by Sam Shepard
11
I can’t help feeling a similarity between him and me. I don’t know what it is. Sometimes it feels like we’re the same person. A lost twin. The eyebrows. The chin. The twitch of an ear. The hands in pockets. The way the eyes look confident and lost at the same time.
12
You were always getting up quite early back then. Way before me. Six or five something like that. Feeding Max something smelly. I heard the can hit the trash. I still hear the can hit the trash. You were always going off to work in your feed store with your canaries in another town not too far from here. Another small town of its own. This country was full of small towns back then. You were also working with chickens, as I remember. Speckled chickens. Leghorns. Layers of white eggs. I remember some kind of Spanish chicken. A very unique color to their egg. Not white at all. The egg was blue as the sky. Sometimes the slightest shade of green. I used to watch them in our little chicken coop back home. I would sit under the shade of an old avocado tree. It was so old that it drooped to the ground. Some of the branches had gone right into the ground and rooted themselves. A gigantic tree. The chickens loved it. It provided them with lots of shade and they could hear coyotes coming because a coyote would always crunch the dry leaves. Anyway, the time I am referring to is the time when you were living in that garage in a little house. Living in a garage in a very small town in northern California where the migrant workers stand on corners looking for work or hoping to get some. Usually pruning, raking, working in orchards. Pruning grapes. Gathering the leftovers. They would burn all that stuff in the middle of the fields. Smoky cones drifting out to the freeway.
Right now there’s a gigantic plume, a white cloud, raising its head above the farm. My daughter says it looks like an atom bomb. She’s very smart that way. She sees things. She sees things before they happen.
13
Back then you had all these stones in the yard. Do you remember? Red, green, blue, white, gray, all different colors. Very clear. Stones. You had something in mind. Shapes. Figures. You were working on them. Different stones. You were working on them with hand tools, chisels, hammers and rasps. There was one really fragile one, a green figure, that you were afraid you might break the neck off of. Stone. You had to be very careful how you struck it because one false move and the head would be at your feet. I remember your hands. Your hands in relation to the stone. Very clear. A backyard with a chain link fence around it. There was water somewhere, a water fountain. You went to Berkeley or Oakland in your truck. You went to find a stone and you liked this one particular place. This quarry. Because the man, a little Italian guy who ran it, seemed to know something about stone and he always guided you in the right direction. There were all these fires around, fires dotted the landscape, it was the season of fires. We were having sandwiches somewhere behind a picture window and I think we’d gone swimming at Indian Springs in the hot spring water up there with palm trees all around and snakes. The water was so hot when it came out of the mountain that it would steam. Huge steam clouds reached up to the sky. It would have to cool down in one pond before it got into another because it was way too hot to swim in. I remember that very clearly.
You finished the sculpture, the green one. Stone. You finished it and put it in the kitchen above that old black-and-white television set.
14
Sometimes, very often, he speaks to himself. Who else could it be? I see from this distance—I see that his lips are moving. His lips are keeping him company. But it’s very hard to tell. His gestures—well, his gestures are the same, as if he’s talking to someone else. There must be someone else. But it’s very hard to tell. Sometimes.
Sometimes something sweeps across me. I’m not sure what it is. Sometimes swooping like the wind. Sometimes toenails or just the toes in the surf. Sometimes color. I remember sometimes you would start whole stories. Sometimes paragraphs. Sometimes sentences with the word “sometimes.” Do you remember how you did that? I thought it was a good way to start. “Sometimes.” In other words not always but sometimes. In other words sometimes not always. Sometimes this or that. Sometimes birds. Why birds, you would say. Why birds? Sometimes. Why color? Sometimes. Why…wind? Dogs? Sometimes it made complete sense to me. It made complete sense.
Or you would start a sentence or a story with “for instance.” For instance, a single oak tree growing. For instance, the wind comes. The leaves fall. The dog pants. The flies buzz. The butterflies go in and out. The leaves fall for instance sometimes not all the sometime. Just sometimes.
I think sometimes there’s something wrong with him, actually. People attend to him sometimes and sometimes he just sits there alone talking to himself. No gestures at all. Or he falls asleep. Sometimes I wish I were back in that time. There’s a car in the driveway with a blue handicapped sticker. A white car. A white car with an Arizona plate.
I’m not trying to prove anything to you. I’m not trying to prove that I was the father you believed me to be when you were very young. I’ve made some mistakes but I have no idea what they were. And I’ve never desired to start over again. I have no desire to eliminate parts of myself. I have no desire. Maybe we should meet as complete strangers and talk deep into the night as though we’d never seen each other before. All we know is that there is something reminiscent, something mysteriously connected. Sometimes.
You put up flags on sticks in order to guide the memory. In order to guide something. In other words, something stands out. A flag on a stick. Kind of like the Spanish in the 1500s, who staked the plains from the New Mexican border clear up to northern Texas to mark where they’d been and where they were going. Because nobody knew. Little red flags on sticks. It was the home of the Comanche, who always knew exactly where they were but to everyone else everything appeared to be lost.
15
I was relatively healthy. My son was very healthy. You, my son. The one who worked with canaries and stone. I think your grandparents, Jay and Aubra, were living in another garage on the other side of town about then. Jay was healthy but Aubra wasn’t so healthy. She had a lot of maladies that seemed to get worse when it rained. Hacking. Sneezing. Occasionally throwing up. The problem with it was—this other garage—was that it was in a flood plain. So when it rained really hard they were up to their necks in water. The linoleum would peel and curl and break out of its aluminum boundaries. But up to that point they were happily going arm in arm to the coffee shop that the woman from Berkeley owned who was having an affair with you. She was married at that time but you didn’t care about that. She didn’t care about that either. Marriage. You were in love. She had lots of coffee and she was in attendance almost always at her coffee shop. Your grandparents would walk down there arm in arm. They were very much in love too. They had always been. Aubra kept pretending that everything was alright. They would go down there to the coffee shop. They would walk across the zocalo—the little park—in those days it looked like an old Mexican village. They would sit at a corner table looking out at the zocalo through a big picture window and see the migrant workers talking about family problems. For instance, women. They were always talking about women. Wives, girlfriends. They were always talking about women. Meanwhile, inside the coffee shop Jay and Aubra were holding court over Brazilian coffee talking about Nietzsche and Erroll Garner and taking hot baths. They sat at their circular table by the big picture window in the early morning hours because Jay liked to get up at ungodly hours—four in the morning sometimes. Three in the morning sometimes. He was worse than you. Aubra, on the other hand, used to get migraines and sleep all day. She was getting worse and worse. But Jay loved to get up.
It was around about this time that the rains started and it rained and it rained and it rained and it rained and it rained. It wasn’t exactly apocalyptic but it flooded the small town. The flood plain. It flooded the second garage where Jay and Aubra were domiciled. It flooded bad enough where they were forced to leave. The Russian River overflowed its banks. Bridges were uprooted. Dams exp
loded. The sky weeped.
Around about this time Jay inherited a sum of money from his dead father and this sum of money was enough in those days to purchase a house. So he and Aubra jumped into their white Chevy Nova and drove out to New Mexico because they had heard through a friend that Columbus, New Mexico, was a brilliant new place to be. Now Columbus was the town that Pancho Villa attacked in 1914 or something like that—and is notoriously the first U.S. town that was invaded from the outside in, including Pearl Harbor, of course. But that was hardly even a town. Columbus was the first town where there was a foreign intrusion, let’s say. They sent some General Pershing down there but he never even saw Pancho Villa’s dust. Pancho Villa swept down on Columbus, New Mexico. Anyway, when Jay and Aubra reached Columbus, it was entirely different from what they had in their imaginations. Whatever that was. There was black plastic blowing from barbed wire. There were dead pigeons in the road.
They made a big U-turn and drove back to Deming, New Mexico. Deming, just south of Truth or Consequences. Deming, home of duck racing. They drove straight to a real estate agent and asked him if he had anything for sale. He said certainly. So they drove out to this place on the corner of Iron Street and somewhere else and they immediately liked it and Jay gave up all his hard-earned inheritance to the real estate guy and all of a sudden they had a house which they hadn’t had before. He owned his own house, which is a good thing I suppose. He owned his own house in a little border town called Deming. That’s how they got down there. Look up at the sky, Jay said to Aubra. She looked up—Are you interested in all this? About your ancestors? Your grandma and grandpa? About love?
—
In the meantime, back in the little town, the little Mexican zocalo town of northern California, you, and the woman who owned the coffee shop, your wife now, were living in perfect harmony. Jay and Aubra moved all their stuff from the flooded second garage to Deming, New Mexico, in a U-Haul trailer. An upright piano, many books, many pictures, many stuffed animals, a burl oak table, a broken down sofa, all the stuff they had accumulated, plus Jay’s notebooks, photographs, mildewed and dripping. They moved all that stuff down there to Deming and they started to live a life.
16
In this desert I was originally referring to, the painted desert, you walk across Zen-like sculpted gardens full of carefully raked sand and cactus to get to the Clinic. And these sculptured gardens are full of little signs. They look like dominos from a distance. Signs that read Watch Out for Rattle Snakes. Beware of Rattle Snakes. People come from all over the world to get the cure from the Clinic. The magic cure. People drive up in fancy limousines. People are pushed in high tech wheelchairs by well appointed orderlies into the famous clinic. Sliding glass doors part in front of them. On the foyer wall are the pictures of the two brothers who first started the clinic in Minnesota. They’re in a snowstorm. They have snowshoes on. Heavy overcoats. They’re bringing the cure to the wilderness. Snow is flying everywhere. Outside here in the desert it’s 112 degrees but these men trudge in the snow with beatific smiles on their faces. It’s a gigantic mural that sweeps from one side of the clinic to the other. Bigger than life size. You can hear the blizzard winds blowing. But just outside in Arizona it’s 112 degrees and there are sculptured gardens full of sand and cactus and rattle snakes. Bigger than life itself.
17
Once upon a time there was a Pancho Villa who came from Durango, Old Mexico, which at that time was the very end of the Santa Fe Trail. Or the beginning of it. Depending on which way you were going. In other words the Santa Fe Trail sort of began around St. Louis, Missouri. If you were American that is. This was in the days when America was very isolated. Surrounded by enemies. The Santa Fe Trail went from Missouri and then all the way down to Durango, Old Mexico, where Pancho Villa was born. And Dolores del Río also was born there. There’s a Dolores del Río Boulevard in the middle of Durango. If anybody gives a shit. Anyway, right after the Mexican Revolution Pancho Villa retired to a hacienda just outside Durango. They discovered he was no longer the core of the revolution. There was an Indian in the south called Emiliano Zapata who was more politically important. Pancho Villa was living in this hacienda and having a good time. He had his hacienda and he had a brown Dodge sedan that was chauffeured and he had many many bodyguards. Villa would periodically go to town to collect gold from the bank in order to pay his many many peons and people who worked for him at the hacienda. On one particular day he decided to go to the bank. And so they took off in the Dodge sedan and they went to the town of Durango, Mexico, and they went to the bank and they got bags of gold in order to pay all the peons. So they got back in the Dodge and they headed out of the dusty town back to the hacienda and suddenly a boy, a young boy nine or ten, jumps out—he was a pumpkin seed vendor and he was barefooted and he had a huge sombrero and a sack of seeds over his shoulder. He came out yelling Pancho Villa’s name. Very excited. He got in front of the Dodge waving his skinny arms and he said, “Pancho Villa, Pancho Villa! Hail Pancho Villa!” And that was the signal for all the assassins to come out of hiding and shoot Pancho Villa dead in his brown Dodge. That’s the last anybody ever heard of him. “Pancho Villa, Pancho Villa! Hail Pancho Villa!” That was the end of that. End of story.
—
Durango’s still there, the desert’s still there, Mexico’s still there. Everything’s still there but everything’s changed. Jay and Aubra went to New Mexico and they had absolutely nothing to do with Pancho Villa. They were two different subjects, two different entities, that lived not even in the same time.
18
I don’t like the idea of him talking about Pancho Villa. Whether he’s overheard it or learned it through gossip or comic books he’s got things wrong. To me the story of Pancho Villa is completely private and belongs to the world of fable. Why should he be poking his nose into information that’s private? It has nothing to do with him, it’s not his story to tell.
19
There’s some things you don’t know about me mainly because they happened before you were born. For some reason they stand out in my memory. Then they didn’t, now they do. For instance, you don’t know that I used to sleep on a mattress on the floor on the corner of Avenue C and Tenth Street on the Lower East Side, in a condemned building. I used to sleep there on my mattress in a corner of the floor. And I used to heat the whole place with a gas stove, it was a shotgun apartment, floor-through, there was no furniture at all—just stuff found on the street. And one night I was sleeping and I was awakened by a woman screaming. I debated whether to go down and help her, whether to go downstairs and see who it was. All kinds of things were running through my mind. I stared at the blue flame coming from the gas stove in the kitchen. I had a moral dilemma. And finally I got up enough courage to go down there and I went to the bottom stairs and left the building and I saw her trapped by a man who was beating her up. As soon as I appeared they both stopped and turned and looked at me. They had the dumbest blank stares on their faces just like that doctor in the painted desert. And she said, the woman said to my face, “What the hell are you looking at?” I turned around and ran back upstairs and the woman continued to scream from the street. The man continued to beat her.
20
The time that I’m trying to get at—the time I’m trying to get at here is a fragile time. Like a scab very crusty, very small that you pick at. It’s somewhat muddied, this time. It’s not at all clear to me. It must have been—it must have been, I would say, in the mid-seventies. Thereabouts. What went down? It’s not at all clear. Cambodia. Tet Offensive. Helicopters crashing. Watergate. Muhammad Ali. Float like a butterfly sting like a bee. The chestnut king of the Triple Crown leading the Belmont field by thirty-two lengths. Regardless how you thread them there’s no escape from the confusion of that time.
21
This period I’m referring to must have been somewhere in the mid-seventies. Wasn’t it? Nixon. Somewhere. Somehow. Somewhat. Escaped. I can’t talk about the actual escape much
except to say that it was exhausting. It was mentally exhausting. It still is. All the planning all the preparation for it and then the experience of course was quite different than the plans. The experience is always different than the plans. The experience was exhausting. I am still exhausted from it. Angel Island. Escape from Alcatraz. Three escaped. Thought they drowned. Maybe only one drowned. A blurry photograph from 1975. Recent computer-generated evidence suggesting two made it to South America, just like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
