by Don Bajema
Transforming in the dark, she is a dervish dancing and singing that she loves me, or what I was, or what I once imagined myself to be. Becoming a blur, whirling and pulling a bent steak knife, hissing, “Here. I’ll give you something to remember me by.”
TRIP THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
Don’t ask me how long this’ll take. I don’t have a fucking idea. If I did then I’d be done with it already because the reason it isn’t done is because it’s gonna be fucked and I can’t stand the idea of getting started, and then you know, having to go on and on and on with all the shit that goes with it. Anyway, I gotta wait here for a minute more, the fuck will be coming back to his car any second. Meanwhile, I gotta wait here and try to look inconspicuous. The car radio blaring, the light’s on and the key’s in the ignition. Is he asking me to just jump in and drive? I see his brown, shiny shoe stepping out the door, his expensive and tasteless slacks snap in the breeze. He isn’t even looking where he’s going. So I bump into him and he’s a solid fuck; he doesn’t budge. I say excuse me to throw him off, and he gives me a funny look and before he can tell me it’s alright, he sees the knife in my hand and he looks at me again. I nod and hold out my hand saying something to him that I can’t remember even though it just came out of my mouth. I’m scared, that’s why. And I hate to be scared. The guy is slow so I tell him to give me his money before I. . . . But I just did cut him, right down his arm and I’m now punching the blade under his ribs. He’s backing up and the look in his eyes tells me he’s another asshole who won’t go down. Fuck, I hate this. I hope he doesn’t die. I hate this.
FOR THE RECORD
The Lincoln Brigade were volunteers from the United States who fought in the Spanish Civil War against the fascist forces led by General Francisco Franco just prior to World War II. Picasso’s piece “Guernica” condemns the first use of air warfare on civilian populations by Hitler’s Luftwaffe in that same war.
The Spanish Civil War was a slaughter in which another chip of mankind’s collective soul was lost. A war where Germany tested its twentieth-century weapons on cities without air raid sirens, without any means of defense, with nothing but an innocence that was left burning in rubble. The world stood back in horror, pounding pedestals, screaming protests in newspaper headlines, and waiting to see how far the Third Reich was willing to go. In the most real sense the first battles against Hitler’s extermination camps were fought by men like my friend Bill Bailey. Communists, labor organizers, and blue-collar heroes from New York’s docks who were used to standing up immediately when they faced heartlessness and violence rained on innocent women and children. They formed a brigade without adequate ammunition and weapons, far outnumbered, fought in a country where they did not speak the language, understand the culture, or know the terrain. They fought and they lost.
Bill Bailey is respected for his participation in that war, and in later years for his courage on the stand during the McCarthy era of political repression in the 1950s. By the time I met him he was in his seventies. His hands were the size of baseball gloves. He was tall and stooped slightly with age, his face craggy and his eyes looking sad as though he could see right through you and what he saw made him isolated, distant, alone. His manner was warm, grandfatherly. He seemed to be always on the verge of saying good-bye.
On a December in the 1980s, Bill and I sat on a bench overlooking the slate-gray San Francisco Bay. The morning overcast and cold, container ships plowing under the Golden Gate, seagulls suspended in updrafts, rush hour traffic stopped, a bakery smelling sweet to the point of nausea. The Contragate scandal was threatening to explode; we were talking about Ollie North, his connections to Reagan. I was hoping the administration would fall. But Bill shook his head saying that the government would never let an assassination be followed by a resignation be followed by impeachment inside of twenty years.
“The instability would bring the entire government down.”
I was younger then. I thought at the time that a corrupt government’s fall would be worth the instability. Expose the whole thing. Embrace Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Bill’s look stopped my end-to-end sentences.
“Anarchy would be a ugly thing. It’s always comes down to people. Not the people governing, but the people being governed. Right now they’re too comfortable. They’d never handle it. It’s easier for most of us to be exploited than it is for us to look out for each other.”
I adjusted, agreeing with him. I raised the question about the CIA killing, torturing, and repressing people in our name. Bill looked out at the container ship heading for Oakland. Beneath his face I could see something hurting. He swallowed. He stood and we started walking.
I told him I thought the war raging between Iran and Iraq was the result of the United States’ efforts to destablize the area and keep oil prices down.
During Christmas a battle had killed thousands of kids pitted against each other by both sides. There was no sign of surrender, just climbing casualty lists. Riverbanks piled with the bodies of wave after wave of suicide charges. Their God had assured them a spot in heaven if they’d die today. I didn’t realize who I was talking to, or what it was I was evoking in his memory. I didn’t care. I had theories, I needed facts. I wanted someone to make sense of it for me. Bill nodded his head with my breathless tirade.
Ten minutes later I was still at it, telling him in Honduras, American troops were poised and ready for invasion into Panama. Death squads yanked families apart, people disappeared. Central America was a war zone fought without lines, without explanation, without the slightest compassion.
I went on. The nature of fascism. The fact of it in our own governmental policies. Bill was engaged in part of the conversation when we recalled President Eisenhower’s farewell to the nation in 1960, when the President admitted the existence of and warned us about the dangers of what he called “the Military Industrial Complex.” I went on to the television media discovering its power in the election of that year — Kennedy defeating Nixon by virtue of his onscreen charisma. How the country became brainwashed, and economics tied directly to the Pentagon had set the foundation for what was now our fascist state. He tried to tell me all these issues had a validity, that in his mind the facts supported my anger. But something kept coming through — his emphasis was on the spirit. I thought at the time it was the result of his age and his proximity to the end of his life. That somehow the years had run the urgency out of him. That he was trying to make peace with something.
“We can identify all of these things with our minds. But what it comes down to is what we feel in our hearts . . .”
His old hand covered his chest like a child saluting the flag.
“. . . how we treat each other, what we will stand for and what we won’t. But people are mistrustful of what they feel these days, so we’re sorta lost.”
But I knew despite all of my information, what he was saying was lost. We walked on and I wondered how a person could say so much with so few words. I wanted everything I could learn from him; I was in such a hurry.
I asked him about his involvement in the war in Spain. What motivated him to risk his life for a losing cause.
“What da ya mean? Ya mean at the beginning? Ah, it was a lot of things. But I remember seeing a newsreel of a Nazi beating an old woman, and I thought, she could be my mudda.”
Simple as that. Left his girl, left his job, sailed across the Atlantic, fought with strangers against strangers because a thug was filmed beating an old woman.
On our return from our walk along the bay, we stopped again at the bench we had been sitting on. I tried to explain what I thought, what I felt in my heart. I got nowhere. The words were inadequate. Bill’s gigantic face creased into a smile, his huge hand covered my shoulder and shook me gently.
“Don’t despair, don’t despair.”
Don’t despair? I could almost hear him from half a cen
tury past telling his overrun comrades, “Don’t despair.”
1993
Just read what the commanding officer of the United States contingent of the forces in Somalia said explaining the actions of the “Peace Keeping Mission.” He admitted they killed over one hundred civilians, mostly women and children, shooting them with 50mm cannons from helicopters. Said they were combatants. Women and children. Our enemies are women and children. Should I despair yet? Guess I’ll call Bill.
1995
When I leave, the warm bed creaks. Carmen usually sleeps late, having worked until one or two and needing another couple hours to finally settle down to sleep. She breathes where am I going? I tell her, “Coffee and the paper.”
This winter it’s usually raining when I make my way out to 16th Street. The car’s morning headlights wink over the Mission District’s streets. The slanting shower splashing sidewalks, windows, awnings, umbrellas. The asphalt is slick, black and hissing with passing cars’ tires.
I get the paper with the same bad news from the same girl behind the counter, get the same smile, exchange an extra sentence between us trying to make the transaction human, and then I cross the street. The dealers stare and lope around the corner like dogs. Skinny, scabby junkies bum change and crack wise with each other. Someone is always raving. The cops fly past to tape off the latest crime scene. Ambulances converge on some fixed point in the near distance.
They make a double espresso and drop it in a cup of coffee when they see me come in the door. There’s a seat at a window table, I settle in. As I read, the coffee grows acidic as I grasp, again, the meaning of what I am reading. All these killings, technological advances, and hype for sports and entertainment. All these personalities we are supposed to care about, the latest disaster, the coming ecological disaster. The insinuations that some countries are doomed and some aren’t, the reduction of health, education and welfare. Kids killing kids makes the news, but not unless they are under eleven. Everybody pointing their fingers at everybody. Everything selling out from sea to shining sea. Movies extolling the same stupid macho garbage. Music incorporated to the point of a bad joke. Art unfunded. The mass worship of the consensus opinion. The empire in a tailspin.
An older gentleman is a fixture at the coffee shop. He looks like a Southern general. White goatee. Hair around his collar. Tall, weathered from years of sun and windburn in Minnesota. He’s a translator. Worked for Army Intelligence during the early Cold War years in Germany during the occupation. He writes on a thick pad for hours, occasionally taking a smoke on the sidewalk.
We’ve become friends. One morning he walked to my table and identified the absurdity I was reading, which the newspaper passed off as governmental policy, as I laughed to myself. We commented to each other regarding the harshness of contemporary society, hard chic defined as the style of psychic self-defense adopted by many of the young people within the city. We wonder at what is happening to us. We dodge the topic of our fear. We omit our complicity in our community’s distancing of each of us from the other. We tackle easier problems — racism, sexism, the problems of the generations’ misunderstanding of the view of the other, the advancement of biotechnology and the potential for disaster within its runaway acceptance and rush for product. This brave new world. This new world order. The conglomerates, the war industry. We wonder what we will tolerate from our military, what we will tolerate from the government, the Republican agenda, the Christian Right’s takeover of education, the privatization of prisons and what that could mean. And we try to find our place in it. And we fail. Which is what it really comes down to. Our failure.
His father was a union activist on the railroads of the Minnesota-Canadian border. He and his father had fallen out when he was young. Never really regained the closeness they needed. Almost made it, almost understood his relationship to his father, but his father died. The rest of the family froze him out. More respectable people I guess. More in line I guess. Playing it safer I guess. Christians I guess. Good Christians I guess. We were getting nowhere, so I mentioned Bill Bailey. Of course he knows who he is. Heard his name many times. Saw the television special on him. Read his book, Kid From Hoboken, even. Never met him. Would like to someday. His goatee spreading over his face.
I did the normal routine the day I had to catch the plane to Florida to read from this book and be the guest of several literature and writing classes at a small university there. Thirty thousand feet over Arizona, I was reading the paper and chuckling to myself. I turned for some reason to the obituaries and there was William Bailey. A long piece revealing the modesty of the man. It was there in three long columns. He had done more, said more, seen more, and put more at stake than those of us who met him later in his life would have dreamed. He had claimed to have been in the rear for most of those losing battles in Spain, when it appeared he was never out of the action. He had admitted taking part in a demonstration in which the Nazi swastika was ripped from the flagpole and dropped into the New York harbor while the Bremen’s crew and a handful of protesters fought on the deck. He hadn’t said it was he who had cut it off and thrown it into the water below. Or that he had been the one his friends selected to be at the center of the flying wedge they formed to clear the way to the ship’s stern. That it was he who they knew, amidships or thereabouts, would be on his own to fight his way alone to the flag, signaling the refusal of the longshoremen to offload the Bremen’s cargo in the harbor to protest the new Third Reich’s persecution of Jews.
We all want to meet a giant, don’t we? We all want to shake hands with a hero. We mark part of our lives by the day we met someone known to be brave, human, foolish, principled, and enduring. Especially enduring. We want those people to endure for us, to be here, to never leave our side. To endure for us. To not leave us to despair in our own small lives, our own lack of what it is to be fully human. The great heroes are compassionate. Above everything, they are compassionate.
I got back from Florida. I whispered, “Coffee and the paper,” to Carmen. I crossed another rainy street, bought a paper. Found a chair, drank my coffee and the older gentleman crossed the coffee shop floor to my table, bowed slowly from the waist, placed Bill’s obituary before me, turned and walked away.
suit of lights
The bull’s stride explodes, spewing chunks off the arena floor. The sand shakes beneath your feet in rhythmic power. He squints you into focus beneath ten-inch horns.
You only have five seconds — three to find the position, two to plant the feet. The beast blasts past, leaving salt, piss, snot and blood over your face. Your rivals hope for the worst.
She waits at home, to give you what you need to stay alive.
acknowledgments
There isn’t enough paper to name everyone I should acknowledge. Elaine Katzenberger, my editor and publisher at City Lights, for playing a hunch on a book and guiding its writer. Stacey Lewis, also at City Lights, for her invaluable advice. Elizabeth Bell for her sharp eye and easy ways, Yolanda Montijo for her beautiful book cover. And everyone else at City Lights who helped make this book happen.
Henry Rollins —Thanks. Dawn Holliday, Queenie Taylor and Bill Graham, the first to permit me space to work. The classes I taught and read to: “Find a good spot. . . .” Michael Green, James Gammon, Sandy Ignon, Steve Whittaker, Robert Englund, Christopher Buchinsky and Fox Harris for starting me on this path. Jane Handel for more than words can describe. Val Hendrickson and Lorraine Olsen for inspiration. Lydia Lunch for insisting I write. Jim Carroll, Hubert Selby, Jr., Bob Fitzgerald for great company on the road. Dan Fawks for being who he is and always was. The whole Fawks family, god bless them. The Bad Girl from Texas. All those incredible writers and performers I’ve read and seen who generated that voice inside that said, “I’ll never be the same.” And Carmen Garcia — the premonition in “Navajo” and my inspiration ever since.
Don Bajema, Winged Shoes and a Shield