Heaven's Gate

When Billy died, Patsy (my mother) flew his ashes from LA to Colorado. Billy, aka The Cowboy Singer, Billy Bucks, Cancer survivor, Poet, and my father, had wanted his ashes buried in Longs Canyon, Colorado, alongside his mother, grandmother, and all the others with whom he shared a blood connection. Dad's family has had land up in the mountains since the early 1940's. Their land clings precariously to the sides of the Canyon, which made it difficult to see Billy's family planting and harvesting crops, but they survived off the land for decades. The family was so big at one point that it had its own Church, graveyard, and dwelling where the zealous members of his family practiced Penitentes.

Billy left Colorado at nineteen and found work in Hollywood as a fry cook and later sent for Mom and me once he moved from a roach hotel into a two-bedroom apartment off Hollywood Blvd. Every year after that we took our vacations along Route 66 as he and my mom went home to visit families. When I was old enough we would travel without my mom. Our last trip road trip together is when I learned about the zealots.

“Remember the stories about Longs Canyon?” He asked.

“Yeah, Dad, where your Grandma lived, and you and Cousin Rebecca spent your summers. Why, we going up there this trip?” I asked.

“Not this trip, but eventually.” Billy turned the radio off and stopped talking. I waited for him to continue and when he didn’t I went back to my book for another 20 or so miles. “Honey?”

I reluctantly lifted my eyes from the James Clavell’s Tai-Pan. “Hmmm?”

He started slowly. His voice unsteady and shaking like he was about to cry. I turned to look out the window. “Things weren’t going so well for my Mom because my Dad had a love affair with the bottle and Ma would pack us off and send us to the mountains. My summers with my Grandma were heaven on earth, and where I could just be a kid and not have to go find my Dad in the bars. I never understood these things; I just did what I was told back then. We loved the Canyon, me and Rebecca. Do you know what Penitentes means?”

“Penatent? No, what is it?” I asked. I felt dizzy and my eyes were cross-eyed from staring out the window.

“Close enough. My Grandma was the caretaker for the Church, and… La Morada. I’m not sure why or if my Grandma did it, but the people in the Canyon were strong in their beliefs and to atone for their sins, would hurt themselves. Penitentes, means to atone for sins there is flagellation. Do you know what that means?”

"Yeah." I wanted to ask him if he did, and what sort of sins would require people to hurt themselves, but I was having a hard time processing the information and sunk into my own thoughts. A canyon of silence opened between us. I was barely twenty, and had gone through my entire life and had never once been hit by my parents, which was odd because back then it was fashionable. Back when being a latchkey kid was commonplace. I closed my book and spent the rest of the trip looking out the window

Billy loved Longs Canyon, his fondest memories in life were living there with his grandmother. He would light up from the inside until he was so brilliant that he glowed in the dark, almost as if he had radiation poisoning.

Until reaching the Canyon for his burial, I had completely forgotten his stories and his family’s practice of Penitentes. La Morada, the dwelling where the zealots practiced, remained standing and was still cared for by a family member. As I looked around at the faces of the people that I hardly knew, his people, I couldn't help but wonder if they still practiced Penitentes. I laid the jar of Billy’s ashes into the ground and hoped he was happy now that he was back in the ground where he was happiest.

When I decided I was going to be a writer, quit my day job and live off the royalty checks from my best seller come box office movies it came as brutal smack across my bare arse that my ambition didn't match my knowledge or skill. Boohoo times two. I ran to Barnes and Nobel, and dished out a few hundred dollars. I bought books, dozens of them. How to's on everything. They are lovely books. Each of those books has oodles of tidbits every writer (except me) knew or must know before they can be famous with a movie, a ShowTime series, and a Wikipedia page written by a pseudo fan and or Mom. If I had bothered to read those books, it would be a different confession. I wouldn't be self-teaching myself via my everyday writing, nor editing my first book on my own-I'd have an editor doing the dirty work--I would have only positive comments on all those books, but I don't, because I never got past page nine or ten on any of the books that I bought on the mysterious craft of writing. They were boring and never made sense to me. I accepted that I was dumber than dirt when it came to the craft of writing. Like when I am reading lofty literary fiction. It makes me sleepy reading through one hundred and twelve words when nine would do.

That was another slap to the backside, kick in the gut, upper cut to my chin. I'm not literary. On a good day, I am vintage Goodwill, or trade. That realization was like swigging castor oil. It's a hard swallow, even if it’s oil and its purpose is to lubricate. I hated myself for my lack of brilliance, not knowing what a dangling participle was, but worse, how to fix it. I wanted to die. I had to learn, had to go to school. My first writing class a fellow student said the best book ever written was Coetzee's Disgrace; that night on the way home from class I stopped at Barnes to buy it. I couldn't wait to turn back the pages of the book and read it. I held out some crazy notion that if I read it, I would be literary like my classmate. I didn't understand what my classmate wrote, but it was big, and he used words that I had to look up, and there was an abundance of imagery, and he wrote in third person and talked around feelings, and other vague similarities, all of which confused me, but I knew if read the best book every written like he said then literary would grow on me like a Chia pet grows green fur. I didn't grow fur or become literary.

I threw the Disgrace across the room before I hit page forty. I hated it. I wallowed in literary self-pity. I didn't quit writing, but I was lost in long moment, a year of moments, I wrote thousands and thousands of words and looked for a clue. Why was I un-literary? Why didn't I roll around in the opaque stuff like Martin Aims? How could I be so, so, so nothing but still have a burning desire to write when I couldn't appreciate what all writers are supposed to be, aspire for, write like. I loathed myself. Oh woe is me I wrote to my lover, the too brilliant genius that read every word I wrote (and never said anything about my dangling participles). "The ten-thousand hour rule, " he whispered to me one afternoon. "What…" I panted. "To be good at anything requires an investment of ten thousand hours…."

After that, I read Stephen King's memoir on writing. In his words of wisdom, I found peace and I got over everyone else's prejudices and myself. Now I write what I want and in my voice. I don't give a damn about anyone else. Even better, is that I don't apologize anymore for my zany voice and POV.

Writing!

I have few passions, one is writing, and the other is thinking about writing. When I am not writing, I think about it, and when I am not thinking about it, I'm writing. There is one other passion that occupies both my mind, and my writing, but I am not sure if that is a separate passion, or if it's woven into the other two, or if is the part of primary one, which is writing to understand.

This other unclassified not really a passion, is a man, the love I can't seem to shake, and the loss that hangs over me like a black cloud. Is he a passion? Technically yes, because he was once. He flipped my on-switch up, and gave me a reason to write, and from there I stumbled onto a path that led me to the well of words, which is now the reason for this breath, and the next, and one after that, and the giver of my passion to write. Confusing is it not? Imagine the jumble inside of my imaginarium.

I arrange my primary life around my passions. I've responsibilities that pull at my hem, and often unravel me row by row. These obligations are like my passions, they are not disposable. My writing self I carry with me, but the room where the passion and I unite with, my bedroom, pulls at me the moment I walk through the door at the end of the workday. She says to me, at last you are here, but I say, not yet. I drop my bags on the title floor in the kitchen waiting for the flock to hover and pour out the events of their day.

I operate on three levels, 1) listen attentively and speak when it's appropriate to interject; 2) listen to the murmur of my writer words in my head, 'do you think she will pick me tonight, or will she pick you, will she write about him again, or will she work on our book; and 3) finally, I'll will give the man a mental nod and hope that he is well, but at the same time wish the locust upon him. (I am torn on the subject of forgiveness and the philosophy of live and let live, but oh how this silver of indecision grants me access to a brilliant honesty and fearlessness in my writing.)

From the kitchen where I chop onions, heat olive oil, uncork wine, grill the asparagus, I've one foot, in reality, and the other in my head. I feel the passion to write heat my skin. It's only a matter of time before there is a release from thinking to writing. Until then, I volley between my reality, what will fall of my head onto the page, and between, I wonder if the lost love is fuel to my fire or is the cause of my madness, or if letting go will break the spell my writing has over my life. Until I figure this out, I keep one foot in reality and the other in my head, thus boredom isn’t something that plagues me.