LAST TRIP

A milestone, if you will. Published in "The Black Boot" magazine, now defunct

IT WAS THE BIG BROWN NOSE and demonic, toothy grin that I recall most vividly. The eyes were concealed behind leatherbound goggles, and the entire assemblage capped by a half shell helmet. He was easing up on my left on a BSA twin, a Lightning, I would guess.

We were already rolling along at a pretty good clip, somewhere west of Glorieta. The acid was starting to wear off, but I was still high. I glanced over at him, and nodding a greeting, goosed the throttle.

Coming from the east coast, the landscape still seemed bleak. The high desert is reluctant to share its sparse beauty with newcomers. Annamarie was helping that process along with this ride.

She had gone out there a year or so earlier, solo, on a sweet little CB350-4. Rented a flat on Galisteo Street, just below the Paseo. Got a job at the Harley shop. I stopped off to visit, on my way to Alaska-so I told myself.

Quickly, things got too comfortable. Within a day or two of arriving—broke—I got a job at Boddy’s Honda, turning wrenches. Clarence, the shop foreman, was skeptical of my ability—maybe because when he asked my name, I told him my old friends called me Gonzo. So, first morning on the job, Clarence gave me a new CB750.

“The transmission is bad. Can you overhaul it?”

No big deal. In Honda school, you had to tear down a transmission and reassemble it, without the manual. But it’s really not hard, once you learn the system. All Honda trannies—large and small—share the same configuration, which is logical and intuitive.

“Sure,” I replied.

“OK. Let me know if you need a hand.”

 All I had to work with was the set of hand tools I carried in my saddlebags, but by lunchtime I had yanked the engine, split the cases, and inspected the transmission. However, there was nothing wrong with it—the trannie was in perfect shape: shifters, dogs, gears, shafts—all sleek and gleaming. So I poked around, and found the problem: the shift linkage was fouled. A tweak with some channel locks and it was back in the groove--there had been no need to pull the engine. By late afternoon, I had the engine back in the frame, and was hooking back up the last of the cables when Clarence walked by my bay.

“Need a hand getting the engine out?”

“Nope. It’s back in. I’m going for a test ride in a few minutes.”

“What about the transmission?”

"It’s fine. The clevis from the shift lever was bent. I straightened it. Sorry I didn’t find it until I had it all torn down.”

“No kidding—you had that engine apart and back together in one day—the flat rate manual gives it 24 hours! Who helped you lift the engine out?”

“Nobody.” I demonstrated how you sit astride the rear seat, lay forward with your chest on the gas tank, and ease the engine up onto one of the frame tubes. You dismount, balancing the engine with one hand, then squat beside the bike, and roll the engine onto your haunches. Then you hump it onto the bench.

“Well, if you want to go by Gonzo, you’re Gonzo, alright. If you want to call yourself Jesus, you’re Jesus.”

 It’s no big deal, really. I worked with some serious flat raters in big shops back east, guys who were faster than me.

***

That weekend, Annamarie wanted to show me one of her favorite spots. We loaded the bikes with a small tent, sleeping bags, and some food and water, and set out for the Pecos Wilderness.

In my pocket, I had a couple of squares of windowpane, powerful stuff. I had tried a dose, back in Takoma Park, just before I left. I went for a walk along the creek, and the acid came on with the rush of a jet engine. Nearing the road, the sound of the passing cars took form, growing as the car approached, and dissolving from sight as the sound receded. I walked up a hill, along a little street I never new existed. Some old bungalows backed up to the park. As I walked beside them, one of the bungalows, with a low slung, wide eaved hip roof, became a merry, portly woman, who hitched up her long skirts and danced a jig for me. I was eager to share this stuff with Annamarie.

We must have camped above the tree line, because I remember taking off my boots and all my clothes, and running through a meadow, and down a hill. The sun at that elevation was dazzling, and as the acid came on, clouds, mountaintops and trees took on new forms, merged, and recombined. I felt scree and thistles cutting my feet, but did not perceive it as pain. It was like I was shaking off the demons of the past.

But Annamarie held back. Maybe she was worried that I would leap off some crag and try to fly away, or some local might see us and freak out and shoot us, so I chilled out. Although she was always more adventurous than me, she was a lot more circumspect. Plus she knew I had no common sense. 

***

I started pulling ahead of Brown Nose, and he gunned his machine in response. We were heading up a long incline, and my mildly tweaked R-60/2 was pulling him all the way. But after we crested the hill, the BSA overtook me. I had to watch it anyway, because the beemer got a little wobbly over 95.

And so it went, I’d pace him up the hills, and he’d gain it all back going down. Soon, I could no longer see Annamarie’s 350 in my mirrors. Brown Nose was in the lead when he peeled off onto the two lane spur into Santa Fe, and I had to yield to a couple of cars. Trying to catch up, I roared up the shoulder, slinging gravel and passing traffic like crazy until a bridge abutment blocked my path. Never caught back up. It was over.

I killed the engine and waited for what seemed an hour for Annamarie to catch up. When she did, she wasn’t so much angry as disgusted.

I suppose it was a good thing, though, because then and there I decided that I had experienced all I needed of the psychedelic state, at least for the time. In the thirtyfive years since that trip to Pecos, I’ve never dropped another hit. Even tapered off of mota, and finally quit that, too.

But I reserve the right to try it again some time. Like if I were diagnosed with terminal cancer, maybe.

Or if Brown Nose blasted out of the hills again, to give me another chance. 

God Is

God’s a hungry red tailed hawk, keening somewhere out of sight

God’s the ancient Hebrew prayer I forgot how to recite
God’s the hand I cannot see, on a dreary moonless night
God is what I left behind, though I tried with all my might
God is all the work I’ve done, but never gotten paid
God was in my car that night I could have gotten laid
God stood by in silence while my father called his name
And turned His back although He knew, just what his son became

Acts Of Rebellion

I witnessed several acts of rebellion today, 
against the leaden lawbook of the earth:
lofting branches laden with nubile leaves;
beyond, the intermittent silhouette of a heron,
solemnly beating upwind; and a swallow,
cutting like a tight end on invisible turf,
to snag a hapless butterfly from the unsuspecting sky.

Ode to Li Po

there is a slender stream, slicing through my town
that must be traversed, to reach my home.
I’ve got a pipe in my pocket
and a head full of wine--
as I plunkplunk upon the bridgeplanks
an owl barks at the hovering moon,
There, over the sparkling trickle,
I pause to light a bowl. Deeply drawing smoke, 

the pipe’s orange glow swells to rival the rising moon.
Without a sound, the owl takes flight. 

The one flies past the other; their twins skim the stream.
Their witness exhales leisurely, and then departs the scene.

A reply to a poem by Roy Bentley

Bastard

Being fatherless and, by definition, a bastard,
my sad father had annunciatory balloon clouds
attached to his communications on any given day.

I have seen the single-tear at the corner of one eye
after someone praises Fatherhood or he’s been privy
to locker room towel-snapping or the one-upmanship

of men who grill burgers under fleetingly cerulean sky,
roughhousing language into its use as a tool to separate.
So what if he was a bastard. I’m not excusing collateral

damage he inflicted on others, but he was a romantic
so and so. His mother was institutionalized for firing
at his biological father with a forty-five automatic—

story goes, she was reloading when a hand reached
for her hand then for the gun. I hear soft, Southern-
accented tones, the sheriff counseling nonviolence,

the laying down of arms. Like in a B-movie where
someone trusts in one desperate act to settle things
which will never be settled in this life or any other.

Copyright (c) 2016 Roy Bentley. All rights reserved.

What of this gal,
who had the wherewithal to rack a forty five,
and the will to line up the sights on his forehead--

Was she surprised when the gun leapt at that first shot
(which went wide, like the succeeding eight)--
or did it bring back memories of her father, or some brother, 
or maybe some earlier boyfriend, standing behind her--
his arms enveloping her and steadying her own would be lethal hands--
Squeeze it, don’t jerk it BLAM thata girl!

We all know he had it coming,
but then how could she miss in nine tries?
And anyway, what lessons could she teach him,
by blowing out his brains?

Cattle Call

I thought the girls were silly, back in nineteen sixty five,
when they came out against the war, a million miles away.
Fast for peace, their buttons read, pinned to their swelling chests;
feast for war! I mocked—they fired on us—let’s blow them all away!
More intent was I on little Nancy Swope, when she shifted in her seat,
and flashed a glimpse of pink between the buttons of her blouse…

But that day when class abruptly halted,

and on the glaring TV screen, Johnson came to life:

My fellow Americans, he drawled, I need a hundred thousand more…
I swear I saw the words come from his mouth, alive as they could be—

I swear I knew right then and there—they were lies, they were lies…

“Cattle Call,” David called it, when he came home to Tricky Dick,

with some shit that blew us all away—

a cattle call it was that caught him, back in nineteen sixty six…

By nineteen sixty nine, I had a newborn child—

I carried her one autumn night, among a million more,

up Pennsylvania Avenue, and placed a single candle on the wall,
where a million candles cast their glow, upon the White House lawn.
That baby kept me out of war, after I quit school. Still,
I envied those more brave, who burned their cards,
And let the pigs drag them away…

Not long after, David took my wife and child, and I drifted west;
never was I bitter, though—I liked him anyway…

And now, by god!--fifty years have passed; David's teeth are missing—
lost to demons he brought home, that haunt him to this day.
Yes, I thought the girls were silly, though they were right—

but even so—how did they know, how did they know?

BENEDICTION

A marvel, it is, how we share these times. It goes back to that spring morning, 40 years ago--after I had abandoned any hope of recovery--the magic bullet, the miracle cure--those miserable, worn out hopes that had sustained me through those long, wretched years of decline--and after I finally let myself say it, I want to die--that morning, when you, my oldest son, came in to my room to say goodbye.

Not goodbye, father, may you find peace and liberation from your years of suffering. No, it was goodbye, I’m going to California with a woman who is running out on her husband, a woman I slept with once, but who is seeking out her lover, a stoner living in a run-down bungalow on the beach in Summerland. Or some such cockamamie bullshit.

I replied, but my voice was so weak you could not hear me. So you leaned your ear down, so close to my lips that I could have kissed you; I felt your long curly hair and that horrible beard brush my face. Then, in the faintest whisper, I spoke my last words to you. You’re crazy, just like me.

In fact, those were the last words I spoke to anyone, because that evening fever took me, and I slipped into a coma. Dr. Britt finished examining me, and called my wife into my room.

Lisabetta, he said, your husband's condition is grave. He will be gone very soon, perhaps by morning. I could admit him to the hospital and they could drain his lungs and possibly revive him (No! No! Please let me die!), but even if they could, this will only happen again.

Thank god she let me go. If I had suffered, she had suffered twice as much--this young, voluptuous woman who gave me enemas, this still young woman with wide-set brown eyes, who irrigated my bladder drain twice a day--thank god she let me go. This woman who turned away my neighbors, my old high school buddies--who thought they could get away with it--this woman who buried her wishes for my death deep inside herself--thank god she let me go.

Enough already. Let’s talk about other things. I’m delighted you've settled down. You even call your mother once in a while. And you’re finally making a little money--although you didn’t do so well last year. But you could have made so much more of yourself. The opportunities you pissed away. What I could have done with them! So many times I wanted to get up out of my bed and beat you. I mean beat you. Hurt you, like you hurt me.

If only you’d have found a nice girl, a Jewish girl. Those tramps you used to go with, one after the other. Living together--uuuhhh! What kind of a way to live is that? And that one you married, what did you see in her? She was just as sick as you were. She was built, I’ll hand you that--every bit as nice as Lizzie, from what I could see.

There were some good ones; that country girl, from Virginia. Now she was nice--even if she was flat as an ironing board. But the nice ones--those were the ones you treated like shit; you’d cheat on them (I guess it’s cheating--you were only shacked up) and then leave them, like a dirty little shit.

And that friend of yours, that sissy boy. I told you he was a sissy--I could tell the first day you brought him home. You were friends all through junior high, all through high school. But my god, how angry you got, when I warned you about what could happen.

So much anger you had! I’ll never understand. But that’s all past. Maybe it’s your new woman. Finally someone that’s good for you--even if she is a shiksa.

I tell you, I was right--you were crazy. Even now, a little. No wonder we get along. It’s so nice when you tell me about your life. And the things you remember, from way back, before I got sick. Teaching you to swim, the books I bought you. How you loved books! What you could have done with them.

No wonder I felt so comfortable, right away, when you leaned over me to listen, when I opened my lips to speak and my soul flew up out of my mouth and into your ear, I felt at home, like being with an old friend.

Oy, enough already.