dog dances in a puddle and you want to as well for no particular reason, you become fearful of a kind gesture when someone actually looks into your eyes rather than tossing change or a comment your way, you become afraid of the lack of buildings or trees and brush to serve as your cover, you become afraid of being lucid, of conscious assessment, of knowing not that you have become darkness but that you will never be a son of light again.

When the morning stars sang and the sons of God shouted with joy, where was I? I was hiding in the rocks, jaw clenched, afraid of chimes, looking to score.