Second Time Around Revisited

It's four-thirty and eighteen degrees when I awaken. Today I’m leaving snow covered Hancock in the western Catskills and the frozen headwaters of the Delaware River, for sunny California for a new job. My bag packed and ready to go rests by the front door downstairs. My neighbor Stanley is driving me to the Greater Binghamton Airport for a six AM flight. It’s still dark outside and I see the yellow light shining dimly in the window of his house next door. I dump my bag in his truck and walk carefully up the gravel path. It’s a sheet of black ice. It’s no joke this black ice. One slip and there goes a hip. "Stanley!” "Yeah". 

He's sitting at the head of his dinning room table where he always sits sipping his coffee and smoking a cigarette. The house is warm and the wood stove glows. He's wearing a tee shirt. I'm dressed in layers – tee shirt, black roll-neck under my green wool sweater clasped at the neck, scarf and my black Calvin Kline woolen pea coat and a wool cap too pulled low over my brow. 

We drive the forty miles to the Binghamton airport. The truck’s headlights cut a swathe through the soft darkness, reflecting off the corridor of snow and ice piled high along the roadside. Stan drops me at the entrance, no crowds, no hassle. Soon I'm snapping on my seat belt ready to fly to San Francisco. 

After five hours a disembodied voice asks us to please move our seats to the upright position. Now I see the Pacifica Ocean and the phantasmagoric silhouette of San Francisco; the triangle of the Bank of America building jutting into the sky above the coral-white city, the arch of the Golden Gate spanning the headland between San Francisco and Sausalito and the Bay Bridge stretching from the city to Oakland and Berkeley. My ex-wife texts she’s waiting outside to drive me south to her home in Monterey.

Arlene and I were together six years before I walked out with a shopping cart and a few possessions telling her I was going to the gutter and I did, settling for a while in an empty artist’s loft under the Brooklyn Bridge far from the bourgeois life she offered; her millionaire relatives with many original Edvard Munch prints on the wall of their Washington DC mansion, the pretentious  New York university life, the Italian Renaissance apartment in Brooklyn over looking Grand Army Plaza and the civil war monument at the entrance to Prospect Park in Brooklyn.  

My eyes are glued to the revolving baggage carousal in the arrival hall at 

San Francisco Airport. My bag appears lumbering towards me and I push past a couple, swoop in and grab it and head for the exit. 

We’d been together six years and for the second time in my life I’d broken my marriage vows, crossed the bridge into another affair. But as time passed we’d both gotten over the indiscretions and I was looking forward to seeing her again. She’d lived in Monterey almost twenty years now teaching at the local university and working gratis on a number of local boards and arts organization. She’s made a good life for herself and loved her west coast life.

She opened the trunk and I threw in my bag and we threaded our way through the airport traffic to Route 101, the old coastal highway heading south towards Monterey. 

In California spring had arrived. It was early March. It was hard to imagine the winter’s snow piled high outside my home back east. Here fruit trees were in full bloom and the daffodils had already been and gone. The sudden change was startling. From the dank dark of the northeast to California’s sunshine and warmth. I sat back luxuriating in the change as she outlined plans for four days in paradise before I started my new position at KPFA.  

We were speeding south now, the blue Pacifica surf rolled in on broad empty yellow beaches for mile after mile and eucalypts and conifers and brilliant deep blue Californian Lilacs, surreal, the color so startling, lined the highway as we headed south. She suggested we stop on the way at the surfing mecca Santa Cruz. I’d never been but heard it was at the high end of hippie sheik.

We arrived at dusk.  She had a one hundred dollar coupon for a free organic dinner at a  fusion restaurant: Mediterranean, Indian, Pakistani, Afghani. I ordered Moroccan beet salad with turmeric, coriander, marinated beets, wild arugula, goat cheese followed by a lamb burger: tomatoes, red onion, mint aioli, a traditional sauce made from garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, and usually egg yolks, with Swiss cheese, roasted potatoes, green salad, and an elegant glass of pinot. The restaurant was spacious and comfortable and the young man serving us smiles one of those disconcerting Californian smiles that makes you think he must have seen his new lover over your shoulder but really he’s smiling at you. We left him a good tip and drove less than an hour to Monterey. 

She lives here on a hill overlooking Monterey Bay. The floor to ceiling windows and sliding doors open onto her deck and a sprawling live oak tree and then the red rooftops of neighbors and in the distance Sand City, another ex hippie hang-out lines the bay. At night the lights sparkle like mica glinting on a beach. It was late and we sat looking out at those distant lights as she rolled fresh, clean Californian medicinal quality marijuana and we smoked and talked. It was like old times back in Brooklyn. 

When I awoke next day a thick fog was roiling in from the ocean and Sand City had disappeared but here on the hillside the warm sun is shining. I slide open the glass door and step out onto the deck to take my coffee. Potted plants are parked back against the wall and there’s some micro salad greens growing in a canvas earth bag.  After Hancock this is a kind of paradise. 

By the time we left for the spa the sun had burned off the fog and soon I was luxuriating in a roiling hot tub squinting in the bright sun, at the spare olive green hills that surrounded the spacious outbuildings constructed on a generous scale with natural timbers and large areas of glass that invited the delicious sunlight inside. 

She invited a couple to join us at her home for dinner that first night. They were originally from LA, now retired, lived in a condo close by. Earlier in the day we’d visited a local farmer’s market so the vegetarian meal we ate was infused with fresh local greens quite unlike anything I’d been eating back east. I took a sip of red wine as she explained something of our married past as if to justify my visit though with no nefarious intent. 

She explained that I was a journalist, an artist she called me, and had interviewed both atomic bomb pilots and an important eye-witness to the holocaust: “And,” she said and dropped one of her dramatic pauses, “he mentored Amy Goodman, the founder and host of Democracy Now when we were married”. 

 It was true and a little shocking to me when she reeled it off like that. She was generous at heart and had always reinforced my journalistic pursuits and at that level we were more than simpatico.  

I suppose that’s why the couple started talking politics beginning with a story about somebody they’d met who described life in a missile silo somewhere in the desert in the mid-west; the booze ups and the deviant sex that went on underground as the Air Force ensured the security of America. And then another story about a guy he’d met at one of those self-storage facilities. The meeting was purely coincidental. 

“I was helping this friend of mine move”, he said. “And there was this guy talking out loud with his friends and he’d recently returned from Afghanistan”. 

My wife’s friends were relaxed now and we were into our second bottle of red. 

“So the guy pulls out his battle gear. He’d been an MP - Military Policeman and did three tours over there. And now he’s telling me how fucked up it is.  I mean the guy seemed ok and he was very open about it. He told me he actually liked it. I mean there was nothing for him to do back home so he just kept re-upping. Those guys are all fucked up. He told me there’s all these camps hidden away all over this country so they can put people away when the shit hits the fan; kind of like concentration camps.”

I’m listening and it’s not the first time I’d heard this. Such stories circulated on the Internet and after Bush-Cheney, 9/11, torture memorandums, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay  I was prepared to believe such a preposterous proposition.  

“And so the MP says even though he’s now home, the army can call him up on a moments notice and that’s for the next twenty years. It’s like once you join up you can’t get out. They got you for twenty years. Not many people know that. 

“He says they line 'em up, the soldiers before they ship them into the war zone and they inoculate them with all this shit. They don’t even know what they’re getting. Haven’t a clue what they getting. It’s like we are all animals.

“They just line up and boom, boom, boom they shoot the shit into your arm. They got some device and they don’t even change the needle. I tell you, I was freaking out. And then the guys shows me his weapon right there in the self-storage unit and I’m like a total stranger. He doesn’t know me  and he’s showing me his weapon. He gets the thing and he’s pointing at his friends and he’s calling them melon heads. And I ask him so what’s a melon head? And he says that’s what we call them Taliban motherfuckers, we shoot and their head explode like a freaking melon.”

By now it was late and my ex’s friends get up to leave. They don’t want to use email they tell me when I inquire about keeping in touch. All the NSA spying has them spooked. So we walk them to the door. They leave, The house is quiet again.

One year later. 

Prologue

It is as if you are gone and tears are already in my eyes.

I wanted you to fall in love with me. 

Perhaps you did. 

But it was never about that anyway, a throw away. 

Oh no. Oh no. 

But tears already in my eyes. 

You were my best friend for a few. 

You were fun and I don’t know why. 

You made me cry. 

I danced with you a while.

We never touched.

“I like it”, you said 

“Aei-laik-it”.  

Comrade, that was our game.

And when you slipped behind the wheel and we shot of somewhere, 

bags thrown on the back seat and just got the fuck out of there

And then got drunk and somehow you drove 

I don’t remember how we got home that night. 

Black eyes blaze and you amaze and I have to smile. 

Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea; 

Pablo Antonio Cuadre floats in clouds of smoke in Nicaragua 

and Sandinistas march into Managua. 

I hear the shouts and fires burning in the hills. 

Fidel, Che, Somoza and Batista 

you are the listener and my soul sister.

And next day I care and nurture 

and  think you’re strangely touched somehow; 

Rub your feet, and play you music, make you tea and read to you. 

Of a sudden you are my mistress.

I think I channeled my stepmother. 

She liked fast cars and drove like you.

“Baader Meinhof”, I  said. 

“That’s who you are”. 

“Who’s that?”

“A German political leftist gang who were revolutionaries”, I said.

“Ah-ah A-Ho”, she said.

It’s the Fourth of July and we’re driving south from Oakland on the 101 headed inland towards Salinas, south of Monterey. We were going to the Mission San Antonio de Padua. These outposts were established by the Catholic Church colonizing the Spanish Southwest starting in the seventeenth century. They are edges, transitions from one to the other, from heathen and animist to Christianity, where Western missionaries and explorers met the Indians. So they carry all that weight and memory in the adobe walls and the red clay tiled roofs and startling sunlight and shadows.    

My traveling companion is a radio producer at KPFA. I’d now been manager more than a year and settling into California. She a KPFA’s producer and soon after I arrived, introduced herself and we were to become an item as they say. 

She was from a wealthy farming family in Sinanola on the Pacific coast. They grew Blue Agave, succulent spiky cactus that grows eight feet tall producing Mezcal and Tequila. As a child, she rode her horse or Honda 250 motor cycle  through the dusty rows early in the morning before the sun beat down. She could see the Sierra Madre Mountains on the horizon and the new sun lit them golden.  

She was one of  eight. Her given name was Maria but her grandmother preferred Maruka and that’s what I called her. As a young girl Maruka loved to play in the tall reeds by the river. She went with her grandmother in the evenings. I loved the image. She visited Mexico recently and two weeks after she got back to the States she heard her grandmother died. 

We were silent as we drove on. I liked how silence between us was comfortable, sometimes there is no need to talk.

I’d called Arlene that morning telling her I was planning a trip south to The Mission with a friend and could break the trip in Monetary where she now lived. To my surprise she  asked us to stay over and suddenly Maruka and I were in the Benz again. Maruka was behind the wheel sitting back in the black leather bucket seat, relaxed and steady and I feel comfortable and its a pleasure and I wonder if there’s something psychological about it; my stepmother was a good driver and sat similarly behind the wheel, speeding down country roads in Australia, a cigarette burning between her fingers. The memories play in my mind as we glide south to Monetary. 

Driving through a cool, dark shadowed part of the Redwood Highway near Occidental, I told Maruka about Arlene. Married thirty years ago in a Park Slope synagogue. She was a smart Ph.D. student at New York University when we met one night in The Village. She owned an apartment on the top floor of a small building on Grand Army Plaza near Prospect Park, described as luxury, pre-war Renaissance Revival. It had views looking west over Brooklyn and the East River to Manhattan and New York Harbor and The Statue of Liberty, all the way across the Hudson River to the New Jersey Palisades and  Newark Airport. From the living room you could see The Rockaways, the Atlantic Ocean and planes coming and going at JFK. We separated. She moved to California. 

After the four hour drive from Oakland we arrived in Monterey at dusk; sandy beaches. bleached weather board and sunshine blue. Arlene is waiting for us at the front door and Maruka is getting out of the Mercedes and Arlene looks her up and down, swallows and smiles. 

 

The tall man standing to one side in tee shirt, suntanned muscular arms and blue jeans turns out to be her handyman and her lover. His name is Frank. Frank does what he’s told and takes Maruka’s bag. 

That night Frank chewed on his corn cob with vigor and turning to Maruka asked: “Why are you a vegan?”. 

And Maruka looked up, sat back and cocked her head slightly and then answered in a steady voice looking him in the eye: “Because it was my choice.”

Frank keeps gnawing on his corn and invites as all to slather the way he does, rolling his corn in the butter and turns again to Maruka and asks if she eats honey.

“I like it. I don’t eat it”, she replies and Frank nearly chokes on his corn cob:

“But bees aren’t animals” and Maruka says she doesn’t eat honey and Arlene, a devoted vegetarian, glances across at me and our eyes meet for a moment. 

Maruka turns to me and says: “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I call her Beider Manhoff.

For a moment we are a couple 

streaming down the back roads 

The white Mercedes Benz, 

the smallest four door

pretty as a picture.  

For a moment we are a couple. 

She seems content. 

Leaning back behind the wheel. 

Black cap. 

Like a guerrilla fighter

and sunglasses, 

leaning back

one hand resting on the gear shift between us.