The following was written in Mexico on May 5th, ten days before I returned to the United States. It was about 105 degrees outside, probably 110 in my room (the “Belly of the Beast”) as the sun beat down relentlessly on the metal roof. I suppose this can be considered the final blog entry chronicling my nine months south of the border. For whatever reason, it’s taken me a while to post it. I never did like endings. Saying goodbye to the kids was like swallowing my own heart. In the rearview mirror I could see Pedro, the eldest son, standing in the doorway looking utterly lost and despondent as he watched us drive away. I stuck my arm out the window and gave one final “thumbs up,” that simple yet endlessly expressive sign language we shared from the first day we met. I pushed that thumb up with everything I had, as if I was ready for the weight of the world to bear down upon it. I held it up until we rounded the bend, until at last I saw Pedro’s face light up with recognition, his own thumb reaching out to meet mine….
La ultima semana:
I suppose it’s somewhat arbitrary where one begins or ends a story—especially if it’s the story of ones life. Shit, some of the most interesting parts aren’t even implied by the little dash on the tombstone that’s supposed to represent the whole of what happens to us. I mean, during the nine months leading up to my birth I transformed from a sperm omelet to a full-fledged Homosapien. Then, of course there’s death, which just might be the most interesting part of the whole trip. Presently, at this exact moment in time, raindrops are gently tapping on the metal roof of my room. A Zen master might leave it at that, but there are a few more details I feel compelled to explore. It hasn’t rained in weeks. I’m still in Mexico. La Ultima Semana—the last week. Ten days from now I’ll be touching down on U.S. soil, and eight days after that will make seven years my wife and I have been together. Seven years since she appeared on the porch steps of the Music House to join us in celebrating some great milestone the band had just reached, like our latest record, or our first show as headliners.
The woman who would later be my wife, she met me on a good day, when I was in fine fettle, free as a bird inside. But if this turns into a love story I could just as easily begin ten years before that, or twenty for that matter. So many points of entry, all leading in to the center, like eating an apple. Ten years earlier… I finally lost my virginity after years of shyness and acne-induced withdrawal. She was a Goddess, thought I, a Goddess who never even noticed me until I came to class one day with crutches and a braced knee. She was the teaching assistant for my Psychology Statistics class, and I had just had knee surgery for a torn ACL. Somehow I found the courage to ask for some “extra help” with the assignments, and before I knew what hit me she was calling me “just to talk,” because she was having a hard time with her boyfriend—the captain of the basketball team, no less. I played the only good card I had, the “nice guy card,” and soon she was dropping by the dorm room to say hi. One night, she didn’t feel like going home. I stepped out for a moment, to inform my roommate that he would have to clear out for the night, and when I returned, the Goddess was buttoning herself up in one of my shirts, a makeshift nightgown that meant, above all else, that she was not wearing much underneath. I can’t remember what led to what exactly, but at some point she whispered in my ear, “Do you want to feel what it’s like inside?” This was without a doubt the most interesting question put to me in all my years of education—and she was just a T.A. A simple yes or no answer was all that was required, and I didn’t even have to think about it. I could’ve just nodded I suppose, or said “Uh huh,” but no, I gave a clear and resounding “Yes,” as if I were answering on behalf of the entire human race for all time. So began two years of ecstatic adrenaline rushes, jealous rages, drunken arguments, and an underlying sense of insecurity that culminated in an hour-long session of convulsive weeping in the passenger seat of her Mercury Zephyr, as she drove around looking for a suitable place to set me free.
Maybe it was ten years before that when I finally confessed to David Prescott that I “liked” Hannalore Stanton. That bastard David, he made it seem like telling him was this big bonding thing, like we just became best buds or something, then he goes and tells Hanna the next day, tells her right out in the hallway as we’re all readying to go home. She wheels around, gives me a look of pure meanness and shouts, “Well, I don’t like HIM!” I never forgave David, that little fuck. Years later, when he was desperate for a friend, weeping at boy scout camp over being shunned by the cool kids, I coldly told him that I didn’t like him that way. The scoutmasters feared he was on the verge of suicide, and his parents had to come fetch him from camp.
Each year it was different Goddess, starting the year before Hanna, in fourth grade, with Pola Russo. Pola, with an “o.” She was quite the looker, and years later even got some work as a model. I never said a word to her, just stared all gaga from the next row over, several seats back, a perfect spot to gaze lingeringly and lovingly, undetected. After Hanna it was Amelia Lewis, then Michelle Wilson, then countless more, a string of unattainable, unapproachable vortexes of feminine energy, projection magnets that sucked out the best and the worst of me, and everything in between, down into the unfathomable darkness of their mysterious beings.
My wife was the first woman in all my life—and I was thirty when we got together—whom I related to as a human being, a person with her own flaws and her own beautiful attributes, her own soul apart from my needs and projections. And so she was the first to know me as an individual secure in my own being, confident, aware and awake, able to respond spontaneously, transparently, authentically.
It was really ten years ago that I technically met her, but then we were just introduced in passing. I was still with Brenda then, unknowingly approaching a deep, dark chasm in which I would wallow for the better part of two years. I remember thinking, upon that brief introduction, “She’s beautiful. There’s something about those eyes.” Three years later, she’s on the porch steps and I’m out of the chasm, free as bird, singing inside. Ten years have passed since I first saw those eyes, and now we return together to those same streets, to that same town, married, ready to enter a new phase, beginning a new chapter.
The rain has stopped now, the tropical sun burning up every trace so not a drop remains. The last week, la ultima semana, then we go home and it begins again. We’ll be in a familiar place, yes, yet it is something utterly new that awaits, something utterly unknown.
A blank page, and then another, and every day we can begin again, starting from anywhere, with any word, until the time is ripe for silence.