Cracker Jack, Seriously Whacked in El Paso
Jervis D.
Continued from Chapter One, as posted here under header of,
"Apple, Cherry, Lemon, Blueberry", and revised since an
earlier posting under header of "Blueberry Comin' Up!"
---------------
"Rosa!"
"Si!"
"Yeah, guess I'll have the blueberry."
She straightened up and declaimed it loudly, "Blueberry!"
Yeah.
"Blueberry coming up!"
Down right of me something had caught my attention. Seated
at one of the tables, a guy in a blue shirt was motioning to
me. I tried to indicate my disinterest by shrugging my
shoulders, hands raised in a gesture of "What?" But no, he
just wouldn't let it go. After I'd arrived at his side, he
was still with the sign language, crooking his finger for me
to bend an ear to what he had to say. When I did, he spoke
right out loud.
"You wanna buy some grass, man?"
Shocked back to an upright posture, I was just opening my
mouth to answer when I heard a woman's voice from the
counter, "Your order's ready!" I raised a finger to let
this guy know I was coming back to talk to him, and walked
over to pick up my submarine sandwich.
All the way west across Texas to this garlic salami smelling
dump in El Paso, as I drove, I kept wondering how that
sultry, blue-uniformed, unbuttoned beauty's blueberry pie
would have tasted. Why, all I'd said when she was setting it
down in front of me was, "You and me, baby. Where and when?"
Her eyes went big as the saucers the pies come on. "What
chew plum loco, man? You see this?" She's pointing to the
gold band on her finger, changing her glance between me and
the guy at the service window behind the counter.
Before I had time to close my mouth, the guy back there had
his meat cleaver up in plain view. Bet I got that quarter
out of my pocket and slapped down in less than two seconds
flat, before I was bolting for the door. I could hear them
laughing their asses off in there just behind the screen as
I was jumping in the bug, with them going on about this
'"crazy gringo coming around here...". About a million years
of trying to get the key in the slot came to the end of an
era when it turned to a start, and it wasn't but a blink of
time in the eye of a Pecos Valley white-faced steer staring
at pure dumb gringo luck before I was spewing dust and
Volkswagon rust in a spray over the waves of amazing Texas
grace, dropping nuts and washers, bucking over the dirty
bounding main, all the way out on to the great rolling river
of highway.
And what, we might rightly ask was I really doing driving to
Juarez with the idea in mind to smuggle a couple bricks of
reefer across the border? Had I really gone that
shit-the-bed far out of my head, and all over the road loco?
Yes, well..., yes.
But, why go into all kind of horrible detail about how that
blue shirt guy in the El Paso Submarine Shop ripped me off
for all my pot money, and left me standing cross-eyed and
scratching my butt in a downtown alley? Does anybody have
to know what his race, the particular shade of blue his
shirt was? I don't think so, but he probably saved my idiot
life, because now I could not afford to go across that
bridge, score a brick of border reefer, and get my butt
caught in the gears of the Mexican justice system for the
following five to ten years; I should have lived so long. I
should someday kiss that guy for the favor he did me.
With most of my money gone, sitting in a downtown El Paso
hotel lobby full of the sweet ancient armoa of a half
century's worth of aged cigar smoke and tobacco spit, I
considered it, looking over the map. Along the New
Mexico border, there was what appeared to be a dirt road
looping up and around the Animas Mountains, and between the
southernmost loop of that road, as the Sonora buzzard of the
Sierra Madre Occidental flies, Mexico Federal Highway Two
was just south of there, and judging by a thumbnail's crease
on a matchbook cover taken from the linear scale of the map,
it wasn't but about ten miles from the southernmost turn of
that dirt road.
Well, by George, there's nothing like an old cigar smelling
El Paso hotel lobby to keep a man who happens to be seated
there with a Rand McNally map on his lap in a mood for
business, no matter what the ups and downs in the market had
been that day. Wasn't this the town in Texas where that
famous brand of "Faro" Texas jeans were made? Sure enough,
and whatever the hell that had to do with the plan hatching
in my head for going over the border on a peyote cactus hunt
is up for grabs to anyone to decide. But, my mind liked the
idea real well, as I arose, savoring it in a slow stroll
over to the cigar counter to spend one of my last remaining
thirty dollars for a single, gold-banded, shade-grown, 100%
guarenteed to be stinky as sin, Jamaican panatella to smoke;
this in the way of a congratulation to the fair fortune of
having had such an idea enter my head in the first place.
Much as the notion would please me to linger over the
details of the drive up to Las Cruces, then west, and then
south again to the mountains, I just hate to be the sort of
author who sets up his reader just to knock him down, more
than once in just a few pages, for I fear that y'all have
yet to forgive me over the matter of that blueberry pie.
So, for mere sake of having the facts of this matter
recorded aright, it is necessary now to note that after
driving up, and up, and up and then winding down, down, and
down, near all the way down again off the southern slope of
that range; after getting parked, and following upon a night
spent of sleeping in the front seat with a Volkswagen floor
shift in upright, outright violation of common decency half
the night, and then a morning of no breakfast, nor any
coffee; and a five hour hike through the prickly pear,
ocotillo and sagebrush, well...
Let me just put it the easiest way I know how: not only was
the peyote not there, not one stick of wild reefer growing
anywhere, well neither was my Volkswagen parked anywhere
near where I'd left it on my way out that morning.
All my shit was gone? Oh, no.
Yes, all my shit was gone! No, not all of it?
All of it. Yes. All but about Twenty-five bucks and some
change, a couple books of matches, a pack of cigarettes, and
I'm sitting here shitless on the border, witless and
wondering what on earth I could have done--outside of what I
_had_ just done--to deserve any kind of fate like this? The
bottom had really fallen right out of my market, here. I'm
standing there staring, turning in every direction, I'm
sitting there and moaning low on the slope of a range of
mountains rising to my back; right there, I'm rolling in the
dust with my fingers in my hair, screaming and kicking; and
finally, I'm just sitting there in a long blinkless
southward stare, right exactly where the Continental Divide
is running about under my butt crack, and I'm looking across
there in the gathering dusk of the evening, yes, after
having spent the rest of the day in a vain search for the
possibility that I had merely gotten turned around; in hope
that the car would still be there around some unbegotten
turn of the road?
No. No, it was not.
At last, as I saw the sun sliding to sundown, and there on
the horizon to be raggedly torn, and sawn asunder by the
jagged teeth of the Sierra Madre, looking over the broad
sloping plain of nothing but prickly pear so far as the eye
can see to the south, as I was just on the verge of letting
my face drop between my knees in tears, suddenly a saving
grace, a sort of Sonora desert Satori came to me! Why, I
jumped to my feet and nearly laughed out loud, at the very
audacity of the thing. I balled my hands at my sides, came
out of my grief in a teethy (to hell with the 'toothy') grin
that I flashed to the skies, and croaked "Yes!"
Go forward? Was I hearing this thought right? Hike it on
out to Mexico 2? Yeah, might be able to do it, just might
be able to...find some wood! Get some wood. I let the idea
just kind of ride and dig its spurs in up there in the
saddle possibility while I foraged. Yes, but for what? For
what? Well, I wasn't sure, but that wasn't that the point of
it! For once in my life I was considering the idea of doing
something that needed no point at all, that depended on
having no plan, no design preconceived at all to get in the
way of what would come my way. Again! as I noted my rising
stack of mesquite and thornbush, I laughed just to think of
it. The very idea...to just walk out into that desert, free
of every possession, every plan, every fear. And just to
start walking into a strange, unknown land from here.
* Sent from RemarQ http://www.remarq.com The Internet's Discussion Network *
The fastest and easiest way to search and participate in Usenet - Free!
Jervis D.
a poet misunderstood by men." Søren Kierkegaard,
Diapslamata. Either/Or.
Jervis D.
you wish to keep the birds away from the trees, you fix up
something to resemble a man, and even this faint resemblance
to a human being which a scarecrow has is enough to inspire
the birds with 'respect'. S. Kierkegaard. Diapsalmata.
Either/Or.
Jervis D.
of life from which all the 'higher forms' like apes, cats
and dogs evolved...
"Cats are loose in their morals, but not consciously so.
Man, in his descent from the cat, has brought the cat's
looseness with him but has left the unconsciousness
behind--the saving grace which excuses the cat. The cat is
innocent, man is not." From "The Damned Human Race" in his
_Letters from the Earth_.
Jervis D.
the wood:
"I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and
maniacal hooting for men."
I am done making answer to the hooting of fools, for as any
fool can plainly see, one must learn to hoot a similar mania
in order to be the least way understood by them.
There is much wisdom in the saying of Solomon to wit:
"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be made
like unto him."
If I should let the tone and the terms of the conversation
be set by the hooting of a fool, it is a foolish foundation
from which to begin with anything other than hooting.
Nay, I do better to permit the hooting to echo and decay in
the night, and continue in the tones of my own mellifluous
chirping until these words have done their work in the heart
of these hooters, that they may begin to understand a new
thing, and learn a word of respect or two that I may
understand them and talk with them in a language other than
hooting.
No, I will not sit on your limb and hoot with you.
--
Jervis
Jervis D.
the Muses...equally avoid flattering men and being vexed at
them, for both are unsocial and lead to harm." Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius.
--
Jervis
Jervis D.
bullfight; I was pleased that he was killed with a sword,
for anything to be killed with a sword was a rare enough
business...I do not understand it yet, Anyway it is the best
two dollars' worth I have ever had." Death in the Afternoon.
Hemingway.
"...can anyone fail to see that everything seems to ensure
that savage man will have neither the means nor the
inclination to change his state? His imagination depicts
nothing to him; his heart asks nothing of him...and he is so
far from having enough knowledge to make him want to acquire
more that he has neither foresight nor curiosity." Jean
Jacques Rouseau. "Discourse on Inequality Among Men".
Jervis D.
bullfight; I was pleased that he was killed with a sword,
for anything to be killed with a sword was a rare enough
business...I do not understand it yet, Anyway it is the best
two dollars' worth I have ever had." Death in the Afternoon.
Hemingway.
"...can anyone fail to see that everything seems to ensure
that savage man will have neither the means nor the
inclination to change his state? His imagination depicts
nothing to him; his heart asks nothing of him...and he is so
far from having enough knowledge to make him want to acquire
more that he has neither foresight nor curiosity." Jean
Jacques Rouseau. "Discourse on Inequality Among Men".
* Sent from RemarQ http://www.remarq.com The Internet's Discussion Network *