I.
Danny’s Vision Quest
A day came when Danny didn’t have the urge to drink. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to drink; he never wanted to drink but he just couldn’t help it. This time the idea bored him. He played with it, testing himself, but the urge wasn’t there.
He figured the time had come to head west again. He kind of angled himself northwest toward Brighton Blvd. to hit I-70 and then he’d take his chances hitching, worse came to worse he’d spend another night in the Cherokee Street jail on a loitering charge.
He was heading to a place called Glacier Lakes, a name on the map that appealed to him. He’d memorized all the roads and he’d just keep thumbing and asking for each road in turn until he was in the area and then he’d scope it out.
The first person to give him a ride was an old woman which surprised him because he thought that women were scared to pick up hitchhikers. But this woman was craving company and as soon as he closed the door she began talking to him about what he guessed was her life, picking up her narrative where she had left it off sometime in a past she didn’t seem to realize he didn’t share. If he asked questions she got irritated so he just shut up and listened in total confusion.
It didn’t take long to get sleepy and he wasn’t sure when he was dreaming or waking. He’d look over at her while she droned and see this huge birdlike creature clutching the wheel and talking with a desperate intensity. Blinking didn’t help. He had to shut his eyes again and sleep, rude or not, and when he awoke fifty miles later she was still talking. She let him out somewhat abruptly in the middle of nowhere with some quiet and inexplicable anger. Maybe she had asked for some response and caught him napping. Maybe she thought she knew him.
The old woman gave him food and told him she’d see him later. She gave him an apple, a peanut butter sandwich and a hunk of cheese, like the lunches his mother used to pack for him when he attended day school a hundred years ago. Maybe she was his mother and he just didn’t recognize her. She looked to be a white woman but she was so old it was hard to tell. He checked his surroundings carefully just in case he hadn’t gone anywhere, but he’d traveled alright and he had that lunch to prove the old lady had been a reality.
His next ride was with an old man who looked a lot like the old lady and he also talked a lot: mostly about the weather and all the places he’d been and what the weather had been like in those places. Danny heard about tornadoes and hurricanes and six month snow storms, also about warm weather, humidity, insects and malaria: the guy had been around. When he let Danny out at a diner he gave him a blanket: one of those plaid things with thick wool fringe. Danny still had about 100 mountain miles to go.
The next car slowed for Danny to get in and was off like a shot before he could shut the door. In the back seat two half-naked kids were apparently screwing and the driver was clearly stoned. Danny decided the best way to get through this was to sleep. The driver woke him as he screeched into a gas station saying, “Gas, grass or ass man, nobody rides for free,” and Danny said that was fine but he had to take a whiz. He locked himself in the men’s room and peeked out the vent until he saw the car burn rubber and take off down the highway.
Danny wondered if he should try to be careful or let God look out for him. He wasn’t so sure about God anymore but trying to be careful was too stressful. He’d had three different rides and only traveled about 80 miles. He prayed that he might magnetize a pick-up with a gun rack, a 4x4 with a canoe on top or an old jalopy with fishing gear protruding from the trunk: anything to indicate that there were serious folks inside. He watched an attendant change the trash bag in the can outside and then took the clean bag to use for cover in case it rained, and headed west again.
He walked for a good hour before anyone stopped and he thought he slept as he walked, plodding slowly and stubbornly toward his goal. Then he was picked up by a car in a caravan of cars. This large group of rednecks had hired horses to take them high into the mountains to a secluded fishing spot and made jokes about Danny coming along as their guide. He told them he was a city boy and they probably knew more about tracking than he did. Danny pretended to be asleep while they made cracks about injuns and women and someone told that old story about some guy fucking a doe.
They stopped at a cabin at the base of the recreation area before dawn and sat down to a large pancake breakfast ordered ahead. Danny was invited to join them but he didn’t feel like pancakes and asked instead if they could spare him ten bucks which someone in the group obligingly handed him.
There was a map outside the cabin on a large piece of wood with the lines and letters burned into it and he located a spot far from the group’s destination, and started walking. He’d overheard one of the men talking about this spot: how no one was going that far, not this time, maybe another time: so he knew that was his spot. He started following the horse droppings of other guided groups. It was a long and difficult hike but one thing about street life was a man got used to being on his feet and walking was as natural to Danny as sleeping standing up was to a horse.
The hike took him a good six hours but he still had energy and daylight left over when he got there. He recognized the place by the joy he felt when he arrived. He let out a holler and ran across the grassy meadows to the glaciers melting at the edges and feeding little lakes.
At the edge of one of the lakes he found an abandoned one room cabin, slightly caved in on one side. There was no firewood to speak of that he could use in the cabin’s rusty stove so he went about collecting rocks, as big as he could carry and built a circle big enough to hold the seasoned fence posts that tilted at odd angels from the ground. Some still had pieces of barbed attached to them and he handled them gingerly as he crisscrossed them in the stone circle. He divided the fence posts into three piles, one in the stone circle and two by the cabin to be used later. He knew he’d need three nights and knew that he could not get through them without fire. Then he gathered pine cones and small branches for kindling. He got hot working in the late afternoon sun and stripped naked to store its rays in the pores of his skin.
It got cold long before it got dark on the snow-speckled plateau all around and high above him. The wind in the pines roared like ocean waves (Danny had heard the ocean waves at the movies). He slept outside that first night close to the fire, his feet almost in it and he’d wake up every now and then to look at the stars, stars by the millions that he never saw in the city, and listen again to the half threatening, half soothing roar of the wind in the pines. He’s stir up and replenish his fire and go back to a deep sleep. He knew this was the place. The Gods would come to him here and give him a name.
The next morning he awoke to spiral columns of steam rising off the lake like ghosts and a keen but controllable hunger. It was still chilly but he stripped again and washed in the icy water hootin’ and hollerin’ as he splashed himself. He dried himself with the rough wool blanket and laid it on the still hot stones of his fire circle to dry. Later when the sun was high in the sky he resolved to wash his clothes again. He enjoyed the smell of himself when he was clean and sober.
He spent the day exploring the plateau around the lake but always kept the lake in sight despite the urge to follow new paths over ridges, around rock formations, track a waterfall to its source. That day, his first full day, he kept close to his center. Later he’d range further, paying attention to the timbre of flowing streams of melted snow, the arrangement of small and large glaciers and meadows, places where the trees had burned and fallen covered with lichen and moss, making a map in his mind.
On the second day the mountains drew him farther and farther out. It was the third day he got lost. He was following a path back toward camp he’d followed three times already, decided to take a diagonal toward his point, ran into impassable thickets of head high willows and headed back to his original straight line, except that there are no straight lines in the mountains where wild animals wend
their way through the overgrowth in patterns that relate to their own seasons, carrying their warmth with them and eating wherever they go, unaware of the needs of men to get back to someplace before dark. In a matter of fifteen minutes, maybe less, Danny was totally lost. Instinctively he slowed down, knowing haste would bring him all the sooner to disaster. He calmed his urge to panic. He remembered he had headed west earlier in the day and tried to keep the lowering sun at his back. And he knew that time uncounted goes quickly by and the return is always longer than the journey out, so he wouldn’t start too soon down the mountainside for there were many valleys with similar lakes on both sides of the plateau.
From east to west on the plateau meadows dipped and rose in gentle rises but on the north and south the way down was steep and treacherous. Once he thought he’d walked far enough and started down into the pine woods that looked familiar. When he got close enough to see there was no cabin in this valley with its lake of melted snow, he also realized it was dark so far down and he scrambled and ran pulling himself up by the branches and roots of trees to reach the light and the far view of the plateau. He began to fear the cold dark night. Once the darkness came it would be useless to move.
Having reached the top of the plateau he began to walk away again from the setting sun and decided to leave it to the Gods. He’d make no decisions, just keep walking until he received a sign that he had come to his spot. He made no attempt to recognize the familiar but looked instead for the extraordinary.
The extraordinary thing he saw was an old woman picking tiny wild flowers that grew everywhere. He imagined she was picking them for tea. He imagined she was his grandmother or the old woman from the highway. He could not get close enough to see her as she hastened her pace whenever he tried to catch up but he could feel her femaleness. He thought he caught the smell of a goat in heat, a smell that wafted back to him from twenty years ago. She wouldn’t let him get near, but he knew she was sent to lead him because she never let herself move out of his vision. It was that dusky, surreal time of day when nothing is clear, when terror or ecstasy sets in. For Danny it had always been booze that turned terror into a brief ecstasy before the anger overwhelmed him. He had always associated that time with neon, but here it was a pale moon that came up in perfect balance with the lowering sun on the opposite side of the sky. He willed his panic down, kept his eyes stoically on the fading, flickering goat-woman and told himself he’d see another morning.
Because he was afraid, he broke into a sweat, and the sweat felt icy on his skin. When the woman’s head disappeared over the steep edge of the plateau he called to her not to leave him, but she didn’t come back, and then he realized that must be the spot to climb down to his cabin in the valley by the lake.
The light wavered as it dimmed and the trees appeared to be moving with him down the steep mountain sides to the lake. He kept his eyes on the gleam of moonlight on the water. His first vision of the woman had faded into the trees but he knew there would be others. He had come here to follow visions. There was a smell too that he followed as he felt his way in the darkness to the lake. He recognized the smell of the old cabin with its scorched fireplace and ancient ashes, the rusty smell of nails and barbed wire, these alien smells rising from the earth smell and the pine smell were a landmark in the night guiding him to his safe spot.
Once there he began to tremble with the fear and the cold and the weakness of hunger and he may even have cried. But through this bodily pain he felt a fine satisfaction, a sharply honed joy that wracked him because he felt it coming on: the trance that heralded the coming of visions, his initiation into the consciousness of his race. His own Gods were here in these mountains and they were coming to name him, a name of his own people.
His body tingled with exhaustion and he savored the slow creeping numbness and relaxation as his body fell asleep before his brain and then finally he succumbed completely to sleep and dreams.
It started in the Gold Mine Bar with all the usual crowd of down and outers, men drifting in from the tracks and Jack was singing in the corner that they always converted to a stage when he came in. And it never went anywhere. No mountains in this dream and no eagles or bears. Just his usual night life reenacted in his dream as if he’d never slept, never gotten lost on the mountain, never fallen into a trance-like state: an ordinary dream. When it finally came, the voice intoning his name, it was not in Hualapai or any Indian language he’d recognize. It was in plain lousy English in the voice of some bartender he vaguely remembered:
“Singer” the guy called him: “Singer.” It wasn’t even accurate, it didn’t mean anything, because Danny couldn’t sing worth shit and it was Jack that was the singer. So he figured Jack had invaded his dream, had put a hex on him, was maybe this very minute making a mockery of him, singing some funny song like he sometimes did, making up the lyrics as he went along in a blues mode or country/western mode or rock ‘n roll: he could sing them all with equal ease and he had that quirky sense of humor that could devastate you. In his dream Danny woke up and registered dissatisfaction with the dream but he was still not really awake: it was a strange overlapping of consciousness but it didn’t matter because it was the same world in his dream that he lived every day of his life and when he finally did awake fully he was surprised to be in the mountains at all because that dream had felt more real to him than the beautiful surreal wilderness that surrounded him.
Danny was indeed in the mountains and he believed he really had been lost and led back to safety by a strange old woman, a mythical woman, and that should have counted for something. But no Gods had visited him in his trance and bestowed upon him a name he could bear with pride. Of course he had run away a long time ago and chosen his own life and maybe the message was that he belonged in that life, in that city, on those streets. He felt defeated and hungry and hunted up the food he had saved. The apple was soft but edible. The cheese had gotten moldy and smelly in its plastic baggie but the peanut butter sandwich was OK and he ate it in tiny bites chewing slowly and somewhat tentatively to see how his stomach would react. Ultimately he kept it down although it choked his throat which was dry with surprise and sadness and disappointment. Hell, he’d had enough of hunger and cold and he walked briskly till his legs wobbled, back toward the entrance to the recreation area. Thank God he didn’t meet those rednecks coming down.
As he descended, he heard birds literally screaming as he approached their nests in the low growing bushes, and his own laughter because he meant them no harm, didn’t even know about the nests but for their noise, and always, always the delicate sound of shallow water running down the mountains, hidden in the low willows that hid the birds and various other small critters. And wind, pretty constant the wind. The sound of planes blended with the wind until they got close and there was no mistaking their roar for wind or thunder or anything god-made and Danny realized it was a journey back in time he wanted: he wanted to go back to a time when the gods took care of men, rewarded and punished them, and the affairs of men and gods were indeed mysterious, but these were mysteries penetrable by certain means and certain men and women. Life was a game yes, a dangerous game, but a game with some sense, played with purpose.
Somehow men had usurped the power of gods, some men, men who put those noisy planes in the air. But who could usurp the mysteries? In place of the mysterious was only chance, often harsh and always meaningless. So what good was a name to Danny anyway in this new world? Something his drunken buddies could call him by: the gods wouldn’t be calling him. He remembered the old woman. People who had hallucinations these days were locked up in hospitals and called crazy. Maybe that should be his name: Crazy Dan.
Once priests and shamans had visions; in some parts of the world they still did, were still revered for it and their wisdom sought out, but not on the city streets that had become his home, getting drunk in the dark cavernous bars was the only ceremony these days.
&nbs
p; The land of his people, the Hualapai, Mojave and Navajo, the land of the Hopi, the Havasupai, the Zuni, and Utes, the Lipan, Jicarilla, Tonto and Mescalero people, the Chiricahua, Yavapai, Kiowa, Santa Clara, Dakota, Lakota, Oglala, Brule, Blackfeet and Bloods, where once lived the Cree, the Shoshone, the Cherokee and Cheyenne, Tis-Tsis-Tas, Arra-Arra and Dine they called themselves, Kwakiutl, Inuit, Haida, Maida, Alsea, Aleuts, Athabascans, Acoma, Ponca, Ojibway, Sac and Fox, Pottawatomi, Kickapoo, he’d learned all their names once a long time ago in legends and myths secretly told, he strained to remember, memory being all that was left of some, a hundred here, a dozen there, and there a name only if only he could remember it: Illinois, Miami and Delaware memorialized, Abenaki, Pequod, Mohegan, Micmac, Seneca, Passamaquoddy, Nez Perce, Multnomah, Modoc and Miwok, Tewa and Tiwa, Toltecs and Tsimshian, Wasco, Wintu, more there were more, the Chinook and Cochiti, Coos, Crow and Flathead, Okanogan, Metis, Maliseets and Lumni, what did all the names mean? He didn’t know, enough to remember, to chant them to the mountain: Pawnee, Shawnee, the Kansa and Mandan, the Iroquois and Arapaho, the Katawba, Wichita, Missouri and Chippewa, lands of the Osage, Papago, Yakima, the Seri, Cocopa, the Pee Posh, Assimboin, and Powhatan . . .all those people, all those lands, no longer sacred. What wasn’t dug up for coal and radio-activated was buried under concrete and condos, golf courses and tenements, roads and factories, foul smelling, ugly and privately owned.
No wonder the gods had fled, leaving a handful of devotees searching without hope, getting locked up, getting drunk, crying and dying and dying out until they would be gone too. Up here it was cold at night and the daytime sun was hot and the mountains still dominated, but even here in this remote and harsh landscape, planes flew overhead. Danny high tailed it for the road – it was the only world left to him.
II.
Joe’s Journey
Joe had been put on the bus in Denver to go visit his sister in Pueblo but he didn’t get off in Pueblo and the driver didn’t notice him until Walsenburg. The drivers had changed in Colorado Springs and the new one didn’t know about Joe so he just put him off the bus and figured that was his lookout. Joe had wanted to go to San Francisco ever since his last runaway episode. He’d been found in Cheeseman Park then and the attendant who found him with another man told him he belonged in San Francisco with the other faggots. Joe didn’t know what a faggot was but took the man at his word and decided to head for San Francisco next time they let him out. He had no idea of the distance or direction or even what exactly San Francisco was – it could be another group home.
Joe was picked up by a bald headed man in a van that he lived in on the road. He told Joe he was from Boulder and was on his way to a dance, “Sun Dance” he called it, and asked Joe if he’d like to go and Joe said “Why not” and so found himself riding for a couple of days through land that grew hotter and more bleak with the miles. They slept in the van at a rest stop between huge trucks, the same that came barreling down on them on the highway, constantly startling him. When the bald man stopped for gas Joe peed and got back in the van, afraid not to, the land seemed so lonely. He ate beef jerky and chips but the bald man said he was fasting. In the home you weren’t allowed not to eat.
The morning of the next day they stopped to visit an old Hopi man named Thomas in a village with a foreign name. It looked like television pictures Joe had seen of the villages in the middle east. The house was a series of rooms built as add-ons, the window of one looking into the next and through another window into yet another room. It was “L” shaped and seemingly endless. Around the walls of each room were stacked various things: filing cabinets, boxes of clothes and linens, washers and dryers and tables piled with tools, boots, books and papers. Then around the inside of this border of assorted accumulations were lined up yet another layer of boxes and tables, fold-away beds, mattresses, chairs stacked with more books, more papers and so on until only the center of each room provided a clear passage to the next room. In Thomas’ “office” a double bed was barely accessible behind a make-shift work table surrounded by four different chairs in different phases of disrepair and these all stacked with papers. One carefully covered electric typewriter sat on a table behind the bed and god only knew where he plugged it in, if he plugged in. Only the kitchen was left clear and functional holding a wood stove, a gas range, a refrigerator, a double sink, a hutch cupboard, a table set with bowls and utensils and again four chairs of somewhat sturdier appearance. The living room held an electric organ covered with a rug and stacked high with the ubiquitous books and papers and the same with various sofas and armchairs. The used furniture might have filled three houses but there was no place to sit comfortably without transferring various items from one surface to another. Outside were parked a half dozen vehicles without wheels or engines, their innards and limbs apparently donated to newer, functioning vehicles. Thomas moved some books and stacks of papers to make room for his guests and they sat at his work table.
Outside, the wind made an ominous noise and blew dust and litter across the barren landscape. Thomas drew the blanket that served as a curtain over the door, over the jamb and shut the door on it, thereby securing it tight against the wind. His hair was tied back with a red chiffon scarf and he had red yarn braided into a short scraggly braid down his neck. The three nibbled on old fruit that filled his room with ripe odors.
Thomas told Joe and the bald headed man what he told all his visitors—the Hopi prophecy. People were mistreating the earth and there was going to be a great world wide purification—whether by natural causes like a flood, or a nuclear war Thomas didn’t know but he knew it was coming soon…and when it did, the survivors wouldn’t know how to live with what was left of their world. He said they’d have to come to the mesas and be taught how to grow food so it was important to leave the traditional people on their land to keep up the ceremonies and the old ways so they could teach the survivors after the great purification. He fully expected to see all those folks, fleeing chaos, crowd into the bleak land of sandstone and clay he called home. And this was a man who’d been to the United Nations in Geneva, the Congress in Washington, D.C., had spoken in Los Angeles (and yes San Francisco) and had even spent seven years in a U.S. prison because no one told him he was entitled to conscientious objector status during World War II. This man who had been everywhere, was here today and across the ocean the next, believed the world was going to end up in Kokotsmovi village. The bald man nodded his agreement – it made sense to him. Joe asked if they had a lake – he’d like to raise ducks. Thomas was silent a moment.
“What did you say?”
“I said where is the lake? I’d like to learn to raise ducks.”
Thomas just looked at Joe for a while and then said he thought it was a little dry for ducks.
Joe was relieved when Thomas’ wife came in to invite them to file singly through the myriad rooms to the kitchen where she served corn and bean soup with bread and an herb that tasted like a mint and a hot pepper. After they had eaten, they went to another village to watch the Kachina dances – Joe heard Thomas say there would be clowns. The clowns were dressed in cut off blue jeans and painted with obscure insider jokes written in English on their backs. They all ate incredible quantities of food brought them by the village women: home-made cakes and pies mixed up with packaged cookies, chips and sodas and fresh fruits. Some other men were dressed as Navajo women and the rest were dressed as traditional Kachinas. The dance Joe watched was called the Navajo Dance. People came to watch and climbed ladders to sit on top of the Pueblo dwellings and sometimes clowns threw melons up to the children sitting up high with their legs dangling down. They moved and ran here and there like little mountain goats. Grandmothers sat stolidly on folding chairs in colorful shawls thinking private thoughts or not thinking at all, sleeping with their eyes open in the hot desert sun, at home in their world.
Then they continued on, following roads like animal paths to th
e top of a mountain where people had set up tents and tipis and were cooking over fires outside. A bedroll was found for Joe and he slept under the stars near the van as did the bald man. In the morning just as the sun became visible over the mountains his friend got up and walked around the camp drumming and chanting a beautiful song. His voice was clear and made Joe happy. Joe got up and put his pants on in a hurry but left off his shirt and ran barefoot through the sand, miraculously missing the cactus that grew here and there, he called out loud to all the people still asleep in their tents to wake up and listen to his friend sing and they all grunted and said “OK Joe” because he’d been introduced all around by the Buddhist dancer and he loved to hear his name spoken that way by all those voices within the tents and so he did this every morning thereafter—woke the people at sunrise with his friend. And then a man would call out around the camp, “All dancers to the sweat, all dancers to the sweat,” and they let Joe go into the sweat lodge too but when he asked if he could dance he was told to watch this year and then maybe he could dance next year. Joe thought a year was a long time. He had no idea about ceremonies…his own rituals at the home were daily and very dull – he preferred not even to get out of bed for them—those people in the home were nice but not too smart—no imaginations.
The dancing would continue for four days—for four days the men and women who had so chosen would go without food and water and dance for long periods in the hot sun. They’d have brief breaks in the shade and sometimes a sip of water. They’d have sweats in the evenings and each dancer carried a fan made of eagle feathers and when they stopped they’d fan each other’s necks, gently lifting the long hot hair of their brothers and sisters.
The night before the dancing began a procession of people carried a large tree, hung with multi-colored prayer flags and offerings, to the center of the circle where a deep hole had been dug. They planted the tree in the hole and filled it in with dirt and food offerings which were blessed by an elderly woman of the tribe. There was drumming and chanting and ropes were tied to the tree hanging down like the ribbons of a Maypole but later these ropes would be affixed to the chests of young men with sticks that went through the piercings of their skin and when the young men, so attached to the Tree of Life, the tree that acted as a conduit to the Great Spirit, pulled away, their flesh was pulled away and left at the end of the ropes that were then tied up around the Tree. The medicine man who led and explained the ceremony told them you cannot give to God what is already his, you can only give what is yours to give: your own flesh and your prayers. And so the Tree would stand there the four seasons hung with the flesh offerings of those who would pray and sacrifice to the Great Spirit and who might sometimes come back to this tree in times of trouble to ask for help.
Through the night and the next couple days people arrived in campers and vans, with small tents and tipis and the dusty mountain top became a village. There were Buddhists and Rastas and Australian Aboriginals, Cherokee and Cheyenne, Arapaho and Shoshone and an Iroquois Chief, Shawnee and Dine but it was a Lakota medicine man who led them. There were Indian men who had gotten out of jail just in time to hitch a ride to the Mountain. There were young women who’d lost their children, lived on the streets, been drunk for weeks, sobered up and made decisions about their lives. There were desperate people and determined people. There were whites who claimed an eighth or sixteenth Indian blood, whites who claimed mystical past-life connections and whites of plain European descent who were political activists and legal workers supporting the resistance of the traditional Navajo to the forced relocation. There were Mexican Jews investigating their Indio roots and there were folks who weren’t saying and could be anything. There were gap-toothed old hippies and students of Tai Chi, there were dreamy children who talked about rainbows and angry children who wondered out loud why all the white people had come. There were crows and eagles soaring and calling overhead and sheep and goats farting and baaing and dogs barking and trucks sputtering. There was thunder and a few ten minute showers that evaporated as they hit the ground, and wind, incessant wind blowing, and men laughing and women whispering. They were all there to capture a vision.
In the late afternoon several of the dancers were escorted to the Tree by a female dancer—they ran up to it in couples and the women stayed in the center to pray but the men, after praying, went to the edge of the circle where they were harnessed to a rope on which were tied several buffalo skulls. Sticks were pierced through the skin on their backs and the ropes that attached to the skulls were tied to the sticks. Escorted by several comrades each man in turn ran around the circle dragging the skulls which grabbed the ground with their horns. Then finally he stood still and little children were brought into the circle to sit on the skulls and when he took off again to run, the harness broke free and the flesh of his back was torn and streams of blood decorated his back. This was repeated many times as each man made his prayer and submitted to his yoke of suffering and transcendence, but the very first time Joe saw the blood run down a man’s back he went wild, screaming and running into the sacred circle and the helpers appointed to act as “security” grabbed him as gently as they could but firmly and they took him to the medicine tent where a man in a red arm band gave him some herbal tea and talked to him quietly, quietly…but he didn’t stop talking to Joe until the drums and the chanting had ceased and the ceremony was over for a short break. They induced Joe to sleep then and resolved to keep him away from the rest of the Sun Dance for he was too frightened by the flesh offerings that would take place each day.
Joe was escorted once more to the arbor encircling the Sun Dance ground for the water ceremony. The leader alone in the center held a bucket of water in one hand and his eagle feather fan in the other and with the fan he scooped the water out and tossed it up toward the tree and the drops of water flickered in the sun like silver coins and dropped to the dry earth. Helpers danced around the circle fanning sprinkles of water over the bowed heads of the spectators and then other helpers came around as they did throughout the four days, with smudge pots and waved the sage and juniper smoke over and around the bodies of the people with brushes made of sage tied with red yarn and the people bent toward the fragrant, purifying smoke and waved it towards them with their own sage brushes and Joe followed their actions and imitated their reverence without questioning it. In the modern world, spirituality had become a motion people went through, hoping thereby to arrive at its core and accepting, in the meantime, that they were lost and seeking to assuage their panic.
The wind was incessant, blowing the hot dry sand everywhere, the hottest driest summer in 28 years said old Lee at the Dinebito Trading Post. But when Joe was put to work herding sheep, he discovered that when he kept moving, pacing himself to the rhythm of the sheep and goats, the wind didn’t bother him. The noise it made in the trees was like friendly talk he enjoyed listening to and Joe enjoyed the graceful sounds of the bells on two or three of the animals and the bleating of the babies running after the mothers to nurse. Joe had been shown where to lead the herd and to keep a certain distance and allow the animals space to graze. When he could smell the sourish smell of the lactating mothers he knew he was too close and stepped backwards over the sand and rock. He felt prayerful in this atmosphere that made him think he was a shepherd in the land and time of Jesus. He stopped shaking, he stopped smoking, he stopped his chatter and listened to the land. Its voice was distant and slow and required his total concentration. It told him to rest, to be happy and when to pay attention to a straying lamb. He almost wanted to stay forever herding the sheep, but they told him it got very cold in the winters – 40° below some nights, so he decided to continue on to San Francisco.
III.
The Meeting
The newly risen sun settles on fields of pale sage like a kiss. School buses and trucks glitter in rural driveways and at rest stops along the early morning highway. Drivers sleep in their little houses or in their rigs g
radually waking up, stretching, getting ready to hit the road again. Over railroad tracks, past miles of wrecked automobiles, a flight of noisy birds makes a moving pattern against the sides of freight trains, and black eyed susans grow tall through piles of dry rotted tires and curve out from the broken windshields of gutted, rusted car bodies. The air smells of smoke, hot rubber and flowers.
Joe wakes, sleeps and finally wakes again at the bus depot downtown where a staffer waits for him with the van marked Wheat Ridge Home for the Developmentally Disabled. Joe sees the van first and realizes he isn’t quite ready yet to let go of the world. Joe slips through the crowd to the street without entering the depot and the staffer waits patiently inside watching as each passenger trails tiredly into the building. When it’s obvious no one else is getting off, he wonders if Joe missed his connection in Pueblo. Somehow, these guys never learn. Just to be sure, the staffer boards the bus to check, but only finds an old black man cleaning up debris from the trip. “A dark skinny fella with a strange way of talking” is all he can think of to describe Joe. “Lot a skinny dark fellas ride this bus but I don’t talk to none of ’em,” responds the old man and the staffer checks his frustration with little grace and curses under his breath, spreading his bit of confusion and hostility to ripple throughout the day.
Joe has already hitched a ride to 6th and Santa Fe where he knows the way and will look up his old friend Berthe Sanchez.
There are always sounds in Joe’s head: voices or music. Sometimes the music is very beautiful but very sad. It makes tears come up in his chest and he feels them behind his eyes but they never get quite close enough to spill out—like the vomit that comes up to his throat but not high enough to throw up when some man rapes him. Somehow his body knows it isn’t a good thing for him to do, cry or throw up. It always makes somebody mad.
What Joe has always liked best to do is walk. He can walk forever without getting tired and sometimes he’d just walk away from the group home and be gone for days or even weeks if he hitched a ride somewhere or had money for the bus. San Francisco had been his best and worst adventure.
Joe had no idea when he set off, where or what it was, and his idea of the geographical extent of the place was still confused with the places he traveled through to get there. To Joe, San Francisco meant Indians and the Sun Dance, desert and ocean and Golden Gate Park. To the staffers, San Francisco meant the three weeks Joe didn’t brush his teeth even once and they all had to be pulled when he got back. It also meant strange stories they suspected were really hallucinations, dreams and nightmares. No one could tell Joe what anything meant, not even his court appointed lawyer, not even Danny who got a janitorial job for a couple of weeks when he brought Joe home one morning.
It was music that made Joe remember his adventures in the world. In the fall, geese came to the soccer field near the railroad tracks down by Main and even gulls strayed over from Sloan’s Lake. The noises they made caused Joe to smell the salt water on the beach and think of walking along the coast, on the sand and close to the cliffs and through the woods of low growing, scrubby trees where men made camps in their protection. The men wore clothing that was filthy and torn, in many layers for warmth, even in the summer months, and had long hair and beards that covered sometimes all but bloodshot eyes, some of them. Some of them were newer to the streets and parks and outskirts of the city.
One of them called to Joe one day and he sat and talked to them and sipped from the bottle of a foul tasting drink they passed around in a brown paper bag. He felt important and respected and didn’t notice them looking at each other when he talked.
One of them called him a faggot and ordered him to dance like a woman and Joe didn’t know if that was good or bad. It seemed strange but the man seemed friendly too and he did as he was told and they all laughed, even Joe, until suddenly their laughter sounded nasty to him and he got confused and stopped dancing and laughing and the man who started it all got mad and grabbed him, called him a lot of angry names and threw him around.
Then the man bent him over and tore his clothes and poked his thing into Joe’s ass with such speed and force and for so long that Joe was broken and bleeding and trying not to cry or vomit and it was worse than it had ever been, even when he was a little boy that time he’d almost forgotten, and yet the other men still laughed.
Joe closed his eyes and went to sleep, lying where they dropped him on a bed of pine needles. He couldn’t walk or sit so he just lay there and slept, not crying or remembering; just listening to the high pitched calls of the gulls and the waves beating the cliffs, a rhythm both terrible and soothing.
Some other men came and found him and helped him to a hospital where they left him and ran away. He stayed a few days and refused to talk because if they knew what happened he’d get into trouble. “AIDS” they always told him, told him what AIDS did to people and how he could get it “fooling around” … “fooling around.” Joe almost cried. The sex lives of retarded adults are of great concern to institutions. Institutions can be sued so sex is highly discouraged albeit ineffectively. Joe’s homosexuality was a source of mild amusement or embarrassment to the staffers and everyone was afraid he’d pick up and transmit AIDS. On one occassion a nurse had visited Joe and discussed sex with him in highly graphic and clinical terms that embarrassed Joe to the point he paid little attention but focused more on avoiding the woman’s determined stare that belied her equally determined smile (designed to put him at ease). Had they but known, Joe was confused and afraid himself. Craving warmth and affection, what he more often got was invasion and shame. Joe didn’t know what to do about loneliness and isolation.
The people at the hospital wouldn’t let him out until he told them where he had come from. He figured it was time to go home anyway so he told them and phone calls were made and his bus trip home arranged and the driver instructed to help him make connections because he was developmentally disabled and mentally ill…“You mean he’s a retard?” responded the driver but was kind enough to Joe. He asked him to sit up front and talked to him while he drove, said it was nice to have some company after all.
Joe remembered other times in the park and the huge trees where he’d sit and pretend the forest extended forever and there were no streets, no people, no buildings. He’d stare at the trees as he walked until he was forced to turn his head to look at them and he hated to turn away and he often hid in the park at night.
Other times he felt like seeing people and streets and buildings and he’d ride the bus all around the city. Sometimes he’d peed himself, couldn’t help it, nowhere to go and he couldn’t hold it and he’d be so embarrassed, knew he stank and people grimaced when he got on and that hurt his feelings but there were some men on 8th St. under the highway, near the Convention Center who were kind to him, showed him where to clean up, invited him to share their stash of blankets and sleeping bags and food. There was one big fella who told the other men Joe was special and that they should treat him with respect.
One night his friend was in jail but the others were still respectful and they told Joe his friend was a Lakota Sioux Indian and it seemed they were in awe of him. They also told Joe he was 100 years old and turned into an eagle once a month and laughed when Joe looked surprised. But they slapped his back and his knee when they laughed and drank some and looked away and settled down again with little grunts and were generally polite.
“Be polite” the Lakota Sioux eagle Indian always told them. Joe told them about the Sun Dance and they weren’t surprised. They knew all about it, but Joe never told anyone back at the home about the Indians dancing. He was afraid the supervisors would find them and lock them up because they made blood come. Patients who cut themselves at the home were locked in a tiny room with nothing in it and sometimes even wrapped up like a burrito so they couldn’t move their arms. It was called the “time out” room and still so many of the people at the home would try to cut themselv
es or beat their heads against the walls or beat each other because of a constant rage continually denied.