Jalaine Street

The days move along in jalainestreet.posterous.com

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Jalaine Day1 by Gregory Smiley Listen on Posterous

It was a long time ago, and now I’m glad it’s all gone by. 

 

There were some pretty crazy years. 

 

Once, I witnessed something pretty amazing – that even then I thought was pretty strange.  Thinking back on it, all I can say now is that I just want to tell the story right…

 

It might just be like some people say - that there's so much happening right in front of our eyes, but we usually miss so much of it - we usually have such a little amount of understanding of any of it that it’s all as good as just not happening, or not having happened.

 

But I think it's true - there's so much there, just under the surface of what we typically think we see, and  if any of us get even the slightest glimpse of any of it, we need to share this with whoever we can, in whatever way we can.

 

And so that's what I want to do, I want to share something - that I think I once got a glimpse of.  Yeah, something crazy and yeah, something actually quite amazingly beautiful...

 

Sometimes we don’t understand what we’re actually seeing until many years later, and by then we might think that it’s too late, that things have moved on, that it’s no longer relevant or important – but it’s always relevant, it’s always important, if only because somebody else – maybe even just one other person – might hear what we tell and put some sense to it, put their own twos and twos together in some way and come up with their own understanding or meaning, and then share that, and on and on and on until someday someone gets a sense of  something that might be close to the truth.   I mean who knows.  It might just happen.

 

I'll try to add a little bit each day, hopefully every day but most likely I'll miss some every now and then but what I'm thinking is that if I keep a pretty good schedule,  I can have this done by next Christmas - which would then be 32 years to the day since the day it all began...

Day 5: The tree-planters

But before going there, maybe stepping back a bit can give some sort of  background to the story that that old man tells - you know, put things in perspective a bit. 

I’ll start by saying that for the most part, it seems that people do what they do, banding together and saying things and taking on ways of being within all the various situations that make up their lives; and when you walk into someone else’s life, you usually get what amounts to close to a whole dumpster’s worth of those scraps and street-sweepings of their own situations, whether you care to or want to realize it. 

And one way of looking at it is that you’re pretty much at the mercy of those who are there doing whatever they’re doing, so why not just go with it? 

Another way of looking at it is to just admit that you’re bringing your own world of situations into the arena, so to hell with all the philosophy and just take it all to its fullest potential. 

I used to think somewhere in between, believing that the true heroes of the world were the people who decided on a moment’s notice to just do what they felt was right and just and whatever they were supposed to do.  They looked around them and made a choice and that was that.

But now, all I can say is that I did what I did and made it through.  I pulled it off. 

But it’s actually not so black and white.  Let me try to explain. 

So to get to that Christmas day in 1980, in a small college town in Idaho, that’s where I walked into what was to turn into a whole series of events I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams.  

There were other days like that - moments, like milestones you might say, like that moment a few weeks later when I first heard about that van.

That one was like a moment when suddenly the stage was set - and the world had changed forever, when I was hit with like a gut-feeling realization that because of that one moment - I would need to deal with life in a completely different way from then on in.  

And oh yeah, of course, that shot I never took.  That was another one of those moments.

Actually I guess there were quite a few of them...

And even after everything that has happened, I still have to admit that in all those moments, I never really felt like I ever made any kind of “true hero decisions” – I pretty much just went along with what was happening around me.  Nothing dramatic or heroic, I just survived - but I can say that – I survived, and even more than that, I…  Well, you’ll figure it out…

But that Christmas day moment was what I’ve come to think of as the beginning.  But even that wasn’t the beginning…

A few months earlier I’d heard from a woman I’d met in a bar, in Utah, or maybe it was Arizona, that there was this group of people up there in Idaho who called themselves “tree-planters” and they had the skinny on a lot of various connections and could probably set me up with some work for a while and she’d make a call if I wanted. 

At the time, I was hitchhiking back to my parents’ place for Thanksgiving after finishing a stint of roadwork down in Nevada, which had been good pay but most of it was all pretty much gone, so sure, I said, make the call, and I had written down an address and heard myself calling my folks and making excuses, I really wished I could be there, etc, etc, you know, they were getting used to it, they understood, they said, stay safe, they said, we love you, I saidme too.

And then, as if watching a movie I watched myself heading to Utah, then Idaho but somehow taking ages to get there, ending up spending the week of Thanksgiving with a some friends of friends somewhere in Colorado gutting and skinning and canning venison, and then feasting on some of the best fresh tenderloin I have ever tasted, and the conversation was good. 

And then I was heading on again like along a steady continuance of so many stray and haphazard celebrations of life so purposeful in each of their own little ways, and I just kind of forgot to notice about time, and finally arrived on a snow-strewn stretch of well-worn porch planks in the middle of an Idaho cold-spell right on Christmas day morning.

Crazy the way it had all happened to get me there just on that day but I’ll always remember the places along that journey like a trail that had been laid out by something I could almost convince myself had been something a little more solid than fate, like time and space talking in a language that I couldn’t logically understand but that I had somehow been able to take part in, doing side-jobs here and there, getting the next suggestion for some next place to go, feeling good about everything and of course almost every day seeming like I was used by everyone as an excuse for them to take a break from their everyday life, relax, show me some little part of their world, make it a special day if only because this guy Ray had arrived, passing through and they were all such good people, and it’s just the way it was, and then Stimms met me at the front door, “ah yes, Ray,” he said, said he remembered the phone call and that I’d be coming, welcome, come on in, he said, we’re just opening presents.

Just like that.

Day 4 - Gold

“They were young,” the voice said, “and every single one of them was irresponsible and proud of it, with dreams and hopes and after a few rounds of that rotgut whiskey they drink they were all gonna solve all the world’s problems, just like always. 

“I knew the drill.  I was one of them.  I was there.  But I wasn’t there, not like them, but hey you gotta go with the flow, you know?  Isn’t that the way, Ray? 

“I’d done gone into Vietnam before anyone even thought we’d be setting up perimeters there, and then the years and the war happened and we had all been there and most of us had made it back and some… some of us didn’t…  and I felt… you know - alone.  I was there but I wasn’t, I never had been, all those years… so much inside, so what was I to do except just move through it all like I always did, like a ghost, feeling the weight of the burden of so many necessary little secrets. You’re damn right I felt like that.  But Gene he was really the one with the real burden.”

“Gene?” I asked.

“Ah…”  The voice said and the man on the bed smiled and it didn’t occur to me that he maybe shouldn’t have been smiling if he was actually in a coma and if it all happened again I’d be sure to pick up on that but at the time, at that moment, I don’t know, I just didn’t think of it as strange.  I had expected him to smile and he did, that’s all. 

“I see something’s missing from your big picture.” the voice said, and even though the body was just lying there like that, like it had always been lying there, somehow it subtly seemed to change, not just the smile fading but some sense of its presence seemed to transform, from seeming only to be just there to seeming to pull back into itself…

But it was the eyes – they were suddenly different, not cloudy and unfocused but becoming somehow full of fire and glow and life and what I mean even to say was a very distinct sense of mischief in them.  Something there, something note there, something missing,  like one of a thousand somethings.

“Did they tell you about Mae?” the voice asked.

“Mae…” I said, “yeah, Mae, the little girl who died… No one’s really told me much about her…

“It might be because the story has it that it was a terrible night and it left us all with scars that we all still live with.”

I had a passing thought that he had said “we” and I wondered if it included me in the we or for that matter how he could be included in the we if he was in a coma but then again we don’t know much about comas do we, and this coma-body was, I even then was hoping, not where the voice was coming from, and as far as myself, I wondered if scars from someone else’s past could somehow be transferred, transformed, or in some way re-associated…

The voice cut off the thought.

“On the ice,” it said.  “We were all there.  It was a big night out, and it all culminated out on the river 39 miles out of town in the strangest of circumstances, and yeah, Mae was there, her father had taken her along for the drive, to what was ultimately a meeting by the river… seen to be a spur of the moment sort of thing, everyone head out to the river, you know?  A crazy get-together in the dead of winter out on the ice in the middle of a frozen river – just like everyone does, right?  Or just some crazy-ass vets doing stupid-ass things.  But hey, they had a point, really.  They had a purpose. It was supposed to be the end and the beginning of so many things…The last piece of a puzzle and the first moment of completeness...  But something went wrong – and Stimms, he’s only ever seen one side…”

“Stimms?” I thought, suddenly on edge.  How the hell does Stimms fit into this?  How the hell does he know about Stimms?  How many sides are there?

“How many sides are ever possible?” the voice said as if reading my thoughts.  “As many as can ever be imagined.  Even mine is just one of many.  But I have an advantage, because if I was just there to be there, I wasn’t playing any role any more than to just be lingering on the peripheries, and that’s what I did, and I saw everything. And felt everything.  It was 1974 at just about this time of year.  And cold – shit, it was a lot colder than this weather I can tell you that.  Man it was cold.  But I had just returned and I wasn’t gonna let a snap of cold ruin the party.  But even so, it all happened so quickly, and it was dark and flashlights got flashing about like tracers and even though I’d been through so many of those crazy nights it had never been in my own country, and never with my friends, and it took me off-guard, but still, I know what I saw.”

“So tell me,” I asked, “what is it that you saw?”  I no longer cared who I was speaking to or where the voice was coming from.  I glanced around the room, looking for speakers up in the corners, maybe some small electronic-looking objects hanging from the ceiling, who knows what a voice-emitting whatever could look like these days, but I didn’t see anything and felt like I was gaining a new respect for this whole adventure.  It was something in the tone of the voice, the mood it was creating, with or without a body.  Very real, very immediate, actually very impressive.

“Most people don’t usually benefit from knowing everything that goes on.” the voice said, and I nodded, craziness or wisdom or a random thought that just happened to be sounding right.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well, like if people knew what they were really actually seeing, if they didn’t just see everyone as stray bits and pieces of lives but saw how they all fit together, most likely they wouldn’t know what to do with all that information.  Information is like gold, it runs in veins of rock as something that isn't so much made or formed in nature as much as it is a part of the whole mix of the things that make up all of earth's structure.”

I don’t know, I said to myself.  I don’t know what I’m doing here. 

I paused, looked around and then I said aloud, “This body… It’s not alive, is it.”

Day 3 - No preconceptions

The first thing I saw was an old man lying in a bed, one thin white sheet pulled up close to his neck.  The nurse said she’d leave me and as she went to close the door she paused and asked did I realize that he was in a coma?

“Yes.” I said for some reason, and she turned and closed the door behind her.

I stood there for a moment trying to take in what was there, and noticed that the nurse looked in - or rather I should say that I felt her look, although I didn’t actually see her, and then I knew she was gone, and there I was, in the room of someone I didn’t have any idea about who he was, except to know that he was in a coma, and for all I knew Aarla was long gone, maybe already driving off into the sunset, fading out of my existence never to give me one more fraction of a moment of thought, forever for all I knew to leave me with what was essentially nothing that I could grasp as any way to understand who she actually was, not even one small morsel of a scrap of a hint that I might call my own little piece of comprehension of who she might be or might have been.

But somehow I knew she was waiting, I trusted that she would be waiting, and I realized that somehow I trusted her, which I understood in my tired mind as being quite an amazing revelation.  

I was standing there thinking about that for who knows how long and the old man in the bed wasn’t doing anything more than just being there in the bed.

I stood there thinking about the implications of my trust of Aarla and understood that time was going by and days had passed but none of what had happened or was happening was really about time.  Somehow it actually felt nice and even comforting to be standing there in that peaceful space but then I got thinking that nothing was happening and that that sense of nothing might just continue on forever, and I made up my mind not to fall into that stupid trap and was about to leave when I heard a man’s voice say my name.

“Ray, right?”

I glanced at the old man in the bed and then looked around and didn’t see anyone else.  There was only the room, the bed, a bed stand and an old man in the bed.  Walls of blankness.  Sheets of smoothness.  Lightness and whiteness.  Windows of simple lines, four panes divided evenly, venetian blinds half-drawn creating stark shadow-lines.  I looked into all the possible places where I thought I hadn’t just looked and then finally looked again at the old man there in the bed, but there was nothing different; just an inert body, eyes fixed on everything and nothing.  There was nothing to indicate that the voice had come from him, so I turned to leave again but I didn’t quite turn, didn’t quite leave and then I heard it again.

“Hey Ray.”

I waited.  The voice had been clear as day but again, I had the distinct feeling that it somehow didn’t match that old man’s body.  There was some trick being played.

It’s ok, I thought, you’ve really only done this to yourself, haven’t you.  You’re allowing it to happen.  You do have control. It’s all about what you see and how you see it, isn’t it?  And if you look at it that way, it can all seem like it’s all just playing right into their crazy story and you’re allowing it, you’re just letting it happen.  And what if it’s all true?  Huh?  What then?  What if it’s all true?

“Hey Ray.  Yeah.  You.”

“Where are you?” I asked.  I let my eyes wander as casually as I could manage to re-scan the space of that room – sterile, white, nondescript, a room of nothingness and emptiness that all focused back on that man in the bed.  Back to those eyes.

There was nothing, and I suddenly felt stiff and tight and had an image of turning to stone, and as if  to fight it I rolled my head and stretched my neck and noticed the light-trails that I knew meant that I was thoroughly exhausted, beyond exhaustion, heading well into that heady feeling of zoning through a very fluid-surreal sense of sleep-deprived reality, I had been there before and knew that there was nothing I could do about it and told myself that things would be changing, subtly, easefully, and it was fine, I wasn’t worried, I was too numb to worry, numb to all the craziness, numb to the fact that I was in that room. 

I  stepped up to that old man lying there and looked closely at his mouth, at his eyes, at the contours of the curve running from his eyelashes to the bridge of his nose and down the left eye to his cheek.  I let my gaze pan like a camera lense, almost physically pulling my sight back away from the urge to take in more and more details to look at the body lying there still and lifeless like time standing still and I had a strange feeling - the hairs went up on my arms, I was tingling all over, the back of my neck got very sensitive to something that wasn’t quite as it seemed… 

No preconceptions, I told myself.  Here I am. 

I looked around the room, at the emptiness and vague wintry mid-afternoon shadows, at the fold of the sheets, at the hinges of doors; I couldn’t quite get myself to lean down and look underneath the bed.  Like not wanting to give in to an inclination to do something that almost every kid who has ever gone to bed alone has tried not to do. 

I thought of whiteness, of people dying and “going to the light”.  You gotta be kidding, I almost yelled to myself, you’re not there, you’re not there yet, this isn’t it, it’s not your time, what are you trying to do to yourself?  Come on, don’t freak out on me Ray, my mind urged.

I remembered the pills – the two little pills that guy from the band has passed to me during the Super Bowl a few days back.  Had that only been yesterday actually?  It seemed like month ago.  I seriously needed some sleep. The old man’s eyes had a look of kindness and sadness and did not show any sense of tiredness.  Did that surprise me?   I wished I could feel like those eyes looked.  I was so damn tired…

I wasn’t in any mood for pleasantries. 

“She’s here,” I said as conversationally as I could.

 “She’s always been here, Ray,” the voice immediately replied, and I just happened to have been looking straight at the man’s mouth and did not see the slightest movement.  Technology, I thought.  There’s some trick to this, some explanation.  Maybe even something like they’ve all been telling me.  But why go to the trouble?  But again I had a funny feeling that this wasn’t all quite as it seemed.

“You know,” I said, “I don’t really give a shit anymore.  You can do whatever or wherever the hell you want.” 

I really truly didn’t care.  Ah,we can talk, sure.  Seems like this is something that’s been planned just like the way everyone seems to have been planning things all around me during these past days, even to the point of somehow manipulating how I have now begun planning my own little mind-games, toying with things I feel I need to understand within this whole mad mess. 

Was that me thinking those things?  Jeez, man, what are you turning into? I thought.

I thought back to so many moments.  Things I could have done differently, things I might have done if I had known more, or less, or something other than what I had thought I had known.  The point seemed to be that in key moments I had hesitated, had stumbled, had fumbled when others hadn’t.  But no, you can’t think like that, I thought, everything works out as it does and for me it’s got me right here.  And here I was, talking to… air. 

“It’s truly amazing,” I said.  “I’ve been… we’ve been… driving this van, all for the purpose, or for part of the purpose, it seems, to get here to this place and to have me stand right here talking to…you.  The van was given to me, it’s a long story, sort of, but I have a feeling that whoever you are you might even know about all that and, well, it wasn’t me who was actually just driving the van…”

“She’s dangerous, Ray.” the voice said.  “Everything that you think you know about her is potentially wrong, distorted, or maybe even just a figment of your imagination.”

And then silence.  I waited.

“She’s a fantasy, Ray.  She’s everyone’s fantasy.”

“I don’t know if I buy that…” I said.  “I mean, she just showed me how to get here.  She…”

“What you think you know about her is not real,” the voice said.

“But why not?” I asked.  “I’ve been through this myself, so I mean, what’s the…”

“What’s the inspiration?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Sure,” the voice said. “Inspiration.  Motivation.  Manipulation.  Captivation.  Transmutation.  What’s the game.  What’s the deal.  What’s the big fucking secret that everyone seems to know but me, right?  What’s the, I don’t know, say truth, because I have a feeling that that’s not coming, but maybe how should I be taking all of this?  Isn’t that what you’re thinking, Ray?  Maybe that’s more like the question you should be asking.  But be careful, you might think, thinking that you’d be sounding like you’re already expecting that someone like me might have something like answers.”

I thought about that for a moment.  He’s sounding like me, I thought.

“So why not,” I finally said. “I mean, what the heck, right?”

“Yeah sure, serendipidy,” the voice said.  “A simple moment of clarity.”

I waited but the voice didn’t say anything else.  I waited for a long time, it seemed, but it might have only been for a second.

Finally the voice said:  “Do you want to hear a story?”

“Man,” I said, “if you only knew the stories I’ve been hearing these past few days…”

“I know, Ray, I know.” the voice said.  “There’s a lot to sort through isn’t there?”

“I just don’t know which way is up any more…”

“No preconceptions,” the voice said

“How do you know that?” I said.

“Know what?”

“That phrase?”

“It’s just a normal phrase that anyone might say.  Language is free isn’t it?”

“Yeah but that’s what others have…”

“Yeah, others, sure, they try hard don’t they?  So what do you say, Ray?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Well,” the voice said, “once upon a time…that’s the beginning of my story, you ready for this?”

“Sure?” I said.  I’d been looking at that old man the whole time and there was absolutely nothing that indicated that he had been speaking.  The body was just an unmoving body, eyes staring out at everything and nothing. 

Like he’s in a coma.

Which he is. 

The nurse said so. 

Hear kill and think dead, I thought, but the voice I had heard had been very real and as I looked at the body I could imagine the voice being the kind of voice that that body would have had if it was actually speaking and it all just somehow seemed natural even as I thought it was all just more craziness, yeah, the old voice-of-a-man-in-a-coma trick and I was falling for it, but the voice said, “Once upon a time there were five guys out getting drunk like good old boys do.” 

And what was I to do?  I just stood there listening.