A Tale of Two Cities: DMV

A Tale of Two Cities: DMV

I was dreading it.

My last day at the farm before going back to LA and I discovered I have to go to the DMV and get registration tags.

All the stuff I had to get done, clearing out a my new living quarters in a day and a half, pack and try to go to the DMV?!?!

Well, no one to whine to about it, except my very understanding dog.

Heave sigh, move on.

Anyone in any city feels my pain, the DMV is the poster child for slow and surly service and long eternal waits in uncomfortable chairs.

I walked in to the Ontario Oregon DMV with a knot of stress in my stomach, push the red button to get a number, 98.

I looked around and there is nobody there.

Well, almost.

One person walked away from the service counter and the one in the chair gets up, he was waiting for the one person at the counter. There was a woman taking a written test.

No one called my number, instead she smiled a big smile and waved me over “Hey Hon, need some help?”

I resisted the urge to look around and point to myself in a comic manner and scurry over with happiness.

She is smiling and sweet and efficient and in about two minutes I had everything I needed and am ready to go. She even knew my family and told me how everyone at the DMV thought my Uncle was just adorable.

As I drove back to the farm, I looked at the clock and realized that in LA this would have been rush hour, there is no rush hour here.

Some things about small town life are awesome and the DMV is now on the awesome list.

I consider this a good omen for my future here—I welcome more such pleasant surprises.

Like the grocery store has finger-steaks at the deli counter.

What are finger steaks, you may be thinking?

Regional cuisine is a topic for another day.

Stay tuned.

Potholes and Stains on Memory Lane.

This place is full of memories.
The cherry tree my cousin and I used to sit in for hours, poised like gibbons to chatter and eat cherries until we were sick to groaning with stained lips and fingers.
My childhood dirtpile.
Imagination games with imaginary rabbits and talking critters in the tall trees where now only rotting stumps remain.

Plastic and silk flowers dustily honor ancestors in a lacquered shrine. 

Wood taps gong and fills the silence until that tiny moment it is gone. 

Memories of a child trying to summon a dead grandfather, quickly spinning around to see him before the tiny moment ended and the spell was gone.

Ghosts of root cellar and gardens grown over crumbled talcum powder dirt.

Sometimes the memories drive by you on the street but sometimes the other way around. 

Ivanohoe Road is a place I have driven by for 27 years.

I say “driven by” because I have not driven down it since 1984 and only this spring did I ride down it, later I drove it by myself and it wasn’t so bad.

Tonight was the first time I have driven that road at night since 1984 the night before my prom of my Junior year.

The night of the Junior Senior Banquet.

I was a different person then.

Of course, we are always different in our youth but what made me different then was not about age, the passing of time or fashion it was what happened on this night.

There have been two moments in my life that the universe somehow decided to teach me massive life lessons on a multitude of levels in a very short span of time. This is the second of those moments.

Lesson One: There are no guarantees.

The morning of that day, a very sweet friend experienced a teen tragedy, her boyfriend, her first real boyfriend had dumped her the day before prom and was taking some other girl with similar hair but apparently less scruples and friend was weeping.

We girls huddled around our friend like good friends do and like good friends do, worked on a solution.

Two of us skipped class (a hobby) and went to the house of a cute OLDER guy with a HOT CAR and explained the situation, within about 15 minutes went back to school with a date for our friend.

She was over the moon.

Tragedy-to-triumph. Fifteen minutes.

Happy days are here again.

After the Junior Senior Banquet, we were all heading out to Cow Hollow (yes really) for a big boozy blow out bash of epic proportions. I had switched cars with some boys since there were four of them, including THE DUMPER and three of us girls so we were driving another boy's pick up truck. We had been across the border to Idaho where the drinking age was 19 and the oldest looking of us had bought our usual starter kit for three teen girls in a small town: A bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 for each of us (I personally preferred the white grape) and a case of beer to split, to start off the night.

Booze is a hobby in ruralopolis, it goes so nicely with the other hobbies of fist fights and remorseful intercourse.

We had had some of the booze and were driving along having a fine time when our newly TRIUMPHANT friend whizzes by our little convoy with some of our other friends hooting and hollering and we cheer back because we know she is going to pass THE DUMPER with the boys ahead of us. We honked and waved.

Tragedy-to-triumph. Fifteen seconds.

It was all over.

Life as an after-school special.

She swerved in front of the boys, and her truck went off the road into a field, a common accident in a rural area, we all get out of our cars, laughing and running in the dust, ready to find a farmer with a tractor to help us just like our own dads help people out of our fields.

Still life with nightmare.

The dust is everywhere and our laughter is silent when we see the flotsam of wreckage all over the road and the bodies strewn everywhere. We hear moans and cries and a cold  hand grips my heart as the dust clears and we see..hell.

Or something hellish. Maybe it is just the hell in my head but there it stays.

In a city a call would be made and help would come in a few minutes but we were on a dark country road far, far from a town or hospital. Before cell phones and people still had party-lines. The time it took you to read that was much longer than the fraction of time before action occurred and lesson two began.

Lesson Two: You cannot predict who will freak out in an emergency.

The big blonde football hero? The guy who went on to be a doctor? Freaked out and became hysterical and screaming and drove off with my car like a maniac, my car with blankets, a pillow, a jacket. Things I resented not having later.

The big blonde football hero? The guy who went on to be a doctor?

THE DUMPER.

The rest of us bee-lined to people, I cannot explain why who went to who but we were each pulled in different directions, there was no discussion. One friend went for help at a farmhouse. There were six people in the truck. No seat belts.

The Prom Queen: Broken femur and a strip of skin the size of a large band-aid was missing from the middle of her beautiful forehead. She was the magically movie star beautiful daughter of a migrant worker family and had been a surprise victory election.

The Class Clown: Extreme shock, wandering the area with a dazed smile and about half of her head was scalped, the blood running in horrific rivers wending a macabre border around her large smile.

The Class Flirt: Extreme shock, walking about with a small hand injury, generally a person talking constantly is silenced and dazed.

The Best Athlete: Broken pelvis and internal injuries indicated by rapidly distended abdomen.

The Assistant Yearbook Editor: Broken pelvis, extreme traumatic head injury, coma, permanent brain damage of a massive nature, leaving him with the mental age of a 9 year old and a completely different personality.

The Triumphant Friend: Massive contusions, abrasions, broken bones and near complete detachment of mandible, snapped spine from being propelled through sun-roof. Died instantly.

I was taking care of our Best Athlete, I had to hold her down, I could tell she had internal injuries because her flat trim stomach was swelling to the point I had to unzip her pants. She was in incredible pain and wanted to stand, wanted to find out about the others.  The lower half of her body was angled in an odd way. Something was very wrong. I spent the hour and more convincing her it was the pain clouding her perception, only a few minutes had passed, the ambulance was almost here, almost here, almost here.

Why were they not here?

Almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here.

Some facts.

The first, the truck had run off into the field but our friend had panicked and spun the wheel to drive back on the road, her bumper hit the irrigation ditch and the truck rolled end over end, flinging people and property in all directions.

The second, we had no idea our friend Triumphant was dead, we had each taken turns going over to her and spending time talking to her so she wasn’t alone. 
We all swore later we saw her breathing but they told us later she died instantly. Which is a mercy since half of her face, her beautiful sweet face with it’s kind smile and small dimple was gone and she lay in a large pool of blood, so large it ran across the spanch of country asphalt. When I spent my time with her, I tried so hard not to let it show that I wanted to scream, I kept my voice calm and soothing and told her the ambulance was coming


almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here. 


I sat with my friend under the starry sky and told her a story while unbeknownst to me I was telling myself a fiction as well.

We all swore later we could see her breathing.

The third, we only thought there were five people in the car.

The Assistant Yearbook Editor was in the back of the truck and we didn’t see him as the truck hollered by. We all ran to someone but no one ran to him until at least an hour had passed and one of us heard snorting. An animal? What makes a noise like that, we wondered aloud to each other. The noise grew louder and more pronounced, and he was found face down in the dirt way back in the field. He had been thrown from the truck when it went into the field, he hit a telephone pole and landed far away from the rest of the group, who were all on the road farther down.

We were waiting and waiting and no sign of an ambulance, someone went back to the farmhouse, they had thought it was a drunken joke and hadn’t called. They looked out the window and finally picked up the phone.

THE DUMPER came squealing back demanding to know where SHE was and why no one was here, the guy who had gone with him to handle his crazed self continued to handle him and calmed him down.

An ambulance finally came, an EMT asked me what was wrong with The Best Athlete and I told him, emphasizing her internal injuries and rapid swelling. When the ambulance left without her, taking the two who had been walking around and The Assistant Yearbook Editor but leaving my friend Triumphant on the asphalt, I grew angry but told my charge that the other ambulance was on it’s way.

Almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here.

A boy I once loved but who no longer spoke to me in that way that teen dramas unfold was in this group of teen triage givers. He spoke to me that night for the first time in three years, softly with kinds eyes he mouthed to me over our injured friend so she would not hear “She’s gone.”

I looked at him and he helped me not to cry and I took a breath and turned back to my friend on the ground, we had found a blanket in my returned car and put it over her.

Almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here.

Then people began to arrive, curious onlookers and with them arrived my next lesson.

Lesson Three: You never really know people until you do and then you can’t un-know them.

More people arrived on the scene as we waited with our friends, keeping them calm and warm as we shivered, coats and extra layers of clothing went to cover the ones in need.

A girl I knew well, a nice girl, a popular girl, a girl who went to church piously and later married in the temple, a virtuous girl, from pillars of community who would aspire to pillar-hood herself,  with perfect 80’s feathered hair perfection tapped me on the shoulder and blinked her big blue innocent eyes at me and I noticed a sparkle that looked hungry and I heard her say in her loud clear varsity cheerleading voice “Is anyone else dead?”

I looked at her and resisted the urge to slap that hungry sparkle off of her face because my friend was screaming below me, she heard and wanted to know who was dead. I lied for the millionth time that night so she would lie still and not claw and struggle to stand, her strangely bent body straining painfully gave in to my fiction an I added another since I was already in to this reality I had painted.

Almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

She was relatively calm until the ambulance took her away with the remaining injured.

Once we were off the clock, we unraveled and the hours of keeping it together melted and we shook and screamed and clung to whoever was there, clung to them like life-rafts.

The rest was a blur of tears and shock as all of us were forced to attend the prom in some idea of us needing to be together, a dans macabre of an extreme nature as people in formalwear wept under streamers. I found my prom picture from that night, I look like a zombie, with a blank dis-associative stare and my date looks sweaty and uncomfortable, like he wanted to run. The prom queen was in intensive care, the prom court dance was a circle of people sobbing. I remember hating anyone I saw having any sort of fun and I hated each anew months later when the yearbook came out and I saw pictures of anyone kissing or smiling.

The last time I saw the Best Athlete was at the yearbook signing, she had been in the hospital all summer, we weren’t told how to see her in fact we had been told she didn’t get visitors, neither did our Assistant Yearbook Editor, he was in a coma for along time and then had rehab. He was in my class and Senior year for us was strange and sad, he wasn’t the same and he knew it and was sometimes angry. He went from being bookish and nerdy to being a cholo and wearing a bandanna on his head and talking slang and his eyes were not the same intelligent eyes but dull and angry and so sad.

The saddest shade blue I have ever seen.

 He was able to sign my yearbook but it didn’t make a lot of sense and his handwriting was shaky but it was the closest to how he used to be and never will be again. His other self.

She signed my yearbook just her senior picture with “Love, _______” her name. I never saw her again. I think about her often, I wonder what happened to her, I knew she had lost her athletic scholarship. A reminder of the first lesson about guarantees and their fickleness, I suppose.

There were lawsuits and surgeries and a funeral. I learned things about friends and greed I can never un-know. It still makes me sad.

There was a brief rural legend that THE DUMPER ran to my friend TRIUMPHANT and held her in his arms as she died, which made a lot of us who knew the truth rather angry, I recall.

Some people stopped drinking and driving. Some for a month or two, I might be the only one who has never done it since. Ever. I will take someone’s keys in a heartbeat because I know that is all the time it takes to stop theirs or someone else’s.

My valley is filled with memories and memories of many others who died this way before and after and yet nothing seems to change.

I walked with an old friend tonight in the dusky hours down a hill and around a bend and she pointed and said “Cow Hollow just isn’t the same, the grass is long and no one takes care of it.” 

I realized I never made it there that night of hard lessons and I had never been there since, it looked small. Barely a park.

I never spoke to the nice pillar of the community girl with the hungry sparkle again, which is hard to do in a small high school of less than 300 but I knew I had nothing to say that was nice to nice girl so I said nothing. 

Tonight my friend told me a tale and part of the tale told of nice girl’s compassion in recent years and tonight I chose to forgive her words and her hungry sparkle.

Tonight I drove down Ivanhoe Road at night for the first time in 27 years, I wasn’t sure if I would know the spot until the strong sense of panic washed over me and my breath came faster and I gripped the wheel even though I had slowed down to maybe 20 miles per hour. Then it was gone. 
The dread about that road. 
The anger toward hungry sparkle. 
The fear of driving at night left about ten years ago. 
The nightmares are only every few years now.  


I see now I will have my life to learn all the lessons from that night, a new one washed over me as I went on a walk later with my dog to try and wrap my head around finally writing this story.

Lesson Four: Time does not heal all wounds but the scars are almost invisible except in certain light.

Tonight I said hello to an old friend and goodbye to some old feelings that I no longer need and the stars in the sky look especially bright for some reason and I think this story is done, finally and the book can close it’s tattered cover and rest. 


I hope others will share this story with anyone they thinks needs to hear it. If this story stops one person from driving drunk or getting in a car with someone or gives them the courage to take those keys, well it is still not worth living the story but it will feel a little less wasteful.
Peace.

A Night On The Town!!

Last night I drove to the town of Emmett Idaho to meet with someone I haven’t seen since 1980 or so, we went to junior high together for a year before I moved in with my dad and re-acquainted recently over Face-meh-book and discovered we have something in common besides Hillside Jr. High—we are both LIBERALS *GASP * ((cue ominous music))

In a way it is a little like a scene from Logan’s Run where Logan finds someone else  who is over 29  and who’s life jewel has gone out *Ally* ((Look around)) *Whisper *  ((RUN!!!))

SANCTUARY!!

Well, not quite but I am known for an active imagination.

It gets a little lonely in my head.

Out here, it’s very quiet. Just me and some birds.

Real ones, not the angry ones.

So back to the story.

Emmett Idaho is about 30+ miles from where my family lives, it’s nestled in a valley and surrounded by a lot of fruit orchards, the occasional hop field (Where the beer fairy gets beer from, don’t you know) and random dairy farm. When I set out on my trip, I of course checked the yahoo map to make sure I was going to the right place, I hadn’t been to Emmett since the 2^nd grade for a field trip to an apple orchard. I don’t know why I felt the city person’s need to check technology, like all the places out here, there are many signs to tell you where to go, you just look for arrows labeled “Emmett” and take it from there, silly me.

I had forgotten something about this valley and it didn’t hit me until I turned onto rural route 72 that I HAD been here one other time, my mid 20’s on a motorcycle ride with a boyfriend from my high school days, we went skinny dipping one hot summer afternoon out in a secret swimming hole.  We had a summer fling and he wanted to follow me to the city and I that’s when realized it was only a fling to me. 

I broke his heart and went back to my city life then forgot our romantic outing until this moment.

Amazed at my poor memory and callousness, I drove on and wondered if he remembered that day.

Coincidentally, I had just run into him the other day while standing on a corner talking to an old friend from high school, a truck drove by and the driver made eye contact with me and said my old name.

It was him.

He is married now with kids and a camper and a boat, no hair and smile lines around his big brown eyes. I have always been a sucker for big brown puppy dog eyes. 

They say you can’t escape your past and in a small town it is especially true, your past can drive or walk by at any moment.

But back to the present, or at least back to last night.

I make my way to Emmett driving down memory lane and then taking a left at the light to the karaoke bar. My friend and her boyfriend were going to meet me there after the cherry festival bands stopped playing and I was excited to go in and sing some songs on my own, I love karaoke and will go to bars in LA by myself and sing the night away.

I walk in and am hit by a wall of cigarette smoke. Of course, independent Idahoans would not allow a government law telling them where to smoke, how could I have forgotten?

I find a stool at the bar near the open door and order a gin and tonic.

The bartender is dressed in a black shirt and tie with a cute porkpie hat and a ponytail, he looks like a guy I know in LA, he stands out in the crowd of flannel shirts (men and women), baseball hats (men and women), and moustaches (men and women). The bartender looks at me in that Idaho way that says “hello stranger, you aren’t from these parts, are you?” all in a glance, I am familiar with that glance, something about 25 years of city living has marked me and even when I try and blend in, I am not from here to them so I don’t try anymore. He then hands me my gin and tonic ($3.50, suck it Los Angeles!)which brings tears to my eyes and not because of the price but because it is basically a tumbler full of gin with a tiny splash of tonic. I sign up to sing some Patsy Cline and a little Dolly Parton, order a coke to help me gag down my drink and survey my surroundings.

So much flannel. I notice people noticing me, not staring but that glance and I feel a feeling I have not felt in a long time, that feeling of being the Lone Asian.

Like the Lone Ranger but less heroic.

It’s not a bad feeling just one I haven’t felt in a very long time.

Sort of like being the two-headed calf at the Boise History Museum you know people are looking but you’re used to it, it’s as natural feeling as the second head.

My name is called, well, sort of she pronounces it “Po-zhjoe” and I hear echoes of

“Po-zhjoe?”  

“Po-zhjoe?”  

“Po-zhjoe?”

“Po-zhjoe?”

 As I walk up to the tiny lighted stage with brown shag carpeted walls. The two-headed “Po-zhjoe” sings and I feel another familiar feeling, the one that transcends species or heads I know my voice is good and I know it is always surprising for people to hear a soulful country belt come out of my two headed cow Asian person.  It is a magical spell I always enjoy casting. I leave the stage to applause and now it’s “Po-zhjoe!!”

Now here is where my night gets interesting.

As I head back to my stool near the precious oxygen of the open door, I see an enormous bear shaped-man has taken my seat and put my coat on the bar. I think to myself “Oh, boy.” Try and look friendly but not too friendly and reach for my drink and my coke-down-the-drink-soda and say “Excuse me” meanwhile another man, much thinner with a leathery quality sits down to my left so I am basically the filling in a very awkward sandwich.  The bear man lets me know he has rescued my coat from the floor and I thank him. I move to leave and he and his buddy say “Sit, sit, we’re all friends!”

So I sit.

I introduce myself to them, the mountainesque fella is named Dave and his friend mumbles so much I can’t tell what his name is so I will call him Mumbly for our purposes. Dave goes to talk to someone and Mumbly and I begin to chat, we talk about rodeos, how Nyssa’s really sucks now “They just don’t have the draw anymore, they can’t afford a carnival.” says Mumbly and he feels Vale has one of the best rodeos. I tell him I haven’t been to Emmett since I was a kid and he talks about how pretty it used to be and how it is full of lead and poison nowadays, I am beginning to like Mumbly, his teeth like a fine aged oak, he cares for the environment, has good taste in rodeos and I can tell he loves his town. 

I notice over his shoulder a booth of very drunk women with matching blonde over processed long hair and tight, tight jeans of varying sizes.

The drunkest and tiniest is wearing a tiny tube top and I realize she has “The Look”.

Now to folks not from the region, “The Look” is when a person is boozed up and wants to indulge in one of the more popular sports in our area, a fight.

Yes, women enjoy fist-fights as much as men and in my wild youth I admit I did indulge in a few.

More than a few, to be totally honest.

I haven’t been in a fist fight since 1985 when my most excellent right hook downed an intruder in my dorm who had just attacked a friend, to the impressed cheers of all the Alaskan boys who watched. I took a vow of non-violence shortly afterward but I am well acquainted with “The Look”

I hear her slur to her friends “No one will fight me” and make a mental note to steer clear of Slurry-Tube-Top.

Dave comes back and smiles at me and I smile back, he says the words every girl longs to hear in a bar “So, are you a lesbian, or what?” I am tempted to lie and say “Yup, Dave” and tell him some tale of my wife and our cats or to confuse him with my stock answer of “Well, I like dorky boyish men and dorky boyish women, but mostly I like the men” but that would probably just confuse him and who knows how Dave feels about lesbians or the ambisexual, so I keep it simple and go with “Or what.” and laugh "HAHAHAHAHA!" 

Dave smiles and after a brief pause pulls out his best line of the night “Are you a man?” and I say “Well, you ARE a smooth one, Dave! Does that line get you a lot of action?” He gives me his suave look and grins his textured British-tribute-toothed grin and says “Well I figured I should find out before I ask you to dance.”

Now who can turn down a line like that?

Certainly not this hippy, that’s for sure.

So Dave takes my hand in his meaty paw and leads/drags me to the dance floor, which is really a small space beside the pool table and we swing dance. Dance is a loose term, it is more like he swings me about while music plays and slams me roughly into his island-like-torso, my spleen groans and my spine threatens to herniated but I manage to smile and look somewhat graceful as we play a sort of musically accompanied person-and-bumper-car performance piece. 

I wonder if I might have whiplash as the music ends and I stagger back to my stool with Dave to rejoin my awkward sandwich.

Mumbly is there and all is right with the world until Slurry-Tube-Top gets a look in her eye and weaves her way over to Mumbly and though he and I are sitting very close, she shoves her ass in between us and leans into his face to rub his neck and whisper sweet nothings into his ear as she burns me with her cigarette, I brace my feet on the stool and lean as far as I can to give her denim-strangled-buttocks more room which of course makes Dave think I want to ride the Matterhorn. 

I am literally stuck between a rock and a hard place. 

I realize that all of these people are friends with my friends who have yet to show up, so I curb my instinct to tell Slurry-Tube-Top to get her butthole off of my arm and stop burning me with her smokes and instead grab my drinks and slide out and into an empty booth. “VICTORY!” I think to myself as I slide into slightly less smoky-burny-horny-creepy seating.

SANCTUARY!!

I relax and look again at the room, I see an enormous woman slow dancing with her tiny leathery boyfriend and they look happy and in love, I am jealous.

I wonder if I will ever be in love again, will I dance in smooth rhythm with someone and have him look at me like this tiny man looks at his lady. 

I sigh and gag down my drink.

I see the booth next to mine filled with patrons in their 80’s matching flannel, moustaches and ball caps men and women sharing a pitcher. A woman sings “Me and Bobby McGee” and I feel connected to my fellow patrons as we all wince in pain and clap politely, acknowledging that she did her best and grateful it’s over as is the way of karaoke.  I think of  all the short stories, plays and screenplays this night is inspiring when the other bartender, a beautiful Latina woman with that efficient calm that all female bartenders over 40 seem to have no matter what town or city comes and asks me if I need a refill, I ask for another coke and when she brings it back she refuses my money. Dave waves at me and smiles his mosaic smile and I realize he has given me a gift. He slides into the booth and we start chatting awkwardly when Slurry-Tube-Top walks by and asks for a light. Dave invites her to join us and the thought of being trapped next to her ass and penchant for burning me is more than I can bear. I tell her I am about to go up and sing and I need to sit on the outside “I’m naaaaaah gonnna to fuckin’ get trapped in that hoooooooooole back there!” she slurs at me and tries to shove her ass into the booth onto my lap and force me over. I repeat myself, then just get up and take my drink back to the bar.

An hour has gone by and I consider that it has been one of the most action packed nights I have had in a while.

My friend arrives with her boyfriend in tow and they are wearing tie-dye and I cannot tell you how happy it made me. It’s the simple things. 

SANCTUARY!!

Oh, Tie-dye what a sight for sore eyes!

We start chatting away and then it is that thing that occurs when you talk a lot with a person online and then meet them IRL and the only difference is you are hearing each other’s voices, I am totally at ease. Her boyfriend is equally warm and witty and we have ourselves a great chat. As I suspected they know Dave and Slurry-Tube-Top, I don’t know about Mumbly as he and Slurry had some sort of falling out and he left, seemingly to get away from her.

Like I said, I like the way Mumbly thinks.

We talk, laugh, sing and are the last ones out of the bar and as I drive home I think about the night, how things are not always what they seem, we are indeed all connected and if you get past a wary glance you sometimes make friends. Though I doubt Slurry-Tank-Top and I will ever be close and Dave is moving to Tri-Cities so our great romance will never begin.

 I am coming home for a longer stay in the fall and you can bet I will be making that memorable drive again.

Country roads really do take you home.

A sticky situation.

I need to say some words about bumper stickers, America’s favorite method of political  salon: on the ass of a car where no one can have an actual dialogue, you just shove your ass/bumper/views in their face and drive off, tra-la-la-la-la.

I still have my Nadar/LaDuke bumper sticker on my car.

I am frequently amused by the fish wars, like the great crusades of the middle ages but with stick on fish on car asses. First came the standard Jesus fish, then the Jesus fish with symbols, then the 90’s came and brought us something to balance out the gloom of grunge—the Darwin fish with it’s tiny legs and “Darwin” inside. So clever, so funny and so inflammatory to the religious right,  Darwin fish caused angry honking, car defacement as many a poor Darwin fish was pulled off  of cars leaving chipped paint in the name of God. Then came my favorite fish of all, the religious retaliation fish, a huge fish that sometimes says “Truth” or “Jesus” eating a tiny Darwin fish. Why is it my favorite, you might be wondering? Because the retaliation fish is actually supporting Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory by showing the big fish eating the small fish as well as the adaptation of zealots in bumper sticker expressionism.

Always makes me laugh.

Recently I saw a bumper sticker that did not make me laugh. 

It actually caused a knot in my stomach.

Now I am not bumper sensitive, I have seen the various anti-abortion stickers, with or without sad fetus, with or without a promise of hellfire blah-blahde-blah. I can certainly “Visualize whirled peas” and keep driving.

But this new sticker cannot be washed away by clever words about peas.

I feel I must bring this sticker to the attention of people.

This sticker has a picture of President Barack Obama and next to his image it says

“Re-Nig 2012”

Yes.

It really does.

They are creeping into town, on the highway, the backroads of our country like the covert racism stuffed away since the 60’s hidden with polite smiles and PC terms that has bubbled to the surface with the election of an articulate, intelligent man who happens to be half black and become overt racism. 

Like a boil, it is ready to pop.

Red, swollen and angry.

Like the GOP.

Believe it or not, a person who owned one of these repugnant stickers actually tried to tell me it wasn’t racist.

Yes.

Really, he did.

So I asked him “If this sticker is not racist, then what does it mean?”

“Well, we want to take back the country,” He says “it’s not racist, it’s a joke.”

“How is this a joke?” Says I.

“Well, see it’s like re-negotiate” says he.

“So why is it spelled with an I instead of an E for re-nEgotiate?”  I inquire.

“Well, it’s a joke, see.” He repeats lamely.

“Well, to most folks it LOOKS like you are calling the president a racial slur that starts with NIG, can you see how folks could see that?” I say

“Well, people need to learn to take a joke” he says indignantly and walks away.

Just because you call something a joke does not make it funny. I know a lot of people, myself included who don’t think that is a joke in any way in fact some of those people might like to kick mister bumper sticker in the nutsack and ask him if he thinks that is a joke.

The problem with an area like the one I have grown up in is most folks here do not know anyone who is black. They only see black people on TV and since a large part of what the media portrays is stereotypical that is in turn what a lot of people perceive as actual fact. 

When a person is deemed “other” it is easier to dehumanize, to make that person or group into a “them” and then it is easier to treat “them” in ways that person would never treat someone they knew or tolerate receiving from someone else.  When you know a person and look them in the eye, they are real and you can see how your actions affect that person by what is reflected back in those eyes.

People who do not have words used as weapons or tokens of shame do not understand how deep the visceral ripple goes for people who have, plain and simple.

When I was in the 4^th grade I was visiting my family’s farm for weekend visitation with my dad and a neighbor girl and I would always play together when I was there, there was no one else our age to play with and we always had a good time, I knew her family and she mine, we had slumber parties, built club houses, rode motorcycles and made mud pies. 

It was always a blast.

 Until this day when I was in the 4^th grade, you see my friend from across the way brought a friend to play a girl from town who she knew from school, they almost looked like sisters with their blonde hair and green eyes and smiling faces. The more the merrier, we strode off to the large irrigation canal behind the house and we decided to go in, it was fall and the water was long gone, we had already had our annual mud fight down there and now it was bone-dry with a sprinkling of shells from the little bivalves that seem to love irrigation ditches here. We played with shells, dug for clay, looked at nests and it was good clean all American fun on the farm. 

We played for hours and then decided to get out of the canal and my friend went first and helped the girl from town out and I reached up my hand and she pulled hers away and let go, I fell back and looked up at them, a little dazed and they looked down on me, smiling like little twins.

They smiled as they spat on me. 

They laughed as they threw dirt clods at me and called me “Jap”.  

It went on for some time, and I could tell it was my friend’s idea and that the girl from town was the follower, I looked at girl from town and asked her to help me, tears streaming down my face as I pleaded for them to let me out and to stop and she looked down at the ground and stopped smiling.

 So did my neighbor and she prodded her friend “Come on, it’s just a joke, it’s FUNNY” they looked down at me and my old friend spat at me one last time and led her shamefaced-twin towards her house to play some more. 

I stood there shaking with rage and climbed up and went in the house, alone.

To this day when I think of humiliation, powerlessness and shame, I remember this fall day.

Some people in this country have kept the cruelty of childhood and think things like

 “RE-NIG 2012” are funny.

I have no answer to this situation other than to say out loud when I see it that it is wrong, it is cruel and I do not think it is in any way a joke.

Once when I was traveling in the deep south, I saw a pair of trousered bare feet dangling out of the back of a car’s trunk on the highway, as we got closer we felt sick as we saw the feet, though plastic were a dark brown and we knew they were a response to the news of the month about an African-American man who had been dragged to death in Texas. We pulled alongside the car and flipped them the bird and shouted.

I know it didn’t change their minds but it felt necessary to voice that it was not funny it was not right and it was in fact disgusting.

I know this post will not change the mind of the man with the bumper sticker but I also know I must voice that this too was not a joke.

It was not right.

It was not nor will it ever be anything but disgusting.

I see the neighbor who spat on me in town and I wonder if she remembers that day at all as a flock of birds fly overhead and the big sky clouds roll by in the never ending show that only appears here and I wonder if anything will truly ever change.

Spontaneous Rhyming on FB part one:

So I started with one line on my status today and was encouraged by an old friend from my TV news days to keep going and so I did. I polished it up and added a bit for my blog friends and here it is for you to enjoy. Please imagine a portly gent in flannel who has  less teeth than fingers playing beatbox as I rhyme  just for atmosphere in your brain:

Spontaneous Liberal Rant/Rhyme on FB:

Whining about Weiner because I am bitter about Vitter.

Smart man shows his junk leaves the world in a funk because spineless Dems kow-tow and made him a quitter.

Ain’t that a shitter?
Vitter there he sits on the senate floor

Checking priceline for his whore

Nobody hollers ‘bout his using time or dollars

of constituents while he tries to rent

some vagina on company time.

Committing a crime.

Because it’s family values time!

Now I’m Mocking on the Bachmann and I'm railin' on Palin'

got an itch to bitch about Newt Gingrich

and I wish I were funnin' but Santorum is runnin'

I got a fix on his frothy mix

he spray papooses with his anal juices

and you need a tube for all that lube

we need a quorum on Santorum

runnin’ down your leg

Uncle Sam! WHAM!

mister you might be in an assload of jam.

And if you a Muslim he make you eat ham.

If you are gay better pray for the day of election to spank his erection

For power over your love cuz he thinks God above

Gave him power to shove your rights

All the way to Uranus. Fucking heinous.

Now Boy-eee! You better-

Hit the deck here comes Beck ---Cryin’
‘bout his ratings while people are dyin’

drink an orange crush

throw it at Rush

Limbaugh

watch fatty run like my mee-maw

to her trailer to watch hee-haw

if we really want to be failin'

elect Donald Trump and his ho-dee-oh dee-oh Sarah Palin

OAK TREE!

Lady got a wooden head and Donnie’s hair is well fed.

Maybe Mitt and Michele will save us from hell
but only if they ain’t elected
That meat is stinky it wasn’t inspected.

E-COLI can I get a holla hole in my colon?

There’s no way of knowin’ if my tumor is growin’

‘cause healthcare is for COMMIES.

Peace out (of the middle east)

Running away wee-wee-wee all the way homophobia and back again.

We small town folks who leave home for the “big city” do so for many reasons, some of us leave because we want to see the world, some of us are artists and feel a city has more to offer us creatively and professionally, some of us seek diversity of ideas and ethnicity while others merely seek freedom, freedom of thought and expression. Whatever the reasons we small town refugees seek refuge in the cities of the world looking for something different than what our native land offers us.

We surround ourselves with like minded people who become both friends and family of choice, artists in the city are familiar with the terms “Orphan’s Christmas, Orphan’s Thanksgiving, orphan’s Easter, Orphan’s Passover” we soon discover that holidays with other orphans are often far more peaceful than when we brave elements and distance and travel back to our tiny nests.

In a way we are runaways, whether we fly, bus or drive—we have chosen to escape. Escape the norms of small town life, seek out the unknown, the other, the exotic bustle and honk of city life. Some of us are merely in love with the idea of ordering food to be delivered.

What drove me to leave? I have pondered this over the past few days as I sit at the family farm. When I was young, the desire to leave was burning, instinctual, like the call to birds to migrate. Even as a three year old child, I knew I was going to “grow up to be an artist and live in Los Angeles” even before I knew where that was, when all locations were just destinations Bugs Bunny had on his many cartoon vacations. Even though I am from a very conservative and homogeneous region, I had a highly atypical childhood. My mother, a fourth generation descendent of original Idaho pioneers, the Lambeths of Lemhi County had a rebellious streak and a strong desire to avoid accidentally dating a cousin (it had happened more times than she liked to remember). She developed a fondness for dating the Japanese Americans in the region whose numbers are rather high  due to the one lone town who hired Japanese after the second world war, so many of the prisoners of Heart Mountain Wyoming  and Minidoka Idaho settled neat the town of Ontario, Oregon  a tiny farming town on the Oregon Idaho border. My father, who left Heart Mountain camp for Ontario which by then derived the slur of “Ontokyo” due to the Japanese influx translated the racism and cruelty of his country into a cautious flag waving Americanism and a strong desire to mate with white women—even though it was illegal and he had to drive to Winnemucca Nevada to get married. The marriage lasted barely a year and by the time I was three my mother had married and divorced a total of three times, we had moved from Ontario to Fruitland, Boise, Portland, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Sacramento and back to Boise. I had hitchhiked, bussed, flown and met showgirls, gamblers, dissidents, hippies, hipsters, drag queens and even Tiny Tim. My favorite baby sitter when I was 5 was Ricky, a 19 year old boy who told me that even though he was a boy on the outside, inside he was a girl which made total sense to me at 5 because even though on the outside I looked like a little girl, inside I was really a kitty cat. We were fast friends, and years later when I was a teenager at a BBQ Tupperware party of Boise drag queens and bikers, a beautiful blonde woman called my name—Ricky had become Chris. I learned at a very early age that people are people and that racism and prejudice made no sense.  From the age of 5 to 12 my mother and I lived with her boyfriend, who was one of maybe five black families in Boise, Idaho. Elijah Clayton Jr. “Jay” was 6 foot 4, handsome, funny, patient and kind. He made my mom very happy and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had a real home. The only problem was my dad’s incredible racism. The shiny glow of adoration a little girl feels for her dad tarnished each time he called my beloved Jay a “nigger”. My heart actually hurt, a deep stabbing pain when my dad would come to the front door to pick me up and say  “Is the jiggaboo here?”  Which would inevitably result in a screaming fight with my mother and me not getting to visit my dad, I would walk upstairs with my suitcase in hand and feel ashamed of my father. At six I remember asking my dad “why are you a bigot?” I could not understand how my dad, usually so funny and nice turned into this judgmental creep. It made no sense to me that someone who had been treated so unfairly because of his race could turn around and do exactly the same sort of thing to another person because of his. It made no sense. My dad couldn’t explain it either. It just was. I tried to pretend he was like Archie Bunker on TV but it was never funny. A wall built up between us, he tried to lower it by changing his slurs and just calling Jay “Kurumbo” which is black in Japanese (Japanese people consider this to be a slur BTW)  but the intent of his words belied the language. My wall went up a little higher. Years later when my mom was no longer with Jay but a woman named Judith, my father never said a thing about lesbians.

Judith was white.

Those little tidbits of life, the facets of people, their races, sexual identity, views of the world all effected me making me curious about the world and the people in it, staying in a place where people dress the same, eat the same, think the same held no interest for me, I blazed out of town as soon as I graduated and like many other rural emigrants, I only returned home for the occasional holiday, biting my tongue most of the visit and steering the conversation to the weather or the nieces and nephews, safe topics.

Now I am here for the long haul, caring for my elderly father and uncle and I realize that I cannot live in a state of permanent tongue biting. I sit stunned as racist tirades spew forth from nephews floating on a wave of homophobic vitriol and ignorance that stabs me in the heart. Once again, I am in the position of loving people with views that hurt my very soul. I am trying to ask questions, to understand while also trying to interject some reason and experience into an ignorant modus operandi. I think of my many young gay friends, some have expressed interest in seeing where I come from and I feel a great sadness to think of the pain these dear friend might feel at the words and treatment they might experience. I think of the people I grew up with who turned out to be gay or lesbian and I understand that migration. Some have migrated home and I try and send them love and good wishes, wondering if their culture shock is similar to mine. I wonder and I hope.

In a way this reflects the polarities of our nation, cities with more liberal views baffled at tea party rhetoric and vise versa. The easy and simple thing to do is to walk or run in the opposite direction and seek the company of like minded folk—which I intend to do as often as possible while also doing the more difficult thing, stay and face the issue, ask questions, try and find understanding and even some sort of common ground. I guess mutual respect will have to be the shield. 

I will try and remember that everyone is someone's family member somehow.

I am sure I will make plenty of mistakes, go for lots of walks, cry, scream and weep but I also hope I will learn, teach and maybe somehow understand. 

If I didn’t have hope I wouldn’t even be able to try. 

Wish me luck, friends, any advice is welcome. 

My tongue does have a few bite-marks, I have been home for two days.  My tongue might very well resemble a sieve when I leave in 10 days. Will two months in the city and a trip to the world’s largest theater festival in Scotland buoy me through staying the fall in rural America? Hope springs eternal. Especially for my very holy tongue.