Peace Chicken

 1996-

     We frequently had to push-start the Peace Chicken.  It turned over with a little nudge, back-fired and roared in first gear while the pusher climbed back in the sliding bay door and said, "Hit it!"

     With that, the driver would ease the clutch out and in that last inch of play the old air-cooled pancake motor would thrum us away in a coughing cloud of blue.  The Peace Chicken was an early 1970's VW bus, brick-red with bags of stale to moldy bagels piled so high  the rear-view mirror was useless. 

     The bagels were cast-offs we intended to give to the poor and hungry, although I do not know what we had against those people.  We would pile in the Chicken and attend meetings around town with other noble idealists, sweat running down our backs, into the cracks of our asses, puddling on the vinyl seats before dripping out the rusty holes in the floorboards.  Boxes of STOP GENOCIDE flyers mouldered in our laps waiting to bring people down as they ate pizza, or shopped for a Bob Marley poster in the student union at FSU.  For those who needed further explanation, we carried folders of color-copied photographs depicting children murdered in the streets, old women cooking grass soup, and city parks lined with tombstones and freshly dug graves.  This was our calling card. 

     That winter, the Peace Chicken carried two of our emissaries to a meeting in Washington D.C.
Prior to their departure we collectively worried over the Chicken.  Those with abilities changed oil, tightened throttle cables, and checked brake pads.  Those of us without lined the floor with blankets, made peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches by the dozen and passed bottles of Dewar's around and watched the others work.  I have pictures from that trip north of the Peace Chicken coated in clear ice so thick they couldn't open the doors, the driver and passenger swaddled in sleeping bags as they rumbled up I-95 to join the voices for Bosnia, prosthetic stump socks on their heads to keep them warm.

Sometimes I think I see it around town. 

-Juancho

Happy Birthday

Today is my wife's birthday so I wrapped up my eye teeth in my last bottom dollar to give to her. 

She said, "Thanks, but that's really not necessary."  I said, "Oh, but it is." and ran across a bed of hot coals to get her a glass of ice water.  "Now you're just being silly," she told me as I rubbed my belly and patted my head while jumping up and down on one foot.  "No I'm not. I'm a serious person." I told her and I seriously love you and that is nothing to joke about."  She said, "What has two cheeks and is brown in the middle?" and I guessed a hamburger, which was the wrong answer.  

Last week she said, "Don't do anything special for my birthday." So I let the ice carving of Pegasus slowly melt out behind the shed.  I paid the chorus of 5 and 20 angels their travel per diem and apologized for putting them out unnecessarily.  "What can you do when your true love speaks, but what she requests?" the conductor angel shrugged.  "Indeed." and the 26 of us polished off the Scuppernong  pies I made for her, cooling on the window sill.  "Good pies!" the angels said and they penciled me in again for next year just in case.  

-Juancho

Listen

My right ear has been closed up tight for almost two weeks.  I think it is trying to protect me by prohibiting negativity from coming into it.  The doctor says it's an infection.  To each our own. I still have one good ear so that means I'm listening, but just barely.

A friend took a scary fall at the Santos trails down in Marion County, FL last week.  We got a pensive call from his girlfriend late at night with scant details.  I spent the next 24 hours pondering the possibility of his death, or permanent incapacitation either mentally or physically.
That's the kind of information my ear is trying to shield me from I think.

He tumped over from a small height onto his head and lay there unable to move or feel anything below the neck. "I think I broke my neck" is what he was reported to have said.  I know a bit about broken necks and a life without movement.  The thing nobody acknowledges is that it goes on.  My step-father is quadriplegic, as is a childhood friend from back in the day.  They live, they get things done.  They travel the third world and get drunk.  You say you would rather be dead, but you wouldn't.  We all persist. We accommodate.  We adapt.

For some minutes my friend must have lay there amid the crumbled limestone and pine needles and contemplated such a transition.  How will I earn a living?  How will I eat? How will I everything?  I imagine those minutes will become very important to him, much like my Crash of Great Clarity.  I can't recommend enough a terrifying accident or crisis when one needs to prioritize their values.

As feeling tingled back into his fingers and toes, and the paramedics loaded him up, was he making amends?  Counting his blessings?  Who knows?

All of that is personal between he and his moment. 

Juancho

Wobbly

Am I out of my groove because my inner ear is infected, or is my inner ear infected because I am out of my groove?  Either way, this record has been skipping in all the wrong spots. 

Time to make it right.  I got the antibiotics, but the rest of the prescription reads something like:

• Acquire perfect summer theme song
• Swim against the current
• Consult the Angry Monk
• 2 tblsp Turpentine
• 1 bushel of barbed wire
• 100 miles per week

I now welcome any and all non-binding, should-free advice from you- my crowd-sourced board of directors.

Thanks!

Juancho

Finding Charlie

Charlie the black Labrador disappeared in the storm on Sunday, a pouring down of buckets and crashing thunder that laid most of us down flat with the weight of the  falling pressure.
It has been a run of the putrid touch lately, when my every effort to get it right turns up shit. It is a syndrome exacerbated by effort, churning more and more best intentions into disappointments, let-downs and failure.  
 

"My aged black lab escaped my yard Sunday during the storms. He is black, about 100 pounds, and he has a difficult time getting around, so I'm not sure how he got further than the drive, but he is missing.  If anyone has seen him, please let me know.  He answers to Charlie, though usually only if he thinks food is involved."

I read that message at my desk and thought about old Charlie.  Was he off on a rounder? Scarfing cat food off or porches and licking wrappers behind Vertigo burgers? Had someone taken him in, unable to find his people? Was Charlie alive?  

I thought about that dog all day as I willed myself to not leave the building, my job, and my financial security behind.  Such a feat of strength by the hunger artist that goes unnoticed by his distracted audience. I exited the building to no applause, although I took my bow.  

The social network was alight with erroneous sightings of Charlie, and one concrete piece of information, however ominous-

"There is a black lab laying in the water in the Greenway by optimist park if anyone is missing a black lab it is alive but seems disoriented."

 I called Charlie's people, and she said that she had been up and down the greenway twice and saw nothing.  I felt the draw, the inexorable draw of adventure, redemption, yet another go at getting it right. I wanted to find Charlie, and I felt that I knew where he was.  Down into the greenway we went- my wife, my neighbor JJ, and our two intrepid search dogs, Summer Chanel (pictured) and Max the Australian Shepherd.  Find Charlie! we beseeched them and they did nothing of the sort.  

The greenway is a lowland drainage, which in lesser neighborhoods would be separated from the community by a chainlink fence and no trespassing signs, but in idyllic Indianhead Acres, it hosts wild foxes, a beaver, a walking path and even in early spring, every mosquito on earth.  

Our crew trundled down the long stairway into the covered, close air of the swamp.  I hung back, allowing myself to wander off the path and into the knee-deep marshy thicket.  I could see the basketball court, the nearby road, and hear the kids playing in the playground just a hundred yards away, but this was a wild place and I walked it the way a wild place must be walked.  I walked cautiously along a muddy rivulet invisible from the main path, obscured by thickets of grass. 

A black lab laying in the water, a black lab laying in the water, a black lab laying in the water, I whispered to myself as I walked and then I stopped-frozen with excitement, relief, and fear for the possible outcome.  There, neck-deep in the mud, were the sad and frightened eyes of a dog, alive.  I cried out something, and as I splashed towards him Melissa appeared above on the bank, her hand outstretched with a packet of food.  Charlie licked an inquiring tongue out to taste the food and then hungrily lapped it up from his prone position.  I called the owner and she was there, she could see us down below and she hurried down into the mud with me, a strong woman with white hair in a long braid and worry all over her face.  I reached into the water and felt all over Charlie, probing for injuries or signs of trauma.  He seemed unhurt, just exhausted.  

A gentleman with a long white beard and a rugged bearing, Charlie's other human companion, went back up the trail to find a tarp to help us move him, and Charlie made a move to follow. He was a willing old dog, but he just wasn't able. His tired old hips would not hold him upright as he repeated his effort to get unstuck from this place.  That was it for me.  I knew how Charlie felt, stuck and tired, staring hope in the eyes yet unable to get there.  "Charlie, it is time to go buddy.  We are getting out of here." 

I knelt down in that  muddy water, my knees pressing into the walls of this rutted stream and I scooped my arms around this 13 year-old dog, 90 lbs made heavier by muck and mud, and I lifted him up, cradled in my shaking arms and laid him on the grassy bank above us.  His owner and I worked ourselves out of the crick and Charlie stood wobbly and tried to head up the trail, unable to hold himself upright for long.  I thought once of my back, then put that thought aside and thought, I will carry this dog out of here or stay here with him forever.  Up he came, and he felt so good against my chest, this thing that I had gotten right.  

 

Juancho

On the River

My sweetheart wasn't gone 30 minutes before I found myself parked next to a dumpster eating a burrito in the van.  Three days of living alone was more than enough for the kitchen to become the garage again, with bikes stacked against the refrigerator and greasy rags  in the sink. It is hard to resist that late afternoon ennui that leads to drinking beer in your underwear on the back porch while plotting against that beast of an orange cat that haunts your own cat's dreams.  Where does that orange cat hide out?  I want to hit him where he lives when he least expects it, a barrage of green kumquats raining down on his tattered head.  He is as big as a five gallon bucket.

Oh well, nothing to do but plod on, resist the torporous daze and go for a ride.  With a rookie.  And crush him. Some things never fail to cheer me up.

My honey cruises through Dothan, her faithful dog presses her face to the stout 70 mph wind, while the rookie and I cool off at the local rope swing, a couple of old guys trying not to break an ankle.
An adolescent gator watches like a wallflower from 50 feet away, which seems like plenty of space when you are in the air, but a bit too close once you hit the water.

Juancho

Courage

More than once in my life I have said to myself, "That's it.  It is time to get serious about writing.'  I have canceled the cable, bought ink for the printer, and planted a bottle of scotch at 2' O'clock at my writing station.  Passport, Glenfiddich, Lagavulin,Laphroaig, Oban, Macallan, Highland Park, Dalwhinnie, and the ubiquitous Johnny Walker in all hues.

I have tried cigarettes as a writing aid also, and more important than the tobacco, is the right ashtray, it's proximity to a window, and the correct relative humidity to allow the smoke to wander slowly across the room lit in just the right fashion by the setting evening sun.

I have trusted a quilted flannel shirt from Wal-mart to be my muse, a broken alarm clock given to me by a friend-- set to the exact time of our parting for separate paths, a most profound and priceless gift.  Tuques, toboggans, stump socks, and watch caps have covered my balding to balded head as I courted inspiration at IBM Selectrics, Apple IIC's and E's, Brothers word processors lugged from month-to-month apartments in cities and towns, from mom's house to dad's.

I have scribbled on yellow legal pads and in so many incomplete journals I know that a 5x7 leather-bound is more of a non-fiction thing and a black 81/2 x 11 sketchbook is for poetry.  I have a wooden trunk from Haiti, intricately carved and deep enough for a body, full of incomplete stories and trying too hard.

I have at times plagiarized the voices of Henry Miller, Harry Crews, Stetson Kennedy, Tom Wolfe, J.D. Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, Jon Krakauer, Roald Dahl, Toni Morrison, and every other author I have read and admired.  Each of those words arrived on the page DOA,  flat cold things.

What I have learned from all of this is nothing.  Every trick and and totem is pointless.  The only thing I know is that it's like Robert Zimmerman said, all you need are three words and the truth.

I don't know.
I am afraid.
I could not.
I will try.
I was there.

--Juancho

El Merengue

At the risk of sounding overly noble-- sometimes I want to see my friends succeed so badly I can barely stand it, and when they do, it makes me hoarse with pride.  At the root, it is self-serving because by my logic if my friends are interesting and successful people, then perhaps I can feel the same about myself?

A sweat-polished Fender bass, near to a thousand gigs behind it- 995 of those gigs in the hands of his octagenarian father,  my friend pulls the beat from it while my own father sits in on guitar, the congalero is in a trance, he is also amigo to me, not this master musician.  A couple gets up to dance, they are amazing- no. They are incredible- as in it all seems staged and unreal.  The small, packed room cheers them and they move roller coaster hips in Converse All-Stars and high heels.  We are the hippest collection of gringos to ever watch them dance and we can't stand it, we all want more, and the band won't let them quit.   I see them talk with their eyes.  He says, "Tienes mas?"  She purses her lips, "Por favor chico, siempre!"  Finally the keyboard signals the break and the band, the dancers, and us, the audience, take a deep breath, a swig of wine, to see us through to the end.  This room has never seen this moment, and this moment is already gone, and the next one is passing. My hands sting from clapping and I want to carry all of them; band, father, friends, audience around the room on a chair and celebrate them, but instead I just smile, and clap and dance in my own chair.

Last night I thought of that evening as I rode a murderous lap around the trail, no joy in my heart, no sap in my legs, just knives and brass knuckles in my determined heart. I ran over a snake while racing the clock, which I believe must be a high sin.  I think it was not the killer, but the benign Lampropeltis elapsoides, the Scarlet King Snake, and he deserved better.

Let us rush in this life, but be in no hurry.

Juancho

Over it

In the 1980's when I was emerging into my own sexuality,  I might greet a friend by calling him fag, like, "What's up fag?" Which was enough to get you a frog on the arm and a return shot of "nothing fag." This was just adolescent business as usual in central Florida and probably every other community in America.  Adolescent boys are nothing if not repugnant, ignorant, fetid assemblages of mucous and ill-intent.  In the complex rules of middle school, boys whom one was not friends with were not fags, but homos, as in, "What's up homo?" followed by slapping whatever the homo might be holding in his arms to the floor in the hall- books, Trapper-keepers, cartons of half-drunk chocolate milk, pink Hostess coconut snowballs. This might result in retaliative homo-calling (I'm not the homo, you're the homo), pretty standard and unoriginal stuff between dullard tweens. 

And thus the days did pass. 

By the 1990's I was here in Tallahassee, enrolled in a University, and working at a restaurant known as a refuge of employment for gay and otherwise outcast members of society who were turned away from more traditional venues of employment, such as everywhere.  I remember the day I was hired, having spent dollars I could not afford on a cup of gazpacho served in an octagonal glass bowl that I slurped nervously watching the clock and wondering if I had been forgotten.  After the tomato had crusted to the bowl and I had drank much more coffee than recommended, the owner sat down with me, looked at my application stacked with pancake house and Chinese restaurant experience, and she hired me.  I worked there until I left town almost five years later.  Gay was normal at Food Glorious Food.  Normal and fiercely defended.  When I get nostalgic about my college years, it is never school I think of, but pulling all-nighters making pita chips for a wedding party of 300, and taking my orders from a smart and exacting lesbian who indulged us boys our buffoonery and chided us towards sophistication.

I learned from the owner of that place, and my friends there, that it was not enough to refrain from persecuting gay people, but that an active role in the advocacy of their rights and protection was a moral obligation, and that choosing not to do so was persecution itself.

By the year 2000, I was working in a place that housed teenagers in crisis. Homeless, angry, scared, defiant runaways who came in every form, including the old familiar stinky, lumpy, fuzz on their teeth adolescent boy form.  It turns out lots of kids end up in runaway shelters because they are gay, or to be more specific, gay, lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, intersex, two-spirit, and every other sub-category of not straight and conformed to gender stereotypes.

But now I'm getting preachy, which is so boring.

I learned to protect these kids from other kids, my own staff, and themselves. Some were bright and resilient, capable, intrepid believers in themselves.  Others spent their free time in their rooms scratching into their arms with safety pins, or trying to set themselves on fire with curling irons, which never worked and left an acrid burnt foil smell in the building for days.

I watched a young woman transcend her physical male body and become who she was in the confused and chaotic safety of our building.  For me it was a logistical issue, which bathroom can she use and who can be her roommate? For others it was an ideological war to stop her at all costs.

She ran away to New York days before she turned 18 and got help from this place.  Years later I met the woman who picked up where I left off, and we shared a cigarette outside a hotel in Portland, OR and hugged like proud parents.

Now I have friends who I still, after all I have learned,  think of as my gay friends, which means I am not done growing yet, but there is still hope for me, because they are gracious and understanding with me, and far too patient with all of us.

Juancho

Power Trios

Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner
The Police
Father, Son, Holy Ghost
King Ad Rock, MCA, Mike D
Duke, Mingus, Roach
Crosby, Stills, Nash
Bosh, Wade, James
The Melvins
Armstrong, Hincapie, Popovich
Bill, Larry, Juancho

Bill told us about pulling a bonked rider through the forest by a stick. I said nothing, but kept wishing for that stick.
He said he liked what Bruce Lee (Lei?) said, that he hoped he never reached his peak, because there's nowhere to go but down from there.
Larry mused about watching people get napalmed on TV in 1969, and how tennis lessons did not help ameliorate that.

The forest was lovely, dark, and deep
and I hung all the way to Fisher Creek.

We saw Mike M along the way, and I wished again that I could stay.
Instead I rode along in silence, glad to be there, in defiance-

of my legs, my lungs, and pollen
voice of weakness again has fallen.

Robert Frost deserves better, but I'm just trying to say thanks. It's not every day you get a private audience with two of the most respected men in town on two wheels. I felt better at the end than I did at the beginning, which is all I needed to keep me coming back.

Thanks,

Juancho