the habit of being

I’ve seen the Alamo, and hopefully will remember it, as well as San Antonio’s pretty riverwalk and the old man who told us we should stay under an oak tree “like an umbrella” with two car seats under it.

We caught a ride from DeSoto with an instrumental rock group called Stinking Lizaveta - two brothers, Yanni and Alexi, on bass and guitar, along with Cheshire, a female drummer, and Debbie, the considerably younger frowning roadie. What we got of their story was that they’re been together seven years and produced three CDs, and were currently on tour, having played 20 shows with 8 to go. With the possible exception of Yanni, whom I didn’t get a very good look at, they were all heavily tattooed. Cheshire had one arm reading “I am fine” and the other reading “I am time.” Debbie was the most decorated, with an artistically rendered metamorphosis of tadpole to frog on one arm, and insects and a large bird on the other. Her face seemed mad, and I never talked to her.

The band proper spent quite a while debating how our species is and the existence of a human “pre-fire” age. Not out usual fare from those giving us a lift. There were many books with them, most about current affairs and political criticism. Also, the mammoth “People’s History of the United States” and a few titles by Joseph Campbell. Debbie was actually reading something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which made me curious how she had met up with and begun traveling with the others. Somehow I got the impression that her family wasn’t pleased, but I never had the guts to ask her. She seemed to want to be left alone, at least by J and me.

There were also two “Philly mutts” aboard, as pit-bull mixes of the city are called, making it, along with all their gear and ours, quite the packed van. The lighter colored dog, Davis, spend much of his time drooling in my lap, while the other, Shu-Shu, wallowed all over J.

At one point, we were stopped by a cop. Apparently Alexi was going too slow. At first Alexi was rather argumentative, but by the end of the encounter Yanni nearly sold the cop a CD.

When we got to the club (Sin 13) where they were playing that night, the band offered is spots on the guest list. Unfortunately, by the time they got onstage, we were already fast asleep in our nearby San Antonio River jungle-ish campsite. We never got to see them perform.

The next morning, we headed downtown, where we saw the Alamo and ate as cheaply as we could at McDonalds. It was extremely hot out, and I felt very dizzy, but we eventually made it out to I-10. The last stretch of our walk, with the sun nearly down, was quite nice, and there was even a cool breeze. We came to a library, where we got online for a little while, and then slept in a field of wildflowers. J spoke of the wrongness of his having sex with me, when he no longer saw a future for us, or at least not a happily ever after. I fell asleep sad, envisioning a time when even my body would be utterly rejected, and woke up with an awful pain in my foot. A blisted had gone crazy somehow, and half my foot throbbed bitterly.

Morning came with decreased foot pain, hoards of rolly-pollies, and, oddly enough, sex, which was most likely viewed by passengers in many a car driving down the freeway. It was good, as sex always is lately, from my perspective at least. J commented last night that the sex was sad, as he was sad. I understand that, but that is not all of it. I still think of love myself, and an element of desperate agony is there, a yearning sort of sadness. Yearning translates well into sex, and of all the things we ever had, only the fucking is better now then it was then, when we were more pure. Physically speaking, I do enjoy it more, if only because it is the last thing that holds us together, unhealthy as that may be.

We woke up this morning in a colony of rollie-pollies. They were all over everything; it was creepily amusing. We slept in a densely wooded area next to a Big K-Mart (where we got water, bread, Pringles).

We�re finally out of the rain and cold of Oklahoma City, where we got much free Wendy�s food and took a shower in a truck stop and slept out in the storm wrapped only in our tarp. J fell asleep and got quite soaked; I stayed dry and didn�t sleep a wink. This was the tail end of a storm that flooded a town near Austin, among other damage. The next day it rained as well, and we were as cold as we�d ever been, standing out in the chill and the drizzle and wind trying to hail a ride to San Antonio, huddling in the less-wet of our two blankets. Near frozen, we resorted to calling the bus station, only to find out that it would be $75.

The day before, a young woman named Kristie had stopped in the road and offered us a place to sleep for the night in case we were unable to find a ride. We never took her up on it, due to my reluctance to use the telephone and J�s subsequent annoyance, which led to two horrible moods and the night out in the rain, which ended at 5 AM when we took refuge in a truckstop restaurant called the Iron Skillet. The warmth was well worth the price of the greasy food.

I called Kristie the next night, exhausted despite the numerous �complimentary� cups of French vanilla cappuchino and completely unwilling, after the bone-chilling sign-holding experience earlier that day, to sleep outdoors in the downpour. It was either Kristie or spending all our money on a hotel room, so I worked up the nerve to call, and she was glad to make good on her offer from the day before.

K showed up at the Pilot truckstop on the intersection of MLK and Reno, with her prim mother and meticulousl groomed miniature schnauzer in tow. Along with Kristie�s stories of Africa and China and the Peace Corps, we received warm taco stew and couches from the mother and a full demonstration of Bridgette (the dog)�s tricks. Kristie had just returned from a four-month stay in China, and mended my poor ripped jeans with a purple patch of Chinese silk while I enjoyed her mother�s shower massager and shaved my legs for the first time in a month. She gave us multigrain bars and industrial-strength trash bags for waterproofing and much appreciated books, including War and Peace.

I checked me email, to find a 14k treatise from my mother, only a couple days old. She apparently thinks J is holding me hostage, based on some experiences with my father. My grandmother is doing well at all. She doesn�t want to lose us both at once. Everything is incredibly incredible, and I fear for her sanity. She is trying her hardest not to be angry with me. I don�t think there is anything I can do for her, short of returning home. She begs me to call, but I can�t. I wonder if I shouldn�t email her to tell her how far off her assessment of my situation with J is, but I fear the truth would only scare her more. She can think him sick and manipulative much easier than she can think the same of me. It�s all impossible.

J and I talked about it in Dallas, where we waited for Aaron, the talkative trucker who drove us from Norman, where we were dropped off by Kristie, to take us the rest of the way to DeSoto, where we now sit in a McDonald�s, covered in bug bites.

We got a ride with a Vietnam vet who didn’t seem older than thirty, though his youngest children (twins) are 27 - Steven, called “Mosquito,” who only dates white women because black women have “too much attitude.” His father was the first black mayor on the East coast and his sister, a doctor, is profiled in a book called Women Leaders in Public Health.

We visited the largest cross in the Western Hemisphere. Or maybe second largest, because another one was more recently erected in Illinois. The site also featured a series of statues depicting Christ’s crucifixion, a replica of the Shroud of Turin, and a memorial “Tomb of the Unborn” dedicated to all the “innocent victims of abortion.” (One week until my next period. In his journal, he called me a weight without substance, and said he’d never raise a child with me. I hope I’m not pregnant. I don’t feel pregnant. What does being pregnant feel like? Nothing, until you get nauseated after a couple months, probably. Think of something else.)

We’re headed for Corpus Christi, Texas, now, because it’s warm there and not likely to storm soon. Then maybe on to New Orleans again to catch the tail end of JazzFest (if we can buy tickets off someone). Oklahoma is grassy and windy, as expected. It’s supposed to rain a little tonight and a lot the next couple days. J is out looking for an appropriate campsite. We do have a tarp, afterall, though the tent was stolen back in California.

Mosquito referred to me as J’s “lady friend.” I gave J a frienship bracelet in Santa Fe, if you could really call it a gift when it was bought with communal cash. He doesn’t want to be a hippy, he says, because it trivializes his world view. It seems too happy a world view for either of us, but really, things aren’t totally ungood. He says he’s glad to be with me sometimes, though he went to the trouble of recalling everything I’d said to him yesterday in order to point out that I’m never appreciative of his kindnesses, after I called him mean for saying the author of my yogi book was full of shit. He was right though, about my unappreciativeness, so I felt guilty and easily upset for a while afterwards.

Guilty is the color grey, which I wear easily and often. I wonder if I am even capable of self-improvement. I do try. I want more than anything to make him happy, even if can never undo what I did or bring back what we had. I though about my pearls on the ride here. I never really mourned for them, for they were a symbol, and seemed to die when he told me to take them off, back in Desert Hot Springs. They were taken from me before they were stolen. He’d say I gave them up long before, and I don’t feel like I can argue. I can’t. Though I never wanted that, and created a space for myself where things were different somehow, and I didn’t realize I was cracking the foundation until the world toppled down on my head and smashed him in the process.

I miss my pearls. They were perfect and made me perfect in his eyes. I’ll never be his pearl again. He called me a black pearl once, or said I should get one, in an antique store somewhere. Redlands? It was a month ago today I took off my pearls. I just realized it. A little less than a month since I took the Tylenol, one by one, relieved at having finally started it. I didn’t finish it; he stopped me, and only thought the worse of me for having tried.

Such a sad state. I wish I could say I was out of it.

I suddenly can’t remember anything to write about.

. . .

I’ve now been reading my yogi book for what must be hours, waiting for J to return from his grocery excursion. The truckstop is forever teeming with tattooed men, but I don’t see much. Behind me, there are counters for a Chinese food restaurant and a pizza place, both run by the same Flying J attendants. Jeans are 2 for $19.99 and New Mexico tee-shirts are 3 for $10. Shelves are being restocked. New showers are constantly becoming ready.

Last night, as I thought over my experience with the St. John’s choir, I was reminded of a similar experience previously recorded in the stolen journal #1. When J and I were living under the overpass in El Paso, only a day or two after I twisted my ankle in the Arby’s parking lot, we went on a day-long trip to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico…

We crossed a long bridge and kissed at the international border, over the center of the Rio Grande. In Mexico, we acquired a map of the city with a walking tour, and proceeded to follow it unexactly, with J excited reading Spanish words from the sides of buildings and me occationally correcting his pronunciation. He would gleefully exclaim “Hola!” to the natives as we passed, and find himself quite lost if they gave any more than a hello in return. The city was crowded, with narrow and quickly filling streets; J likened it to a flat Manhattan, complete with street vendors and taxi drivers who speak little English. We ate cheap tacos and paid a dollar for a ten cent ice cream cone due to the language barrier. We wandered through marketplaces where the Sellers of Things followed us around and were constantly offering up their wares. These places were packed with sombreros and saint candles and many colors and small trinkets which all seemed to blend together into a big flash of dancing commodities - an orchestra whose conductor swung his arms through the air in a lust for cash but was all the same cheerful and unfatiqued by the effort.

Most vivid of all my Mexican memories is that of the Mission of Guadalupe, a very old church and one of Juarez’ most notable tourist sites. We passed through the thick wooden doors and sat in a pew toward the back, looking forward to the altar and worshippers. In that place there existed a choir, simple and rustic and airy. Old Mexican women sat at the front pews with shawls, chanting their Hail Marys and caressing their beads. Their voices flowed in and out of unison, a medley of unpretentious devotion, a ship that seemed to sail about the room giving light to its features, gently setting anchor in each woman and continuing along its path. J laid his hand on my thigh in that place, in the same manner as in the St John’s choir room, as if acknowleging the beauty that was around us. The words of the Spanish prayer and the Latin symphony are both humble, addressed to a deity in supplication.

. . .

A driver just walked by and, seeing me writing this, asked “homework?” with a trail of warm laughter. “No,” I replied, with a similar giggle, to the old man. It has been nearly two months since I left my university, my assignments, and the much greater portion of my possessions behind in the Village, to go on this pilgrimage for love, as I thought of it at the time. My family, back in Georgia, is most likely still desperately seeking me, as I desperately seek the love I came for, and I wonder who has the most hope. I am seeing the country, complete with little alienated moments in the sun, hopefully learning a lesson about life, if not about love and despair and what it means to cling to something beyond all logic and all else. I am going to be nineteen in a month now, and my future is completely unknown to me. I’m getting anxious about J, who has been gone now for ages.

I saw a man sitting in a cafe in Santa Fe, dressed raggedly and surrounded with legal pads, yellow paper covered in pen, words and words. I wondered what he was writing, if his experience was anything like mine. He waved at us walking by, and it seemed that we must understand each other on some basic level. I longed for the one notebook I had managed to fill on my own.

We finally got kicked out of St. John’s this morning, and I’m sitting on a bench in the Plaza while J. seeks out a restroom. We slept in a booth at the coffee shop last night, until the security guard woke us up to close the building. Then, when he saw us again the next morning, scampering to thaw out our frozen toes, he asked us if we were students and then told us we weren’t “allowed here ‘like that.’”

We spent the entire day yesterday in the student center, and I’d napped in both the coffee shop and the girls bathroom, after having been completely unable to sleep the night before. Thoughts of I don’t remember what raced through my head all night. We put together a jigsaw puzzle of a unicorn with a handful of missing pieces. J played Go while I rested in the booth. We read Frodo and our latest used bookstore purchases - my Autobiography of a Yogi and his Bonfire of the Vanities, and we sat still and didn’t walk anywhere (a rarity).

J stumbled onto the choir practicing one of his favorite pieces - Allegri’s Miserere, and he brought me there (upstairs), and we listened, transfixed and in awe. They’d sing a few haunting passages, filled with such sadness and beauty and truth, and we sat outside the door on a bench, hanging on to every syllable breathlessly. I became quite hypnotised by the movements of the conductor’s arms and hands, tracing a ribbon through the air, and everything started to blur. Then they’d go out of tune and or the teacher would make an error and suddenly it would all come to a halt, the singers cutting off suddenly and standing there laughing, people again.

The music was so amazing, alike only to Mozart’s Requiem in pieces I know, though I’m not well-versed in classical music. Requiem is my favorite and I once listened to it daily. “Hallowing,” maybe, is the word for such music. James said it made him happy that he could be sad. It was the perfect thing to say. It is the most beautiful sadness, but not an exaltation of sadness, simply desperate and accepting, unending and intense - even intensely fragile.

He recognized it immediately and he took me there. I was quickly taken, deep inside myself and in that moment all at once.

(Continued that night in a truck stop in Albuquerque)

After a break we seated ourselves on the floor of the Great Hall, against a wall, facing the full choir. We could watch them, their faces even, as they sang. I searched for the solo soprano who rang out above all the others in a piercing stream of unhumanly high notes which flowed down in a triplet structure and held the entire mood of the piece in a thread noose. I picked out the correct girl before they even started singing again. She was the one who looked like she could sing that part. She was tall and thin with curly hair and pure expression. Her entire body arched when she reached for those tight pitches.They fell down back into the song of the others like a waterfall, and I stared at this girl, amazed, all throughout the rest of the practice.

When I found myself in tears, I did not know whether it was the music or J’s hand on my leg or the thought of my own agony (itself sadder than any note or chord, but all the same beautiful) or the anglic face of this girl I knew nothing of, but had somehow come to worship, which moved me most. The faces then faded, along with the conductor’s arms and the imperfect tone of the amateur choir, and all seemed to be a feeling.. “divinest melancholy” the yogi would say.

I felt so close to James then, because I knew he felt it too. He knew this thing, if not as I did then with at least the same intensity, and we both understood it as we did with the help of the other. Whatever may happen in the end we had given each other that moment of understanding.

After the choir had practiced another piece and been dismissed, I walked up to the wailing soprano and said, in my silly Southern accent, “I wanna BE you,” and a few other things about how it was lovely and I had cried. She was very polite and he voice and eyes were kind. I told her my name and she said she was Emily. James asked her when the show was amd she told him, but I couldn’t pay attention. We walked out and I never really stopped crying.