Mobile Junkie I: Oregon Postcards

Mobile Junkie
drawing by MJ

The day I lost my phone, Georgia and I left Portland just like Thelma and Louise, in the wake of her crazy man. We each tried, in our separate way, to enjoy the moment. I was determined not to let his nagging presence in our minds ruin my newfound Buddhist nature (we all are inherently good, repeat several times) even if her boyfriend IS an asshole. We headed west toward Tillamook and followed the coast down toward Bandon, our goal to gaze at the Pacific and play on the big rocks. Finding ourselves tired in Lincoln City, we drove on to Newport and parked with relief at a two-story motel that proudly boasted "39.99 for 2". Sandwiched among gas stations, parking lots, super stores and strip malls on the bleak and busy commercial strip, it felt like home.

Georgia set out alone for the office to check in so "they" wouldn't think we were lesbians. (Georgia's mantra became: "This is my sister! I'm showing her the Oregon coast! She has never been to Oregon!") Cousin Eddie from National Lampoon's Vacation signed us in- he was accomodating, ingratiating- and scary. Our second floor room smelled suspiciously foul and carried with it visions of the worst possible sexual perversions. I told Georgia that the board nailed to the wall above the bed at head-level looked chipped and dented by a thousand battered heads.

Desperate for incense but without matches, I crept down the steps outside and headed for the darkened office. The door was locked, but I saw shadows moving inside, so I boldly knocked. Cousin Eddie finally tore himself away and peered out at me through the glass, sizing me up. He unlocked the door, opened it a bit, and when I asked if he might have some matches, he said, "COME IN". In a split second I simultaneously hesitated (by rote, through years of training as a girl) and was somewhat comforted by a motherly-looking figure wearing a pink chenille bathrobe who had frozen mid-exit in a doorway leading to what I imagined was the bedroom. (Was he her son? Was she his wife? The possibilities were mind-boggling.) I stepped inside, her eyes warily tolerating my presence, and the door closed behind me.

I waited while Eddie rummaged through a box of lighters that rattled like bones as one by one they were held up with a flick and dropped back for dead into the multi-coloured glittering plunder. There were BICS and Scriptos and Jack Daniels and glow in the dark and green flame, jet flame, bargain lighters, disposable lighters, all colors and contours, and finally one surfaced that, when clicked, lit up Eddie's face. It was pink. "Thank you," I said, genuinely taken with the lighter game. "Oh, that's OK. I know how that is. I'm a smoker too," said Eddie, who couldn't have been happier if he'd given me a pair of white shoes.

"In Heaven I Thought I Would Have to Play Badminton with George Washington Forever"

Once, when AJ was very young, she questioned me about heaven. "What does it look like, mom? Who is there? Is it fun?" Transforming myself into a tender mother I once saw in a movie, I said softly, "Think of the place you love the most and all the people who are dear to you. Think of all your favorite things. That's what heaven will be like." AJ looked at me with a mixture of relief and disbelief. "In heaven I thought I would have to play badmitten with George Washington forever!"

AJ was a smart girl. She knew that you can't be happy unless you are pleasing grown-ups at home and at school, and some of the home part had become vicious. During our almost daily backyard badminton competitions it was not uncommon for AJ's brothers, Huck and Auggie, who were offensive linemen on the high school football team, to break rackets in mid-air while returning a birdie at lightening speed. We were always on the lookout for stronger, better-built rackets. AJ was lost in the high speed confusion and would stand covering her head as the birdies blasted toward her. The boys, grass-stained from diving for birdies in the heat of the game, would encourage her, in their way. "Come on, AJ. Hit the ball. It's not going to hurt you!" When it came time for AJ to serve, the game usually fell apart, with the boys slipping off to the house as AJ tossed the birdie up again and again, madly swinging her racket, whiffing all over the place with me on the other side encouraging, "It's OK, AJ. Watch the birdie. You can do it. Take your time." Sometimes I would even sit down for this part.

I imagine it was in the heat of one of those competitive summers that AJ revealed her apprehension about heaven. Probably her memory of the school year still stung, with visions of unbearable multiplication and division problems, writing exercises that never were good enough, Nazi art teachers, cruel classmates and history assignments featuring austere-looking white men in powdered wigs. And I was just a parent, like all parents, bumbling through life while pretending to know what I was doing.

AJ doesn't ask me those big questions anymore. She has learned what all children eventually realize about their parents.

Heaven is a beautiful place, AJ. Obey your parents. Believe your teachers. Love your enemies. Stay safe.

Gusto Jones

My sister Georgia wanted to be a nun. I, on the other hand, wanted to eat shit and vomit out my nose. Or so it seemed. Strange then, that Georgia would end up having sex with a criminal on the bathroom floor of a maximum-security prison and I would be teaching middle school students how to be good citizens. Which proves, once and for all, that people can change.

One of my former students (ironically!) happens to reside in a maximum-security prison as I write, and this unpleasant thought reminds me of his disturbing personality mix of childlike enthusiasm and chilling devilry. In fact, we dealt at our little alternative high school with pathologies that would make the professional psychiatrist shiver. Our school was populated by your run-of-the-mill rebellious students who refused to learn and diligently worked at making our lives as miserable as possible. But once in a blue moon a truly driven pupil walked through our doors, whose misbehavior transcended nuisance or malice and rose upward to the level of performance art. They didn't care about the fucking teachers. They were just passing through, on a higher mission, and tolerated us as minor characters in the grand scale of their tumultuous lives. A teacher rarely gets an opportunity to observe a student such as this in captivity, but I experienced one when my life for a brief few weeks ran together with Gusto Jones.

"Who wants to make a piñata!” I trilled cheerily at a group of high school students who had been designated the "party committee". Most of the students sat lethargically at their tables, waiting for the big party plans to unfold before them. A couple of the girls put forth their best effort and actually acknowledged me.

"Can we bring our own music?" a white suburban girl named Mandy challenged.

Nicole, rolling her eyes petulantly and dipping a thin lipstick wand into a tube of shiny pink lip gloss retorted, "We are not listening to your fucking rap music! If we listen to our own music we need to vote on what kind.

"Nicole!" I hissed, already strained at the prospect of a day of party preparations. "Watch your mouth!"

"Can I lay down?" asked an unkempt boy named Nate. "My girlfriend kept me up all night."

Much wrangling and bribing later, the boys tore strips of newspaper and dipped them into thick paste while the girls, with their pretty gel pens made lists of absolutely necessary kinds of candy to put into the paper mache pumpkin piñata that they agreed would be the highlight of the Halloween festivities.

"OK. Games. How about we pass an orange around the circle with our chins?" Shayna wore a tight low-cut shirt announcing that she was a "HOTTIE".

"Cool," said one of the boys, glancing up at Shayna as she scribbled intensely with purple glitter ink.

The boys grew weary of such demanding paper mache duty, and felt a mixture of irritation and admiration at the girls, who had made it perfectly clear that they could not be expected to apply layers of paper mache without surgical gloves.

"This doesn't even look like a pumpkin."

"It has enough fucking layers of paper."

"This sucks."

Sensing the end of their collective attention span, I took control. "GOOD JOB! OK! We'll put the candy in tomorrow, seal up the hole and paint it." As the students loudly pushed their way out the door I saw Gusto Jones standing in the hallway quietly looking past me at the table where the paper mache ball sat heavy and misshapen on wet newspaper.

Gusto didn't stay long in one classroom. His troubles started in preschool, and each subsequent teacher had added to his lengthy student discipline file. Bullying. Stealing. Cursing. Fighting. Skipping. Vandalizing. Insubordination. Uncontrollable. The list of wrongdoings marched with him through elementary, through middle school and into high school. The school psychologists and social workers tried to find redeeming qualities, give him incentives, scare some citizenship into him, but Gusto was far beyond their simple platitudes. He knew that the "Dream, Believe, Achieve" posters hanging in the school halls were bullshit.

Gusto's mother owned the local bar, The Bloated Cow, and her duties there included bringing men home and into her bedroom nightly. Gusto listened to his mother having sex with different men, some nice to him, some indifferent. He was interested in how the sounds varied from one man to the next. He began having sex himself when he was nine years old, which was two years after his father had introduced him to marijuana. Soon he was selling his own Ritalin. He and his friends would crush it up and snuff it. They liked to raid their family medicine cabinets and crush random pills that they snuffed and chased with cough medicine stolen from the local pharmacy. The storeowners were afraid of Gusto and his friends. They recognized a quality in him that was best not messed with, and they rationalized their small losses.

Gusto's father was a Hell's Angel, or so Gusto liked to say. Most of his friends thought he belonged to some lesser, regional gang of bikers. Everyone knew the myth meant a lot to Gusto, and every few years when his father was released from his latest stint behind bars he would show up on his loud machine along with his tattoos, his facial hair and his sober presence. He always took Gusto for a ride, and Gusto felt a confusing mix of pride and rage for days after his dad thundered out of his life again. Gusto began having sex with his mother's friends when he was fourteen and in the eighth grade. Sometimes they would leave him a trinket, some lunch money.

When Gusto stole money from a teacher, keyed her car and threatened to kill her if she went to the police, he was sent to the alternative school, where it was obvious from the beginning that he would be just passing through. Keeping him in my classroom was a full-time job. One brief glance away and he disappeared, and then I would embark on a search party, always finding him with a cigarette at his lips, outside. He had made his own decisions for so long, school was an irritatingly silly containment system. He couldn't make sense of our trite rules. If he was having a nicotine fit, he should be able to go have a cigarette. I tried to give him some leeway. I found rules and formalities generally senseless too. The students called us by our first names here. We knew that most rules were created to control people, and we knew the value of breaking them. He had no interest in academics and found schoolwork totally pointless. After several attempts at finding some writing activity that would engage him, perhaps an art project that could be a starting point, I realized that Gusto was one of those students who had lived as an adult for too long. There would be no going back to school for him. Almost seventeen, he was biding time until his birthday, when he could drop out and be free.

The day of the party found the school in total chaos. Students ran to the bathroom in groups, applied green make-up and black wigs and roamed from room to room carrying their Mountain Dew, admiring one anothers' new identities. Girls giggled in groups, smoking cigarettes, wearing pajamas and pigtails, carrying teddy bears and dolls. Gusto stood at the end of the hall in a close embrace with a girl dressed in a nightie. I watched his hand gently caress her bottom. "Stephanie! Break it up!" You see, even I walked with caution around Gusto Jones.

At the appointed time I gathered a few boys together and we went outside to tie the piñata to a big oak tree next to the school parking lot. One of the boys climbed to the first branch and as he held the rope they negotiated the right height to achieve maximum impact. The pumpkin, like a freak of nature, swayed heavily from the branch in all its malformed glory ("it doesn't even LOOK like a pumpkin") and we gathered everyone together for the main event. It had been decided by the planners, with their gel pens, that the girls would get the first whack. "It wouldn't be fair if boys went first. The girls wouldn't even get a chance."

One-by-one the girls swung a heavy branch at the slowly swaying target, and one-by-one they grew tired and bored and escaped back into the school. Gusto was primed. "I'll do it!" This was no longer a little piñata child's game, but a test of strength. Wanting the other boys to get a turn too, I ordered them to form a line, giving them three whacks each. They all deferred to Gusto, and as he approached his task I saw the determination in his eyes. He gave the thing at least five hard hits before I could stop him. He grudgingly gave the next boy in line a turn and through the line they went, each one hitting three times with all his might, and each time the pumpkin swayed heavily, unfazed.

"Let's just take it down and break it," said Nate.

"Let's get a bat," said Gusto, and soon the boys were tossing a baseball bat back and forth, swinging with all their might, working up a sweat and quickly growing bored. "Tell us when the candy comes out," they said as one-by-one they headed back inside. Gusto and I were left standing under the oak tree, looking at each other. I handed Gusto the bat and he began swinging. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. The rope creaked, the pumpkin lurched ever so slightly, but the paper mache held firm. Gusto swung harder, his small muscular body tight and focused, his eyes not leaving the prize. The effort was Herculean, and I wondered whether Gusto had ever even heard of Hercules. Gusto continued his heavy blows, all alone in his labor. The country silence was all around us save the crack of the bat against what seemed to be the cement facade of our Halloween piñata. Gusto paused only once during his endeavor, to remove his wet t-shirt. The sweat ran down his forehead and the colored leaves fell around him as he single-mindedly delivered blow after endless blow. Finally candy began to trickle to the dirty ground. Gusto targeted a couple more hits at the weak spot and candy rained freely, a mountain of Brach's bulk chocolates. Gusto lowered his weapon, glanced down at the bounty and turned and sauntered gracefully into the school.

I stood alone for a moment in the hushed aftermath of his effort, and then the students burst out into the fall sunshine, grabbing up handfuls of candy, stuffing it into their pockets, snatching up the good kinds, until the pile was gone and all that was left was the dirt on the battlefield.

I listened to the voices of the dispossessed as they shuffled back into the building.

"He took all the good kinds."

"Do you have any caramels?"

"This sucks."

"What time is it?"

"That piñata was stupid. It had too many layers."

Gusto Jones went on to do many more amazing deeds, such as committing statutory rape and getting himself thrown in prison, just like his father. But I prefer to remember the man that had the potential of Hercules in his heart, who had the tenacity to move mountains, who was just a little boy named Gusto Jones.

A Threat to the Moral Order!

Societies are based upon preventing potentialities and on channeling the energy of an individual female into a specific body, but they are also based on the repression of this energy and, as a final resort, on the censuring of the self. This situation is what makes the stability of this constructed body uncertain and explains the long duration, the never-finished nature, of its construction. – in Reading the Social Body, CB Burroughs and JD Ehrenreich (eds.)

---

On a cold winter day in 2002 my daughter Moe and I rode the subway from her apartment in Harlem to the Village, headed for Andromeda, where she would get her second and my first tattoo. Trying hard to remove my “I am a woman from the Midwest!” facade, I disinterestedly read a magazine in the damaged-chic grunge waiting room and listened to the employees entertain me.

“Can you tattoo my balls blue, man? I want my ball sack blue.”

“You want your balls blue? Well, I can do that, but YOU have to shave yourself, man.”

Two young gay men studied flash art on the walls. They wanted traditional anchors on their biceps, with their names etched on each others’ bodies for eternity. A young kid wanted to know “how much for a Frankenstein scar around my neck”? Asian girls pointed at bright flowers. A stretch of prime gallery wall space held a large rear view of a blonde girl bent over, legs apart, with WHITE” tattooed atop one hefty thigh, and “TRASH” tattooed on the other, both bordered with bouncy pink satin ribbons.

I go first, and I like the drops of blood that appear as a pierced heart appears on my wrist. Moe also gets a flaming heart, on her back, and she asks if I’m OK, and I am giddy and full of meaningful lightheadedness, standing outside at the top of the steps, squinting in the winter sun. An amazingly exotic and beautiful employee with at least three hundred piercings in his face it seems, is taking a cigarette break in the doorway, talking to a friend who has come by to show off his newest piercing. I see a community of decorated people who take joy in their bodies, who enjoy one others’ body art, who are together, somehow, in their confrontation of invisibility, in their thumbing of their noses at social hierarchies. “Yes! Fuck social hierarchies!” I silently concur. The moment takes me back to those endless days with friends, before the knowledge of time colored the pace of my life. High school, college, long summers, girlfriends, wasting time, getting high. Having adventures. Laughing.

We walk down the street to Starbucks, and I order a venti latte. I don’t want to say the word 'venti', but rejection of corporate slavery is so difficult. Moe asks me what my tattoo means, and I say that I have been wounded, but my heart is still beating. There is hope.

The Village is feces, and vendors, and hunger. I smell all of the lunches coming from all of the restaurants, and I love the inclusiveness of this place. I love the dark places, because I know that to be open, a city must to be open to all of its dark places. Decadence can be a signpost of liberation.

I Liked Richie Havens Better Without Teeth

The first day of my summer vacation found me headed, in my cute rental car with the sunroof, for New York City. School was over, at last I had time to think, and I wanted the trip to begin to define me in new ways. I bought two CD's for the ride, a Cat Stevens compilation and "Richie Havens Sings Beatles and Dylan".

Cat Stevens was a cute! successful and thoughtful songwriter who disappeared from the music scene in the early 70's. Rumor said that he had become a Buddhist monk, which was intriguing in the early 1970's, but even more fascinating to me today. It is not easy to swim against the tide of what is acceptable in our culture and there is something really attractive about dropping out and forsaking the material culture that most people are chasing. One of my quests was to find out what sort of life he had lived after forsaking fame and fortune. I have heard his music called adolescent, but that is dismissive. His agony at being "different" (a thinker!), his search for love (carnal and otherwise), his gentle explanation for his exit from the music industry ("I Never Wanted to Be a Star"), his attunement to nature, and especially his tortured search for self knowledge and truth, drew me. "On the Road to Find Out" became my anthem through the mountains of Pennsylvania. Oh my God! I was falling in love with Cat Stevens!

But Cat is no longer Cat, of course. He is Yusuf Islam, and he isn't a Buddhist monk, he converted to Islam in 1977, is married, has five? children and owns a hotel in London. But he has helped me undertake this blog and begin this new life. "Don't be shy, don't live in fear. Nobody will know you're there," he encourages.

But Richie Havens, what happened to you? It's like "The Man" said, RICHIE! We're gonna make you a STAR! We're gonna get you some TEETH, we're gonna get you some JEWELRY, we're gonna take photos and every picture will have your HANDS in it! EXPRESSIVE! Show em your JEWELRY! Let em know you're still around! DYNAMITE! Make you a STAR.!" ....This album sucks! What have they done to you? They put unlistenable upbeat synthesizer elevator background bullshit behind your beautiful voice. They gave you front teeth. I liked you better without teeth.

I love New York City. My trip there, with Cat Stevens as my soundtrack, took me to Strawberry Fields in Central Park with my daughter AJ. I realized that we do, in the United States, have monuments where devout pilgrims make their journeys. I saw young seekers in Central Park that day, longing to break away from the unbearable tedium of high school and what comes after, of what our lives have become.

Strawberry Fields
Mobile Photo by MJ

"Well I think it's fine building Jumbo planes,
or taking a ride on a cosmic train, switch on
summer from a slot machine, yes get what you want to, if you want, 'cause you can get anything.
I know we've come a long way, we're changing day to day,
but tell me, where do the children play." - Cat Stevens

Walking to South America

I want to walk to South America. I want to step out my door and begin putting one foot in front of the other. I want a new life.

When I first had these thoughts a year ago my marriage was disintegrating, my children were grown and I was teaching English Language Arts in a small midwestern town known for its close proximity to the regional strongholds of the Ku Klux Klan. My husband Steven had given me an ultimatum three years before that it was "alcohol or him", so I quit drinking (drinking is not the problem, it's the symptom."-Moe) and began weekly psychotherapy sessions with a therapist named Mallory. I agonized over grad school, was I "good" enough, was I "smart" enough, would they find out that I was an imposter?

I finished my degree and went on to other forms of discontent. My job sucked. In theory it didn't, but in reality I received and handed out a thousand abuses each day at an alternative high school where students were resistant to learning and faced awesome challenges in life. I tried to integrate anti-racist teaching into my curriculum. I formed relationships with the students and tried to foster self-esteem. I raised academic standards. We confronted drug use and the all the other myriad of problems that our population of students faced. The "Dream, Believe, Achieve" posters of the traditional school system were laughable. I was buried under my job, and I didn't know how to get out. I had become my father.

When Steven left in 2002 the nuclear bomb hit. I dreamed short colorful dreams of atomic bombs detonated in the east, somewhere beyond the city. I looked out the kitchen door at the most psychedelic sunset I have ever seen, and then I was blown quietly off my feet, flying horizontally, slow-motion into my kitchen, my arms stretched out before me in a futile attempt to cover my children who were playing contentedly on the floor. A blast of such magnitude would have certainly vaporized us instantly, had my dream not ended with my fall unfinished, in mid-air. My interpretation was that the atom bomb symbolized the devastation caused by my husband's leaving. But later I realized that the explosion was my anger, and what that anger could do. Years and years of discontent. Years of a pattern of becoming angry, not expressing my anger, and blaming myself for the problem. "There is a problem and it is me and I am defective." -(Mallory, you rock!)

So, I eventually found myself faced with the realization that I have a pattern of "crumbling" (losing myself) joined with the beastly reality that I don't communicate very well. Shit. And this is where I am today, at the crossroads, dreaming of life-altering journeys, pilgrimages, putting one foot before the other and walking to South America.

"He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." - Tolkien