JHFARR.COM

The other day I realized with a thud how few years I supposedly have left, actuarially and biologically speaking. At least there was a “thud” at first, but then I felt a big weight fall away. It may have been the past.

In terms of my personal tale and moving to New Mexico in ’99, this means I’m finally inside my skin. “My God, what have I done?” has left the building. The guilt and self-abuse that made me small is gone. There’s a wild, expectant energy. A Saturday morning of the soul.

Oh, there was a little help. Besides the matter of my empty corpse—death is where it’s at, I’m telling you—I spent a morning staring at the truth about the old home town, and the little cargo cult thing in my brain burned down. That movie set of memories with no McMansions in the corn fields and all our old friends tan and fit. Green grass, lust, and simple country folk. (I’m in there, too, of course, all fresh and young and full of great potential.) A post-hippie paradise trapped in amber like a pebble in my heart, ouch-ouch-ouch. But what’s the use of such a thing? For all the transformations, I’ve often been a fearful, stubborn man. No wonder we haven’t had more fun or felt more crackle from my awesome talent! As if feeling good and making a success of who and where I am were some kind of betrayal.

But that’s not happening these days. Instead, I feel like I got away with something. You normal people must be shaking your heads, but this is fairly huge for me: always on the lookout for a cozy gig, of course, but all at once, I’m just not torn. No voluntary drawing and quartering. No leaving my entrails stretched across the landscape. Mostly, it feels so good to not be “bad.” (Try to remember that when you reach behind the seat to swat your kids!)

Finally, long-time readers of this blog know that I’ve frequently been obsessed with what is “home.” Understandable for an Air Force brat, I think. With so many places to remember and choose from, how does one proceed? I was on the right track a couple of years ago when I left my wife a note that said something like, “Wherever you and I are together is ‘home’ to me.” She kept it on her dresser for months and months. That’s still true, but now I also think that “home” may be the pot I’m dumped back into when I die. Eek. Or whoa!—I’m not sure which.

At any rate, the thing is settled, sort of. There’s 6 Mbps worth of bandwidth in the old adobe, the woodpile is high, and winter’s coming on. Let’s see what I can gin up next, and thanks for stopping by.

Things were going well enough for Juan del Llano. The passing of his mother, maddened and dangerous in her final years, had smoothed him out and changed his face a little. He used the modest cash from his inheritance to pay off credit cards and spent freely on his needs until the fear of running low set in again.

Somehow it had gotten to be fall. Here and there a battered pick-up truck piled high with firewood crept up or down the road, reminding him of age and freezing. Too soon, he wailed inside. The thought of spending another winter huddled in the old adobe with mice and spiders, crumbling plaster, Taos plumbing, and no room for a goddamned thing was almost more than he could bear—or so he told himself. Taos being Taos and Juan being Juan, however, it had been this way for years.

That night it got cold enough to freeze the bird bath. Juan built a fire in the wood stove, not for the first time that October, but now it made more sense. Suddenly his wife was happy, with her bare feet on the coffee table. Juan plopped down in a comfy armchair with an old-guy groan. He had a cup of coffee, cookies, and his iPad. The cat walked in and sprawled out by the stove. In gratitude and horror, Juan realized that the unseen side of his eternal housing angst was shelter from the storm! In fact, when all the world was locked in snow and ice, the ancient Ashley wood stove raised the temperature to 70 °F in 15 minutes, and the thick mud walls were like a fortress. Nothing rattled when the wind blew—he rarely heard the latter—and he’d sit barefoot in his chair, not two steps from a loving wife who made him coffee every morning while radiators burst and stray cats froze. Without realizing it, he’d gone completely native, and it wasn’t hard at all.

While something of a prize, this made him restless, too. If he wasn’t careful, Juan thought, he’d end up just another gray-haired idiot with a pony tail, shuffling along the Paseo in Birkenstocks with socks, looking for a gallery opening to score free cashews and a little plastic cup of wine… What a cruel town Taos was, where aging hipsters went to die! You had to be clever when resigning from the club, Juan decided 40 years too late. Otherwise, it was like stepping into a hole and coming out when everyone had left. A few days later, the moon rose over the mountain, almost full. In the primal stasis of the bone-dry air, nothing earthly moved or needed to. Juan sat quietly at his desk. Inside the wall or high above the vigas, something gnawed a while and stopped.

Meanwhile on the East Coast, a giant hurricane was bearing down upon the very land he’d left to make a new life in the mountains. He remembered their old house, and all the tricks he’d used to keep them safe from coastal storms. Besides the candles and the food, there were towels and buckets for the porch, a jerry-rigged sump pump in the basement, and storm windows to be lowered when the rain and wind began. He’d even kept a chain saw in the hallway, in case trees fell down against the doors and blocked them in. Juan thought about his friends along the sandy lanes and woodlands of the Eastern Shore. It had been some time since empathy had loosed his memory like this, and he wondered how they were.

By way of contrast, he had only dust and cold and human foibles to contend with, like the time the gas company shut down service at 26 below. (No natural disaster, that.) He had few friends in Taos, either, after 13 years. It seemed that everyone was struggling, and their own narratives—his included—were the only things that mattered. After all, most had come from someplace else and shared no common frame of reference, outside of the adopted one. Juan wondered if his own version of the Taos trip—resigning from America—allowed a man to play a bigger game or put him deeper in the dark. Latinos, on the other hand, could bask inside a culture that had thrived for centuries, and Native life predated Moses. They were rooted in a way the Anglo seekers and retirees could never hope to be.

The next day he and his wife went hiking in the vastness underneath a vault of blue. The air was clean and cool. Suddenly from over the hill, a mountain biker appeared, and they stepped aside to let him pass. (Juan stole a glance back at his wife, bare-headed and beautiful in the sun.)

“Another day in paradise!” the rider called out as he rolled by.

The less he minded that, Juan thought, the better off he’d be, no matter where he was.

For a couple of weeks, I haven’t wanted to do anything. My exhaustion goes all the way to the 90-mile horizon and back. I’m getting plenty of sleep but still want more. Understandable, perhaps, in light of the end of the year-long effort to empty and sell two mobile homes 600 miles away filled with furniture, coupons, family treasures, and crap.

But it’s more than that. You know it is.

I’ve been tensed up forever, just like my old man. Even when he “relaxed,” it made you nervous. He looked out for us, but approval had conditions, and I often wondered where I stood. Sometimes he felt oppressed by fate or circumstances. While the Air Force and his family meant lot to him, he also wanted things he must have thought he couldn’t have. (More rank, respect, another life, another woman?) When I went to college in the ‘60s and declared the rules were obsolete, it hurt him in a fundamental way. One Christmas my sister hit him with astrology on top of going on about the war and scared him half to death. Either would have done it, frankly. When I supported her, he looked at us as if he thought we ought to be committed.

Believe it or not, my parents later sort of tried. They sanctioned lying and abuse from a family shrink to get me to change the way I looked—and presumably believed—even after I was 23 and married. The idiot thought every longhair was a repressed homosexual. His own son committed suicide! He meddled with my draft board and employer (a junior college). There was no one I could turn to.

Emotionally, I had to live like I was on the fucking lam. I got divorced. I ran away to Austin every weekend. My stash was buried by a rock beside the highway 20 miles outside of where I lived, so I could pick it up and drop it off on every trip. I can’t believe they never caught me, zooming down the back roads in my VW bus. The damn past, rising like a mist down in the holler after sunset.

He died at 67, lung cancer raging in his chest—got the news at Christmas, gone by April 10th in 1987. I buried the ashes by myself. My mother lived for 25 more years. We locked her up a year ago until she died on April 3rd. Her ashes are in my pickup truck, but not for long. I’ll tuck the box in the storage unit until I can drive us back to Maryland and dig another hole, underneath the pine tree, where the big stone that says “FARR” lies covered in bird poop and sap.

But it’s over now, all of it. Everything I fought against and ran from. All the shit I had to shovel, all the good times, too. OVER. Sanctified by the ritual of the last 12 months. And none of them can hurt me any more, to state it plainly. This is quite the feeling. On top of that, I feel virtuous as hell, since I also did the hero-good-son thing and cleaned the whole mess up. Physically and administratively, I mean. I was perfect for the role, even the blood on the floor—as if this was why they had me. Imagine that. And now, completely on its own, some unseen business straightens its shoulders and begins to work. This is not at my direction. What does that tell you about the world?

I don’t know why I remembered my father this time. Credit the unseen business. But I feel good. My wife cracked what we can call a “test joke” yesterday and was astonished that I laughed. She needn’t be, but this is what I mean: I can’t believe that I’m still here. I can’t believe there isn’t any test to pass. I can’t believe I’ve never rested, either, without feeling guilty, so no wonder I’m exhausted.

I just can’t believe that everything’s all right.

His wife took one look at it and said, “You’re a screwball!”

The appellation from darkest Iowa in the ’50s was a primal zinger, and he felt it. Why couldn’t she have landed on “visionary,” he pouted?—albeit in a manly way. It was one of the most manly things he’d ever done, in fact, renting the giant roll-off dumpster, even if it was the smallest one they had. Juan del Llano could hardly believe his eyes: the sucker was so…industrial, that was the word! Just the thought of having the beast under his command for the next few days made his testicles swell with pride.

He’d rented it the day before, maddened by fear of never completing the clean-out of the old lady’s double-wide and having to stay in Arizona forever. No one could survive that, so something had to break, and did. The expense was ridiculous, true, but the estate would pay, and his share of that was only a fourth. With less than a week left to empty the trailer, the mere fact of the dumpster changed everything. Screwball, eh?

“Just look at that! I could put a car in there! No, TWO!”

“Three,” she spat darkly.

Oh, perfidy of truth. With Fiat 500s, perhaps. And then his thought processes shut down: faced with the looming maw of steel, a blind urge to FILL the emptiness consumed him completely. There was already a pile of trash under the carport, so that went first. Old boards, odd pieces of metal, vases and jars clattered into the bin. Unidentifiable plastic parts, an old toolbox, dead lamps, and magazines. It was 103 °F, but what did he care? The living room closet was next: in less than 10 minutes, he utterly killed it. Umbrellas! The old slide projector! A broken antique cuckoo clock! Vacuum cleaner parts! Soon he was pitching things over the side just to hear how they crashed.

He paused for a moment—beginner’s mistake—and saw there was still room for their car, a large diesel tractor, and maybe a blimp. The cognition poisoned his mania, and suddenly he heard a voice:

“You’re never going to live this down,” she smirked.

WHAT?!? Oh, right. A prophet in his own land, yada-yada. But the sun was sinking slowly in the west, and it was time for tequila. The Cuervo Tradicional was almost an afterthought following three glasses of lemonade (103, remember), and he staggered outside again, unable to rest.

The dumpster’s heavy steel sides were still too hot to touch. Must weigh 10,000 lbs empty, Juan thought to himself. By now he knew that filling it was impossible, but at least it was there. Whatever he couldn’t pack or persuade the Salvation Army to take would go over the side and vanish forever. The sucking sound in the back of his brain was the past disappearing down a black hole, back into the Void, whence cometh all evil and joy. It wasn’t a question of whether he’d ever finish, more like don’t stand in the way.

The future needed fertilizing, anyway, and he was just the man for the job.

UPDATE, 5-18-2012: My God, it’s almost full!