Repost: In Memoriam.

(original posting, september 2009.  So I can feel connected this far away from home during Hurricane Sandy)

Suzette had this raspy voice and a laugh entirely unanticipated. It used to shoot out of her mouth and hit you in your chest then explode up your neck and down your back, cacophonous echo blast of megaphone and hot air.

She worked the Fool the Guesser one stand up from me on the Pier.

In September the tourists went home, it all sort of started when Felix came in early August which was also the time I kicked Kevin out of the house for the PCP. This left us, Suzette and me or the hot Tico Kiki who was way older which then meant like 35, with lots of time to holler back and forth to each other on our mics. Hurricane Felix was a big one and I got on the local news screaming kooks go home--the reporter was on 9th street, three up from us where the old deadhead house was, we learned from them early on where not to buy our drugs. Jerry died that summer, it was almost omen-ic: Deadheads by then couldn't be trusted a lot of them were tweakers, everybody knew. I imagine the reporters edited me out, we didn't have a tv so I never knew. We didn't even know the hurricane was coming. I got off for my afternoon break and came home for a puff or jay and a swim or some food hopefully someone had some otherwise it was soft-pretzels from the Pier for free the only place I could surely get hooked-up. Sparky was the only dude around though, he was a squatter one of those 9th street kids. Besides Black Mike and Little Kid, the only ones still down to hang after I kicked Kevin out, there was Sparky. Sparky I never trusted cuz of the deadhead squatter thing but we still hung cuz my roommate thought he was the shit. He never had anything to offer he just came looking. We had nothing though since Kevin and the boys went, nothing at all. So instead me and Sparky just took a swim and it's the only time I ever remember the Ocean slamming me again and again like a hard wood board. I swam hard but never never got to a place where she was settled and smooth so I could just float and roll. Like I said the Hurricane was coming but we didn't know. No one else was on the beach though! Mom somehow got in touch with me and said to put all the stuff on the floor up so really that just meant my books and music on the lowest shelf. The pots and pans earlier in the summer, since we didn't ever wash them, all got thrown out.

After Felix it was all different. Like I said, then it was just Black Mike who slept on the couch every night and also suggested we each sleep with a little switchblade under our mattress. Which is funny to me now, cuz like cousin Joey says a weapon will end up getting you in even more trouble if you dont know how to use it. And I for one, didn't, no one ever taught me how.

But luckily we never had trouble. Kevin moved out, he and his boys trashed our house broke windows and the outside porch lights and tagged all over all our shit, then Felix came and after that everything changed. The alleys were more quiet, there was a lot more of the large grey sky. And when the sun was out it was ethereal again, funny yellow glow. I didn't know it yet but that was the summer I first started to learn: there are tides that come and they move as one and they bring a certain power all their own, and they effect us all.

And the earth is where and how we learn.

By September it was cool already I had the greatest snaked Hoodie I lived in with holes down at the edge for my thumbs. Everyone was gone. Just 14 years ago, that's all, but OC didn't have the condo weekenders it's so full of now. Even my aunt and uncle and grammy who lived summer here were gone, they had to go home to the county to teach school.

Which meant we ditched 6th street for my family's house at the Pines, the girls and I, because it scared us being alone like that with just the beach rats who were hating on us and the ghosts that we heard again and again--no lie, the old fashioned player piano music or loud foot steps upstairs on the outside deck when for sure no one was there, or even the radios in our house that would go on without reason sometimes. Local folklore said the Broadripple on 14th, and our place too on 6th, were the original Bordellos from back in the day. It was mid-1800's that the town came to be. But Wikipedia says the original Pier burned down in a fire in 1994, which isn't true, the fire happened in the winter of 1995, winter after Felix, I remember because we drove over that winter to see. The fire took Morbid Manor and the waterpark, too; I smoked pot everyday in Morbid Manor in 95 then got to ride the water rides for free since I worked there, ran a betting game for the same guy who did Fool the Guesser, Suzette Kiki and me. And that fire took everything, all that, down. 1995 last of the Pier and the Manor, the Riptide Park and Jerry, too.

So me and Chrissy who worked Morbid Manor and loved a guy, Johnny, started hanging at the Pines. It was cool and vacant in town and I learned all at once to love September, the sheet clear blue sky, the white clouds puffy and bright as a smile. The way the water looked suddenly so navy blue. September, goddamn I learned to love you.

Suzette invited us over for for spaghetti that's how I found out she was into selling and smoking crack. She got arrested later that winter which I learned the same night as I heard about the fire at the Pier. It sucked cuz she had a little one, I dont remember his name anymore he had brown hair with flints of yellow curl, he was three-years-old. Guess he'd be 17 now hope he's not in jail. That night over spaghetti when I first found out about her drug of choice, it was the first time I ever got that gut-twisting sweaty-necked premonition-chill. It was September, the streets were flat and empty but she lived all the way downtown so the air from the inlet was coming off the water and was damp with a terrible cold. The sky was low and hung with thin grey clouds.

Addiction is a hell of a fucking disease.

In September now I come here every year weekend after Labor Day and have a reunion with old friends. Last night we were up to 3, boardwalk, dancing, talking, laughing and lots of quiet on the cool, white sand. Round 2am I walked past sixth street, Kevin is dead, I'm 9 years clean.



Everything is changed. And also, September, the clean earth and shushing sea, is just the same.

O Elvis, when to you I said the Prayer. Chester River Runoff @ Seacrets and other Myths and Dreams.

Mandy and I were in Memphis at Elvis'.  It was 2007 and we were on a 48-hour mission to get to an army base in Texas, I can't remember if Graceland happened before or after we stayed straight where we should've merged and next thing you know wound up in Alabama, or Arkansas, one of the A states not sure which but one otherwise not on our route.  We drove that route-not-really-our-route til the sun went down and purple twilight was everywhere and the road became a single lane, cutting through cotton fields with white puff-drifts breezing along the edges and high and thick in the side of the ditch.  Finally soon after that we were out of the car laughing, laughing so much at the middle of nowhere deep south cotton field that our road laid down before us, laughing and picture-taking and story-telling, a non-stop MandyKelly fury of redbull and flavored mini-cigars.

Mandy and me, before Red Bull existed.  Different Spontaneous Trip.  Domenical, Costa Rica.  Dec 1996.

Later, or before, or at any rate whenever it was that we made it to Elvis', I made an exaggerated deal about Graceland being my wedding gift to her.  It seemed right, it seemed epic, it seemed of the epochs, it seemed mythic as Mandy and I were then and always are to me.  To go visit the house of Elvis, the King, is what I mean.  Neither of us were Elvis fans, necessarily, but both of us found ourselves so moved by his timelessness, by the legacy of him, the specific honey-magic he generated that we were weepy again and again.

Last night Chester River Runoff played here in OC.  They opened for a band called The Electric Company's CD release and the whole thing started with the boys live on Ocean 98 playing the Live Lixx show. 

CRR, On the Big Screen.  Ocean City, April 2011.

In November, at the same big club, in the same corner up near the same stage where we always go Jotto and I were dancing like mad to a typical OC cover band.  I rooted my high-heeled feet down through the hydro-bouncing stage, I loosened my stance in Mountain Pose so my spirit hung gentle and witnessed easy and soft as a wild rose. O heart of moon and ocean, let me reign in with your song,  O mama spirit mama la mar mama la luna, mama the wise earth, o all she holds which is all that is here.  O, Life.  I raised my arms in dance, a dance prayer all dance is prayer and I rolled my eyes and beseeched holy Life, said help me dance this mediocrity away.  I twirled and twirled and twirled and whirled and frenzy danced so much like I love to do with Jen.  Later that night, at Mambo's, while Jott was busy in a textbubble that I was judging her for in a funny laughy way, Nate from the Electric Company walked in I didn't even know original bands existed here then and had never heard of his.  It was enough, that one night talk over the seat booth with him who knew and was friends with Sam, of witty, flirty talk.  Enough to keep me rooted in the deeper life myth, the Call.

Elvis is Here.  Graceland, Dec 2010.

O Elvis.  O ELvis, I said and would have grabbed Mandy's hand had she been standing near, O Elvis, we were there at his gravesight Mandy and me, out back of could be GlnBrnieBrklynPrk Memphis, Tennesee. O Elvis now got me Graceland touched, forever Graceland-bound. I wrapped me, wrapped the self the me that touches the timeless heart the heart of all things, touched in the heart of the emotions we felt, Mandy and me.  O Elvis and the sun shined and there he lay, and it was still and beautiful, O wrap my friends in the same big spirit myth the one you've evoked here today in me.  O Elvis and Angels who looked so happy on him bless them, bless them please. I brought them there, I summoned Walsh then, the boys from Chester River, I summoned The Took and Josh and his Parade, too. 

Rocking Chair.  Ben's Farm, February 2009.

Last night CRR played Molly's song. About too many sunny days and I went up near them close as I could to them, my old tribe of mad genius men, my old friends.  To have with them a moment for her where it was peace.  My friend of the precious wanderer tribe, poet-spirit sister of things too big for this world to see.  They wrote that song before death took her and I was in Oregon when that happened last June and couldn't be part of the ritual Ben and Sam arranged that said goodbye.  They played her song and I closed my eyes and kept them closed for long and let the song be a prayer of thankfulness for it all: and in that time there in Morley Hall with the songs and dance-prayers to follow me the wild grl me came back on me and in my happy bluegrass dancing in my wedge spring high heels I actually was the myth of then, the myth of us the myth of how it all came to be.  Country as hell, country wild as I used to be, I had barefeet and there a great bonfire in the mad brickpit with flames as high as six feet and there tall pine trees and there a stage in front of a late harvest corn field and there middle of the night christmas lights on the tree branches and on the grape arbor hung just so, and there all the music, all my friends, all the fresh grown food the pot luck kitchens the river the naked swimming, there the ever-witnessing big white full moon.  That one solstice at Ben's farms on our backs in her the Chester the river silk and moon milk on our summer tanned river skin. Running in the wild dark and leaping in.  Dancing and hamming and jamming and there two in the morning shadows on the backlit sky,  wooping the wild spirit wild as it used to be, fresh rockfish fresh corn fresh herbs bike rides coffee shops genius madness, poetry, wild as it still is because it Was and all that is is from, always, what used to be.

Goose Blind.  Chester River @ Ben's.  Febraury, 2009.

I thought of Elvis then, and my prayer to him back then for these my sacred friends.  I remembered November, same dance hall different dance--of desperation--the night that I first met Nate when I forgot but he was sent by Life as Reminder all that comes passes, to come back in different ways again.

I blessed Myth then, thought of Mandy and all my precious wild women-grls, I danced some more and loved my friends and loved even more the perfect timelessness in the heart, the Heart of the heart, the heart that lives inside us all and that I am thankful cuz I live it for sure, its gift of livingness inside me.