Moving Day 2

     I wasn't five miles past Fernley when I heard the thump thump thump of a flat tire.  I guided the Subaru to the shoulder and headed back to check the damage.  It hadn't sounded good.  Sure enough, the back tire on the passenger side was shredded.  I'd ignored all the extra insurance offers Alamo had tried to give me, but I didn't want to dwell on the negative.  I was outside of Reno, and that was all that mattered.  I opened up the hatch at the back of the station wagon, put the boxes containing my kitchen supplies and my video game collection to the side, and looked into the compartment that, with and luck, contained a spare.  It did, thankfully--a nice new Goodyear, ready to go--but it sat there by itself, sans jack or tire iron.  I gave the gravel on the side of the road a kick, but it was half-hearted.  As bad as my luck had been as of late, I wasn't that surprised.  I decided to take a glass half full attitude.  Up ahead was a lengthy stretch of desert, with salt flats, a prison, and lots of "no hitchhiking" signs.  At least I was within walking distance of a town.

      I loaded my things back into the rental and considered my options.  I still had one friend left in Reno, but Jeff rarely woke before noon, and even if by some chance he answered his phone, then what?  I was trying to make a clean break, and waiting for help from back in Reno didn't really seem to fit that narrative.  I could call a cab, but the money I'd borrowed for moving wasn't going to last long at that rate.  As it is, I knew a jack wouldn't be cheap.  I'd grabbed one for Sharon at Auto Zone shortly before the "incident," and it ran me nearly fifty bucks.  Maybe there was something cheaper at the the automotive department of Wal-Mart, but if that was the case I could always taxi back.  I decided walking was the best bet.  After grabbing my iPod and bottle of warm soda from the passenger seat, I crossed to the other side of I-80 and began the long walk back.

    I'd been walking fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, when I was shaken out of the haze inspired by Jimi's guitar by the sound of a horn.  I hadn't even bothered to stick my thumb out while I walked--it was mild and I always felt self-conscious hitchhiking--but there was still a large truck rumbling to a stop ahead of me.  I walked a bit faster, wishing for a pretty girl in the driver's seat, but this wasn't Tuscon and the truck wasn't a Ford.  A large man with an NRA hat and overly large sunglasses peered out at me as I approached.  I was ten feet away when I was hit simultaneously with the sounds of Hank Williams and the smell of marijuana smoke.  He wave some of the smoke out from in front of his face with a meaty hand and gestured me closer.

      "That your car back yonder?  With the flat?"  He said it "yonda," and I wondered if he was actually from the south or if it was just an affectation.  He certainly looked like Nevada, with skin tanned nearly to boot leather and callouses on his callouses.

     "Sure is.  You got a jack, maybe?"  I'd been around him less than a minute and already my grammar was slipping.

     "Not with me, sadly.  I've got one back at my trailer, though.  Hop in."  So I did.

     A couple minutes later we were back in Fernley proper.  The man--Donald, he'd told me between songs--pulled into Jake's Gas, still going nearly forty miles an hour as we looked for a parking spot.  I could feel my Mt. Dew bubbling up towards my esophagus, but I didn't bother saying anything.  He was doing me a favor, after all.  He took a spot right up against the side of the building, and I had to grab onto my seat to keep my face from slamming into the dash as we came to a stop.  "Hang on.  Gotta drain the lizard."  He slid out of the truck and the shocks sighed with relief.  I just waited.  He'd been gone five minutes or so when I got bored and began poking around in his truck.  There was a gun--a big one, at that--in the dashboard, but that didn't bother me.  There was also (amid his registration and other things you'd expect to find) a partial pack of cigarettes and a dented, dirty can of Bag Balm.  I was about to poke around under the seat when Donald came shuffling out the front of the store, three bulging plastic bags in his arms.  I quickly closed the dash and went back to staring at the other people in the parking lot.  Donald climbed back into the truck, and dropped two of the three bags at my feet.  The third contained various foodstuffs, and he rummaged around until he found a liter of Mt. Dew and handed it to me.  "Thanks," I said, but he wasn't finished.  He'd also bought me a cold cut sandwich and some chips.  He'd gotten hot dogs, three of them.  They were the big ones, and he'd piled them high with onions, jalapenos, and artificial cheese sauce.  He'd turned the key, so that Hank could return to his lamentations, but rather than drive to his trailer Donald began to eat.  This disturbed my stomach more than his driving--he took each hot dog up at an angle and sucked them into his throat, using his teeth to tear the bun but then letting gravity and a wet gasping sound pull bread and condiment alike into his reddening face--but again, I was in his debt.  An attractive woman of about forty was washing her windshield , her skirt exposing more and more leg as she stretched to get to the top of her SUV's windows.  A couple of kids ate ice cream on the sidewalk, their "Home of the Vaqueros" shirts letting me know they were locals. I even watched an elderly man purchase the Reno Gazette-Journal, his gnarled hands struggling with each nickel, just to keep from having to look at Donald.  I hadn't had breakfast that morning, and I was looking forward to eating the sandwich he'd bought me, but it was going to have to wait after hearing the way the cheese and mustard made percolating noises as they cleared the way for the processed franks.

     When we began driving again, it was down Newland Drive, past the eyesore that was Amazon.  Even situated as it was, sitting next door to a Wal-Mart, the warehouse was painful to look at.  At least it was a source of quite a few jobs, though miserable ones from all accounts.  Donald went a bit further, then careened into an RV park.  His long silver trailer with a permanent wooden porch ensconcing it looked out of place next to all the shiny motor homes surrounding it.  I guessed Donald had been here for more than a few years, while most everyone else was a retiree, a seasonal worker, or both.  "Let me go stick Blackie in the bedroom and then you can come inside while I look for that jack," Donald said, and started walking without waiting for a response.  I'd have rather waited in his truck the whole time, with him being so big and his trailer so small, but I didn't want to be rude.  He opened up the door and Blackie poked his head out, a snarling head full of teeth.  I'm a firm believer that dogs have the capacity for good or evil no matter what their breed, but the Rottweiler that lunged for daylight didn't seem kind in the slightest.  It looked like it would take Donald a minute to get the dog under control, so I ate my sandwich.  It wasn't bad for gas station food. He'd just tossed his hot dog wrappers behind the seat, so I assumed it would be fine to do the same.  I stuck my hand behind me and my knuckles smacked against something hard and cold.  I looked behind the seat.  It was a jack.  I almost yelled out "It was in here all along," but something stopped me.  Donald had been nothing but kind, but I had an uneasy feeling.  I rustled through the trash behind the seat.  I was about to discount my wariness as a symptom of too many bad slasher movies on basic cable, but then my fingers hooked something soft amid all the food debris.  A wallet.  I picked it up and looked inside.  Jeff Benton glared at me from his Oregon driver's license.  There could have been a rational explanation, of course.  Jeff might have been a co-worker, or someone Donald drank with.  But it felt wrong.  I looked down at my feet.  Donald's other shopping bags contained a new pair of gloves, duct tape, some rope.  "Well isn't this interesting," I asked nobody in particular.  I got out of the pick-up and started walking towards the Wal-Mart.    

Walk in September

Outside is the day and words have power inside of my house. The evil of the word and work of the darkness, cannot encapsulate the light.  I am afraid of evil, while living in the blessings of that that is good. We all have choices to be evil or to follow after good.

 Just walking along the railroad track with my two year old boy. Pine blown air and words made of “Joy.” Joy has more meanings then one, and my child teaches me about pine cones that he steps on counting from “two” to nine, our time on this earth is numbered limited, blind.  I pick him up, piggybacking to be blinded at once by sunlight over the Clearwater River. This is to be driven ether into insanity or out of it by sunlit diamonds. Billions of diamonds on this September day, waiting for fall colors in sleeping summer trees.  Fall into me my son, before you fall, running as you are fast on uneven railroad tracks with toddler joy happy to step on to pine cones. I feel joy and death –both –joined –alone. The opposites of sin and righteousness; and of course the river had something to say to me when my little boy and I sat on the edge of the rock looking out into hard water swift, already into the Pacific within its mind, fast, cold swift.

 Death right before my child and myself if we fall. Icy swift water leaves nothing of sunshine memory when it the Dworshak dam chained North fork it is unchanged from a dam bottom spillway to reconnect once more with sunlight. My arms around my son, holding him tight. Keeping him from harm. Not to surrender to the void makes a strange calm. But the knowledge of what is before us makes a tree of the fruit of knowledge evil song fear that I sung away with a listening ear to Righteousness. I don’t know righteousness, but I know it when I hear it. The spirit of God himself spoke to me though the death diamond water, and said “choose ye this day, whom ye shall serve.” 

Ghost Dance Shirt Was My Raincoat

I believe that I could like myself in October if only I could play a silver dagger fiddle. I don’t have nothing to do today but to cut wood on a Monday? And without saw gas I’m treading hours. Gray day this day outside has me gray. I don’t know what to say except that I want my saddle out of the barn and dusted off and placed on the back of a spotted horse that knows the bottom of this canyon.  I’m in a canyon. Drivin by myself into a black rock place of basalt battlefields. I blow my trumpet to, - Death? and only laugh when his army prances onto the soggy rain bitterbrush field. 

Grim Reaper blues. I don’t mind so much but I never used my blue sky day to learn to play my fiddle, that scroll necked fiddle that still looks up at me with expectation  and dread that I will never coax

he song within it that It wants to write with me. I don’t see, but blackly I agree that I’m just imagining the fiddles release from silence. Rather that Lord Jim fiddle only knows that it will picked up by a player and sung to after I’m gone, with or without MY song.  I didn’t see nothin’, but The Snake River is black where It aint blue and salmon die with spawning done and nothing left to do, but let me be a Steelhead on a second round to the sea, with the essence of life I agree, let my seed and song and memory be white hot without winter, until the dead flowers bloom and the sky for all intents and purpose becomes a corral for eternity. My skies are fenced just like the earth and like a long drive cowpuncher of the golden aspen days, let fences disappear like the buffalo did and let the buffalo come back in their place. I put on a Ghost shirt against the rain of this day, and Deaths regiment, and dance in a circle the long and scenic route back to my pickup truck. My hands want to be capable of work and not just wasted time. My mind, a stranger ever since it left my heart, reaches for a flint arrow, and missing that takes up a Bible and opens it to a verse of round rebuke. I sing this like the Crows did at Little Big Horn to the riders of death who watch me and sit slumped and stupid silent upon, their night horses, and are leading-333- what’s that- a spotted horse for me to ride? Hell I just meant to Montana from Hells canyon , or maybe Nevada, just cuz its bin awhile, but how do I know that those riders aint headin for a peaceful valley of smoking lodges and buffalo meat hanging from a rack with the laughter of all my friends guarding it? My spine tells me that I better fight, and I aim my Bible like a drunk with an empty bottle instead of strait like a gabardine gunfighter, and then I spit. He and his cronies are just ridin’ by today, leaving my with the gray sky day, and the black river that’s only a state line Oregon solution in a black coffee way. Maybe I ought to quit wasting time. 

Thoughts on the Evil Dead remake:

Don't click play unless you like it gory. 

I'm torn when it comes to re-makes, reboots, sequels, prequels, "side"quels and spin-offs.  True, most of these movies are shameless cash grabs that don't even take quality into account.  In Hollywood it has become truth that if a movie makes X amount of dollars, a sequel is pretty much guaranteed.  Since films cost so much to make, studios really like working with a known property.  It still won't guarantee box office success, but at least they can head into a project knowing that there is an audience for it.  Of all the above options, sequels are perhaps the least distasteful--plenty of bad sequels are made, to be sure, but if you like movie #1, there is at least some chance future installments have something to offer you.  Reboots seem the worst.  If you aren't familiar with the fairly new term, a reboot is a remake, but a remake of a film that exists within recent memory.  It happens often with foreign movies, as a good concept is white-washed with familiar, English-speaking faces, but has begun creeping into our own films.  "Spiderman 3" fail to meet expectations?  Start over with a younger Spidey.  Christopher Nolan finished with "Batman?"  That's fine, Batman begins, again. Along with the recent trend of stretching novels into two or even three film epics, it screams "give me your money, talking meat-vessels."  

So right in the middle you have your traditional remakes.  Are they, at least, justified?  Certainly, you can make a case that the older the film the more forgivable it is to remake it.  While I am fine with the argument that a well-rounded and critical movie watcher should take the time to seek out films in black and white or with subtitles, it falls short in two regards.  First, not all of these movies are readily available.  Secondly, the bulk of the film-going audience doesn't meet those criteria.  

On the other end of the camera, who is to say that a director shouldn't get to explore somebody else's world.  To step away from film, Gregory Macguire's take on Oz ("Wicked" and its sequels) is vastly different than Baum's original vision.  Just because he began with a setting and some characters that he changed drastically, does that make him unoriginal?  Most remakes aren't shot-for-shot, and I think the conversation surrounding a remake's worth has to start with the director.  Does he/she have anything new to say?  

Even if we agree that some remakes have merit, though, it becomes a bit dicier when the film is held up as a classic.  While I enjoyed both movies quite a bit, the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" remake was held to a different standard than the remake of "The Hills Have Eyes."  A director attempting to remake "Lady Hawke" would receive less pressure than somebody trying to re-do "Back to the Future."  

What all this boils down to is that they are remaking "Evil Dead."  While it doesn't have anywhere near the stature of Michael J. Fox's time travel fantasy, it is certainly a horror classic.  When I heard that they were going to make a new one, I recoiled.  I'm not even one of the biggest "Evil Dead" disciples (Having started with "Army of Darkness" and working backwards,) but even I knew that was sacrilege.  Even when the original director agreed to produce the remake it wasn't on my list of interesting films.  Even when the star of the original films gave this movie his stamp of approval, I didn't really care.  When the early response to the trailer came back from Comic-Con (or some-such other con, who even can keep track these days) I was still hesitant.  

Today that trailer became widely available.  As I sat in front of my computer waiting for Youtube to load, I was still ambivalent and leaning towards disinterested.  A minute and twenty seconds later?  I CAN'T WAIT.  "Evil Dead" has one advantage that other horror films from that era didn't, I guess.  It was funny, and intentionally so.  So when the directors chose to go headfirst into horror horror, real, R-rated, brutal horror,l it quickly became apparent that while the particulars--teens, woods, cabin, Necronomicon--were the same, they had something new to say.  Definitely going to be keeping an eye on this one.      

Moving Day 1

There is nothing left for me here.  I typed the words and stared at them.  They could have just as easily been the opening statement of a suicide note.  Maybe they would have been, if I was a slightly different me.  Truth was, at that moment I already felt dead enough.  My girlfriend--I was all set to promote her to fiancee', but it turned out she had other plans.  Intentionally or accidentally, perhaps some vague subliminal merging of the two, it doesn't really matter; either way I ended up with a text message that showed her doing things she had always claimed were too kinky with a man she always said was too arrogant for respect.  My boss.  Somewhere between eight and ten drinks later I walked in the rain to the restaurant where I worked and challenged him to a fight in the middle of dinner service.  The theme from "Rocky" was blaring in my head, and I had spent most of my walk envisioning some sort of triumphant revenge.  Hell, even if I'd won I would have probably regretted it.  It's hypothetical, though, because I didn't win.  I got my ass handed to me.  I'm not typically the sort of person to give in to emotion in that way, and if I'd approached my betrayal from my standard rational perspective, one glaring fact would have stood out.  I'm a terrible fighter.  In the fourth grade I got my lunch money stolen by second graders, and in the fifteen years since not a whole lot had changed.  I should have gotten my revenge by icing his front step in the winter, or pissing in his convertible.  Not through physical aggression.  I was already soundly beaten when a waiter ran up and held my hands behind my back.  He told the cops he was just trying to break things up, and none of the witnesses contradicted him, although typically when you are trying to break up a fight you grab the person standing and not the one who has fallen to his knees.  It was while in the midst of being grappled that my boss kicked me in the face with a steel-toed boot.  My jaw would be wired shut for most of the next month.

So what was the total damage of my one bad night?  Newly single, after putting a two-hundred dollar down payment on a ring.  Unemployed and very ineligible for unemployment benefits.  Charged with public intoxication and assault.  Nearly six grand in medical bills.  These are the big things that happened, of course.  There was still the fallout to deal with.  Reno may be the biggest little city, but it seems more little than big when you aren't a tourist, and especially in the digital age word of my humiliation traveled quickly.  Sharon and I had been dating four years, enough time that just about all of our friends were mutual. A few diplomatic souls still invited both of us to parties, or neither, but mostly they called her.  She was the pretty one, the funny one, the one that lit up a room.  I was the one who could tell you that the guy from "Scrubs" got his start in a Woody Allen movie, that "Psycho" was the first film to show a flushing toilet, and that Bruce Springsteen wrote "Blinded by the Light."  So my social life ended.  My professional one as well.  The incident at the steakhouse had pretty much turned my resume to shit.  I sat at home and watched cable until the cable was cut.  One mistake. One bad day.  Now all of my belongings--well, all of those that would fit--were piled into a rental car.  I'd seen on the news a week before that one of my high school classmates was going to represent the country in the winter Olympics.  I was headed back to Boise to live with my parents.  I looked back down at my phone, my hand shaky as I finished the message.  I guess I have you to thank for that.  Go fuck yourself.  It was immature and I knew it, but it didn't matter.  My thumb hovered over the send button.  If had really typed out the text because I felt the need to hurl an insult, that would have been one thing, but as I fought back tears in the parking lot outside of what had been our apartment together I knew--and knew that she would know--they were just camouflage.  What I was trying to say was I'm leaving, ask me to stay, or wish me well, or just FUCKING think about me at all, ok, bye, and I didn't want to say those things.  I hit the end key and put my phone in my pocket.  Going home to live with the folks.  Yeah, great.  It's not one of those things that's very good for the ego, but at least it was forward momentum, and that's more than I could have said about the last couple of months.  I got into the car and headed north.