Ghetto Plainsman
Become a Seeker, Don’t be Afraid of Your Journey
Jarid Manos
Smashwords ebook edition published by Fideli Publishing Inc.
© Copyright 2010, 2011, Jarid Manos
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Printed book published in the United States by Temba House Press.
www.GhettoPlainsman.com
ISBN13: 978-1-60414-451-2
What they’re saying about Ghetto Plainsman:
“Like a modern-day John the Baptist emerging from the wilderness … An insightful look into the life, the heart and the soul of a man who cares about the Earth and humanity … a poetic lyricism that rivals the world’s greatest writers.”
— Bob Ray Sanders, Vice President of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram; award-winning member/National Association of Black Journalists
“This book shook me to the core. Manos’ voice is compelling and irresistible. The integrity of the land and our most important stories have always been inseparable, and Manos expands this storytelling tradition to our current era in which both are under unimaginable duress. Ghetto Plainsman beautifully forges a path forward despite voices of the apocalypse clamoring everywhere, and as such is a crucial element of my personal toolbox of hope against senseless destruction.”
— Elizabeth Merrick, author-editor of the acclaimed anthology This is Not Chick Lit
“Just as intense as any good hip-hop album … The nimble, brutal language that Manos uses to describe the hustlers and lost souls of New York and Los Angeles works equally well in capturing the delicate beauty of a yucca plant, a sunset along an impossible horizon or the mysterious animal life that populates his adopted home. Not since Edward Abbey have I seen such an improbable writer so hopelessly in love with nature, and so gifted in describing its bounty.”
— Paul Constant, Whole Life Times
“A true artistic talent.”
— Washington Blade
“An intense journey from darkness to redemption … and a manifesto that exhorts us, in passages of sophisticated and sublime beauty, to honor and protect the land we love. I am reminded of a modern day Walt Whitman or Jack Kerouac. His is a voice, like theirs, of urgency and hope, of yearning and celebration.”
— Paul John Roach, Senior Minister, Unity Church of Fort Worth
“The new face of the environment. This is a personal story about activism and [Manos’] road home is a long and tortuous one. Idealistic young men and women should take heed of the price one must pay to live according to high principles. Manos’ writing style is poetic and flowing, especially when he writes about plains animals and their landscape. Although the language of the street often makes its way into his prose, there’s no denying his writing glows when he writes about the environment. The reader may come away filled with a certain sadness that the author suffered from bad decisions and even worse behavior. But an abiding love for a special part of the world has helped him rise above his flaws and become a better man. This is a story not often told.”
— Yvonne Marcotte, Epoch Times, New York staff
“In his fascinating new book, Ghetto Plainsman, Jarid Manos fashions peace, beauty and hope from the unlikely raw materials of his own personal biography and his observations of the grave dangers facing our shared environment. Part detailed memoir, part sophisticated manifesto and call to action, Ghetto Plainsman is one jolting, shocking read, but a ride well worth taking.”
— Bill Nevins, FIVE Magazine
“If you haven’t joined the movement after reading Ghetto Plainsman, then you haven’t read the book.”
— Judge Maryellen Hicks, and host of KKDA “Speakout”
“Ghetto Plainsman reads as the soliloquy of a loner who, after descending into the deepest of hells, comes to relinquish his anguish in order to make pact with the land and its inhabitants — whether buffalo or bird, homeless derelict or drug-dazed passerby. This deal is a promise to self as well as to them. A promise to strive towards wholeness, recovery, reclamation, and a resurrection of sorts.
— Tammy Gomez, contributing author to Hecho in Tejas
“Through his work with the Great Plains Restoration Council, Jarid Manos’ word becomes actions, actions that illustrate the impact of his deeply compelling story.”
— Tamara Warren, pop culture journalist for Rolling Stone, Vibe, XXL, and Men’s Journal
What they’re saying about Great Plains Restoration Council
(www.gprc.org):
“GPRC’s ecological perspective has been an invaluable help in giving our youth opportunity to learn about nature, to connect with the environment, to enjoy it, love it, develop a sense of ownership of it, responsibility to protect it and to keep it clean and healthy for future generations.”
— Ana Colin-Hernandez, Peer Advocate Coordinator, AIDS Outreach Center
“GPRC’s goal of building a national movement of young people taking care of their own health through taking care of the special places on Earth is one we at Patagonia wholeheartedly believe in. GPRC combines hands-on work, community building, and action. Their leadership in the communities they work in is a vital inspiration for both growth and change.”
— Yvon Chouinard, Founder and Owner, Patagonia, Inc.
GHETTO PLAINSMAN
by
JARID MANOS
Illustrations
by Adrian Torres
Cover photograph by Jarriel Jones
Design by
Brian Blankenship
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I give thanks to God and Earth that I’m still here today, and for such profuse experiences of life.
* * *
Many people have helped in some way. I’d like to personally thank:
Susan Alexander, Phyllis Allen, Sisley Aragon, Jean Belille, Beautiful Confusion Films, Black Vegetarian Society of Texas, Brian Blankenship, Brian Christopher Brown, Archibald Bush Foundation, Lisa Callamaro, Yvon Chouinard, Rosena Clarke-Turner, Ana Colin-Hernandez, Ana Davidson, Karla Dingle, Andetra Fennie, Tammy Gomez, Tracie Hall, Ann Hamilton, Judge Maryellen Hicks, Cindi Holt, Cyrene Inman, Ittleson Foundation, Sarah James, Lisa Jennings, Little Marvin, James M. Johnston, Jarriel Jones, Jane Kretzmann, Lynn Lewis, Dan Licht, Gabriela Lomanaco, Kanae Maeda, Paulita Martin, Ben Mater, Amy McNutt, Men of Essence, Rose Ann Meredith, Elizabeth Merrick, Denise Mewbourne, Ashli Monroe, M. W. Moore, Clarence Nero, Gabriel Newhouse, Patagonia, Inc., Lenon Phillips, Lou Pizzitola, Apple Poe, Frank and Deborah Popper, Gayle Reaves, Doris Respects Nothing, Susan Ring, Jerome Ringo, Richard Rosen, Bob Ray Sanders, Stephen Sargent, William Shannonhouse, Nelson Shirley, Babatunde Solarin, Spiral Diner, Shauna Stafford, Robin Surface, JoAnn Tall, Evita Tezeno, Nick Tilsen, Adrian Torres, Valerie Traina, United Riverside, Angelica Valenzuela, Lorenzo Wilborn, Andre Williams, Anthony Wood, Medora Woods, Zawadi Writers and anybody else who has helped in any way.
I must especially acknowledge Greg Johnson, Publisher of Temba House Press, who not only made the best offer but allowed me creative input in the whole process of preparing this book for print. A devoutly religious Southern Black Christian with an intellect’s need for depth, precision, and the vetting of ideas that make for social change, Mr. Johnson has ensured a team of individuals and creative environment that a writer needs to prosper.
I would like to thank the Board of Directors of Great Plains Restoration Council, all our staff and volunteers, and all of GPRC’s funders, members and supporters who took a chance on a brand-new organization and helped us get so far in a short time. I also wish to thank and honor all of GPRC’s Plains Youth InterACTION kids who show how possible a healthy new world really is.
Thanks to everybody, especially black folk, who’s come into my life over the years to insistently show me the importance of relationships, that “friends aren’t temporary,” and claiming self-respect, confidence and never being anybody’s victim (including your own). I’d like to thank Malaya, the prairie dog who was blinded in a poison gas attack, was rescued, and lived on for years to bring inspiration to many people. And I honor all the wild animals who struggle tooth and nail through a hellish, seemingly endless war zone just to get through each day, holding on for the time when the natural flow of life is restored and they don’t have to worry about being constantly obliterated by us humans.
If I have neglected to mention anybody, please accept my apologies; my eyes are going in circles after all this work to finally bring this project to a close.
“Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind and spirit. The man who preserves his selfhood is ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence — not a leaf, as it were, astir on a tree: not a ripple upon the surface of the shining pool … his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life.”
— Ohiyesa, 1911, [Santee Dakota Sioux]
“I tell folks all the time if nobody’s told you that you’re crazy … then your vision ain’t big enough yet. It’s only when somebody steps forward to tear you down that you realize you’re on the right track.”
— Tavis Smiley
“… unmistakably identifiable by a crudely-emblazoned clenched-fist “Earth First!” and other prison graffiti-style cult tattoos on his arm and shoulder.”
— Varmint Hunter Magazine
“Peace is not this utopian idea of dashing through a field of dandelions, you know; it’s hard work.”
— Aqeela Sherrills, who brokered the historic peace treaty between the Crips and Bloods in South-Central Los Angeles
FOREWORD
Housekeeping
This book took me eight years to write.
Many people have wanted to know how I got into my work of protecting our endangered Prairie Earth and creating Ecological Health programs that serve our threatened youth. I’m very aware that the last thing people think when they see me walking down the street is, “Oh that dude saves prairie dogs and helps kids help themselves get healthy!” I know I’m an odd mix to most people, a hip hop mug who’s also in love with America’s flyover country, the Great Plains. My path to this work can’t be summed up in a sound bite. When I mentioned to a few people that I wanted to write a book about the violence that was really going on in the American West, it was suggested to show it through my own experiences, how I changed, and how and why I got involved. It’s taken several years to let go of this story, a painful reminder of an angry, reactionary, and undeveloped young man unconsciously seeking more than just immediate survival. But my work is ultimately not about me.
Here in this crucible-like first decade of the new millennium, I am so focused, so driven toward the practical implementation of visionary ideas, so interested in bringing people together from all walks of life, all colors, cultures and communities, that it’s hard to imagine the angry, radical militant I once was. My former backlash hatred against my enemies, against a whole slate of planetary destroyers and those who tried to smash, consume or keep me down, quite honestly, made me little different than the Hate People themselves. Hate and anger are so unproductive. I am uninterested in blame or politics.
So much of modern life is immature and profane. My work with Great Plains Restoration Council (GPRC) is focused on building a new path of maturity, sustainability, health and wellness for our tenancy here on Earth. As I look over this book before it goes to print, I think, “It’s funny the distances we must go to learn something and get somewhere.” I haven’t arrived by any means, but I can say I’ve come a long way. I’ve found something worth keeping, worth living and dying for. And that is our incredible living blue and green Earth, and our children’s health and long, long-term future.
In this book, in order to keep the flow concise and protect the innocent and not so innocent, I’ve made minor adjustments or combinations of some names, places and events. A small portion of this book has been fictionalized in this way. This was done for thematic efficiency, to protect identities, and also to allow me as a writer a little literary license. I wanted to stretch my wings here, rather than write an encyclopedia.
Any possible likenesses real or imagined are not intended to disparage any person. There is also a bit player named “Martin” who is a composite of two people. Dialogue has been painstakingly reconstructed in order to provide the reader with the most precise essence of a person’s character. Outside of these minor adjustments you have a straight-shot non-fiction parable.
Parable because when I finished the manuscript and had editors go over it, they continued to tell me that what I had, among other things, was an ongoing analogy between the problems of the Earth and those of the body. Body and Earth, Soul and Soil, all are inseparable to me, and the health or disease of any of these affects the other. “Body” ultimately comes to represent all of us, our civilization.
Some of what follows is ugly and embarrassing. When I consider the editors’ comments, I see how I decided to keep some things and omit others. Some omitted events are more outlandish than those recorded here, some boring as hell, but they are not integral to the theme of the book. In any case, I wrote a book that made me take risks.
My business is now ‘in the street’ and of course it bothers me because I’m an extremely private person. Hell, my dream job used to be an anonymous baggage handler at the airport.
I have always regarded the human world as mostly a war zone. This war zone outlook colors the story, the journey, and my whole life even today. But compared to so many others, people and animals, I’ve still had an incredibly blessed, easy life. I thank God for how lucky I am to be healthy, vital, and alive.
CONTENTS
Section One
Chapter One — If You Were Missing
Chapter Two — Who Would You Be?
Chapter Three — Passage In Flight
Chapter Five — I Might Be Cold
Section Two
Section Three
Chapter Nine — Mutate and Survive
Section Four
Chapter Fourteen — Prairie Earth
Chapter Sixteen — Dive by the Wreck
Section Five
Chapter Eighteen — On This Side
Section Six
Chapter Twenty — Crack Between Both Worlds
Chapter Twenty-one — Sand Creek Still
Chapter Twenty-two — On the Other Side
Section Seven
Chapter Twenty-three — Red Mist
Chapter Twenty-four — Political Prisoner
Chapter Twenty-five — Everything Will Now Come Your Way
Chapter Twenty-six — Scarred Face
Section Eight
Chapter Twenty-eight — Things Surely Turn to Autumn
Chapter Twenty-nine — Unconditional Love, Straight Up
(The American West as Afghanistan)
GPRC’s Twelve Components of Ecological Health
The American West They Don’t Tell You About
Great Plains Restoration Council’s American West
PROLOUGE
1984
Sitting in my drawers beneath the Harbor Bridge, drinking a $1.79 six-pack of Schaefer beer and jug of Gallo Chablis, one right after the other, taking in the world around me. Our seedy old North Beach side of downtown Corpus Christi is sweltering … this hot Texas sun … the bridge keeps me in shadow.
The weight of the traffic pushes down on the bridge seams overhead. Wonder what’d happen if the bridge just smashed down on top of me. Maybe it’d block out all the thinking. Too much thinking.
Head hurts too much. I wanna give in … pass out. Can’t stop this low panic inside … shit, I’m still a teenager and I can’t shake this fucked-up feeling I’ve already used up my life and ain’t nothing else to rebuild like I thought. I’m supposed to be starting a new life.
There’s a giant abyss up ahead but I can’t see it, just sense it. Approaching, and getting closer. And at any moment I’m gonna step into it without knowing — And if I did?
* * *
Dear Reader,
In this life, there have been moments when I suddenly asked myself, Where the hell are you? Right now? Right this minute?
All I’m gonna say is, if you’ve ever had zero confidence or struggled or suffered in any way, maybe you will endeavor to cause less pain.
Because you understand.
~ SECTION ONE ~
“Violence is just another form of communication.”
— overheard on Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, NYC
CHAPTER ONE
“This is how you kill a wounded duck,” my father said, thrusting the hen mallard up so I could see. “You can do it two ways. Grab the neck in both fists like a rope and pull in opposite directions and you can tear the inside apart without breaking the skin. That’s how we used to do it in the slaughterhouse. That’s how we had to make blood sausage for those Polish people. The blood fills up the gap and hardens, and they slice it, cook it, and eat it.”
I saw the duck’s stiff tongue sticking out, like she was gagging on something. She struggled again in his grip, her bright orange feet trying to kick at his hand. A drop of blood, bright red lung blood, rolled off her tongue and fell into the water.
“But this way is better. You only need one hand.” He grabbed her by the head in his right fist and spun her around, wringing her neck multiple times. Feathers puffed off and wafted away. Her wings fluttered and died down. “You don’t want to shoot them again because you’ll ruin the meat with all that shot.”
I learned all about duck hunting as a kid, hauling decoys and paddling the canoe off the marshy shores of Lake Erie for my father. He and I rarely spoke unless it had something to do with work or a job he needed me to do. I didn’t mind. I already liked the silence. And getting to go to Lake Erie took my mind off things in the same way hard work did, off problems that otherwise weighed me down like an anvil. My father was the standard yellow-brown-skinned immigrant who saw the world’s value only in how much hard work, especially physical labor, was accomplished and how much farther ahead he could get that day. He hated personal expression. And he liked to hunt and fish, but not for the outdoor experience of it. What mattered was getting the kill, the landing, the final acquisition of things that were not things. Meat in the freezer, or sometimes just the kill if it wasn’t edible.
Back in the blind, he snored as the Sun rose higher, blazing light across the marsh.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was going to be what he called a bluebird day, when ducks stayed put and enjoyed the sunshine, or flew sky-high. For good hunting, you needed a blustery, cold, stormy day with heavy clouds that stirred the ducks up, kept them low and kept them moving.
My mind drifted back to earlier this morning. Me rowing out here in the silence, setting the decoys in the pre-dawn blackness, leaving him behind in the blind, the Moon wobbling on the water. Sweet-wet-muck smelling fresh lake water. The canoe paddle dipping in. The open black horizon of the lake had pulled at me.
My legs began to cramp from sitting still. Hate to sit. I checked his watch. It was only 9:30. We were supposed to stay here till 12, or at least that’s how long the permit was for. I checked the safeties on the guns.
His sleeping head was slumped sideways against the flimsy wooden panels of the blind. Some powdered donut sugar had fallen on his hard black stubble beard. His hunter-green baseball cap was pulled down over his face, but I could still see the three hairs poking out of one of his fleshy nostrils. He had a stern look on his face, a scowl, even while sleeping.
That look never seemed to go away. As far back as I could remember it was always there. It flowed down between his thick black eyebrows, down his big sloping nose and onto his lips, which seemed to have a natural outline to them, though they were creased and dry. He had strands of white in the short curls of his wiry black hair that stuck out the back of his cap.
I glanced at his wader boots, then my wader boots. I looked at the two thermoses, one filled with coffee, the other hot chocolate. Hate coffee. I picked up a donut and slowly ate it, making sure I wiped off any powdered sugar left on my face.
The sun would be warm on our faces, I thought, if it weren’t for the thatched cover over our heads. I wanted to feel that sunlight. When I thought of God I automatically thought of the Sun. I looked up through the rectangular gap of the blind, out at the blue sky. The gap was only wide enough to stand up in and shoot from. There was a viewing slit through the wood in front of our faces, or if you wanted, you could peek over the rim, while scanning for ducks to be ambushed.
I wanted to talk to him.
I looked down at my boots. Involuntarily shivering from the chill and tiredness and lack of movement, I sat on my hands.
Looking over at him again, I took one hand from under my legs and made as if to poke him awake. I stopped. My eyes strayed to the imprint of the wood grain bench on the back of my hand. Then focused back on him.
I let my hand fall to my lap. He always looked so mad. His snore, a steady rise and fall sub-rhythm, had begun to sound almost soothing and peaceful. I heard two shotgun blasts in the distance, muted punches of sound reverberating across the flat marsh.
I knew nothing about my father. The only thing that was discussed was what work I had to do, couched in his ever-present disapproval and disgust with me, and that was it. As a child I certainly never felt man enough, period, even though I tried to prove myself through the constant hard labor that I hated at the time, but would greatly appreciate much later for the physical fortitude it did instill in me.
I knew hard labor could refute his sneering insinuations that I wanted to be “body-beautiful.” (I couldn’t help how I looked and I refused to even consider what he was hinting at; I just knew that work would beat out of me any traces of being one of “those” kinds of people.) He was simply and always an unreachable man. His scowl, his specter, and the belt, along with the assignments of endless physical labor, summed him up for me.
Today, I wear the streets like I wear my senses and skin. It’s almost hard to believe that I was this naive, second-hand-clothes-wearing country boy from the rural Midwest, who actually grew up doing things more indicative of the early 1900s, hunting, fishing, even trapping animals for their fur. I mean I even used handmade tin buckets and washtubs, and tools left over from an earlier era like it was a regular thing.
This is what I believe I know about the person that was my father: A mongrel, swept over on a boat as a very young child with the teeming, unwashed masses from Southern Italy off the coast of Africa, he clearly harbored a lifetime of shame over his differences in American society. He’d never spoken about it, so it was only much later, after questioning him during a single, unannounced, end-all visit I had made that he revealed that our ancestors were not just from Southern Italy, but traced back to North Africa and black Arabs. He seemed embarrassed to admit it. By this time he was an old, old man; he looked like a short Osama bin Laden. He shook his head — was it self-disgust or the old disgust with me? — and said, “They were called the Moors.”
But that was all I got out of him. I had to do my own research later, with the help of a librarian in Colorado. I learned that Saracens was another word for Moors, which is another word for African Arabs. Pre-Islamic and Islamic, Pagan, Animist, pre-Christian and Christian, the region was a fascinating upheaval of blood mixtures written in thousands of years of great journeys, personal turmoil, tribalism, conquests, horrid slaughters, wholesale ecological devastation and climate change, and reverse conquests. Berber, Bedouin, Black African, Arab, Turk, Asian, Phoenician, Southern Coastal Italian, Spanish and French all became tied together by the Mediterranean Sea. Countries have always been artificial political boundaries. Through this diaspora, I garnered a deeper sense of time and connections. The dark blue Mediterranean, ringed by aqua shallows, at one time filled with wild dolphins, untouched underwater caves, and teeming shoals of fish (all diminished or degraded now) and bordered by African grassland steppes that became European empire granaries that became desertified, was equally a fertile combustion place for the mixing of peoples on its African, European and Asiatic coasts. Often, this occurred through wars and their aftermath, sometimes just through the nomadic impulse and trade that the region embedded. Like the mixing of its legendary spices, anything could come up.
But despite strong ancestral impulses, the long avid agility of nomadic people, I really have no identity. My only culture has been the street. So that is my heritage. As for my father, I later understood that “swarthy” people back then did everything they could to “pass” and assimilate into “normal” society. There were no benefits whatsoever. I also found myself wondering if they had to face — like today — constantly being mistaken for whatever racial identity a person is prejudiced about at the moment, or the irritating, intrusive question “What are you?” thousands of times from people of all races and colors. I mean, in any given week I may hear that I’m Creole, Puerto Rican/Blatino or Palestinian or anything else with a mixed black blood. But ultimately, as an Old World pre-Biblical, pre-Qu’ranic plainsman who will never really belong to any race or within any boundaries, I know I will always just be the stray dog, the plainsman, the nomad traveler through life and across lines, and when my work is done here (in this longest of commitments ever), I will have moved on, disappeared. Again.
As a kid, I couldn’t hate my father. I would try, it would flicker up, then fall flat, dissipate. I just felt nothing. I sensed, or wanted to believe, that somehow he was different, even though the belt, and especially my universal sense of suffocation, was attached to him too. But I’d absolutely hated everybody else, including my paper route customers who smiled in my face and said insane bad things under their breath thinking I didn’t hear them, and the big Polish kid, and especially all the old men who followed me around in the park and the street and tried to do things to me. I wanted to kill them. I knew where the guns were. I knew that would ruin my whole life. I knew, even then, that I was trapped, with no way out.
CHAPTER TWO
I still dream about the silent flash of fireflies in the welling darkness, the Ohio-humid slickness of bare underarms in the summer dusk, dip of a paddle in sweet water …
In moments of quiet, when I allow myself to think back to my earliest years, I again feel that internal flushed heat that stays in your body when the air is nearly 100% humidity and there is nowhere for it to escape.
Separate from all the bad feelings, I think there lies in me a small, private grieving for what was once there in the Ohio country, even though I only knew its last, dying breaths.
The Ohio I remember was such a physically hard place to live in. Damp no matter what season, frigid in winter and boiling hot in the summer. But over the course of my youngest years, before I finally made my breakout, a personal relationship formed with my natural surroundings, built on mutual resilience.
Daddy long-legs, I thought. From up above I used to watch the high-stepping spiders, and I wondered if they were now crawling over me. Having tried to balance on the aluminum guard of the window well, I lay crumpled upside down at the bottom, my sneakers pushing into the sky. The glass shards sticking into my head and the backs of my arms made me feel prickly, crinkly. Hot. Sticky. When I rolled my head, I felt — heard — the crunching of glass inside my skull. Like I had a big red grin munching on something it wasn’t supposed to back there. I had finally succeeded in balancing upright with no hands on the window well guard.
When I fell backwards, around the age of three, my head cracked wide open on the basement window brick ledge. Hot blood flowed out. I lost a lot of it and they had to give me a transfusion. Lying upside down, I worried if I was going to be in trouble again on this perfect cloudless day.
They never got the blood removed from the brick ledge, and over the years the stain grew darker and forgotten.
Since then I’ve been prone to what I call my “pass outs.” At certain times, I just start to lose consciousness. My head begins to feel very heavy, or squeezed, while behind my eyes I sense a fizzy gray lightness approaching. A strong yearning to fall into that lightness wells up inside me. That yearning is my definition of pure desire.
Over time, I became able to mostly hold my pass outs at bay, at least for a little while, since they start suddenly, but approach gradually. I’ve managed my pass outs for so long that I hide them well. As long as I can get someplace to put my head down, or even close my eyes for a few minutes, I can control them. A lack of being able to do so, or stress or anxiety, or people talking too much, seems to trigger attacks.
In my pass outs, especially as I began to grow older, I’d often go into a wild, shimmering, whispering world, into a wilderness so deep it transcended comprehension. It was like falling into a living painting that folded up and around me, swallowing me whole. Slanted animal eyes that glinted from the edge of darkness, the dip of my palm into warm river water, or the sense of suddenly turning around, seeing my own trail stretching back through an infinity of open grassland beneath a blue and pink, rose-hued horizon at twilight, gave me promises.
Sometimes, in the background of all this, even though I couldn’t actually see her, and everything was so unformed, I would sense a very dark-skinned woman wrapped in wind-blown white robes and veil, blue-black arm extended, beckoning. Her original feet were planted in the Earth, and for some reason I always knew her back was leaning into the West, even at night when the Sun was down. I knew she was wedded to the Great Sun, who (kneel down, press your forehead into the ground) I knew was my Overwhelming True Father.
The Shadow World was my secret sharer. For the longest time, I didn’t get what that meant to me.
My little low-rider banana bike, painted a sparkling bronze, served early on as my main mentor of freedom. I loved to hang out in the park, near the pond, where I could catch catfish and bluegills and hope for a bass, or at the playground on the other side where I could just kick around in the dirt or make myself dizzy on the self-propelled merry-go-round.
But sometimes, bad people hung out there, even in the daytime. I quickly learned to spot them before they saw me. Sometimes this big teenager would appear and always cause problems. One time he stole my wire basket of bluegills and, after dumping them on the grass, stuck firecrackers into their gasping mouths and blew them up. I’d heard he also did it to cats and dogs, the ones he could catch, only instead of in their mouths he’d jam the firecrackers up their butts, after tying their legs.
The public bathrooms were by the playground. White middle-aged men with hanging faces and rabid eyes would often hang out there, always with these looks like they were crazy or had forgotten something. They would stare at me, especially at my ass, or follow me with these sick-looking grins. I wanted to shout, “Leave me alone! I ain’t one of you!” It wasn’t only in the park that I sensed or noticed these threatening men. By the school, by the ARCO gas station, the corner store … really they might show up anywhere, and leer, or start following. I had to always be on guard.
Under an overcast sky, I glided on my bike toward the restrooms, scanning the area from side to side. Why did they have to set the bathrooms so close to the woods?
Approaching, I tensed and hesitated for a moment, even though I could barely hold my pee any longer.
There was a car parked down there. I couldn’t tell if somebody was inside. I didn’t see anybody hanging out, either. Making one more pass just to be sure, I directed my radar into the woods behind the low brick building. They were the only woods I would never go into.
I swung off the bike, trying not to let my tennis shoes make any noise in the gravel path. Leaning the bike against the warm brick on the WOMEN’s side, I walked silently around to the gaping entrance of the MEN’s. Pressed up against the brick wall, feeling its soaked-up warmth in my palms, I leaned in, listening.
I whipped around the corner and went in, trying to avoid the puddles on the discolored concrete floor. Partially afraid, but bladder bursting, I decided to just get it all over with. I rushed to the stall, ready for reverse flight if somebody happened to be in there. The gray cinderblock stall only came up halfway from the floor. I peeked around. It was empty. Somebody had pooped on the metal seat less toilet and the toilet paper roll had fallen in, with a long sheet leading up and over and onto the floor, the brown soak gradually spreading. There was some piss on the floor in front, and large wet foot tracks across the restroom. But at least there was nobody in here.
I hurried to the urinal and tried to calm down so I could pee.
I stood up on my toes a little so when the stream came out it’d hit higher up and not splash on me. Trying too hard to relax, worrying about my exposed back, I closed my eyes, counting numbers. Counting backwards and forwards. I kept my ears open, listening. All I could hear was my heart beating. Good.
My bladder finally relaxed and a hot pitch of urine forced out, then flowed, hitting the back of the urinal, splashing. I didn’t care. I rolled my head back with relief, willing it to flow all out and hurry up too.
Gravel crunched beneath footsteps outside. I jolted. I shut my pee off the best I could and quickly tried to jam myself back into my drawers. I whipped around and rushed for the door, zipping up, just as the big hairy pink-faced man came bearing down on me through the entranceway. He was grinning with that same crazy look they always have.
Eyes wide, wires inside buzzing and hot I kept my head down and tried to rush through to the side, wincing in the last moment before contact. I hit the side of his belly and he spread his arms out wide to snag me like a gill net. He rotated and tried to flatten me against the wall, humping, hairy arms and breath and everything stinking like lunchmeat, trying to hold me in, grabbing for my dick and balls, and I squirmed out and bolted. I flung myself to my bike, hearing his shoes squishing backward in the puddles of liquid on the floor. Hot and jerking like I wanted murder, I grabbed the bike and hopped onto it in one motion, pedaling as fast and hard as I could out of there.
I was horrible in school. Didn’t give a shit about my lessons; what did anything in the books have to do with me? Didn’t get along with anybody there either and I avoided them. I always felt dirty, second-class, out of place, constantly embarrassed, secretly scared, and never tough enough. I was not big yet, but all the kids still wanted to fight me or beat me down, especially the big Polish kid whose grandfather lived on the same street. People thought because of my sour, silent face that I was always ready to fight, which was crazy. The teachers were just as bad; after all, they wanted to fit in and be cool too. And people constantly bugged me about my “alien” or “devil” eyes that have this desert slant and hue of very light yellowish-green seen in some families in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, which I quickly learned to cover with the bill of a baseball cap, and later, shades.
By the time I was seven or so I was on my bike every morning and afternoon, pedaling two different newspapers. I kept my prized low-rider bicycle wiped clean and shiny, but I’m sure the wire newspaper baskets I’d bolted to its rear wheel compromised some of its thunder.
Two things stand out from that time. From the drugstore I’d bought a notebook that had a cover painting of a grinning, skull-faced, hard-hatted man driving a bulldozer forward, his blade smashing the living jungle of life, tossing magnificent animals, bald eagles, lions, everything, to the side. Some were upside down in mid-air. All the animals’ eyes looked blankly at me, as if they couldn’t see anymore, and their tongues were hanging out. And, second, as I rode my bike, my recent attention to telephone pole after telephone pole made out of killed tree after killed tree. As I looked around, and saw telephone poles endlessly everywhere, and bulldozers approaching some of my favorite places, a great worry began to creep in, like a hand reaching for my throat. I would touch some of the telephone poles, dead trees stuck into concrete, seeing how they were stripped of all their tree parts, imagining their tops filled with branches.
In winter, every morning at 4 a.m., I forced myself out of my warm bed to get dressed in many layers of heavy clothing. When I was finished, only my eyes were open to the subzero temperatures. So I wouldn’t dilute my sharp night vision, I never turned on any lights while getting dressed, nor did I look directly into any streetlights outside. Using natural and honed stealth, I’d slip out unheard. In my snowsuit, facemask and big boots I was a little abominable snowman, sweating beneath all those layers. My hooded wool facemask was crusty with frozen exhale and probably a little snot. It only had two holes for my eyes.
With the whole town sleeping, those early mornings cast me out into a pitch-black world of silence. The crunch of my tires on the hard crust of frozen sidewalk snow and ice, and the uneven humming of the pedal-generator that juiced light into my feeble bike headlamp depending on how hard and steadily I pedaled, were the only sounds.
At one of my last stops, at the top of Plum Street, with the wooded valley below, I stopped at the driveway and laid my bike down like I always did. Folding up the paper in my mittens, I walked up and dropped it on the porch, always careful not to make any sound.
A large American elm, rare in its life and age, hovered above me. Its gnarled branches twisted up into the pitch-black universe. As I got back to my bike I stopped, and just let my arms fall to my sides.
I became fixated on the old elm’s upper branches, where they met against the starless, pre-dawn sky.
The frigid air had been still the entire route, which I was glad for because then the only wind-chill I had to deal with was human-powered.
I pulled off my facemask. A small cloud of steam puffed out of my wet hair and face as sweat instantly evaporated. I could see my shadow on the sidewalk created by the fluorescent streetlight behind. A wind was rising. The handful of desiccated leaves still attached to the top branches began to twitch back and forth. Then the branches themselves moved slightly, stiffly. I felt the tree might suddenly bend over in one sweeping arc, as if to scoop me up. My legs were loose, and I thought I might just fall back into the puffy snow, maybe sleep for a long time. I quickly glanced at my feet. Rocky, frozen, broken pavement.
The wind grew, but its edge softened. Around me, although my face and scalp had started to freeze, a gradual reversal of that cold air … The air passed over me in a silent whispering stream, moving three or four remaining leaves high above my head; seemed to have a current of warmth — almost balm — inside it. How could it be? This was the middle of frozen deep winter.
Standing with the tropical breeze evaporating the last of my head’s moisture, I began to sense I was shrinking, getting smaller and smaller, and warmer and warmer inside. The leaves rattled, the wind blew in my ears, I felt drowsy, shrinking, comforted … intoxicated … like I could just fall into (her arms?)
The giant elm tree, the rough wooded valley below, the twitching leaves, the punched-down field, the silence and pitch-black sky… Sky so black and open it even swallowed the stars, stretching further and further away from me, up into the heavens now, pulling me with it. And I wanted to go. Somewhere. I knew wherever would be so much better than here.
Take me right now, I croaked in a small voice. Lord, how I wanted to go.
Out of my clouded, childhood haze, if I’d thought about the future at all, I could only ever dream of one place — Texas. It radiated in blue and yellow daylight, barely but always visible, a distant, Promised Land. From the first time I’d been brought to the state on a trip as a young child, somehow I knew it was home. It sparked ferociously in me, this great wide-open land of red-arching sunsets over grassy, spiked horizons that stretched from the wild blue seacoast inland toward some distance unknown. It carried with it intimations of ancestral land, of standing on an edge between worlds, where the prairie met the sea. When I had to leave Texas I’d secretly vowed I’d come back and live there, some day, somehow.
Aside from Texas, and more distantly, I occasionally saw myself older, raising a daughter on the beach of some tropical island, swimming, always swimming in the light blue sea, untangling her wet black hair, grains of sand glistening on her brown skin and coarse in the crevices of my sun-blackened hands, never cold. I don’t know where this image came from.
A thought came: You should just run away.
I squeezed my eyes shut. But how? I don’t know nothing! How’m I gonna get to Texas when I don’t have any money? And there’s no bus or anything. Shoot, I don’t even know how to get to the next town!
You’ll have to stick it out then; wait ′til you get a little older. Then take advantage of whatever you can get.
The thought of being trapped for that much longer sunk me like black muck.
The harassment only got worse each year that I got older, but I was way too ashamed and embarrassed to tell anybody, even if there had been somebody I felt I could’ve trusted. I was aware that my body was drawing attention, even if I didn’t understand exactly why. Old men stalked me, drove alongside me, stopped me, followed me, taunted me. And they all made comments about my butt, which I couldn’t quite figure out. I couldn’t look at any of them, in my mind they were all monsters from stinking caves, and as they came for me and as I fled from one place to another to another, over and over and over again, I just knew that inside their small, squirming mouths all their teeth would be rotting. By nine, “Pretty Boy” was fighting words at school or on the street corners or out by the gas station where I picked up my bundle of papers. More than once, other kids tried unsuccessfully to make me stand on my head so it would force my ass to melt back into my body and go down. Although I was still small-bodied and more afraid than I would ever admit, I could fight my way out like a rat if cornered. One bleached-blonde woman in the town would taunt that I had a “colored girl’s ass.” She was the same woman who in the hot steaming summertime would suddenly go into fits at the mere sight of me, especially if I had my shirt off, and start chasing me, trying to hit me, screaming hysterically as I fled from her that I’d “turn into a Negro!” because, like the flip of a light switch, I instantly turned dark in the sun.
I only wanted to disappear more. My stealth came in handy when I needed to vanish. I was good everywhere, but especially in the woods, even in the fall when the ground was covered thick in dry leaves and twigs. I was most definitely proud when I read in a book that the same dry-woods stealth techniques I’d taught myself were what the Shawnee Indians had used to melt through the forests back when they’d lived here. Before they’d been slaughtered or forced out.
The big Polish kid at school was a constant problem. He was always trying to start shit. I wanted to hurt him, kill him. I did everything I could to bottle that anger up inside because I was scared I might go too far. And who knew what the consequences might be?
Raking leaves furiously one gray October afternoon, my face raw, I saw only red as I made large piles at the edge of the woodlot. That lurking lady down there had caught me by surprise and slapped me so hard I’d thought for a second I could see out my ear hole. As I used the inverted rake like a pitchfork to haul the leaves into the woodlot and scatter them, I noticed that the big Polish kid was banging around his grandparents’ place. I could see him diagonally through the woodlot, cleaning up some things out by the street. He sure was ugly, I thought to myself as I raked harder. I thought about how I hated him. He was much bigger than me. A few grades older, too.
I took the longest construction nail I could find out of the coffee can by the porch and slipped it into the pocket of my second-hand corduroy jacket. I picked up the big leaf rake again and entered the woodlot, stalking across the brittle woods floor without cracking a twig or crunching a leaf.
He never noticed me until, just a few yards away; I leapt across the shallow marshy ditch and charged. In my mind I let out a bloodcurdling Haiiii-YAH!! But of course no sound came out of my silent throat.
I whapped that big Polish kid so hard with the leaf rake that he stumbled backwards.
Barely able to hold onto the huge rake, and shaking with anger and adrenaline, I hit him again. The long rake flew out of my grip.
He came at me. I grabbed his garbage can with both hands and hurled it at him. With a bang, that bounced off him too.
In the last second before he was on me with his fists, I took the nail out of my pocket and stabbed him in the shoulder. I don’t know how much damage I did because his forward lunge made it rip back rather than go deep, but I squeezed out a prayer that I hurt him bad.
He beat the shit out of me. The whole left side of my face swelled up to twice its normal size, closing my eye and turning the mess as black and blue and bloody looking as day-old summer road kill.
In school, everybody wanted to touch my blood-bloated shiny purple face. I got a week of in-school suspension because they knew it wouldn’t be punishment for me to be out. I argued that they had nothing to do with my life outside the school. Fell on deaf ears.
Stewing, I put together my own survival kit, consisting of the only three things I knew for sure in this world: 1) Everybody is a threat and filled with hate, 2) There is danger everywhere, and 3) Things are guaranteed to shift for the worse at any moment without warning.
CHAPTER THREE
There were parts of town where I could be alone. I hung out in the abandoned open-pit ore mine, or walked along the railroad tracks. I sometimes stopped and tried to imagine that wolves and elks and even buffaloes had once lived here, northern pikes had swum in every lake and stream, and billions of wild blue passenger pigeons had convulsed the sky before heading down to the Texas Gulf Coast prairie each autumn. Those giant flocks of big, sleek, native blue doves with the apple red breasts were extinct; people had killed them all off. Every last one.
I just couldn’t picture how all those animals and birds, all that life, could’ve lived right here and now there was nothing. There was no real forest or prairie anymore, mostly just scraggly woodlots and rangy, old degraded fields growing back up into meadows. And in the house, alone in the bathroom or kitchen, I would stare at the metal sink faucet, and wonder: How did people make such a thing out of the woods? Or how about a TV? How did we get from there to here? Nothing even closely resembling those things existed out in the fields or in the ground. And further, water really did not come from the faucet, but again, from out there. My tightly closed perspective of the world became malleable.
I looked for black walnut, persimmon and white oak trees because I’d read of a giant green luminescent silk moth, called a Luna moth, who used to live in the forest. I knew the trees they liked, especially the black walnuts, but couldn’t find any.
Seeing a Luna moth became an obsession. The big moths were not extinct, just very rare. In fact, this long-tailed, green silk moth became an unreachable apparition, a heart of the lost wilderness, an otherworldly green ghost sailing through the night woods of the past. Luna’s were said to be a perfect ghostly-bright green, and 6 or 7 inches in length from tip to tip, with long tendrilled tails, a yellow and blue decoy eye on each hind wing, and giant feathery antennas. I studied everything I could find in the library about them.
I was mystified that, once they hatched from the cocoon, the giant Luna moth did not eat for the rest of her or his life. After spending the whole winter cramped up, changing from caterpillar to such perfection, they only lived about four days, and if they didn’t find a mate, they died alone, without ever connecting, without passing on their genes. Their entire life seemed geared toward just those few days of freedom — and a chance of momentary physical contact with a soul mate.
I had to see one. I had to see a Luna moth alive, in the wild. I had to know that some were left, silently flying through the night.
Funny how I never even knew how close I lived to snowy cold Canada, whose border was just a short distance up into the swirling bowels of Lake Erie. I read and read. I liked the library. Ohio’s forests and prairies had been America’s first West. The Old Northwest. I found old books telling me about the land before colonists and settlers arrived. I wanted to know about my world, and what had happened here on land that I stood on. I’d read of the great Hinckley kill, where all the settlers of a newly marked township had gotten together and, armed with long rifles, surrounded the primeval forest in a giant circle. They beat the bush as they all walked in, closing the noose, pushing every living wild animal into the center. Any that tried to break through were shot. At the end of the day there was a pandemonium of animals trapped in front of them, surrounded on all sides, and the people shot and killed them all, buffalo, elk, deer, wolves, bears, eagles, owls, lynx, wolverines, otters, martens, rabbits, foxes, birds, everything. Again, I was awestruck that all those animals had lived right here, right where my feet walked. I imagined the panic, the flames as the forest was cut down and set afire, the end-of-the-world flapping of crazed wild birds attempting to escape through the smoke and realizing they had nowhere else to go, everything, their entire world, crashing down.
The pile of death was so large it refused the settlers’ attempts to burn it, and for weeks its rotting stench attracted so many vultures that they began returning every year. A legend arose and remains to this day that the “buzzards” come back each year to this spot and, in fact, the township has made a local holiday with festivities out of it.
One afternoon, ten, eleven years old, in the library I found a book with some very old sketches or etchings. As I remember it, flat, stiff line drawings showed colonists or conquistadors mingling with Indian people on the Atlantic coast or maybe in the islands. Some Indians were in canoes off the shore, frozen in motion. The Indian women were bare-breasted. One man in armor was effortlessly and bloodlessly cutting off the breast of a half-naked Indian woman with a big scissors. She was just staring face forward. The flat drawing, the idyllic setting, and the flat faces on everybody including the woman made it look like it was a simple, normal everyday act. Other pictures had Indian people tied up flat on their backs, side by side like sticks of cordwood, being held or shipped for slavery, a lot like those drawings I’d seen of African slaves stacked on ships of the Middle Passage.
My fluid motion and natural ability to move, sight unseen, in the woods and tall grass prairie meadows increased with my need to retreat from people. I chewed on sassafras leaves, swallowing the juice. I ate sun-bursting blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries where I found them. In the grass meadows, bees, butterflies, all kinds of other insects, and hummingbirds buzzed around me as sun or rain soaked into thick waxy stalks of long grass. There was a large old garden, now an overgrown field, bordered by a gnarled apple tree that had a rusted, handmade iron tool hanging from it. My father said he’d once shot a possum in that field with nine babies clinging to her back. Her breasts were swollen pink with milk, and he had to hit each baby over the head with a hammer. That was the way it was. Nature was to be cleared. He had become a good American.
From Canada to Texas, our Midwestern thunderstorms are unlike any other on Earth. That heavy, pea-green afternoon darkness lowers as clouds condense, giant thunder rolls, pressure builds with the first few warning tongues of white-purple lightning, and then finally the deluge, the pounding, the roaring of the rain and the thunder, the shaking of the Earth herself …