Conflagration
Posted on 29 May 2011
He was in and out of jail when I dated him, and I was thirteen and he was eighteen, and now, of course, it seems all wrong and out of kilter, but at the time it was love and beautiful, and he looked like John Lennon, and I was desired, and it’s all I wanted.
Then after jail, when he was in Arkansas in rehab and was working in a program for drug addicts in the office of the then governor, a certain William Clinton, he wrote to me often, just as he always had from hitchhiking all over and from jail, and one day sent me a package made up of photocopies of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Bukowski’s The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills. The paper was riddled with letterhead and I loved the thought of the double steal – the intellectual property, the stationery.
I hadn’t yet read either of the authors yet, but I think now they colored in empty lines we all have at that age, causing me a certain curve in trajectory I might not otherwise have had, blending a perverse love of violent imagery in words and film with the romantic notion of poetic prose about the natural world.
Or maybe these things were in me already. (I know they were, violent images have haunted me always, always.)
But now there is this relationship to these writers, and others whose discovery or introduction came with equal measure of story, who stir me like no others, who bring up the murk from the bottom of my gut, which some might mistake for a soul, whose fire is my own, tempered by a creek or lit by whiskey.
Read it to me, I’m yours, I’m yours. Fire it up, love, and let’s burn to the ground.
3 responses to Conflagration
For some reason this reminded me of my first real girlfriend. I was 17 and she was 14 going on 21. I was a shy surfer and she loved all things surfer. She was the most aggressive girl/woman I have ever known. Wow.
There was a beautiful, slightly older boy who I met my junior year. He was off to college; had gone to a NE boarding school; I met him when he was on spring break in FLA. He seduced me with Jack Kerouac. Then he seduced my mom with his youth. I was glad when he was out of the picture.
whom … junior year of high school