OVERWHELMED BY COMPASSION

 

vada

all photos by cheyanne

My heart feels immense sorrow today over junkie friend on his way to the bottom. Yesterday I didn't call him my friend, but today I do. He's somebody in my world I care about. He stays in the front of my mind, heart feeling sorrow for his suffering that is evidently unbearable. Mama put an appeal to prayer in facebook for her son. Justin told me something about himself yesterday I did not know, though could have imagined easily. In his early 20s he spent three months on crack, cell phone one of The first things to go, a bill so high he couldn't pay it and couldn't use the phone anymore, so he threw it on the ground and stomped it with his heel. Then he lost his trailer his grandmother had given him. Everything went away. Mother and her new husband wouldn't let him in the house, his sister wouldn't have anything to do with him. This was in his wild-thang time when I didn't see him for three or four years. I didn't want to know what he was going through, knowing it was far beyond any realm of my interest. I told him when he was 17 that he had about five years of mayhem ahead, running like a dog unchained. He came close to prison, came close to getting killed several times, carried a "nine" all the time. His closest friend in that time ended up dead. He went to Indiana, knew somebody in the drug world there, and nobody ever heard of him again. I asked one of his friends here if she'd heard anything of him. No. Any ideas what happened? She said, "He probably shit somebody there like he did everybody here." It was easy to see. That's what he did. Again, he was a great guy, big heart, and fun to be around with good sense of humor. He was what I call "good people," but he had addiction issues far beyond what he could handle. At the time he disappeared, both is mother and dad were in prison, both for selling stolen oxytocin. Here, it's called oxy-codeine.

 

vada

 

At the same time my heart is dampened by sorrow, I feel such an overwhelming joy my eyes are wet much of the time from being on the verge of tears with love energy flowing. I know not why, but there it is. I took carrots to the donkeys this morning feeling like crying the whole time from the love I was feeling, looking at their eyes, feeling my affection for them. At this moment, at the outside corner of each eye rests a tear waiting for a chance to run down my cheek. This is constant today. And it's tears of joy. I don't know where the joy is coming from. I'm guessing it comes from the immense compassion I'm feeling, the joy accompanying the compassion. A tear just now took a ride down my cheek. The other one is about to go. And it's joy I'm feeling. During the time my friend Jr Maxwell was fading into death, toward the end I was stressed, feeling tremendous sorrow, and felt overwhelming joy all the time. It came to the place joy and sorrow had woven together such that I could not tell them apart, it was one feeling. As time went by, they came together such that I couldn't pick one from the other. It was like they were two sides of the same coin flipping in the air so fast it was a blur. The day Jr left the body, I felt joy all day with the sorrow of losing someone I respected way up high. Eventually, the feelings separated unto themselves again, and today they are back together where they become indistinguishable. Both eyes are running now. Out the window I see it is running time of day for the donkeys. They were grazing and Jack had a fit of wanting to run. He looked at Jenny to see if she wanted to run. No, she'd rather graze. He grazed a little, looking at her waiting to see if she wanted to run. He took off running and she followed. They are running around and around in the meadow, they have a circle they run, taking turns in the lead, ears up, having a ball.

 

 

vada

 

I'm remembering Justin's 21st birthday, ten years ago. He'd been on his own in his wild-thang time a few years. I said, "Its your day. Whatever you want." He wanted to go to Winston-Salem to see Insane Clown Posse playing at Ziggy's. I thought: Oh God! Why did I ask? Why couldn't I just buy him a present? Ok, that's what we'll do. I ordered tickets online. It came time to go. He wanted to go to Laurel Springs, a bit of a drive, to get some crack. We drove to Laurel Springs where he picked up a white woman living in a trailer in a small Mexican trailer park community, living with a very dangerous man. She needed to go to town to get it. We drove her to town to a suburban neighborhood where she wanted to be let out on a corner and us to go away and return in twenty minutes. She was there in twenty minutes. They took care of their transaction and we drove her back to Laurel Springs. Then he wanted to go to my place to smoke some crack. I thought: Oh shit! I told myself this is Justin's day. I sat and watched  him "chasing the high," as they call it. I watched time go by. Four bands were playing and it was an hour and a half drive. When it came time for the show to start, I told him the show started. I told him when the second band started. He didn't care. He offered me a hit and I declined. He said he knew I would decline, but wanted to give the courtesy of offering. Eventually, he reached the place he wanted to be. We left soon after the third band started. Insane Clown Posse was the last band. We arrived in the middle of their show. On the way back, it was around 2am, he showed me how he could drive up what we call 21 mountain, 21 being the highway, with 27 curves, in less than four minutes. He used the entire road, was seldom under 60. I sat fixed on a little word on the dash that said, airbag. I did not get in a car with him for several years after that experience. 

 

vada

 

Justin lit into our addict friend day before yesterday, giving him the lecture of his life. He said, You can pull yourself together! He said, I've been on the bottom, hit hard with a crash, had nothing, alienated everybody. He said, I pulled myself together and you can do it too. Justin's wife, Crystal, extended herself, ending up giving friend an hour and half talk in his face. She told him to think about what he's doing to his mother. He said he didn't care, she doesn't have much longer anyway. It ran all over Crystal. Justin said later, "If he said that to me, I'd have put him on the ground, I don't care, you don't talk like that about your mama." Crystal had to pull back her concern. She told his mother that she'd been through it with her first husband who OD'd. She said too much was coming up for her to deal with any further involvement. Her first husband was Justin's friend all the time growing up. Justin and Crystal bonded in their grief and they fell in love. This was in the time Justin had left my world. I believe he intuited I did not want him around. Guns and the drug world made me nervous. I met Crystal about a year after they'd married. First thing I said to her, "You're a brave woman." She said, Why? I said, You just are. I believed throughout Justin's wild-thang time that he would come back from it, knowing it is a pattern of kids raised by severely abusive daddies. I had my own wild-thang time, just experienced differently. I love Justin as though he were my own, even better, because we don't have father-son tension. I love Crystal the same, so much it brings the tears up again. I have a great respect for the man Justin has become. His intelligence and his heart blow my mind every time I'm around him. I'm happy to see him with a good life, fabulous kids and a good woman. His number one goal in his life is to be a good daddy. He's the kind of daddy his kids will love like crazy all their lives. The tears are flowing again. It's been like this all day.      

 

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PERSONAL IDENTITY LOST AND FOUND

 

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I tend to think an awful lot about the people I know, people directly involved in the weave and flow of my life such that I'm in the weave and flow of their lives. I really do think this is where my head mostly dwells, on the others in my life. I see over years my habit-thinking of the various individuals was actually a projection of how I felt about myself. In the time I was in despair about myself, teens and twenties, I objectified others somehow, left out their hearts, addressed their minds. I wanted to know people that impressed me, and even they weren't really it. Eventually, my attitude toward self changed and along with it my attitude toward others changed. When I finally came to respect my own heart, even my inner child came to life. This happened in my early thirties. Up til then, I wanted to live solely by mind. My heart was so incredibly wounded in childhood, I did my best to shut it down, to quit feeling, because all I felt was rage and the continual depression of holding the rage inside and pretending on the outside I'm happy. It took until late twenties before I even noticed the inner rage that projected my attitude toward life. I wanted to live, but didn't know why, except to get away from parents as far as land allowed and have a go at living without their absolute control and suffocating religion. I didn't do my wild-thang time very well, between ages 18 and 23, when children of dysfunctional families run wild and fall into every kind of pit. I think of my time with them as a dog chained to a doghouse with a ten foot chain, living on a circle of bare dirt a couple inches below the level of the topsoil around it, something like a miniature baseball diamond. One day somebody let the dog loose and it ran and ran in any and all directions, heedless from inexperience, falling, getting up running, ran across a road without looking, out of control. If left off the leash, it would soon be hit by a car. I grew up on a short leash and did just what a dog does, ran til I was out of breath and couldn't move. But stumbling, uncertain, devoid of self-esteem, hesitant, not believing my own feelings and thoughts, taught not to.

 

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I fell on my face, fell on my face, fell on my face, through my wild-thang five years. The first half of it I made stupid decision upon stupid decision. Sometimes fell on my face drunk. Drunk was the easiest kind of falling on my face. I married daddy in a woman's body. When I realized I had bought myself more of same to live with the rest of my life, I bounced off the trampoline. He was done and in the past. I wasn't living the rest of my life as the life theretofore had been. I was not going to live in the same mental climate all my life. A window opened and I jumped. The US Navy seen through the lens of Oppositional Defiance Disorder was my enemy. It took me away from my life against my will, set me back two years. It took care of me in those two years when I could not have taken care of myself very well, not well at all. Working in a shoe store with head in knots. The Navy took me away from it. Navy put me on the sea with head in knots. It allowed time to untie some of the knots and learn to live with the ones I couldn't untie. During the time on the ship I mostly read novels in translation of the French Resistance in Paris during the German occupation. I read the French existentialists almost exclusively. They spoke my truth. I wanted education desperately. By the time the Navy was over, the marriage was over. Out of the Navy on Friday, started school Monday, weekend at the beach, the first days of my life. I look back at my life starting at age 23. I'd taken care of the checklist of obligation to society, church and parents. Leaving the Navy base the last time, I stepped into my new life of decisions made for my life by my self. The Navy got me safely through the time of running like a dog unchained. In retrospect, I look at how the Navy served my development as a human being by putting up guardrails when needed, and now is giving me a monthly assist. I have to say I'm as grateful to the Navy for shelter through my storm as I am the College of Charleston for opening the door to the rest of my life.  

 

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Ego having been buried for so long, it was time for ego development, discovering personal identity. A friend at the college said something that stayed with me as a kind of a minor Zen koan. He said college is the time when we create our own identities. I was thinking it meant as a kind of style, like a writer's style that is one's own, or an artist's style. Imagine it, then become it, was how I took it. I think he thought of it that way too. I wasn't able to compose for myself an identity I wanted to live by, so I left it open to see what happens. Seeing that time in the context of a lifetime, I can see that I did indeed discover my personal identity in that time. For the first time in my life, I interacted with others without the inhibition of bleachers full of judges who believed I was their hand puppet. In the beginning, I kind of became other people's puppet temporarily, because that was all I knew. Did not yet know how to make decisions for myself. It was fun to exit the chute of living by other people's decisions for my life. I can't say I did it gracefully, but got through it standing up. I learned the importance of being a friend. I loved that the College of Charleston was then a small Southern college a couple hundred years old, Old South neo-classical architecture. It felt like a grandmother's arms. It was a nurturing place that helped develop my ego, my self-identity, gave it sound principles, again like a grandmother. The honor code was absolute, no two ways about it. Caught cheating, you're out that day. See somebody cheating and don't report it, you're out same day. I remember a guy caught cheating on his last final exam of his senior year. Out. It got me over any, every propensity I might have had for cheating. It has stuck for life that cheating amounts to cheating oneself, caught or not caught. Learning not to cheat was a primal step in the progression of discovering who I am that became a significant part of decision making.

 

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In a student body of under 500, I had a handful of friends and others I only knew from classes. I had an attic one-room apartment and worked in a bookstore. All through the Navy, when the ship went into any port, I found the bookstores. With just a few hours in Nice, France, in uniform, I found a French bookstore and bought a book of poems by Jean Genet in French, an inspiration to learn French in school well enough to read it. After classes of a wide variety, my interest zoomed in on Twentieth Century American writing, prose and poetry, and American art. By the time I finished at the college, I knew these were the interests of my life. These were the longings from deep within I was unable to satisfy without education. I had a longing to go to graduate school in something like existentialist drama, something I know, and knew then, I would love. I aimed to be a teacher, maybe high school where I felt I understood the kids somewhat. By the time I'd done undergrad, I didn't want any more school from either side of the desk. But I did uncover my self-identity by letting it evolve of its own. Now looking back it's clear that the interests of my life are good writing and good art. It was in the college years I learned that. Without the years of school, I'd have been more lost at sea than I am now. I think Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were the first poets I had experienced on my own after high school. Starting college, the first book of poetry I picked up on my own was Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers. I lay awake in bed all night reading it over and over in awe of what I was seeing. He spoke to me like no writer had ever done before. And to this day, I can sit in awe with Louise Gluck's new collected poems, or Elizabeth Bishop's collected poems, Robert Lowell's Notebook 1967-68. I don't make my living from it, but these writers and a host of others inform my interior life. This is how I created my self-identity: I found it by being open to it, an affection for Twentieth Century poetry. It serves nothing but my own aesthetic satisfaction. It's untarnished by money and ambition. It's uniquely my own.   

 

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