by Sam Shepard
Heading North to Shiprock
‘I guess I was lucky to be alive back then, when you get right down to it, purring along on Baseline Drive in Ed Cartwright’s ’40 Ford with a Mercury flathead and the Stones full blast on KFWB—Color Radio Channel 98—and Anita Guttierre in the back seat with her skirt around her neck and bottles of Ripple and bags full of bennies and the hot summer winds blasting shafts of orange blossoms through the windows. Nothing wrong with that. The unknown is sometimes better. Sometimes way better. Don’t you think?
Felicity Close Up
One image of Felicity I’ll never forget was of her singing when she was about eight or nine years old. It was a foreign national anthem in some language I’d never heard. She kept forgetting the words to it. There was a huge audience like for a World Cup game in a giant coliseum but you never saw them. All you saw was Felicity close up in a parochial school uniform of some kind with suspenders and a white blouse. Her head was tucked into the belly of a middle-aged man in slacks, white shirt, and an alligator belt. It must have been her father but you never saw his face. Just his hand, now and then, stroking the top of her head very affectionately. Very soft. A blue jeweled ring gleamed from his index finger. It had two crossed tennis rackets etched into it. Felicity was singing the foreign national anthem to the huge audience over a loudspeaker system but she would grow unbearably shy and silent, then try to disappear into her father’s pocket. It was as though she wanted to become a tiny mouse and hide inside the dark folds with his car keys and loose change. She kept looking up at his face for relief but you never saw his face, just her, looking up, almost pleading. She never cried but you could see she wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere but there.
Maybe it’s like that. A foot. Hand. Or idea. Something slips. Shifts. You find yourself in another world. You weren’t even looking. It just arrived. Appeared. Like a deer at dusk. Sudden. Still. An ear twitches. Another ear. You’re not alone. You don’t even see it. It sees you. Maybe it’s just like that.
Wafer-Thin Paper
She called me from the road, said she was heading north in a rented Jeep and she’d spend the night in Chattanooga at a Hampton Inn—her favorite, I don’t know why. She’d already done six-hundred-some miles and was dog-tired. It was raining buckets here but not there, apparently, although I didn’t think it was a good idea for her to drive at night. Funny, I immediately became concerned about her, alone on the road at night, as though we were still living together after all those years. A couple with parts of each other somehow embedded. Parts of each.
She arrived and unloaded her stuff—cameras, a leather portfolio, her photographs and the dark archival boxes that held them in bows and ribbons with her name carefully engraved on the front. The way she ran her hands over the contours of the pictures and the wafer-thin paper—the white tissue that separated each photo—I thought this to be very female in the best sense of the word. She made it known right away that we would be sleeping together in the convertible couch and not her stuck away alone in the upstairs bedroom like some houseguest. I had no argument with that. We went out and had dinner at Henry’s place—crowded as always but we found a good booth. My temptation to have a glass of red wine was overcome by how glad I was to see her. Henry was his usual very courtly, very gentlemanly self. There was horse racing on the little television over the bar, broadcast all the way from Florida. I didn’t even know that Tampa Bay still existed, actually. The restaurant was full of “racehorse” people—trainers, jockeys, and the very wealthy who owned acres and acres of bluegrass and white mansions with Greek columns and fields of tobacco and soybeans and corn.
At night we settled in with books on the North Pole and Graham Greene novels. I tried to get her to read some short stories by Bolaño but she found them too depressing and pejorative in a strictly male sense. We talked about our children when they were very young. How our little girl was always making our little boy laugh. How he tried to keep a straight face but she kept cracking him up. We talked about how remarkable it was for two stubborn, crusty, old codgers like ourselves to have spawned such mild-mannered calm kids. I tried killing a bluebottle fly with an empty laundry bag and finally succeeded. The whole time I was thinking of this French woman who wrote an entire essay about the death of a fly. The outright tragedy of it. Suzuki with a whole blank page of his book Beginner’s Mind devoted to a picture of a fly. No words, just a fly. Alive.
We became addicted to the TV series Breaking Bad. We bought a forty-inch Samsung TV and a DVD player at Target just to play the series. We bought ten episodes and started our watching from the pilot, right on through. Neither of us had ever seen the series or watched a show in this manner, in sequence. Just black blanks where the commercials were supposed to go. The two kids who were working at Target seemed suspicious of us when we each admitted we knew nothing about technology and we had no idea what plugged into what. They claimed it was simple. They should have seen us unpacking the stuff back on the farm.
We sat on the porch in the pouring rain and talked about an island off Alabama that opened out to the Gulf. I immediately had fantasies of ocean wind. I could hear sea gulls, and brass fittings banging in the bay. I could smell fish and eel. She told me it was all in my mind. Palm trees waved.
We took a long walk up the driveway when the sun came out and I pointed out the tall white oaks and the hickory with thorny little nuts already protruding. She stopped at every clump of new mushrooms in caps of yellow, pink, and gold. The Elkhorn was running muddy and fast, far below.
Later that afternoon, she fell asleep on the leather couch as I read Mornings in Mexico out loud by D. H. Lawrence. Later she read me something by James Agee. Something about old men on a front porch at dusk.
She told me exactly what was going to happen, as though the future were already past. She told me that as soon as she left the farm, I would call “that young porn star” and bring her down here. She said I would continue to lie about other women and I would continue to have all these “affairs.” I denied it. I denied all of it. I opened the farm gate for her. She rolled down the window. We kissed in the afternoon shade. She drove away. I closed the gate.
Dirt Back Road
“Would you rather be alone? Just tell me.”
“Right now, you mean?”
“Yeah. Right now.”
“Instead of being with you?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Well, if I said yes, that would be an open invitation to an insult, wouldn’t it?”
“To me, you mean?”
“Yes. To you.”
“You would have to run the risk of hurting my feelings.”
“I would like to imagine that I wouldn’t think about the risk.”
“Then you’d probably hurt my feelings even more.”
“Why is that?”
“Something callous about it.”
“Callous?”
“You would stop being my friend.”
“Are we friends now?”
“I thought we were.”
“You’re not sure?”
“Well, I know we’ve been through something together. Lived through something.”
“What?”
“Experiences. Time.”
“Riding around in the car?”
“Looking out the window.”
“Commenting on certain things we see out the window?”
“Eating breakfast.”
“Coffee.”
“Five-grain toast.”
“Sleeping in the same bed.”
“Fucking.”
“Well, yes—fucking.”
“Coming together.”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes you, sometimes me.”
“Watching me get dressed up for you?”
“Is that what you were doing? All that time?”
“Didn’t you know that?”
“I was wondering why you watched me like that.”
“Now you know.”
/>
“All that time.”
“Going out to dinner.”
“Yes. All those things.”
“Are those things you’d rather do alone?”
“Me?”
“Yes. You.”
“No, I was asking about you. Would you rather be alone?”
(LONG PAUSE)
“Do you think about me when I’m not here?”
“You?”
“Yes, do you picture me? Do you imagine me alone somewhere? Daydreaming. Fantasizing. All by myself.”
“About what?”
“Anything. Being somewhere else, for instance.”
“Where?”
A very small diner on a dirt back road. Night. No cars. Very few lights. A lone dog in the distance. A metal table with a white tablecloth. A candle made out of beeswax. One other couple. Drunk. Very drunk. Loud. Talking about baseball. We try to get away from them without being noticed. We try to get some peace, politely. They follow us. They sit down at the table right behind us. They continue to talk loud about baseball and the World Series. They get louder and louder. Especially the woman. They’re from somewhere else. Colorado. Utah. They know they annoy us. They want to annoy us. They seem to enjoy the agitation they’re causing. We both get up from the table. You go off to find the waiter in the kitchen, in order to pay him. The woman starts to insult me. The man laughs very loudly. The woman makes fun of the way I’m dressed. My hair. The shoes I have on. The man laughs even louder. I walk off in the direction I saw you go to find the waiter. The woman follows me, weaving. She grabs hold of my long braid and won’t let go. I whirl around and hit her square in the face with my leather handbag. I knock her to the ground. The man starts yelling at me. The woman is so drunk she can’t get up. She starts crying and screaming and clawing at her ankles. The man takes hold of my shoulder and jerks me around. You come out of the kitchen, having paid the waiter, and knee the man in the nuts. He screams and falls over the short railing into the dirt road. The lone dog barks louder in the distance. The woman starts yelling frantically for the police, who are nowhere to be seen. The man crawls pathetically around in the dirt like a wounded crab, clutching his balls, groaning and coughing, shouting lewd insinuations at the night sky, which is lavishly spangled with stars. The little waiter comes out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a dirty towel and chewing on something brittle. The two of us head for our blue beat-up pickup truck parked across the road. We walk calmly, arm in arm, like a couple entering the Copacabana. The man yells from the floor of the dirt street that he’s going to kill us both. He’s going to find out where we live. The exact address. He knows people who are in the know. He’s going to let us rot in our bed. He’s going to murder us as we’re copulating. He’s going to wait until we’ve almost reached the point of ejaculation and then he’ll pull the trigger. Right then. Right in the moment when we’ve both come together in perfect syncopation and feel as though we’re one ecstatic luminous being ascending to the heavens. Right then, he pulls the trigger.
A Girl I Know
There’s no guarantee against these nightmares now. I just let them come. Every morning at almost exactly 4:22. Black. I’ve left one window open just to let the cool night air pass through my room and give the demons a way out. The demons. The moon is in the window now. There, behind the blinds—glowing. Grinning. It’s gone out of its way to catch me square in the face. I hear the dogs snoring like old people from the kitchen. Old people when they fall asleep, teacups dangling from their index fingers in front of a glowing fire. This time it’s me on a couch high on the cliffs overlooking Los Angeles. I recognize the place. Early day. An old bungalow-style complex, with peeling chalky plaster. A girl I know rents it to me. A girl I know lets me stay in a small room she insists once belonged to James Dean, before he was famous. This time I’m outside, stretched out on a red Naugahyde couch, surrounded by dolly track. Completely encircled. Several camera operators with their baseball caps turned front to back (who started that?) race around, their eyes suctioned to the rubber eyepiece of Rolleiflex cameras. But they’re not actually shooting film. I’m the audience, I guess. I watch them “pretend-shooting” delicately painted cityscapes: murals on sheets of plywood and canvas. Faded pastels in pinks, blues, and yellows. Everything subdued. They keep racing from one position to the other, the grips sweating profusely as they push the seated cameraman at top speed. Now and then, they come to sudden stops, zooming in tightly on the murals, then racing on to the next one. The tips of giant eucalyptus sway languidly in the background. Far below, in the valley, you can make out the Santa Monica Freeway, crawling. Up here mockingbirds flit from tree to tree in the growing heat. Suddenly, my couch bursts into flame. A girl I know runs away.
Blackmail Dialogue #4
“Have you given any thought to the cover?”
“What cover?”
“The cover of the book.”
“Listen—how far are you going to carry this thing?”
“What thing?”
“This idea that we’ve somehow or another coauthored a book that contains beautiful ideas. It was simply conversation. Conversation that I thought was totally private and was never intended for public consumption. Conversation that had nothing to with writing.”
“It all has to do with writing.”
“Oh, here we go—now you’ve got a philosophy.”
“Well, it does. Talking and writing. They’re interdependent.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
“What do you know about it? You’ve never written anything.”
“Now I have.”
“That isn’t writing.”
“What is it, then?”
“Copying.”
“I only wrote down what exists already. That’s all I did.”
Back Across the Desert Floor
At 2:30 a.m. I started bleeding from the left nostril. I thought I could stop it easily by stuffing my nose full of toilet paper and laying my head back flat on the bed. I stared at the white ceiling fan. No sounds except a lone cricket. When I got up my bare feet stuck to the drops of blood on the brick bathroom floor. When I pulled the toilet paper out of my left nostril, it went right on bleeding. More blood now came out of my right. It was very dark blood and looked like it might have come from some mysterious internal organ. From 2:30 to 5:00 a.m. I thought I could get it stopped. I’d had nosebleeds before. The thing I didn’t want to do was to disturb the woman whose guesthouse I was staying in—she had five dogs that really made a racket when aroused. She’d already been kind enough to go my bail and find me a crackerjack DUI lawyer and drive me around town on shortcuts when they’d taken away my driver’s license. At 5:00 a.m. I decided to enlist her help. I called both her phone numbers, trying to connect to her main house, but couldn’t get through on either. Finally, I decided to walk over there from the guesthouse, in my underwear with toilet paper jammed up both my nostrils and blood splashing everywhere. Sure enough, the dogs went nutty and started howling their heads off. Lila (the woman who owns the house) came to the door in her pajamas and was horrified by the sight of me. She couldn’t quite grasp the predicament but understood it was an emergency. We drove to the ER at the hospital in our little New Mexican town, using every back road and slowing for all the speed bumps. (She swore this was a shortcut.) On arrival, someone was waiting with a black wheelchair as I stumbled from the Honda, blood flying. An Irish doctor came and very energetically started packing my left nostril with a cotton material she said was impregnated with cocaine. (It’s hard to believe how much stuff will fit up inside your nose.) She was very lively and got the bleeding stopped. The Irish doctor kept telling me that it should be okay now but make sure to have my wife check it periodically and call if anything further happened. I tried to explain that Lila was not my wife, to no avail. We went back on the same shortcut, slowing again for all the speed bumps. My head was propped back with my nostrils packed full of cocaine-gauze, and I kept thinking how nice i
t would be to be born and raised here and go to prep school here and then on to some fancy Ivy League deal back east and become a lawyer or a doctor and then come back here and have reunions and see your old friends and spend Christmas with your parents who were still alive and give your father plaid ties and your mother turquoise jewelry and your siblings bright red racing skis. We passed the museums on the hill in the early-morning light. Bronze statues of pioneers in various poses of heroic suffering. A beautiful cottonwood tree was the cornerpiece of a soccer field with brand-new plastic netting at both ends for goals. It was too early yet for anyone to be up except garbage men throwing containers at random and jumping back on their truck as though it were a stagecoach. Once back at Lila’s house my nose started to bleed again and she got it stopped with a washrag in the kitchen. She called my doctor in Phoenix and he thought I should come down and get checked into the hospital just to make sure. Lila volunteered immediately for the drive and just needed to call someone to take care of the dogs and plants. There was no talking her out of it.
