A Mirror of Before and After - CHAPTER XIX
By Frank Moore circa 1970s
The next day, Carol and I went riding again through the grey towns in between the white country and woods of black lines.
“I didn’t tell you I was leaving yesterday, but I knew you would understand,” Carol said, switching off the crackling radio. “I was so high, felt so good that I had to be by myself, or I’d have melted into you. I walked for a long time with Bo. But where is there to go in this city to be by yourself … without feeling lonely? So I went home and read some of the Bible with Mom. But I couldn’t keep my mind on Jesus’ words. I kept thinking of you, going back to you. I saw everything you did after I left … really. It must have been telepathy or something. I never felt what I felt coming out of you from anyone else. It is so pure. You’re so spiritual.”
“Stop the car and give me my board! I am not spiritual … not by your definition of the word. That’s a statement of fact. Thank God for that! I am not a saint. I don’t qualify for the post. Even if I did, I wouldn’t accept the curse because I know how lonely it is. People always put the person who is different from them, who they don’t really understand, either above or below themselves. You can’t really love someone who is above you. You can worship him, serving him faithfully, blindly. You can fear him, hiding in doubts, avoiding him, leaving him alone. You can hate him, trying to poke holes in his goodness, trying to find his one weakness, one contradiction, one fault with which you can topple him down under your feet. But you can’t love the guy above you in a simple human way. To love that way, you must be equals. Only saints are strong enough, foolish enough, to live without receiving that kind of love. I am not a saint. I am a man. See me.” But of course, I didn’t make her stop the car or her stream of words to see me. Why did she have to put fancy labels on what we did and felt yesterday? It was very simple. We went somewhere together. I didn’t know where. Only that we went there together. To say anything more was like denying we ever went. It made everything slightly unreal. We took a ride, got stoned both on grass and each other … I got a massage … we held each other … I fell in love with her, or felt at least something growing between us. That was what happened yesterday. We had a good time … the best time I ever had with someone, especially in the back room … but keep it simple … we had a good time.
“You have a peace and a knowing around you that others can share when they are with you,” Carol went on, turning into a rest stop beside the grey Potomac. “That’s why I like to be with you. But I can’t understand how you can live at the store without becoming like ‘them’.”
“Like who?” I asked. She had put my pointer on me and was holding the board in front of me.
“The people who hang out at the store.”
“Like you?”
“You know what I mean. They seem to live either for sex or dope. They have no higher awareness. They don’t believe in God. But you do, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But how can you when all of that is going on around you? If it was me, I’d fall into man’s ways, wanting things. Even now I sometimes doubt God … that he really exists. I know he does because he has gotten me out of places that I couldn’t get out of … I thought I could do everything myself … could handle everything. Until I started hitching around, sleeping on beaches … Then I ran into things and people that freaked me out so bad that all I could do was lay back and pray, ‘OK, God, deliver me, if you’re there,’ And he did. I would be dead if it weren’t for him. But with all of the proof I have, I still doubt, still rebel. Sometimes I want to go wild and say, ‘Fuck you, God.’ I would too, if I lived at the store. That is what I mean. How do you live in a peace in that chaos?”
“I don’t think I live in a peace. But I know the store is shallow. I don’t want to live like that … not for always … I know there is something more … I want it. I know I am more. The store can’t trap me. I see the good side of the store. I enjoy it. I watch teenyboppers trying to be sexy … and I am still the same inside … so I just dig it until it is time to go on.”
Carol didn’t say anything for a long while … just smoked her cigarette. Then she crushed it out. “I keep forgetting I’m trying to quit. But I’m cutting down. I don’t buy them anymore. Just bum them off of people. Do you love everyone?”
“I haven’t thought about it. I don’t think that way.”
“I thought I could,” Carol said. “Before I went to the Coast, I thought I could love everybody because everyone had at least a tiny part that was good, and I could love that part of them. I could see that part when I looked deep into their eyes. I thought that way even when I came back home. I was a mess … skinny and sick with lice and crabs and no money … Mom had wired the money for the plane ticket … it freaked her out to see the state I was in … I was lucky I wasn’t pregnant. Anyway, after I recovered somewhat, I took a walk at around two in the morning in Southeast D.C. I was so naive and innocent. I thought no one wanted to hurt me. A big Negro … he must have been seven feet and fat … was standing on the sidewalk. I said hi and walked on. But he grabbed me by the arm and wanted me to have a drink from his whiskey bottle. He was hurting my arm and he was too strong for me to break away. I tried to love him, but when I looked into his eyes, it was hate and evil all the way down deep. He was pure evil. I couldn’t love Evil. So I couldn’t love him. I should have … That’s what Jesus wants me to do … I thought. I’ve spent most of my time since then in my room … reading.”
“Hiding in your room isn’t going to change anything,” I said.
“I’m not hiding. I’m making myself ready to give my life to Jesus … not just to God, but to Jesus. I don’t know quite what that is. But I’m trying to find out because that’s what I want to do … That’s all there is to do.”
“Two guys have tried to kill me,” I said.
“Come on! Who would want to kill you?” Carol asked.
“Lots of people. The old drunk who we hired to live with me when I first moved out from home one night beat me up, and then waved a loaded gun at me, threatening to pull the trigger. I was so scared that my body shook all over. I somehow kept yelling and looking straight into his bloodshot eyes. For some reason, he just dropped the police pistol and went to bed, but first he got down on his boy knees beside his bed and prayed.”
“The other time was when I was living at the commune in Santa Fe. That night I was sleeping in the Free Store which was carpeted with four inches of old clothes. I was alone, trying to sleep, ignoring the conga drums outside. This biker who had been staying around for a few days, ‘helping us out’ stumbled in. The Chicanos had beaten him up so many times that his eyeballs were permanently red, which the bottle of Vin Rose didn’t help any. When he saw me lying half-asleep on the floor, he picked up a wooden chair and threw it at me. It landed near my head … so near that for the rest of the night I kept bumping my head. Then the guy started playing with his knife and cursing at me, walking towards me. His blonde girlfriend came in, saw what was happening, and pulled him down on the clothes with his head on her breast, explaining to him that I was ‘that cripple that don’t mean nothin’’. He just cried and finally went to sleep.”
“That’s what I mean,” Carol said, “There are people who are pure evil. It’s impossible to love them … only Jesus can. I can’t, so I avoid them so they won’t tempt me.”
“Why avoid them?”
“Well, didn’t you keep away from the people after you found out what they were?”
“No,” I said. “Maybe because I knew what men were like in the first place. So my ideal vision of man didn’t explode in my face. People aren’t pure … or perfect. Most people are fucked up … more or less. That doesn’t mean they’re evil … maybe there is no such thing as evil … but I don’t think about things like that. I try to see what is real so I don’t get clobbered needlessly or miss some beautiful spark. I am just bullheaded. Do you see?”
Obviously she didn’t, even when she said she did. What I said wasn’t bragging because you don’t brag about being insane. What I did made no sense at all. After the old drunk tried to kill me, I kept living with him, eating burnt, starchy cooking, getting punched every once in awhile. I could have moved back home. Mom and Dad wanted me to. Doomsday. A cracked ceiling. That was why I didn’t move back. But a few months later, I fired the old guy and was back home again … just for a few weeks until I met Moe. I didn’t have doomsday hanging over me when I lived at the commune. I could leave at any time … after the scene with Redeye … after the ransacking of my room … after the bomb … after the Chicano attack. I could move back to California, not to live with my folks or even with Jerry … but with Louise on her Hidden garden, swimming nude, staying high, sleeping peacefully under the stained glass window, waiting for her to sell the place so we could move together back to Santa Fe. But I stayed in the chaos of the commune waiting for Louise to come out … waiting for two months. Why did I stay in chaos when I could have had the desired peace? I don’t know. If I moved back, it would have been admitting defeat inside myself. I had to be right in the middle of things and to be on my own, floating free. The things that were going on around me would have overwhelmed me if I didn’t accept everything, working with it and trying to duck the flying chairs and wine bottles. That was what I was trying to show Carol … that you have got to be idealistic enough to accept people and realistic enough to duck … to do anything with people. A white woman doesn’t walk through a ghetto late at night alone without accepting running into hate … accepting, not expecting. To still take the walk, to still be free, but also protected by seeing reality!!
“I’ve been thinking about going back with you. I want to go and be with you for awhile.” Carol said, driving back to the store, “But I have to be free to go when I have to, be free to do what I want … to do God’s will. Do you understand?”
I grunted sure.
“Mom would worry even more about me than she already does. I just get in her hair, hanging around the house, not doing anything to help, except maybe cooking. She wants me to get a job to meet people and to help support us. But I don’t want a job … I’m quite happy studying about God.”
I made a noise to say, oh yeah? Come off of it. “Sitting home, reading books, saying it’s not the way it looks, lately, you’ve been strong, baby, I think you’re wrong.”
“Well, maybe not happy. If there weren’t so many things in the way … things I’d have to do before we go … if it weren’t for them, I’d go with you right now.”
When we were back in the store, with my board back on, I asked, “What sort of things?”
“First, we’d have to buy the car, and then wait until my brother sends the title from Germany.”
“That’s easy. I could give you the money now and we could be off in two weeks. I should have about $135. I don’t know exactly how much because Moe would just say that the grass is gone.”
“How can you trust me that much? I wouldn’t … I don’t. How do you know I wouldn’t just take the money, buy the car, and then decide I didn’t want to go after all? I won’t do that. If I took your money and promised you to drive you back, I’d do it no matter what. But how do you know that … how can you be sure?”
“I don’t know. Not for sure. But I take risks. If I waited until I was sure, I wouldn’t do anything or go anywhere,” I said, feeling Moe listening to us as he sat reading about Malcolm X.
“Anyways, my brother wants $200 for the car,” Carol said.
Moe dropped the book into his lap and scratched his bushy head. “Excuse me for interrupting your conference, but shithead’s math is about as shitty as his spelling. The grass came to $165 … and I think I forgot to tear up the last three checks … they are someplace around.”
That mother-fucking Shitface jerkhead sap! I was so proud that I had managed to pay him back, had somehow got ten dollars to him the first thing of every month. Louise had understood how important it was; no matter how tight our family’s budget might be … no matter if we ran out of food before the end of the month … the check to D.C. went out. And this asshole didn’t cash them! What a dope! And it was impossible that he got that much for ten lids (we smoked the other three up). After I cooled down, I realized that I couldn’t stop Moe from being the idiot giver. So the money for the car was out of the way … with a little left for traveling expenses … not enough to get us there … but enough to start. Louise would have to send a little more. But Carol still hadn’t made up her mind. She would come back tomorrow, maybe with a made-up mind.