It isn't even raining. There was water about an hour ago, on the other side of the mountains, but even that was insignificant, something you could walk around in with no umbrella and be fine. They've stopped the bus because one of the windshield wipers doesn't move too good across the glass. Protocol. This is shit. I have a strong suspicion the driver is lying. Its two a.m. and this early morning without rain they've pulled into one of those half-gas station / half- fast food restaurants that line the long black highways of America. Here you can consume meat and petroleum in one foul swoop, buy cigarettes and smoke them in the cold. I'm sitting at a Subway drinking coffee. The coffee's bad. I'm not even sure where I am. Ellensworth, Ellingsworth, Ellensburg? Does it matter? I'm in Washington and Washington is not my home. My minds not right at this awkward hour of the night. My body is revolting. The left leg numb about the thigh, a wicked twist still twisting in the neck. Also, everywhere I look there's mutants doing things in packs. Where do these people come from? No wonder Americans are hated. If I listen close enough I will know exactly the kind of engine it takes to make a car hit sixty in under 5.2, which, if the rumors are true, is pretty hard to beat. Only American cars can do this. The Japanese make crappy cars, apparently. An unfortunate looking fellow with an English accent tries to make a case for the fast machines of Europe, but he is quickly laughed into silence by the rest of us who've been chain-smoking outside the gas station for over an hour now. Holy shit can these mutants smoke! There's one with a gimpy left hand who takes down three each time the bus pulls over to let us stretch our legs. He's a killer for sure. Can't even look him in the eyes. Luckily, I'm wearing a Guns- N-Roses shirt and a hat with an elk on there that says Montana. If I stick to the shadows, talk bad about the gays, and spit a lot, maybe they'll forgive me for my skin. I would give anything to have you here right now. Its only a matter of time before the mutants discover I'm a poet and tear me into pieces.
* * *
We'll I'll be damned if Dolly Parton didn't just come on the radio with a song I know the words to! The mutants are in an uproar when they realize the skinny Asian kid likes Dolly Parton, and we all agree, it's unanimous, Dolly Parton is one hell of a fine looking woman. Unfortunately, Ms. Parton has yet to write a song longer than five minutes and soon the song is over. Now some inbred beef eater is singing about the USA. The conversation about women's body parts, however, continues unabated and soon the mutants are comparing "bus-slut" stories from various trips across the country, exaggerated, and in all likelihood, completely fabricated narratives that have managed, somehow, to live on in the surprisingly precise collective mutant memory. I will spare you the details, most of which involve a bathroom stall, but what I must explain is the surreal extent to which I can't believe I'm here, listening to stories I can't believe have happened in the same world I walk around and go to school in. But this is Ellensworth at three a.m. Time is passed in anyway it can be. Round here the night continues on.
* * *
I wish that I were home right now and I could write you a real letter with my small orange cat sleeping on my lap. If I were home I'd tell you about my tiny Montanan life and the shitty job I work five days a week while trying to pass a Spanish class I need to graduate that I am currently not passing. I would tell you that I'm happy here but lonely and that I miss you and I wonder how you are. When I'm home I mostly go to school and then to work and then home again where I do homework until midnight. Then I try to sleep, but so often I can't sleep, and so I end up writing poems or else letters to a girl in Germany I met on Ko Chang Island after New Years when I was visiting the motherland. Funny how much easier it is to talk to girls in letters when you don't have to look at them and think they're pretty. Every now and then, however, the gods look down and smile. I imagine, were I in Montana and not sitting in a Subway sandwich shop at this godforsaken hour, I would find myself writing you about a girl I've met here in Missoula. She's far too young for me, but I feel like I'm a boy again, anxious and always wondering what she's doing, what she's thinking, which doesn't happen much these days. For the most part I am discouragingly asexual. Every now and then, however, I'll see a girl so dark I have to know her name and have her, or at the very least, imagine that I do. She is one of these. We read the obituaries together on Sunday afternoons and make up stories of the dead. We do crossword puzzles and never finish them. She reads me Hamlet, which she is studying for an English class, and I lay on the ground and let the room fill up. She's even ruined tap-shoes dancing in the snow! Christ. She's only twenty. What have I become? I have a strong suspicion age is a mutation. Soon I'll be one of these sketchy old men so lonely they ride the bus in search of love, away from nothing toward something even less. Bill, you've got to promise me, if you've ever loved me, if you see this happening, put me down before I'm forty. I mean this. I am far too weak for suicide.
* * *
Suddenly there is commotion and a mass migration out the Subway doors. Our new bus has arrived! Its pulling up right now! The mutants are surrounding it. I can tell they're excited and making noises because their mouths are opening and closing like forty small black holes, tiny puffs of steam escaping through the night air. I will have to finish this letter somewhere else.
* * *
Really? You have got to be kidding me. That bus was not our replacement bus, rather it is a bus going back the direction I just came from. It is the anti-replacement bus. This is shit. Now the mutants from the anti-bus are filtering into my tiny half-a-Subway and are mingling with the mutants from my bus. Twice as many mutants and the mutants all agree. Its unanimous. It sucks our bus broke down. Two mutants to my left are plotting mutiny against Greyhound proper. Apparently, Greyhound proper is run by Jews and/or gays. We want our money back. We also want hotels with cable television. We want beer. Women. We want our homes again. Mine is in Montana. Montana is far away.
* * *
Now there is laughter all around. A tiny mouse of a girl declares it seems her cat has sprayed her binder. The mutants take turns sniffing it. Its unanimous. Cats spraying things is funny, as long as the things belong to others. Now we are talking cats:
"Cats are good hunters."
"I like hunting."
"My cat killed a mole"
"I like hunting."
Now we are talking hunting. Guns. The death of things in general. I am finding it hard to continue this letter without more coffee. A particularly twitchy mutant informs me I look like I could use some meth. Laughter all around. In the Subway-Gas Station at 4:30 in the morning we all agree that meth is fun at first, but arguably a poor decision.
"Bad for the teeth," says one mutant.
"I've got scars," says another.
Its true, he does have scars. He shows us. Now someone shows him her scars. We're in Ellensworth showing each other our scars, speaking of our wounds. Mutant with the most wounds wins. I have only one scar from my belt buckle two Christmases ago when I was fat. This is nothing. Gimpy left handed mutant declares his hand is gimpy from beating up a guy who tried to kiss him, a decision which landed him in prison. Recovering-meth-mutant has a scar clear across his face from being jumped in Tacoma by a pack of juveniles, three scars on his arms from a guy who fought like a girl and started scratching, and, the topper, a gash across his back beginning at the left hip and arching up to just below the right shoulder. A knife tattoo he calls it. We have a winner! He is incredible! The mutants all agree. This kid is a survivor. Shouts and high fives all around the room. A sudden and glorious camaraderie becomes us. The night is new again.
* * *
Finally there is silence. Only me and the freckled, brown haired girl behind the sandwich counter, poor thing, fingering the pickles. One of the mutants has pot and they are all now outside getting stoned behind a dumpster, while I, the quiet Asian kid writing a letter, has been placed in charge of all the mutant’s strange belongings. I wonder what’s in their bags. Probably clothes, same as mine.
* * *
Now the police are here. I fear for my mutant brethren partaking of illicit substances somewhere out there in the shadows. Will the officer take us all away? No, Officer is hungry and wants a sandwich. The mutants, by now stoned enough to think the law is on their side, begin asking questions. Can he call the Greyhound office for us? Arrest the driver? The hungry officer has no answers. There is nothing anyone can do.
* * *
Sodomy. Decapitation. Rape. Now we’re talking history. The worst things that have happened to us. The worst things we’ve made happen onto others. Bill, these people live in a world I can not explain. Any words I’d use would fall out hallow from my mouth and shatter. I lack the ground of having lived these lives in which to root my speaking of these lives. What I can say is that they’ve lived a whole lot harder than I have, much much harder. I can give you facts, but that is all. I have nothing to compare. Three of us are felons. Two days ago, one of us watched our best friend gunned down and bleeding in the street. We are here because we’re running from our lives. The bigot with the gimpy hand was raised, molested, and gang-raped in group homes from the age of ten until eighteen. There’s a lot of talk of liquor and the fists of shitty father’s. There’s depression, gang fights, bar fights, jail cells, even a San Francisco rodeo and a bull hoof to the sternum. I have nothing to add except that time at the Bomb Shelter in Minneapolis I tried to fight a cop and lost so bad Jake and Riley dragged me to a hospital which wouldn’t take me in. The mutants like this story very much, especially the part about being woken up off the concrete by a face full of pepper spray, but that was a secluded and singular event. I do not live my life this way, in such sudden and senseless violence. These men and women have and will most likely continue doing so. What do you say to a guy who watched a Samoan take the head off a Mexican and stuff the body in a drier when he was ten? What do you say when he looks you in the eyes and explains how the blood shot out in rhythm, spraying to the music of the heart until booth the blood and the heart itself ran out? These stories have no end. I can only take them down.
* * *
The boys are smoking again. I’ve got to hand it to them. These people get ground down from all directions and still manage to exist. Somehow, cigarettes allow this. So does hate. So does knowing there are others who have just as many scars, addictions, dead Mexicans in driers, and histories of gang rape as you do. Life is a beautiful democracy. It wears us all down equally. Richard Hugo said that. He said a lot of things and usually he was right. But there isn’t anything equal in any of this. These men and women have so little to do with me, and I with them, and yet somehow here we are, together in an Ellensworth Subway sandwich shop at five a.m. in the morning. Our exhaustion makes us same. What I’ve learned to love about the mutants is the specific knowledge that I’m afraid of them. Not in any physical sense, no, these mutants will not harm me, we are on and off this bus together, but there’s a fear of somehow being on this bus forever, of becoming so badly beaten by a life your only option is to accept it, to find a way to pass the time until the last bus pulls over and doesn’t start again. I’m afraid of what will happen if the poems aren’t good enough, if I don’t get into grad school, if I never have a book, a girl, the farm I’d like to die in when I’m old and in my sleep. Will I somehow end up in Ellensworth again? Will there be someone here to write my story down and find a way to see me as person? Bill, among these people I feel myself a fraud. I am so obviously weaker than they are, so completely untested in a world these people wear the scars of. I write and write and risk so little I'm ashamed. I'm from somewhere else, from poems and universities.
* * *
Any moment now, the sun will come and take us all away. When it does, we’ll board the bus again, all of us, together. We’ll ride east in the early half of morning, the small towns blurring slowly in the window, the spotted fields of cattle, the solitary trees. Maybe I’ll fall asleep, but I doubt it. Soon the woman next to me will ask me for my shoulder. I’ll say certainly, of course. Bill, in Washington the light is warm and rising. The woman’s hair smells like a cigarette in a glass of water forgotten on the counter of a bar. Give my best to Crystal. This bus is full of names.
- Nick
Re, "I write and I write and I risk so little I'm ashamed": This is well-articulated. I would argue, though, that the risks that people who write take are completely different than the risk a person who’s decapitating someone else takes. I know that, when I suggest this, I’m actually ignoring the real point you’re making here about the differences between those who constantly act and those who prefer to observe some or much of the time. I know you didn’t really mean that people who write don’t take risks. It goes without saying that writers are often times taking absurd risks, emotionally speaking, by exposing their thoughts/feelings/perspectives to basically anyone.
ReplyDeleteSomewhat related to this—and perhaps this is more related to what you wrote in your blog, too— I think people who write are capable of taking those kind of risks b/c they first spend so much time reflecting on what they encounter or experience. As for me, I often find myself considering whether or not I spend too much time thinking and not enough time doing things. I live in Missoula now, and when I’m not here, I (like you) think fondly of the place, but my head is my real environment, my own assessments and observations, the books I read. Shit, today I repotted some plants and felt, given the amount of time and skill repotting plants takes, disproportionately proud of myself for having done so. That’s probably because I spent so much time thinking about how I was going to re-pot my plants, so by the time I actually did it, it seemed like a real accomplishment. My point: what is my point? I guess my point is that writing a letter or blogging or writing a poem, whatever: those are all ways of turning thoughts into acts, and turning thoughts into acts then sometimes makes those thoughts more manageable (at least for me). That’s something I forget when I’m thinking but not writing. I have other points, too, one of which is that I clicked on your blog link without knowing that you had a blog; I don’t do a lot of blog-reading, but I got sucked into your letter to Bill, and I liked it, so I will probably read more of your blog posts in the future. My final point is that K told me about the Fulbright: congratulations. That will be better than school for you for now, I bet. Heather
H-
ReplyDeleteHow nice to find you here. A lot of me agrees with you, partially because I'm not the same person I was when I wrote this letter. My relationship to the work has changed, and to myself watching myself do the work over the last however long its been that I've been doing this, that relationship has changed too. When I wrote this letter, I was, as a writer, feeling pretty lost. Nothing had happened for me, no publications, no MFA at Iowa, no peers encouraging and believing in me, no Fulbright. I had, at that point, been hanging blindly, stubbornly to this largely abstract idea that I was poet worth the time it took to be one. But school was coming to a close, Joanna was the only one who had any faith in me, and I was having trouble believing that, especially on that bus watching the mutants doing things in packs. They didn't have a choice, I did. Sometimes I feel guilty I've had so many choices and what I've chosen, is, well, this. I struggle with the extent to which poetry is and is not a selfish act, with the real space it places between me and the lives of others. Oppen says something about this in "Of Being Numerous," I think, though I can't recall it, not exactly. Something, a concern which I think he actually borrowed from someone else, a fear that as the accuracy of seeing someone increases one's distance from the person might also increase. He said it better. He says everything better.
-Nick.