Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 2001

In this issue of RIVER TEETH:

Charles Bowden / "Coming to my senses"

I want to eat the dirt and lick the rock. Or leave the shade for the sun and feel the burning. I know I don’t belong here. But this is the only place I belong. There are too many of us on the hot dirt and that fact cannot be altered. The sheer numbers now are the fact, and I live by lurching here and there to escape the numbers. I remember when they called it a population bomb and sketched out some kind of future that looked more like the fate of fruit flies than of my kind. We were warned and we ignored the warnings. I certainly did. There were too many zeros in these computations, and I cannot take in things with too many zeros. I thought, something will turn up and fix everything. This was an act of faith and I am made out of acts of faith. So I have come to this place because it eats acts of faith and then rots them and slowly takes them back into the ground.

In the early 1960s, Walter Elias Disney took a plane ride over Florida. When he passed the vast area of scrub land south of Orlando, he pointed and said, “There.”

As a native child of Central Florida, I grew up in the advancing shadow of the mouse ears. What did we do before Walt Disney World opened, replacing our perceptions of joy? We lived inside our own kingdom.

Our childhoods were barefoot. We rode ponies into the orange groves, past the No Trespassing signs on barbed wire fences. The sweet evidence lingered in our hair, on our clothes, but we risked punishment every time and kept returning to the dark shade of the citrus trees.

When you clean out a child’s room after she has left home, you will be sure to find precious objects, artifacts that tug at memories in such a way that it has been impossible for anyone to throw them out. Instead, on a closet shelf, or in an empty drawer, you encounter them—tatters left in the dusty limbo of unresolved sentiment. But a 22-year-old is not going to go off to Boston with a teddy bear or a pressed wrist corsage from the junior prom. These remain for you to consider. And so I put the few things I couldn’t part with in a box. Once in a while, I look through it.

It rained blood, one breathed ashes, the smell of burned corpses poisoned the atmosphere.” -- a defense attorney at Nuremberg after listening to Commandant Hoss of Auschwitz testify.

You dread drowning, but you wanted to learn to swim. That’s what drew you here, to this pool full of children’s squeals and bodies and bare, gooseflesh-puckered skin, the whiff of chlorine gas on the air. Red-eyed children run past you in mock terror, damp towels and discarded clothes lie in piles around the wet concrete. Mist drifts lazily over the water like smoke, blurring the glass on the windows.

My dad calls a couple times, but I’m out walking. He leaves messages (Happy birthday! Your mom and I wanted to catch you, and we’ll keep trying), and I love him even more for this and Mom too—they’re so dependable, like no one else in my life ever—100 percent dependable even at 74 years old, when they’ve got every excuse to forget. A birthday card has already come, a check inside it for $1000, a very lot of money still for Juliet and me, money that will go in the fund to buy a little more land, maybe, something permanent. And Pop has sent a tongue-in-cheek commercial e-mail card as well: my animated horoscope. It’s going to be a good year! So say the stars, and this goodness and hope is the message from Mom and Dad: A good year!

They both pull forward at the same time and you hit the brake because you feel as if you’re sliding backward. But you’re not; the shifting ground is only an illusion.

My children, all three of them, including the one who is riding in the car up ahead, believe that I am shrinking. They tell me this daily, unaware that it is they who are growing, rising above their mother. The two boys already larger than I, passing their clothes, their too-small jeans down to me. I know this. Yet sometimes I wonder and I check, standing next to the height mark that Jim made for me last winter. A faint pencil scratch that is almost exactly on, but just a hair over, the one he made back then for our oldest child.

My grandfather introduced the Charleston to Paris. Or the zipper. Maybe it was both.

He paved the streets of Brooklyn and made a fortune mining for Alaskan gold.

He kissed the Blarney Stone and the pope’s ring.

But what made him proudest was this encomium bestowed on him by Judge Samuel Seabury during the 1932 corruption hearings that led to the downfall of Jimmy Walker, the flamboyant Tammany Hall Mayor of New York City: “You sir, are the only honest man to come before this tribunal.”

When the train lifted from the tracks I awoke, thinking I was back in the U.S.S.R. It was not yet dawn, and through the soiled curtain, I could see a snow-blown train yard. Weak light from a watchtower gave vague shape to a row of old boxcars imprinted with faded Cyrillic letters. The carriage I rode in hovered in the air. From below came hard metallic blows and emphatic Russian imprecations.

We are story tellers, story seekers. We lean into the promise of narrative the way dogs lean into the wind, imagining a meal from a faint whiff of hide, detecting some kind of trouble in the distant rumble of an engine. It is our way of making sense of the world. We guess that the policeman who issued a ticket when a warning would have sufficed must have had an argument with his wife this morning; we assume the ailing or distracted parent makes the small child at the supermarket drag her feet or fret. One thing occurs, then something else occurs after that as a result. What happens next? we are always asking. And why? A story develops, the weaving together of circumstance and explanation. There is the rhythm of cause and effect, cause and effect; they are links in a chain of understanding.

A blue line of light drew itself out slowly above the far black hills. It turned to a dull, throbbing red, then gold. And suddenly the sun rose noisily and flung its light over the crest of the Gros Ventre range. The light raced across the valley and splashed like a wave up onto the late-summer snows of the Grand Teton. Framed in the bunkhouse window opposite my bed, it was so juicy, colors so aniline, that it looked like an oil dealer’s calendar.

It happened every morning that summer…but I never saw it once.

I don’t know which revelation shocked my devoutly Christian family more: my acknowledgment of my lesbian relationship or my reluctant and quiet announcement that “she’s white.” While at least one mother (I’m blessed with two—one biological and the other chosen by me) claimed to have “suspected” my lesbianism, nothing had prepared members of my family, old and young, male and female, liberal and conservative, for the race thing. Even my friends, who mostly accepted my “coming out” without surprise or shame, gasped when I revealed that Mary is white. Now all of these members of my extended family who are, I might add, both black and white, would claim that their astonishment (some said incredulity) wasn’t because of their own racial prejudices or feelings against interracial relationships, but because of mine.

What I remember most about boot camp was my feet frying on the grinder, the concrete acre in the Delta sun where we marched all day, or ran in our wool watch coats with rifles over our heads. I was a lot older than the others—who were all about 19—way overweight and out of shape, having lived on beer and hot dogs and two packs a day since high school. The first run to the chow hall, a mile, almost killed me. I couldn’t eat a thing—no air, the sickening smell of frying onions, old grease, and meat not quite good enough to get into the supermarkets. But if you went to the infirmary because of bad feet or anything else, when you got out they made you get into the dumpster, then pop out over and over, a jack-in-the-box, shouting, “I’m a goon SIR” every five seconds. I had to sleep with a pillow under my feet so the swelling would go down enough for me to get into my shoes every morning.

Sometimes, if I am dozing, I miss the first sign; he reaches his left arm over me, so that his wrist meets the fingers of his right hand, which is on the pillow above my head. My head rests on his right arm, and he doesn’t want to jostle me by pulling it out until it’s time. So he reaches over, his upper arm just millimeters from my face. I can smell the gamy, salty odor of his underarm, and I might inhale deeply, make some little noise to indicate pleasure. With his right hand, he pushes the button on the side of his Indiglo watch, and for a split second, his face is bathed in eerie, watery blue light.

“In the Beginning,” says the Brihadaranyaka Upanisad—a scripture composed, according to the rishis of ancient India, by no one; a scripture self-created, found floating like mist, or the bands of a rainbow, in the primordial forest air, “there was nothing here at all . . . Death alone covered this completely, as did hunger, for what is hunger but death? Then death made up his mind: “Let me equip myself with a body” (atman). So he undertook a liturgical recitation (arc), and as he was engaged in recitation, water (ka) suddenly sprang from him. Amazed, death thought: “While I was reciting, water sprang up for me!” This is what gave the name to and discloses the hidden nature of recitation (ar-ka). Truly, water springs up for he or she who knows the name and nature of recitation. Recitation is water.”