oh, why the heck not?

Many years ago, the first time Agent 86 went all the way 'round the bend on me, I was driving, as you may recall, to get out of my apocalyptically painful skin. I'd been up camping at the mouth of the Mattole and doing some work on some pieces about the Hurwitz problem in Humboldt County, but I was a flippin' mess. I wrote this about 15 years ago:

I left the Mattole. Trying to drive myself right on out of my skin, to nowhere. After spending a few heart-thudding nights, nowhere, in Goldie, a sudden streak of sense blew through me. I would have these sensible streaks, whole days in a row when the only hint was my tears. I decided I ought to stop someplace --> sleep in a house --> talk to a calm person. I headed for Marin County, where I was born, in 1953, back when Marin was paradise. I'd called my old friend, Mikey, who lives in Marshall, across Tomales Bay from Point Reyes National Seashore. He was glad to hear from me; said he had to go to the city, but he could meet me at Rancho Nicasio. He'd try to get there by six.

Well, I got there at four thirty. Fine. I'll just stoke up on ginger ale and soda. Rancho Nicasio's been a fixture in West Marin for a couple thousand years. In fact, I bet it was first opened by a caveperson. Nowadays, it wants to be yuppie and keep ranchers hangin' at the bar. This'd be a really difficult trick, but they're advantaged in that there is not another watering hole within what seems like twenty miles. They compensate for yuppie aspirations by serving you spectacularly bad California Cuisine, and serving it to you only as their bio-rhythms peak for it.

I still feel a little ill-at-ease each time I belly-up to that bar. I remember passing through there on the way to the dining room, as a short person, mystified by all those smoky old men. Shirley Temples emanated from there. That smell of plastic cherries and something sort of sour, not quite stale, same as on my old sot uncle, had to be booze. Put two and two together, I did, and came right on up with four --> that was where he'd been. So, I expected to be told by the bartender, "Sorry, kid, but you can't sit here. You have to stay with your parents in the dining room." I'd back up and tell him I wanted a Shirley Temple, with two cherries. He'd send it in to me in the dining room through a waitress. Convoluted process, but worth it.

But, no. It was a snappy little, "Whaddle it be?" I said, "Damn. Aren't you going to ask me for my ID?" Heh. Bar humor. I was peaceful, alternating ginger sodas with coffee. A gaggle of dairymen strode in. Six of them, all old but one, and he sat next to me. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt and bluejeans tucked into rubber boots! Argh! I'm a fool for men in rubber boots. It's soh-ho sexy. I was far, far too pulverized to think about lust, but I just couldn't help but check the ring finger on his left hand. What's that going to tell me? Working men never wear wedding rings.

He tried ordering a beer, but the old guys were having none of it. Much too wimpy --> set him up with a double screwdriver. and start in rumbling local politics, something he's only half interested in. He keeps looking to me for help. I shrug. Those guys got rolling faster than any bunch I've ever seen, and soon he could talk to me without them even noticing. "My name is Joe, Joseph Baldwin Wingate, Jr., little lady, and I own a dairy near here. Just got done muckin' my barn. It's why I look like this. These old boys drug me out of my barn." Nice forthright fellow. A name with integrity. Not handsome, nope, not at all, but wow, is he male. He gets maler and maler to me by the minute, and I'm telling myself this kind of nonsense is no way to mend a broken heart. He keeps up talking to me for five minutes, then the boys for five minutes, and then back to me again for the hour until Mikey shows up.

So far, I've got that he inherited his property from his grampa a couple years ago, and he goes out with all grampa's old cronies once a week so he'll be a respected man around here. His dairy is very important to him, and these codgers are the ones who can help him the most, with their politics and their experience both. I'm squinting at them, seeing if I can't place them from my trips past this mysterious room as a little girl. He's asking me about the timber issue, intrigued I'm writing about it. He's got a lot of cogent things to say. This talk is so easy it makes my skin tingle, sporadic conversation gusts, syntactical breezes. They blow into me while he's engaged with the old boys' club. He's intelligent, and kind, and interesting. That blaring maleness never even flags, his Jack Kerouac hold on his insights goes up and up and up, weightless, completely free. I'm having big fun with this very nice guy, but I am certain he's married, though he hasn't said Word One about a wife or kids. Single men just don't talk to you this way. In truth, I already have to admit, it'd be worse than I could stand if this one was single. So I'm just as glad --> gladder <-- this way. I can enjoy him; not worry about trouble. I can count on my fingers the people with whom I could blow abstractions so freely, and I'm sad to report that all but one were male. It relieves The Headache, makes me hopeful I can stay in my skin.

"Hey, hey, hey, Mikey!" He knows Mikey. Fine. Mikey sits down on the other side of me and orders a cognac. He did grow up with me you know. Joe's saying something to the old boys, and I'm catching up with Mikey. A pregnant woman with a toddler in her arms strides up to Joe. He's smiling, and doesn't get the hello halfway out his face when she lights into him like nothing I've ever heard. This is his wife. This, this pit viper with too much black liner on her eyes is reading him up one side and down the other with a string of epithets I'd never heard, and I'm a dangerous one! I did not know anybody, ever, talked like this, let alone a woman to her husband, her lover. There did not seem to be any theme to it. I guess it was finding him in a bar ire. She literally screamed he better get his ass home, turned on her heel, stunned baby gaping over her shoulder, and hissed her way out the door.

The drunk old farts were agog, silent. Mikey was beat red and breathing hard. I checked in at zero to see if I could be a help to Joe there. Maybe he got it. He hit that silence like he was born to it too. Then he said, "We-e-ell, folks, that was the little lady. I guess I won't be heading for home any time soon." Mikey huffed he hoped to shit not. Disgusted. Appalled. But it about finished the last generation. The codgers were completely lost in the dark vacuum of transcendental obscenity, of killing invective out of someone who ought to be the picture of all human compassion, a young mom. Very quickly it was just me and Joe and Mikey. Mikey took charge like he was a crisis counselor, advised me to start drinking real booze. This was gonna be a long night. I already knew there would be no turning Mikey, Mr. Don't Take No Shit From No Females, from keeping Joe busy all night.

So I ordered a cognac, but it was too hard to put that nasty scene behind us. Joe had slugged down a couple doubles fast and was beginning to sound like he felt them quite a bit. We decided to go to the Western in Point Reyes --> change the scenery around our lumped throats. Mikey shot off in his pick-up; Joe got in a shiny black Porsche; and I got in Goldie. Then Joe got back out and came over to me; leaning down from a great height, stuck his head in at me. "Why don't you come with me in my toy?"

"Not a chance. You're drunk and you should be riding with Mikey. You can ride with me, or I'll drive your car, but you're not driving me anywhere."

"I'm fine. I've never been too drunk to drive, and I've been drunk in my day. You watch me drive. See what I mean. Follow me."

In fact, he drove like a surgeon, not one weave or waffle. We slipped out those curves past the reservoir and through the trees to Point Reyes Station like neurons in the planetary brain. We were a ballet of going. We got to the Western and he told me he has to play silly when he drinks or he isn't any fun. I do know a man who could drink ten men under the table and go shave for work in the trees; my heart has a hole in it his size. I've concluded that such men, such people, are not alcoholics, in the sense that we currently understand it anyway. It is anesthesia, insufficient, but not their place to hide. So I believed him. In fact, I believed every word out his mouth, he had such a way of putting his meaning directly in me, accompanied each time by such a tacit, yet powerful, respect for me in his minutes. He could come in. He could assert away and I wasn't molested.

There were lots of women in the Western, and they liked Joe. He was buying them drinks and drinks. It sort of made me sad. Maybe I didn't like to see a man from zero goofing with a bunch of strange women, but I didn't really know why it made me so sad. It was best he didn't pay attention to me. Mikey and I dwaddled along with our cognacs, and I noticed I couldn't talk as easily with my childhood friend as I could this man just a few hours in my life. Joe had a party with the girls. Mikey was content to have Joe thus occupied. He seemed determined to show Joe's wife, Linda, and Joe was playing it just the way Mikey laid it.

After an hour or so of this, Joe came over to me. "Say, I gotta get away from these broads. They're darn boring. Mikey, get a bottle, would you? Let's go to his house." Fine by me. I should've been there hours ago, in his converted barn, up in the guest loft above the pool table and bar he'd put in, and couldn't wait to show off. I wasn't sure if Joe knew I'd been waiting for Mikey back in Nicasio, but I knew he was going to find out.

I'll be goh-hod-damned if Mikey didn't get us all set up in his barn/bar/guest house, and make his excuses for bed, shooting me this look like, "You need to get laid, 99, and Joe needs it too." I was too floored to protest enough I guess because in a blink I was alone with those rubber boots stuffed with all that masculinity. Argh. Now he started talking single. Kissing me, and I was falling into alchemical swirl over it but fast. Yipes! I pushed him away. You cut that out now. We're not having any of that. Not, not, not, not, not. Oh, why not? You'll like it. I can tell you you're gonna like it, a lot. He's kissing. I'm amazed. I hear the hum! I push him away ten more times. He's got me. I know it. I'm dead meat. This just can't be.

"STOP IT!!!" At the top of my major lungs, I yelled for my life.

"Why?"

"Why? You have to ask why? Because it'll hurt me. You're married. Making love is not small. I don't fuck! My heart is not a sport. Wake up, hear yourself. You sound like a bowling ball hitting the pins. Love is not small. You will take over my heartbeat, go home to your fiend, and I will never see you again. It will hurt me. I'm already killed. It will hurt me!"

Joe pulled away, slumped, said, "I never want to hurt you." The end of his sexual advances. Instead, he started telling me about his wife. Not a snow job. He just let it out.

He hadn't liked school much. It bored him, and he couldn't get interested in indoor jobs --> well, jobs not in barn doors, anyway. He moved to Hawaii in his twenties, and that's where he met Linda. She grew pot. He moved in with her, getting a job as a bartender to support her legally, but it had not been enough. So, he helped her with her crops. That's how he bought his fancy car. He never wanted marijuana, marriage or kids, but he really loved her back then.

"I kept telling her I'd never leave her, but I just would not get married. I was crazy about her. She was sweet, very sweet, all those years. Then Grampa died, and I had a chance to make legal money the way I loved. We came back here and I bought out my brother. It took me a while, but I did it. Tally's the hot shot, a District Attorney, could not give one shit less for the place --> just the cash. God. It was so hard! Now the bozo owes me two hundred grand. Tally owes me big; and sure I've got all this property worth millions, but my expenses take all my cash, and Linda's having another goddam baby. I have to sell the Porsche to pay the hospital bill."

He was sitting there, slumped, looking like his barn just burned down. I asked him how he ended up married when he'd been so strongly against it. He let out a low wail. "She tricked me. She stopped her pills. I shoulda got a vasectomy. I shoulda got a vasectomy. She turned into something else. It's sick! She lied. She got so righteous. She's mean."

[Heh... puttin' it mildly.]

"And now there's another one coming. What's wrong with me? I was scared to get an itty bitty cut in my dick, and hell, I shoulda had 'em cut the whole thing off. I don't have the money for this. Everybody sucks all my money out of me. I work myself stupid, never a day off, and soon there'll be another mouth, another life of needs. I don't have the money for this. I'm too selfish anyway. I want to have a life! I don't want to be a withered old slave like some of those jerks you saw in the bar tonight. I wanted to get so I could hire help. I do the whole thing myself, y'know. I'd like to be able to have some vacations, time to do other things. This isn't a world for kids. This is no world for kids. And I'm not a man to be a slave. I didn't want to get married because I hate what it does to lovers, and I was right. I was right, damn it. I was right. Look what it did to Linda."

He was crying a steady stream now. "Sure I love my daughter, but she just should not be here. I love her, but she shouldn't be here. And, what's she going to grow up to be like? Just like her mother, she's doomed. Linda's thick with all those old bitches in the grange, and my daughter has that for a role model. And the new one's going to be a girl too. Another doomed girl. A boy'd've been better --> to leave the ranch to."

I didn't tell him how many women I'd seen sugar 'em up, and then get down and dirty for the almighty security, sugar 'em up so well they can't even believe you're pulling any number of your other vicious tricks right under their noses. You wonder why men are so afraid of commitment, call them names. Yet you, or your sisters, keep right on fighting your war of deadly pretenses, and calling it love, like the name change is going to make it love. The way of this drill is that you give your whole consciousness over to pleasing him, then if you still don't have that ring, you stop the birth control without letting him know. Yup, this was pure calculation. Remember? I know: jungle urges are sleeping powder, you forgot the plots were plots even before your plotting plotted him right between the eyes. Get him to marry you! Strap him with kids! This is how it's done. Plots and sleeping powder and the set standards mix the party of your life. These delusion cocktails are called families. Get rings. Get kids. Cross your fingers. Watch what your getting begets. Many women are left in poverty by even rich men. Many of those women got there by their own designs. Is it love, all those steaming urges with that one-pointed sparkler on your event horizon? Are you feeling wronged because all that difficult plotting, and its ensuing entitlement, and its ensuing rage, did not sew up for you what cannot be sewn up, ever, by any means? Doesn't there come a point when even the dimmest-wit fellow feels only your plotting and entitlement and rage where he is just sure love should be? What pop truism works on this betrayal? It's not love. It is war. Just because it's called love doesn't make it so. Women can and do get chunks out of men from which neither ever recover.

And, hell. Maybe they're right to fight not to end up like me, but I'd die before I ever pulled that on a man. I am dying, and I wouldn't do it even to someone asking for it. I'm crazy or something. I want the love, not the horror we just call love. I was on Joe's side. Poor Joe. Right there next to me, impaled on his miserable future. I felt it from zero. I cried with him.

He wanted to know who, what, had me killed. I actually let it out, actually said the words, those poison, kill me, ripping words. This got him crying afresh. Damn it feels right to cry with a man. After a while we were talking easily in our tender time in the spirit crossing. We talked about everything there is. We were so much alike, came from such similar stock, thought so much the same things. Here were two people who put the love before the war since they were put on this planet. It came up on three in the morning very fast, too fast. "Don't you have cows to milk, a barn to muck, some dairying to dairy in a couple hours?"

"That can wait."

"You better go, anyway. I have to sleep. I have not gotten enough sleep in days." Try months.

I walked him out to his car. He kissed me, so sweetly, one last little time, and I went back in Mikey's barn. I heard the Porsche engine roar. And it kept roaring. Something like ten minutes went by and I still heard his car in the drive. I went back outside. He was crying --> foot on the pedal, in neutral.

"What's wrong now?"

"I can't leave. I just know if I drive out this driveway, I'll never see you again." He wouldn't leave, asked me to get in the car with him. Nothing doing.

"Here. Here. You can take the keys. Just, please, sit in here with me. Don't ask me how, but I love you. I never even dreamed I'd meet a woman like you, and I can't stand leaving you. Even if I have to, I can't." I believed him! All the signals were against it, except, of course, that big one with the gaping hole in it in my chest. It believed him. I knew he was telling the truth. Awful. Just awful. I suggested things might work out one day. He might not always be married to Linda. It did not look good for their marriage, and she had what she was after, with or without him. He knew Mikey would find me whenever, and for whatever, always. Still he could not make himself go. Kept saying he was afraid this was the last he'd ever see of me, and it set Ms. Doom And Gloom And Loss, here, looking at the halo of death as he spoke, seeing his tear-streaked face in the rictus of incurable heartbreak behind the wheel of his speeding Porsche in the split second before exploding into the trunk of a millennial redwood. Fuck! Drama queen. What a morbid preoccupation with death I have going here! Such a scorching, unrelenting, wish to die. Snap out of it. Grow up. Handle this.

I came up with a bright idea, a way keep the real between us. "Jobee Wingate, we've had such a long drunk night. We're both overwrought, not objective at all. Let's meet at the beach tomorrow, sober and daylight, say our proper good-byes, forever or for now, whatever. Whatever this is, there is no doubt we are good friends. Meet me at the beach. We'll walk. That way you can muck your barn, and know you will see me at least one more time. Okay?" Joe thought I was just trying to get rid of him, that I wouldn't show. Where did that come from? I swore to be there. He finally agreed. We agreed to meet at McClure's beach at one in the afternoon. I handed him back his keys, squeezed his beautiful hand, and then watched him drive away. The hum was knocking planets askew as he left.

* * * * * * *

At two in the afternoon, when he still hadn't shown up, I tearfully headed back down the point, reasoning that I'd see his car if he really hadn't stood me up, was just spectacularly late. I was hurt after all. All that scrambling against it, and it got me anyway. Maybe he did really only want to get laid. There are a thousand other reasons why he wouldn't've been able to show up, or call in time either. I told myself I'd been lucky. He'd had me. He'd had me good. I had only made it out by the skin of my teeth. I told myself it was better this way. So I did not make Mikey call him and find out what was up. Let it be.

* * * * * * *

Do they know what they do? Is it something they feel but can deny? Men frighten me with their ability to deny the very most intense feelings, realities. I'm always thinking they're big chickens, but it's got to have another dimension or so. Men can't honestly be that much less brave than women. How did he come up with the notion I wouldn't be there? Couldn't he feel the truth? Where did that come from? It never even crossed my mind. Is he so inured to all the lies, we only call "feelings", passing between him and the women in his life that he can't tell the real feelings? Though, I guess he does have a pretty good reason not to trust his own instincts. His track record sucks. Galaxies.

Do they know what they do? Did Joe ever have any clue what he was to me? Was it too strange? Maybe they can't know. Maybe you need to have felt the true level of physical strength of your lover --> men's hands alone are so much stronger than a woman's <-- need to know it inside you, inside with your guts, where you live or die, where he can make you live or die, to know what's more important than life and death. Maybe you can't know with no faith in heart knowledge, no experience with truth, wading always in what it's called, but never understanding the way your whole being answers the true, the man, the man not called "yours", the real one. Truth is lovers. If it's choice, or it's a decision, it's not lovers. Nope. Not at all --> that's just what we call it. You don't feel love. You can't do love. Love IS.

So soon he doesn't even have to be looking at you, touching you, thinking about you, and yet you're so alert to his dominion in your skin. Your brain tries to peg it. It cannot. If you're honest, you know all that's ever thought up, all you ever thought up yourself, subordinates, turns to smoke. You do not stop being viable --> please, can we just quit with that poppycock! You see what matters more than just you. You know it's true. You know it's not made you less. Hell, that idiocy's not even remotely in question. Give me a break. Let the real touch a snitty "victim" suing her boss over a dirty joke, and signing over the dismissal will take embarrassingly long. This truth, if we don't let self-ish-ness begin calling it stuff, wipes out all the less a woman could ever find herself to be. It's exactly the same with a man.

Nothing is fundamentally different. All that's changed is your delusion. Love's not a mystery, nor a deed, nor a type of occurrence, nor something you manipulate. It is. Irrefutably. It's always the same thing at its base. Lovers are. There is nothing one can do about it. And whether we know it or not, we know it. We only think denying it will turn it off.

This is the commitment. This can, and does, commit all the way to dead. This is what marriage vows are about. This is, in fact, the only time they can be taken, but people take them --> huh-oping. Guess what. If you can take them, you don't need to. This is why I'll never be with a man for any other reason than he is it. No amount of security, of any sort, can do the trick. No amount of difficulty will ever break the bond, the truth. It may even turn out that you will believe me before we're done here.

* * * * * * *

I'd tried to block it, herd it into something I could live with, and it got me anyway --> too busy fighting that fucker with my guts ripped out of my torso to take my own advice --> too hurt to do what I know is right. Joe's face kept up in me for months, years, confusing me, taking up another few hundred thousand miles of my no patience. I must learn. I never learn.

* * * * * * *

So what if I could see the truth! Not good enough! I needed so many years to swim through the lake of sleep the Buddhists call delusion. I needed to learn how to be it, to shed a whole life, and a whole world, of wrong, wrong, wrong. Everybody thinks it's right! It is wrong. The wrong was killing me. It was killing Joe. I want it all back to do over again. I learned. I won't make one excuse to get out of the work it takes to let truth be true. I won't budge a jot out of the true. Out of the true is not love: it's self. I learned.

The one who couldn't learn is dead.

And so is Joe. A couple weeks after we parted, he drove his Porsche at 115 mph into an ancient redwood.