| the golden west volume 4 part 2 - 1996 january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Sunday 7th January 1996, Buellton CA A motel room. Tomorrow I'll write. This afternoon I came from Encinitas, heavy and fast traffic up I5 into LA, then 101 north with low sun in my eyes. It was very hot in LA, the hottest this day has been since 1930. It's nine o'clock, he's still on shift. How is he. He was on a bus going south, I was in Sunday afternoon traffic going north. He made a speech at the car door. We saw ourselves together in Pilgrim's mirror. He played tapes from 1972 - Roy's music. I said, NO I'm not telling you to take it off, I'm just telling you where I am while you are wherever you are when you hear that music. He smokes weed every day. Dave took pictures of me taking his picture. I hope this is not a delusion: we married each other this morning. He said in his solemn way, Ellie I promise I will do everything in my power to ..., I want to be with you till I ..., cherish love protect (as much as you want to be protected), delight (delight in, I insert). I said what was honest to say, in the freedom he gives me. Will you really? Can I really have that? Is it really true? I saw how fine a way he had of making a vow. Here are my cards, I don't know what you'll say, but here is what I have to say. I said, Tom, I promise I'll do everything I honorably can - I assume that was there in yours - whatever I can without dishonoring myself - to stay in good contact with you. I'll love you, I'll be your home, I'll do whatever it takes to make sure I stay honest, for the rest of my life, 'til death do us part. He inserted delight in too. I said we should go in the water. We got up and drove to find a beach with sand. In the end it was at Del Mar. He said it was too cold. 58 degrees. I knew we would have to go in. I knew I should find a rock. We did go in. It was very cold. He caught a wave right in to shore. I realized I would have to keep my arms and legs moving. He went out further and put his fins on. I was lifted and set down or sometimes when a wave was going to break on me I would let it break on me. His feet were very blue. We sat on the hood of the car against the windshield for the heat. He didn't want to leave. Then we went to the motel room and while I was washing my hair Pilgrim phoned to ask us to pick him up at the supermarket. We drove him home and I asked him to take some pictures of us. We shot a roll on an empty camera. Did it again. And then had breakfast at the Encinitas Café where he used to come when he was married - his little family and his dad. He worked fast this weekend. He thought it out. He gave me first his doubt, then his anger, then his tears. I saw his responsibility and its weight. I understood to kiss him from the top of his head to his feet. I kissed his toes separately, his hands last. When I got to his foot, the foot on the first side, he began to cry. I kissed him down the other leg and he went on crying. I said, Turn over. He said, No. I said Please. He turned over and went on crying as I kissed him all the way down. Then I held him and he cried on. I think he cried for an hour. Then we went out and ate. Then we got into bed. I'm going right out, he said. And went, and I went with him. And woke before him this morning. Earlier when he was angry I went to the table and worked with the book to know what to do. And then went and talked with him. I knew he has often worked with me. He was saying all he hears is he can't do it right, he's going to say this woman is too twisted, I'm out of here. I said I have done what I can, if that's your decision, do it, do it clean, don't threaten, just do it, and went out and walked with a very sore heart, panting with pain, but clear. He would either be there when I got back, or he'd be gone. He was huddled in our bed asleep. I put my arms around him. He was there. And then the kissing, which I found because I wanted him to kiss my sore heart and knew he wouldn't be able to. Now I'll open the curtain and be here alone. 8 He's a big guy. I had him naked walking around the room with his hair in sleepy tufts. He'd go slide open the glass door and stand smoking on the concrete, a little wider at the hip than at the shoulder, long legs, moving well, standing well though he stoops. It is a long hot medium hairy body, a greying tangle of pubis and grey wool on a chest that is breast-plated, narrow and unpadded. His hands and feet are refinements at the ends of their long limbs, long fine feet with blue and brown patches where the tissue threatens to break down. Beautiful hands, hands the shape of mine, bigger, paler, tighter, more corded. Once at the Golden West I watched from the balcony when he was giving directions to a tourist at the wicket. There was such energy in his hands, his chopping chipping jabbing hands that look too fine to be a fighter's hands. What should such a body do? I saw him next to Pilgrim, who is a pretty man wide at the shoulders and narrow at the hips, and saw how much his body, though he is so manly, is not that sort of body. It is a pointed oval. He is strong, he's boiling with life, he's physical, he has a style of balance I can't name. He loves to fuck. He craves strong water. He craves music. He has gone roaring into drugs. He has set keel. He has never been to Europe. He is sentimental. He's fey. He's driven to move into the world, take space. When we had a nap he slept so energetically he kept me awake. "I thought if I had to put you down somewhere on a form I'd put you down as my next of skin." - When I took myself to the task, guess what I found - what's the worst it could be - that he'll prove himself a liar and have to run from knowing it. For me what's worst, I'll prove myself a fool? No, only I will be in pain. But I have a confidence about pain. How do we know it won't be me who bails out? He said, When I arrive on your doorstep will you welcome me? I said You know, I am very interested to know that myself. He brightened. He staggered back but he liked it. 9 It wasn't falling: we waded in. God, Tom, we came a long way in three months! That was a sentence, there aren't many, that comes out level suddenly. - Laytonville CA Tuesday night. I am not traveling very fast. Haven't much to say. Have not seen much - have seen but not thought. North of Santa Cruz, farmland along the ocean. Green and white surf. San Francisco a shabby street and then the bridge. North of Hopland these humpy treed hills, small farmhouses. Either floating or heartsore, in suspense. I left Vancouver in liberty and am attached, preoccupied, stupefied, just driving, driving quite well, without much consciousness or fear, not much I could remember to tell. The candyman's in town, that sinister whine Roy used to use to brag of seductions. I hear it on and off all day. With pain at heart now. Recurrence of agony of suspense - for three months he sold me his conviction - I am so tempted to settle it that way, say he conned me, collect myself to close off and weather pain and have it over. Maybe he conned me. Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse. Am I going to see it whole and clear and see myself sold. This is extraordinary suspense, I don't know whether I am married or betrayed. If I were married I would know. This morning I knew. I played the tape coming out of Halfmoon Bay and went into fear. How am I going to survive this. He was telling me all along - he was telling me in his way - I'm panicking - on the beach on Saturday - the first time he said his doubt - "I'm so afraid I'll lose my nerve." And as he was saying goodbye in the Encinitas Café parking lot, the speech he made - I'll see you in April, I promise on my honor as a man. I was blanking and gone, I wasn't back from the scene, I wasn't seeing him, I was blind, was he blind too? Were we both shut down in that moment? I don't know. I jumped into fear when I heard him promise that way. I thought - he wouldn't promise this way if he were sure. My confidence crumbled. He has been speaking as if he is sure but he isn't sure. I drove away. I drove fast. I talked to him, I told him I was driving eighty miles an hour in the fast lane. I told him I blasted through LA fearlessly. I told him how, after Hollywood, I was getting stressed because the sun was in my eyes, and I remembered the shades in the glove compartment and put them on and calmed down. I'm so sore in my heart. I have been beside myself for two days. I've just driven. I pull into the fast lane and pass all the trucks. I want to go faster. I don't stop to see anything. You're on your day off. Karl and Tom Russell and Vince have got you back. You feel abandoned - do you? Do you have ways to balance? Are you in this state too? You have flowers in your room, so intense they hold your eye. Tom - this is how we have to do it, we have to reach across - the way I could do it in the hotel - I could as if come sit on the bench where I kept you company Christmas day while you were on the desk. I'm not going to decide you were conning me. Maybe you were carried away. Maybe you can't follow through. I'm on the highway driving north, up the map, feeling almost nothing but the extraordinary balance of suspense: how will it be if all you said was false. How will it be if you turn out to be that false - what will it mean for you to know you were that false. Confidence in its surge. False confidence. How will it be if you turn out to be true. What if you are a true heart with true judgment. That can't be. You were too fast, you didn't test yourself. What if it were up to me. What if I could make you one or the other. No. Betrayal out of weakness, is how they do it. The way you got out of your marriage. You didn't want to hurt Rebecca's feelings by saying you wanted out, so you had an affair for four years and exploded it as if by accident. Men who don't know themselves because they need a better opinion of themselves than they have earned. 11th, Vancouver WA It is 4:30 in a grim motel. I have had no taste for this journey or for telling it. Is it because I am going the wrong direction. I need a marriage coach - I wanted to say that, then I wanted to erase it, then I saw myself hedging, then I remembered I can both hedge and not hedge in this way. Let me not hedge it: I want that journey, I want it with you. The fear that attends: you're only safe to want it while I don't. Why I wanted a coach is for that turn, where you test trying to get away. I'll find it harder than you did - you have often chased and won. Am I confusing you with someone. Yesterday I drove. I do not like narrow winding mountain roads in deep forest. I do not like deep forest. It was bloody redwoods for hours. I did not dare think ill of them while I was among them but I'll say it now. I do not like the damp - from San Francisco onward the (I assume) oaks have been mossed over. I did like the bright mist yesterday starting out from Taylorville. Bumps of hills with poor farmyards, mossed bare trees and scarves of blazing white mist. There were stretches of good road. I have been putting midgrade in the tank and eighty feels right on those long loopy slopes. But when the road narrows and has tight turns I can't see around, I get anxious. There's a squeak in some unlocated place under the floor that worries me. There started to be a smell of burning rubber. In Grant's Pass I checked the oil and saw it was down to a quarter inch; it has been flooding out the main gasket (I assume it is) since I had it changed at Buellton. From Grant's Pass at sunset two hundred and fifty miles in the dark. There was a semitrailer I'd pass and he'd pass me again, so I got behind him and let him mark out the road for me with his big square of red lights. It was like taking protection. I liked his speed. His signal lights would tell me what was coming. When there was mist he illuminated it. I assume he was thinking, Why doesn't this guy get off my fuckin' tail. I was relaxing in speed that began to seem unmoving - I mean I was just sitting in it without feeling its peril. When I closed the window and shut off the heater it would be suddenly quiet and I would see the black space above marked with a star. I came into Portland that way, flying without moving, through twenty miles of fast food and industry and then a fantasy city suddenly, the freeway high in the air in fabulous spaghetti loops, ply on ply, with a city in sharp white lights after the proletarian dull orange of the margins, spread sparkling and reflected on sharp water. I rode through, feeling it to be Le Guin's city, her futurist metropolis, where a modest brilliant man in a poor apartment invents a power source that undoes hegemonies of money. Tom. I want to say rock and roll may keep the heart alive but there is intervention to be found, real things for a live heart to do. Le Guin intervenes; and we could. Style isn't enough. (Did I ever think it was? Yes.) What does Le Guin do - she intervenes, I think reasonedly, to defend the best in spirits, the best of spirits. She is love woman grown up. She wrote passage books for children and then she wrote passage books for smart lonely people, and then she wrote a book for her landscape. I wanted to sleep in her town and did, in a barracks on Anarres. This is a workers' dorm for sure, dirty carpet, shared bath, curtains that feel like plastic, dim lights in junk fixtures, plastic veneer, plastic patio chairs, walls and ceiling miserably spackled in beige paint, a door that I can see has been forced at least once. Value Motel it's called. Alright, 6:30. I'll get on the road I hear growling and swishing out there. Heavy truck traffic. - Tacoma, I think. Thursday. I'm more here, I saw this morning pink and frosty with mist, willows, water, copper grass. A gold sunrise. And with beauty, road fear, if that is what this pressure at the heart is. Maybe it's cheap coffee. Another hundred and fifty miles. I'll go look at the oil. Vancouver BC 13 Saturday. I can work. I was reading about sound with delight. I was making decisions with Sharif about the garden house, this isn't right, this looks industrial, can we make this simpler again. Made hello-back calls to Rob, David. So gone, so holding back. And reticent with you - what I want to say is a blurt of dismay - you're feeling it too - what's the use of saying anything - it's wrong to be away from you. 14 It's 4, Sunday morning. What is the sensation, I keep saying: it is not exactly pain, it's being at a loss. Phrases of songs are hooked into me and keep cycling - what does that mean - I know it from when I lost Louie - it means something in the brain is simple, cycling and unsubtle. I can unhook one song by hooking in another. Pressure and panting at the heart, very simple helpless mind, just holding on. I dreamed Luke was coming down a steep rocky slope on the far side of the river, it is close but there is the river so he'll have to climb up again. He's talking to us. I am thinking as he keeps coming that it will be hard to make it back up the rock. I realize he isn't going to stop. He's going to wade into the river. We are walking further up the road but I keep looking back because he hasn't showed up yet. I'm worried. I go back and look at the river. It is shallow narrow and warm. I wade up it. I don't see him. Come to a house with gay men in it. Ask about him. One of the men plays me a recording that might be him. They are all saying he is alright he just wants to be alone for a while. I am not sure. I wade back up crossing the water back and forth to feel with my feet whether he has fallen under. Woke saying, what it is is just a vibration at the heart, it's just that. Or else the solar coming on to block it. 15 I'm socially off, noisy, it feels, throwing myself, careless, as if I'm finished with all these people. The decisions to say to people, I fell in love, I met somebody, I want to live with him. To Rachel, Can I get my love letters on your fax machine? Showing Louie the photos. What she can see. From the set of his hand on my back, the goodness of his touch. His solemnity. From a slight swelling of the outsides of his nostrils, that he's a doper. That he's the real thing. When the phone rang midmorning yesterday putting forward my hand saying It's him. What can I say about how it was. The sensation of acting on a definition I am not in a position to feel. There won't be time in this conversation for us to find each other. We might not be able to find each other on the phone at all. More than that, as if conversation, the quality of any conversation, isn't where it is for us, and that is troubling. But meantime here is his voice, his voice, that I need to hear, that I need to have with me. And the voice he is giving me is his power voice. It has a willed push in it that belongs to his life where he is, except for the sentence where he tells me what he thinks when he's in his bed, a sentence that comforted me by its sound as well as by what he said, now that I remember it. Finally faxing from Figaro's yesterday. Sue did it for me. Maybe she'll read the letter. A loop I like, Sue by way of Louie by way of me got Rob working there and feeling her, which uncoupled me from him, so now I can collect. It's 4:30, raining. There are so many tasks in the next two weeks. 16 A glossy fat mouse tripping along the skirting board, a mouse I've seen every day, passes behind me where I'm reading in the green chair. Next time I see it it's falling sideways in a way I recognize. It is poisoned. It comes out where I can see it and stands shuddering, sometimes staggering. It has already lost its fluffy look. It had been moving with such happy confidence. Now it is as if concentrating on holding itself together. It looks broken into, collapsed. Its fur is disordered. - Earlier there was a moment I was thinking of Tom kind of absently, I felt something very clear and particular I thought of as his real self. I can't recall the sensation, it was not separate from joy at the heart. I was thinking this is why he says we are on the same wavelength. I haven't understood that, we're so different. But it's his intelligence that saw it right away. It is a kind of same wavelength that is - I want to say - quite far back in both of us. There was more but it was like being in a trance, I can't remember it. When the phone rang I thought it would be him, because he had been so present. But it was Susan, and then I spoke to Muggs. And then it was him. He had been trying to get through. He said proudly, lovingly, reticently, how Pilgrim said, I really like Ellie. 18 It's 5:30. I'm drinking tea, wondering what is different when I write him and when I write here. "You are so exciting to know." I woke excited. Want to note a few times that didn't get noted on the way past. On Christmas day when I was writing in my room he asked me to come keep him company in the lobby while he worked. I sat on the bench under the clock so I'd be facing him. The lobby was quite empty. When I went to the bar to buy milk for next morning the talkative kid bartending said he'd never seen Tom so happy and hoped we'd be in love. He gave me chardonnay in a foam cup that I took back and sipped while Tom looked across the red carpet, black and white tile, there behind the mail/keys wicket in tie and white shirt and beigish pullover vest. The way he sits in specs reading with his foot up on the desk and a bit of hair falling over the wire frame. His beautiful tense hands that show his urgency the rest of him conceals when he's on duty. Here's another moment, when he'd given me the Smithsonian story on masks and I thought to cut out the picture of the brass Athena and cut eyeholes in it, and appear to him suddenly from the balcony as Odysseus's patron. The Coach was at the wicket and looked up incredulous and offended. From behind the mask I saw the whole motion of my friend's pleasure. The on-duty glance up, almost no double-take to be seen, then the way he took off his glasses and laid them on the counter and broke into as tickled as entertained a grin as I've seen on him. Ah - I won that with my enterprise. A motion came to me with the mask and those two faces looking up. I swayed, magisterially I thought, but I don't know the whole reason. One more: in the Pacific Surf in Leukadia, when he was angry and I'd gone out and came back and saw his bag still there in the dark and his shape a humpy thing curled under the covers, I got into bed with him and pushed my arm under his neck to get it around him. I didn't know he was asleep until he woke. He woke realizing I was putting my arms around him and his body SPRANG toward me as if with a cry. 19 I'd walk through walls of fire continuously for you, he said of the photos I sent. That's still ahead, I said. The first time I was the one to phone. Joe answering. I hear him in the background. "It sounds like - it sounds like - ". I was asleep when he phoned last night. He was in a state, harsh and overbearing. Tonight he'd had two kinds of love in two days and he was fine.
22nd What to think of Fumiko's experimental film piece. First I have to think of how I was in it. I looked ugly and had very good lines. I said things people can use. What was ugly. He was shooting me very close up, as if he sneaked in through the line my image holds and got a non-attractive woman very sensitively balanced in each word individually, a series of shifts of weight very transparently shown, the shifts of weight continuing when the sentence is through. David was lit from behind and looked cool. Louie kept saying He's so sexy. I was slightly ingratiating with my little edge of smile, but I also had the most moment-by-moment presence of speech. The men preached on in flows of orthodoxy that become grey marks unheard. Each of my words was heard. Current looked beautiful. There was the swan. But David's footage was most beautiful and free. The hour overall. Gave too much credit to Razutis, who was obedient in
the crunch. Misjudged the way Fumiko used her own footage. Had too much
language. But was okay, interesting, had a lot in it, old guard and new
people, reflections back and forth of what's said and what's seen. A massive
intervention. [Through the lens: Film as art produced and directed
by Gretchen Jordan-Bastow and Fumiko Kiyooka, written by Mary Daniel, WTN
Vancouver]
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