My friend Kat makes an appearance in my life maybe three or four times a year. It all starts with a phone call, which leads to lunch over sushi or a couple of drinks at the Cobalt Club or some other downtown dive. Then some follow-up phone calls over the next two days. And that’s that, until three or four months later. And the cycle repeats. Halloween is a constant. I can always count on her touching down into my life during the tail end of October.

It’s my neighborhood. She’s attracted to it much like the kids. The homes are old and spooky looking. Many of the people living in them are rich. They can afford the good candies. And so children from all over the city come down my street to load up.

Last year Kat sat out on my front porch with me and we handed out treats to hundreds of kids. She was a mermaid, in a black vinyl outfit, complete with tail. I was, well, just me.

This year I’m in on the game. We’re back on my porch. I’m in medical scrubs and a surgeon’s mask. Kat’s in a very revealing nurse’s outfit. white stockings and garter belt with a mini skirt and stethoscope. We stand at a medical examining table, looking down at a dummy stretched out. As the timid kids creep up the steps, I use a pair of forceps to pull back the sheet, revealing an opened abdominal cavity filled with entrails and bags of candy corn.

Earlier in the year I picked up the exam table from Kat. She was moving to Shreveport to be near the man of her dreams, who was fifteen years younger than her, very rich, and just a hair less possessive than the last love of her life, who I believe is still stalking her, restraining order be damned. I haven’t the heart to ask if she’s still with the rich kid. I haven’t even asked if she’s still living in Shreveport. I’ve learned not to ask questions. She prefers to keep a low profile. In fact, when I helped her move, it was the first time I had visited her house. She wanted my assistance because I have a truck, and also because she knows me to be discreet and nonjudgmental. You see, Kat’s a dominatrix. And she needed someone to help her empty her dungeon so that she could then get her father to help her clear out the rest of her house. Daddy doesn’t know what she does to pay the rent. I took her cages, racks, and restraint tables to a storage facility on the south side. The examining table was something she didn’t want to keep. “I hate that naughty nurse bullshit!” I told her I’d take it. And so I did.

“Come on, sweetie,” Kat says to a cautious girl in a ballerina outfit who is looking up at us on the porch. There are candles in red glass burning all around us. “We have candy.” That last doesn’t seem encouraging enough. The father laughs. He scoops up his little ballet dancer and holds the giggling girl over the body with the gaping belly wound. She grabs candy and they are gone.

“Wasn’t she the cutest thing?” Kat gushes.

There was a Halloween, it must have been twenty years ago. I was living in San Francisco, working in the warehouse of Rough Trade Records. After work me and three of the women who worked the phones, placing and receiving orders, were tossing back a few drinks at the Metro Bar before heading to the I-Beam for some punk show. Jill had the whole dark goth look to the hilt, which wasn’t really her scene. But it was Halloween. Alex was super butch, like Brando in “The Wild One.” Actually, this was pretty much how she dressed every day. And Erin had on this pink tutu with matching ballet shoes. She started out the night with a tiara, but a drunken drag queen had bought it off her with a bag of mushrooms.

The four of us took turns heading off to the restrooms at the Metro to choke down the mushrooms. They were dusty, leathery, and tasted like dirt.

Erin held back some for her boyfriend, Derrick. But when he showed up, he was so cranked up on meth that he didn’t care about much of anything … except that we should finish up our drinks and grab a cab because the club was going to fill up fast. He glanced at the mushrooms with impatient disdain.

The mushrooms were starting to hit me, ever so gently. And Derrick looked like some evil robot, fixated on a single, pointless task.

Erin seemed of the same mind as me. She leaned back from her boyfriend (she was on a bar stool, he was standing, tugging at his watchband). She helped herself to my beer, and began, indiscreetly, to eat up all of Derrick’s share of the mushrooms, washing them down with my cheap draft beer.

The bartender, Donny, clutched at his throat melodramatically. “Girl, put that in a Denver omelet and it’ll sure go down a lot easier.” I liked Donny. He always managed to comp at least every third drink of mine.

Erin threw a ten on the bar top.

“Okay,” she said, turning to Derrick. “Let’s go find your fucking cab.”

Jill and Alex laughed and followed Derrick outside. I grabbed Erin and she stiffened like she could stab me if she had a knife.

“Be like that Denver omelet,” I whispered into her ear. “Warm and savory.”

She relaxed and leaned back her head. She looked up at me with a playful smile. “You want me to be all hammy and sweet peas?”

“You get locked into some shit with Derrick, it’ll be a long long night for us all.”

“I’ll be like a soufflé,” she squealed.

I turned to Donny. “She’s a soufflé!” And I fluffed up Erin’s tutu.

Outside, Derrick was hustling Jill and Alex into the back of a cab. I jumped in after them. Derrick pushed Erin in after me. She slid in, laying across all our laps. We all started laughing. Derrick took the passenger seat up front. We were off. The girls were singing a Woodentops song. I was gauging the strength of the mushrooms by looking at the fabric of the seat in front of me, and seeing how busy were the shifting of patterns. And then I heard Erin shout.

“Stop the car!”

At first I thought it was a Woodentops reference. But Erin was sitting up in my lap, with the door half open. The cab driver pulled to the curb. We were on Haight Street at Buena Vista Park. Erin took off at a run up the hill. The street lights made her pink outfit all orange. And I noticed that sequins had been sewn into her tutu — they spashed light like a puppy shaking off water. Halfway up the hill she stopped running. She gave us a little hop. She began dancing in a slow serpentine manner. Soon she was totally lost in herself. Not dancing for anyone.

“Christ,” Derrick muttered. “Who’s going to go get her?”

He actually looked at me.

“Hey!” I said. “She’s a soufflé, fully risen and clearly off the leash.” That made me laugh, and I turned to Jill. “I think I mixed my metaphors.” Jill ignored me. She was staring raptly at the lighted radio in the dashboard.

“It’s like Jesus.” She turned to me. “A light … you know, in the darkness.” And she grabbed my arm, grinning. “I’m so fucked up.”

Alex was trudging up the hill. When she got to Erin, she sat down and just watched her dance.

I squeezed Jill’s knee. She focused on my face, with a questioning smile. I pointed up the hill.

“There’s a show up there.”

Jill looked up and saw Erin and Alex. She got out of the cab. I followed. Soon we were seated on the grass watching Erin dance slow and lost and happy. The cab driver sat next to me with a grin and he lit up a cigarette. Derrick stood over us, glowering.

“Is this how it’s going to be?”

The cab driver looked up, puzzled. “Well, she sure is a pretty thing, isn’t she?”

Derrick zipped up his jacket. “I’ll go ahead, right?”

We nodded. And we waved to him.

“Okay,” he muttered. And finally, he left.

We never did make it to the I-Beam. In fact, I never saw Derrick again. But what I do remember is that a couple of white guys in dreadlocks were out walking their Dachshund. For some reason they both had drums — one with bongos, the other with a djembe. They joined us. They provided a beat, and soon it wasn’t just Erin dancing.

Tonight, however, the strongest drug I’ve got going is the sugar rush off the candy corn. Kat’s working her way through a bottle of Boon’s Farm. But it all seems so innocent.

I want edgy. I want Dionysian. And here I am on a porch in a proper, polite neighborhood with candy for kids.

“It’s Harry Potter!” Kat says, pulling on my sleeve. “Isn’t he adorable?”

I agree, and I smile behind my mask. And I reveal the candy for the kid with my forceps.

When I moved into the King William neighborhood of San Antonio, I quickly had it explained to me that I had missed, by but a scant five years, the bohemian era. It had been described to me as a rollicking milieu of decayed old-money, like the French Quarter as envisioned by Hollywood. And sometimes, if I squint just right, I can get a glimpse. The aging hippy holdouts living in the mansion on Adams Street which is broken up into eight apartments, one just a single room, seven by forty-five feet. Or the Vietnam Vet over on Madison with the electronic larynx who plays his theremin late into the night. But, for the most part, it’s become a haven of upstanding citizenry. Such is the price of gentrification. Sure there are still artists here, but mostly of the well-heeled retirees. My duplex, with the apartment out back, is the last rental property on my block. All the rest? Yuppie homeowners.

Last year I met a filmmaker who lives in the neighborhood. Erik was in attendance at a DVD release party for a local psychobilly band at the Wiggle Room. I overheard him talking to one of the guys in the band, and by his reference to cameras and lighting, I had assumed he was the director. But then I saw him plunk down 15 dollars for a copy of the DVD. I went up and asked him what kind of movies he made. We went out to the patio and had a few beers. We mainly talked about books.

Yesterday he called me up to ask if I was available to help him shoot a short documentary. I had nothing planned, so I said sure. We were to interview some old guy who lives one street over from me.

Today I met him at the man’s house. On the porch I asked Erik what he wanted me to do. “Be the interviewer.” He rang the bell. Several small yappy dogs took up their defense cries. “I don’t know this guy,” I sputtered. “Me neither. But he sounds like a grade A kook. Just ask him about saucerians or the hollow earth. He’s bound to launch into some sweet tirade.”

Suddenly the dogs fell silent. The door opened slow with a creak straight from a Boris Karloff movie. Herbert Farnsworth revealed himself, the shadow of the door wiping aside as he leaned forward to take our hands, as gentlemanly as Karloff himself would have. I placed him in his mid eighties, but very fit. He wore white linen trousers and an immaculate white oxford shirt. He had on cheap black house slippers, the kind they sell at the Dollar General Store.

We followed him inside to a parlor done up in high Victorian, sans doilies. I never did see (nor hear) those dogs. Weird.

Erik deftly placed his equipment in a corner. And he continued a stream of small talk patter as he unpacked and set up. Mr. Farnsworth smiled and nodded politely, keeping to his feet. I decided to take some initiative. I sat and motioned Farnsworth to do the same. I was in a maroon winged back chair. Farnsworth sat and leaned back in a matching William IV settee.

When the camera was on the tripod, and the wireless microphone was clipped to Farnsworth’s shirtfront, Erik started rolling video. He nodded to me.

I began asking general questions about his life, his family, his work, the neighborhood. Nothing exciting. He’d remained a bachelor, worked for the Southwest Research Institute as an engineer most of his life, and he had lived in this Georgian Colonial revival-style house since his mother died and left it to him in the ’70s. It was all so prosaic. I could think of no legitimate segue into kookery. Some sweet old man’s nattering on about his mother’s volunteer work for the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and I’m supposed to jump in with a question about extraterrestrials?

Erik came to my rescue.

“Mr. Farnsworth, if you’ll pardon me, I was wondering if you could tell us about the time you discovered the tunnels.”

Farnsworth gave us a shy smile, and he turned to me and began an elaborate explication of the day back in 1967 — it was August — that Farnsworth was under contract to design the subterranean concrete support piers for the Tower of the Americas for the Hemisfair project.

“O’Neail Ford had already weaseled out of his contract for the over-all design. The newspapers were supporting him, saying that he wanted to save dozens of historical buildings on the site from demolition. But the truth was that he had been in lengthy talks with Tom Slick (my boss at the Institute) and T. Boone Pickens, both rich Texas oil men with a fascination for the paranormal. They cautioned Ford. The site in question was over an ancient energy vortex, and clearly there was something down there that wasn’t supposed to be disturbed.”

I cleared my throat politely.

“Pardon me, sir. But didn’t Tom Slick pass away in the early 1960s. How could there have been lengthy talks?”

Erik nodded to me energetically, holding his thumb up. Let him have it, he seemed to be suggesting.

“You’ve a good sense of history, young man,” Farnsworth said. “Tom Slick was dead. But he could speak more clearly through a Ouija Board than any disembodied spirit I have encountered.”

He continued his story. When he was on the construction site, it wasn’t just him, but everyone seemed to feel this great dread.

“And sixty-five feet down they hit this metallic bulkhead. Some fellows from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology came out with their mobile lab. Now you can’t carbon-date metal, but they were using a device similar to Harry Hess’ magnetometers which were used to prove continental drift. They showed that the metal was forged at some time when the Earth’s magnetic field was flipped. The last time this happened, the Brunhes-Matuyama Reversal, was three-quarters of a million years ago. That’s a pretty old artifact. President Johnson sent in some hard-noses from military intelligence to chase off everyone who wasn’t crucial to the construction. And even many of those who were, found themselves replaced by the Army Corps of Engineers. But because of my connections with the Institute, I was allowed to stay on.”

I looked over at Erik. He was enraptured by the story.

“We didn’t have to go any deeper for the foundation, so we concentrated on how to cut through the metal. It was a very strange alloy, tough as hell, but it finally opened up to our oxyacetylene torches. We continued to build the Tower, but we had established a subterranean chamber atop the metal bulkhead. And we worked through the day and through the night. When we finally cut through two and a half feet of metal, we found a tunnel, eight feet in diameter. It took six weeks for us to cut the hole wide enough to send in an investigating team.”

Mr. Farnsworth paused. He looked at me and then at Erik.

“I have a pitcher of ice tea in the refrigerator. I know I’m getting rather parched. I’ll just be a moment. Make yourselves comfortable.”

Farnsworth rose to his feet and padded out of the room. Erik turned to me with a smile.

“You’re doing great. I knew you would.”

“This is it?” I asked. “He’s senile. It’s pure exploitation.” I wasn’t sure if the obvious had sunk in with the guy. Or maybe I had the whole thing screwed up. “Right?”

“Look, he’s not senile. Crazy, maybe. But what he’s talking about is the same sort of stuff he told a writer with Fate Magazine in 1973. He’s been interviewed several times. But never on video.”

Farnsworth entered with a tray containing a pitcher of tea and three glasses with ice. I got up and took the tray and placed in to the sideboard at the windows. I poured out three glasses and distributed them.

“Where was I,” asked Farnsworth.

“Investigators were sent into the tunnel,” I prompted.

“So, in July of ’69, while the Hemisfair was going on up on the surface, and as, much further above, Apollo 11 was touching down in the Sea of Tranquility, we had, at one time, seventeen teams mapping out the labyrinth of tunnels. We even had jeeps down there, and they were heading so far out, that they were running out of gas. Eventually when we began finding some of the tunnels which led up to the surface, here and there scattered over the planet, we were able to distribute fuel and food depots for the crews working down there. As artifacts and technology of this lost ancient culture was lifted up to the surface, we were on a tear to make sense of it all. There were linguists, archeologists, sociologists, psychologists, and on and on. When Nixon came into office, the whole concern was restructured. I, for one, was sent packing.”

I made a show of appearing sad.

“But there is still access to the tunnels through the elevators at the Tower of the Americas. Everyone who works there has security clearence. And they all know how to make the elevators go down. It’s really simple. Just a combination of buttons. You press UP, STOP, ALARM–”

At the moment, there was a rush of noise and activity at the front door. Three elderly women came walking in, chattering to one another. When they passed the parlor, they fell silent, gaping at us.

“What the hell’s going on?” demanded the tallest one.

“Bertie, where are the doggies?” the shortest one asked Farnsworth, all perplexed.

The third woman just stood in the hallway, her hand at her throat.

“My sisters, gentlemen,” Farnsworth told us with a wane smile. “I thought they’d not be back until the late afternoon.”

The short woman explained that the wine tour had been cancelled.

The tall woman was holding up her cell phone.

“I will soon be dialing 911 unless the media departs!”

Farnsworth signed and shrugged. “They are so protective. What can I do?”

I helped Erik pack his equipment. The tall sister stayed in the doorway holding up the phone. The other two drifted off. Farnsworth sheepishly sipped his tea and seemed to have nothing to say.

When we were ready to leave, we shook hands with Farnsworth, squeezed past the sister, and walked outside.

Erik grinned at me. He held up a scrap of paper.

“Look what the old man passed to me. It’s the elevator code. You know, to the tunnels!”

I don’t know if he really believed it. I was pretty sure he just saw it as a misguided narrative, that he wanted to see played out, even if he had no where to go.

“Come on,” he said with a disarming intensity. “Lets go distract an elevator operator.”

The Tower of the Americas was just a 15 minute walk away. I could hardly say no. So off we went.

Allison, the girl who lives in the garage apartment behind the duplex I rent, had brought her own tool box. She sprawled her stuff out on my hardwood floor, sitting there cross-legged. I sat on my sofa watching her rewire my table lamp. She was barefoot in worn jeans. She wore an aqua sleeveless t-shirt and had her hair pulled back with what I swear was one of those thick blue rubber-bands they put around a clump of broccoli. She stripped the insulation off a length of wire with a special tool, and she did it with one deft motion. This is the sort of woman I’d normally be drooling over, but with Allison, there had never been any sort of connection between us. Even on those rare occasions when I’d see her with her boyfriend — whose name I could never remember — she seemed removed from him, like a gourmand tucking into a three-bean salad, dispassionately, methodically.

“So, you really fucked this up,” she said without looking up.

“I just tripped over the cord.”

I don’t think she was buying my excuse. It was almost true. I had been chasing a cockroach along the wainscoting, stomping and missing and stomping and missing, and when it darted behind the desk, I made on last lunge. Never did get the bastard.

The lamp is hideous. Allison made it for me as a gift, and I love it.
She’s an artist who works in that slippery world of mixed media. Sometimes two dimensional, sometimes three dimensional. But never call anything of hers a painting or a sculpture. Three weeks after I moved in, I attended her first opening — first for me, that is. The show was held in a gallery co-op over on South Flores. Her stuff was by far the best of about a dozen artists. My favorite piece was a bas-relief of Ross Perot done in joint compound and 73 garlic presses. I made myself a promise. I would keep an eye out for outrageous items (or, normal items in outrageous amounts) to pass her way. And so, a couple months later, while working a temp gig cleaning out a warehouse on the West Side, not far from Our Lady of the Lake University, I came across a room with about 200 mannequin heads. Male and female. Just the heads. They were all the resined plaster style of the fifties. The owner of the building just shrugged when I asked if I could have them. And that’s what I dumped on Allison. She almost gave me a grin. Two days later she knocked at my door with an unwieldy table lamp, looking like a totem pole from a Jack Benny skit. A wooden platter base, with four mid-century heads stacked. Boy, girl, boy, girl. And the top girl wore the lamp shade that came down to the bridge of her nose. “Isn’t it incredibly disturbing?” Allison wanted to know. I agreed, and I accepted the gift. I gave her an awkward hug.

And here she was now, trouble-shooting. Dispassionately, methodically.

I got up and went into the kitchen. I pulled a pitcher of hibiscus tea from the refrigerator. It was strong and super-sweet. I like to mix it half-and-half with Topo Chico, a brand of Mexican mineral water. Taking two large glass tumblers down from the cupboard, I mixed up the fizzing concoctions.

Allison didn’t look up when I placed the glass on the floor beside her. I sat down and watched her work. When she finally reached out for the glass and took a sip, she paused. She looked closer. Frowned. Sniffed. She took a deep swig, about half the glass, and returned to work.

Gina turned me onto hibiscus tea. It was last year. We were chosen (and I’m still not exactly sure why) to represent our graduate department for a symposium on bicultural media in Monterey. That’s Mexico. Four days. All expenses paid, with a per diem stipend.

Gina was fluent in Spanish and had been published in several journals. Why they added me, makes no sense. And to compound confusion, the family who hosted our lodging either assumed that we were a couple, or that we should become one. We were given the guest house, which was one huge room with a double bed, sofa, dining table, kitchenette, and bathroom. I played the gentleman to the hilt. Took the sofa. And maybe even went overboard with the professional relationship stuff. Gina and I had never spent much time together before. We were pursuing different interests. She was concerned with the tightly focused realm of early 20th century Mexican land reform, and I was dicking around with border fiction. Mainly, my own.

I was old. A returning student, being the euphemism. She seemed pretty bright, and I liked that about her. But Gina was just a kid. Giddy, and oh so serious. As I recall, she was cute. I found her moderately attractive. But there’s something that exhausts me about twenty-something intellectuals. What they have to say is usually just so obvious.

The only thing that stuck in my mind during the symposium is that Gina made me, every afternoon before siesta (which we decided to observe), a cup of hibiscus tea; what, in Mexico, is called Jamaica tea. I really liked it.

The following semester Gina transferred to a doctoral program in Nevada. She sent me a long letter (not email, it came in the post) explaining her feelings for me. It ran three pages, as protracted and sententious as her essays about the agrarian reforms of the Madero regime. Other than Gina’s missive, I have never received a letter from a woman professing her great love for me. It went into detail about my cold aloofness. She ended on some upbeat note, maladroitly dropping in a Ricardo Flores Magón quote; which I’m fairly certain wasn’t Flores Magón, but William Godwin. In short, she found me dispassionate and methodical.

Allison snapped the lamp on and off and on again. The light bulb was a-glowing! She placed it on the table next to where I was sitting on the sofa. I was transfixed with the way she swept up the shards of plastic insulation with her hands and dumped them into the rubber plant pot on the floor next to her. She tossed back the last of the hibiscus tea, and with a move from the younger Michael Jackson, she rose to her feet without using her hands, simply by shifting forward and scissoring her legs together.

“Wow,” I said, trying something out. “I really like the way you move.”

It was almost flirty. And I said it with a genuine smile. And, dammit, I’d given the woman 200 mannequin heads!

I took her to the door and decisively laid a hand on her shouldler as I said, “Thank you.” She flashed me half a smile and took the initiative: she gave me an awkward hug.

I closed the door behind her and sat on my sofa in the circle of light. I opened a book, but I didn’t feel like reading.

Dr. Strawn De Leon needed a fresh nickel-cadmium battery for his new electronic sphygmomanometer — it had a flared plastic handle that made it look built for speed. He’d sent his nurse to the Battery Shack outlet store just across the river, and we waited in uncomfortable silence; me more uncomfortable than he, I suspect, as I was wearing the paper robe that tied up the back. Paper apron is more apt (one-size-fits-all, my fat ass!), and I had to maintain a constant fidget to keep the flesh of my backside from adhering to the vinyl of the examining table.

“I don’t believe you’ve seen any of my magic tricks,” he suddenly said, establishing a modicum of eye contact, which he quickly disengaged.

“Wouldn’t you rather tell me about the Priest and the Rabbi?” I muttered.

“I don’t follow,” he said with a suspicious smile. He patted nervously at his comb-over.

I was afraid he was aiming to prestidigitate some lubricated item out of sight and into one of my unaccommodating orifices. But what could I do?

“Nothing, sir,” I said with a shrug. “Go right ahead. The stage is yours.”

It started out so cornball that I was thinking a prostate exam might not be so grim. I could only imagine that Dr. De Leon started out in the pediatric wards where naive tikes were as impressed with the got-your-nose thumb trick as they were with their first sight of a laryngoscope; but, myself, all I could do was roll my eyes and smile indulgently as the doctor reached his hand up behind my ear — “what do we have here?” — and produced a shiny Kennedy half-dollar. Things started to pick up as he made the coin walk back and forth across the knuckles of his left hand. He spun around, his white lab coat flaring out like a flamenco dancer’s skirt, and he snapped off the overhead lights so that the eye exam lamp cutting across the room was hitting him like a spotlight. Suddenly I realized that the 50 cent piece strolling back and forth over his knuckles had been joined by a nickel. Pretty slick, I was thinking. The guy’s cooking on all burners. He tossed the coins into the air and they exploded with a flash of fire and pink smoke and from out of the smoke dropped a live chicken. Dr. De Leon caught the startled bird and spun it like a basketball, then he placed it on its back on the counter between the sink and the row of glass jars filled with swabs and cotton balls. He stared at the chicken and it seemed to go into a trance. Never once looking away from the animal, the doctor removed his left shoe and sock. He soaked the sock in ether and slipped it over the chicken’s head. Music started playing from a speaker in the ceiling. Mendelssohn’s String Quintet No. 2. I watched, enraptured, breathless, as the doctor seized a scalpel — out of thin air, I swear — and began slashing at the dozing bird with muscular, masterful strokes. Jets of blood slashed across his face with no more intensity than a child’s water pistol. He made a little grunt of satisfaction and walked over to me. I watched as he placed a dripping palm on my chest and he pushed me gently down until I was flat on the examining table. His other hand, I saw, held delicately the chicken’s tiny heart, which he fed to me like a lover.

I was exploring on my bike the San Antonio River just south of the city along the region where the historic missions can be found. I was on the east side of the river between Mission San Jose and Mission San Juan walking my bike atop the river levy. I angled down to the flood plain and walked to the bank. I said the east side, but I like to get fancy and do that left bank, right bank thing. I was on the left bank of the San Antonio River. (Here’s how it works, picture yourself standing in the river, facing toward where the river is flowing. Your left hand is nearest the left bank, and so forth.) The river was rushing through this narrow dam and I didn’t hear the voice at first. I looked up and saw an unkempt man a bit older then myself standing on the far bank. He stood next to a mountain bike like mine, wearing a cycling jersey, cut-off jeans, sunglasses and a baseball cap. His long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. It was Anthony. I’d met him a couple of times before on the bike trail. He painted houses and seemed perennially unemployed. From his gestures I gathered he wanted me to meet him down river at the first crossing I could find. That would be S. E. Military. I waved and headed off. The one thing we had in common, other than our lack of employment, was that even though we appeared to be sadly out of shape, we could move pretty fast on two wheels. I took it as a challenge, and made it down the river, up and across the bridge, and met him on his side.

He invited me to his home for lunch. I didn’t know he was from the neighborhood. But we were just a few blocks from his peeling tar paper home on Pyron, within eyeline of Mission San Jose. The dogs lounging under the pecan tree didn’t get up, they just followed us with their eyes, the whites of which were the same color as their yellow teeth. A child’s wading pool was over-turned across the hood of a derelict Monte Carlo; to dry out, I presume, but that must have been a year or more back, as it now was dried and cracked from the onslaught of the sun. We went inside where it was dark and cool, but a bit stuffy. If Anthony had any kids, they were in school. He introduced me to his wife. She was on the phone speaking Spanish to her mother. She ignored him, but offered a smile to me. I watched as she retreated to the back of the house. I sat at a kitchen table and let Anthony make me a sandwich. He was one of those fair-skinned Latinos, and I could see he’d gotten too much sun. When he removed his sunglasses, they left an outline with his cheeks and forehead in red.

The kitchen was clean but not quite homey. Several cast iron skillets hung from hooks over the sink. An open package of paper napkins shared the table top with a pair of those plastic disposable salt and pepper shakers. Taped to the refrigerator door was the one indication of children. A paper plate with a turkey traced around a little hand in tempera paint. It looked pretty old. Anthony pulled out a can of beer for himself. He raised an eyebrow, but I shook my head. He gave me a glass of tap water. I removed my cycling gloves and washed my hands in the sink with dishwashing soap. Anthony made us each a Spam sandwich with white bread and mustard. He placed a pickled jalapeno on his plate but didn’t offer me one. As we ate I recalled the last time I’d had a Spam sandwich.

It was about ten years ago (and ten years between Spam sandwiches is about par for the course, unless you live in Hawaii, where I understand they eat that shit all the time), and I was living in the Big Bend region of Texas. A tiny hamlet of Vado Rojo, a few miles down-river from Presideo. In fact, that’s where I started that left bank right bank stuff. But I could never get my Mexicano friends and neighbors to play my game (“you see, Texas is the left bank, Mexico is the right bank”). I’d crossed over to the Mexican town of Ojinaga with my neighbor Father Mel. Father Melvin LaFollet served the Episcopal Dioceses of the Rio Grand. His region was huge. And for some reason he’d gotten pulled into some charity work where he was providing milk goats to impoverished families in Mexican towns across from Vado Rojo. These were goats he raised, a large hardy Spanish breed. The legalities of all this seemed questionable to me. In fact, I found myself sitting in a bar off the plaza with Father Mel and my friend Enrique, who was there because he knew everyone on both sides of the river, and he was also a master of diplomacy. Why I was there I can’t recall. Muscle, I guess. It was me holding onto the goat in the back of Father Mel’s van as we drove to the international bridge and crossed over. Also, I’m pretty sure I begged to help out. Smuggling goats into Mexico had adventure written all over it.

Me and Father Mel were nursing Dos Equis and Enrique had a Coke. I kept looking to the open door onto the dusty street, even though I had no idea who we were meeting. The noon-time sun hammered down out there and it must have been a hundred and fifteen. But the beer was cold and company excellent. I was sitting with two of few intellectuals in the whole river valley. Enrique and father Mel were talking about the literary merits of Ovid and my eyes wandered to the bar. I realized that under the counter, on the patron side, the bar was titled, and on the floor was a titled trough. How exotic! The bar was also a urinal. It made perfect sense. No awkward stumbling off to the men’s room. No fear some asshole would steal your smokes whilst you were taking a piss. You park yourself there in the perfect stance and stay there all night, with a finger poised jauntily on your zipper.

Enrique and Father Mel stood up, and I glanced around to see the man approach. I also stood. I gathered he was the local minister of agriculture…something like that. We needed his approval to bring a goat into his country. It would have been no trouble except for a humorless Mexican border guard who, I gathered, didn’t like the look of Father Mel. I can see his point. Father Mel was described by a National Geographic writer as looking like a “mad poet.” He’s every inch the exiled man of religion you don’t want among the canape and tea service set in the big city: wild silver hair, an off-kilter laugh straight from the exorcism chamber, and, peeking from the hem of the cassock, a pair of flip flops. He made an off-color joke to the border official, and here we were, trying to sweet-talk a bureaucrat so we could continue our mission of mercy.

Señor Agrícola sat down with a stern, all-business manner. We all shook his hand and sat. Father Mel squirmed a bit. Then he exploded, asking why this, why that, why why why. Enrique took a deep breath and exhaled. Before a very peeved Señor Agrícola could snap back, Enrique asked him a simple question I couldn’t quite make out. The man nodded, all business. Enrique called to the barman and placed an order of something, pointing all around. Enrique has a calm, quiet presence. He’s about 6′ 4″ and maybe 270 pounds. Sure, he can be very garrulous, but in a polite, deferential manner; and so, when he makes a declarative statement, people freeze, and give his words serious consideration. He wears a Pancho Villa mustache, but when he shaves, he says he looks just like a Ute.

A beer arrived for our guest, and he and Enrique had a chat about a man they both knew well–either Enrique’s uncle or Señor Agrícola’s uncle … my Spanish is spotty. Father Mel sat glum. And me? I grinned like an imbecile, still beguiled by the fact that the bar was a urinal. Brilliant!

The barman finally arrived with four chipped ceramic plates, each with a Spam sandwich. And in the middle of the table he placed a large bowl of peanuts, liberally coated with chili powder. Señor Agrícola brightened up. He squeezed a lime wedge all over the peanuts and began tucking into his sandwich. He was loosening up. I gathered he would turn a blind eye this once, but not again. In the future we would need vaccination papers from American vets as well as have the animals certifiably vaccinated in Mexico by state sanctioned veterinarian.

Father Mel slammed his fist on the table. Thankfully we were the only people in the bar. The bartender shook his head with a smile and turned up the volume on his TV. “This is charity,” he repeated. “Caridad! Un organización benéfica!” He had a flat midwestern accent that didn’t lend itself to the poetry of Spanish.

Señor Agrícola looked nervously to me, then to Enrique. Enrique put a hand on Father Mel’s shoulder and whispered in his ear. Father Mel sighed and walked to the bar. Enrique asked, “Que opcións?” The man just shook his head sadly. But when Father Mel placed another beer in front of him, Señor Agrícola held up his hand. We all froze. He took a drink. Then he pulled a map from his jacket’s breast pocket. He unfolded it on the table, and we were looking at the river valley. He pointed at a spot on the river. An inaccessible region in the canyons. “Aqui. Aqui bien.”

I gathered this would be a good place to cross. He’d do us the favor of turning a blind eye.

“The devil you say!” Father Mel spat out. He repeated his oath in Spanish.

The bureaucrat looked beseechingly at Enrique. But I noticed Enrique wasn’t bending duteously. Señor Agrícola noticed it also. He raised an eyebrow. Enrique firmly but politely took hold of the map. He spun it around. He placed his finger right on the river where Vado Rojo sits. He said without preamble that we would be crossing the goats right there, practically out of father Mel’s pens and into Mexico. The official was about to make a comment, but Enrique launched into a controlled, well-thought-out position I had heard him make so many times to me in English about how the border is an arbitrary boundary which divides a culture, a people, which should be one. He went into the ordeals of the people on both sides of the river, the common struggles they had to put up with that divided families and friends. Hopes and dreams crushed because of illogical nationalistic boundaries. “This river doesn’t separate us, it never has. It brings us together.” Enrique said this in Spanish, but I caught a few words and knew instantly what he told me so often over afternoon cappuccinos in his kitchen with his wife.

Señor Agrícola and – I think I saw a glisten in his eye – took to his feet. He roared with a laugh. Said something about the family of man. And he pounded me on the back, as if I were the missing part of this grand, confused rubric. And he headed off to work.

“I love doing business in Mexico,” Father Mel gushed with a genuine smile.

We delivered the goat to a gracious family in the shadow of Sierra de la Santa la Cruz. “I hope they don’t eat it,” Father Mel said as we drove back home. “It’s a milking goat. Not an eating goat.”

We crossed a few more goats there at the river crossing at Vado Rojo, and then the man, up in Muenster, Texas who was paying for the goats, dropped out of touch. Without the money, the smuggling operation stopped.

Sometimes it saddens me that I’ve spent more time on the left bank of the Rio Grande than I have on the right back. I hope to remedy that.

But the San Antonio River…I’m all over both banks.

So I finished my Spam sandwich and glass of tap water. I wiped the mustard from my lips with a paper napkin. Anthony slapped me on my back as I left. He was holding a new beer. I could hear his wife, still on the phone, laughing somewhere back in the house. As I rode to the street the dogs didn’t even look up. They were flat on their backs like noon-time lions under Serengeti trees in a nature film.

My truck had been running a bit rough, so when I stopped this
afternoon at the Handy Andy on Flores for soy milk and laundry
detergent, I picked up a couple of quarts of motor oil. I tossed the
groceries on my front seat and popped the hood. I was right, the dip
stick came out dry but for a varnishy drop on the very tip. I have
recently started drinking again. Not a wise decision by any arithmetic.
I was sick with hangover, and I wiped at a constant scum of sweat on my
forehead. When I opened one of the oil quarts, I was afraid I might
make a mess. I wasn’t exactly shaking, but I sure wasn’t feeling
steady. I dipped into the cab and rooted around behind the seats. There
was a flyer I had pulled off my windshield last month advertising a
Klezmer band playing downtown at the Sons of Herman Hall. I fashioned
it into a paper funnel. It worked like a charm. And as I was opening
the second quart a girl who works at the grocery store sat down on the
bench next to the coin-op dispenser of sanitized water near where I was
parked. Her name is Laurena. I’ve read her name tag before. And I’ve
overheard her co-workers call her Laurenita. I assume she’s still in
high-school.

“Is it okay?” she asked. It took me a beat to realize she was
speaking to me. In this era of the cell phone it’s, at times, difficult
to know when a solicitous voice is directed your way.

“It’ll be fine.” I turned to give her a smile. A neutral,
non-threatening smile, I hoped. She has this beauty found in so many
teenage Latinas that is guaranteed to break your heart at a hundred
yards, and I know the child doesn’t need yet another middle-age man
wagging his eyebrows at her and dropping double entendres. “I think I
caught it in time.”

She managed a shy, distant smile and began unwrapping an ice cream
sandwich. An old man shuffled up hugging a paper bag of groceries tight
to his chest. He spoke a bit with Laurena in Spanish. I wasn’t trying
to eavesdrop, and beside my Spanish isn’t what it once was, but I
gathered the old guy was asking after the girl’s grandmother. It didn’t
sound good.

The man nodded polity and headed off. Laurena ran her tongue around
the edges of the ice cream sandwich. That’s the way I do. And next you
wait for it to melt a bit and do it again.

I recalled the first time I came to shop at Handy Andy. She was
working the register and she possessed this simple, stunning beauty.
Thick eyebrows, strong cheek bones, and full, soft lips. Her face was
more solemn than serious. Some great sadness was back behind those
eyes. I though maybe she was pregnant like the girl bagging my
groceries that day, but no, over the months she never got bigger. She
never changed.

I used to think that I was drawn to sad, damaged women like my
father. But eventually I realized that whereas he wanted to rescue the
maidens he deemed to be in distress, I just wanted that sort of
communion between me and a fellow traveler. I didn’t want to save or
change anyone. I just wanted to be able to offer and receive solace.
Every woman I have ever been attracted to, I have been able to see the
stamp of pain on her face no matter how subtle it might be.

This is how my heart operated even before I met Karen. I could
instantly diagnose the shattered abused neurotic in any room. And even
if I lacked the courage to approach, my heart would always go out to
her. And so when I met Karen I knew this was my perfect Pieta. And I
can’t simply blame her bottomless sadness, it was indeed with a mutual
midnight that we dragged each other down into the gutter.

But today I don’t want to dwell on Karen and what happened to her.
Besides, there’s nothing common between her and this checkout girl.
Sadness is no real commonality. It’s just too ubiquitous.

I tossed the two oil cans and my makeshift funnel in the trash
barrel. Laurena wiped her hand on the denim of her thigh. I watched as
she stood and tossed her ice cream wrapper into the trash. She was
standing close enough so I could smell what I swear was vanilla extract
coming off of her.

“What’s Klezmer?”

“What?”

She pointed.

“Oh. It’s Jewish music.”

She looked at me and blinked.

“It sounds like gypsy music,” I added.

“You like it?”

“I don’t know. It was on my windshield.”

She nodded vaguely. Then she nodded decisively. She smiled, but without looking at me, and headed back inside.

For almost a month now I have been living here in San Antonio down on the south side. To occupy my mind from gnawing on itself with the fears of unemployment, compounded by an inherent aversion to job-hunting, I’ve taken to long afternoon bike rides along the light industrial side streets off Presa and Flores.

I was turning onto Probandt near a self-consciously funky brew pub when the rains hit. It was a wall that just came down; the noise was absolute, like a train screaming through a crossing. I angled across a gravel parking lot and coasted through a giant doorway into an enormous corrugated steel building, barrel-vaulted like a quonset hut. Against the back wall were several windows, but with the clouds and the rain I couldn’t make much out. There were no lights on, and the place was empty. I couldn’t be sure if I’d stumbled into an abandoned building or a factory during the lunch break. I leaned my bike against the sliding metal door and wiped water off my face. I would wait out the rain here, but I hunkered down near the doorway so that it would be clear I had no nefarious notions in mind.

I smelled paint. Oil paint. The wooden frame of the twenty-foot high sliding door had been recently slathered with silver paint. I reached out. It was still tacky and left a smear on my finger. The odor moved in closer, wrapped around me…transported me back through the years.

The first time I left college, I drove down to stay with some fellow drop outs who were living in Blanco. Milton was somewhat older than the others. He’d turned his back on an economics degree and moved to an old dilapidated building on the town square his family no longer had any interest in. The place used to be a paint and wallpaper store until it had gone out of business in the ’50s. When I arrived in the middle of the spring semester, Milton was living on he second floor with the North brothers, Lyle and Forrest. Back at the university the three had gigged around performing godawful amplafied racket. The ground floor of the building was one large, well-lit space which had not long been painted silver, after, I assume, Warhol’s Factory. The fresh paint had a metallic, chemical smell like a car radiator boiled over. Milton and the brothers practiced there in long, pointless sessions. They weren’t just making music, I gathered, but involved in some sort of social experiment embracing performance art, multi-media presentation, situationalist disinformation campaigns, and all that sort of crap. The place reeked of marijuana and was littered with Dairy Queen cups and take-out trash. My visit couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of days, but in my memory it was weeks. The air was thick with acrimony; the stoned, rambling vituperatives piled to the rafters. They were at each other like rats in a sock. I made my exit early one morning without being seen.

Recently I looked up Milton. He still lives on the second floor. The brothers had long ago abandoned him (one for Jesus, and the other is a diving instructor in, of all places, Norman, Oklahoma). The years have not been kind to Milton–they’ve left crags on his face, and sagging bulges everywhere else. He sponges off his folks and continues to make music. His studio is a cramped room over-looking the courthouse, chocked with computers, cables, speakers, and assorted devices. He showed me his back list of fifty-some-odd CDs he sells through the mail. He claims to have a following in the Netherlands, and I have no reason to doubt him.

We ate some soup his mother brought over and talked about the years gone by. Milton would sometimes drift off like a weak radio station heard while driving. He claimed to be a narcoleptic. But no. His brain was just wired bad. He was all fucked up. The last I saw of him he was wearing headphones and watching a computer monitor as he bobbed his head slowly to the drone of a looped recording of a train whistle mournfully stuttering ad infinitum.

On the way out, I stopped to peek through the window on the street level. The place still had the silver paint, but it was all tarnished with the years, and furred patches of dust clung around the window casements and up in the crown molding. It wasn’t until I was driving through Dripping Springs that I realized I’d forgotten Milton’s parting gift of his entire musical oeuvre. “Don’t think of it as music,” he’d cautioned me. “It’s collage. Sound collage.”

The rain slacked off. Soon it was just water dripping off the building. An old man in bib overalls and a grimy t-shirt ambled across the gravel. He lit a cigarette as he entered the building and passed by me.

“Looks like you got caught out in it,” he said to me with a grin. And he disappeared back there, somewhere, into the shadows.

“I dreamed of pink neon tubes, curly and fat, buzzing like a hive of happy bees. They lit my way through a maze of gumdrop trees and kitty cats….” My court-appointed shrink tapped his lips with the end of his pencil. He wasn’t buying it. “And I took a narrow, dusty path,” I continued. “Into a tight grove of dead trees, and there I saw my mother. She bent over a boulder and hiked up her skirt, exposing herself naked to me. In a husky voice, she demanded that I take her savagely like a –” He just sighed, stroked his beard. What can I say? My hour was about up and I was just padding. Besides, I’d seen out the window that the doctor’s pizza had arrived. Surely he was as keen to shuffle me out his side exit door as I was keen to be shuffled. He told me to start a little diary of my feelings and to read from it Thursday. Kind of a psychotherapist’s way of having you drop and give him ten. Fucking homework. I shrugged. Whatever got me out of there.

Out on the street I was pleased to see that the sun had finally broke from the clouds. The sidewalks were steamy as the rain puddles began to evaporate. I waited for a break in the traffic and ran across the street. I sat down on a bench at the main entrance of the shopping mall. This is where, on Saturday afternoons, the high school kids would be smoking their foreign cigarettes and slouching self-consciously in their ludicrously shapeless outfits. But they were in school right now. What ever became of truancy? This current crop of teens got no fight in them. It doesn’t seem so long ago that when someone said: “Man, I’m psychotic,” the response would be a chuckle, and a: “No doubt.” Now, it’s a chuckle, followed by: “So, what’ve they got you on? Me, I’m taking these little lavender triangles.” Everything’s anti-psychotic this, antidepressant that, and if you’re not somehow managing to pharmacologically inhibit your serotonin uptake, then I’m sorry to say that the parade has passed you by.

I don’t put much stock in medicine — though lord knows I’ve spent more years of my life than I care to admit engaged in various forms of self-medication. I also don’t hold with Dr. Freud’s “talking cure,” or whatever subgenera of quackery practiced by my new doctor. I certainly would never have darkened his lobby were it not for a misguided, though very well-meaning judge. All in all, I don’t feel there to be any damage to my psyche; leastwise, nothing that needs massaged, re-birthed, elevated, or actualized. Although, there was a time I had my doubts. About a year ago I started seeing shadows. Things moving just at the boundary of my peripheral vision. I’d turn, and — nothing. First I thought it was vermin around my apartment. You know, roaches or mice. Fast scurriers. But that didn’t explain the fleeting forms I’d see in my car or at the park. For a while I was convinced they were floaters, those dots and strings in the vitreous fluid of the eyeball, which are composed of condensed proteins or cells. I had to change theories when I noticed the phantoms were at times quite large, like a raccoon or even a small car. I settled on a diagnosis of optic neuritis, and decided I’d learn to live with it. It’s really not so bad. Like having a pet. Without the responsibilities.

I decided to go buy a spiral notebook and a pen to begin my homework. Ideally, I’d stop by the drug store near my place, but there was that slight matter of a restraining order. Instead, I stopped off at the 7-11 next to the Ethiopian restaurant. I found one of those steno pads with the spiral on the top, and you turn it over and there’s the alphabet in Gregg’s shorthand. People still use that shit? I had to wait my turn at the check out. A little boy — who I really think was too young to be out and about on his own — was pulling from his pockets little fistfuls of coins. I couldn’t help but smile at his ambitious assortment of candies mounded on the counter. Just like me at that age, when I’d…. But, wait. I hit a wall. What was just like me at that age? I couldn’t take my memory further back than, what? Fourth grade? It was nothing. Maybe shimmers of sunlight. Grassy fields. Bushes choked with honeysuckle vines…. Buzzing with happy bees? But that was just a guess.

Life at Cielo Vista took on a strong monastic flavor right from the get go. I guess I should insert the caveat that all I know about the community was what I received written in my father’s letters. Sure, there is the information available on their web site, but that’s just self-serving propaganda generated to drum up new recruits. They do make it sound attractive, I’ll give them that; a peaceful agrarian society on the upper slopes of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Oriental where the members practice meditation and discuss a philosophical mishmash of Gurdjieffian neo-gnosticism and some kind of ancient astronaut poopery I thought had long ago gone the way of the the mood ring and drum solos. Try as I might, I’ve never been able to figure out what triggered dad’s transformation from a suburban CPA to a new age goofball with Mercury rising; however, I’ve never been at a loss in understanding why mom divorced him. His once analytical outlook on life, as sturdy as an actuarial table, gave way to a slippery world of ectoplasm and astral bodies. His first letter arrived just as I was starting graduate school. I was pretty busy and didn’t get around to reading it for several days.

“How’s it going, sport! You’d never believe how clean the air is here. It’s like you can see forever. They’ve got me working at the cheese factory. It’s positively rustic. I’ll tell you, milking goats takes a real knack. It took a while, but I’ve got it down solid. There’s a little valley just over the hill with a sacred grove and you can just barely make out the stone foundation of the pre-Columbian temple. The grove is located at one of those points of conjunction between this world and another manifestation, a higher vibration of the cosmic apparatus. Some of the others here can actually see that vibration. I think I’m beginning to pick up on a glimmer now and again. This is all very exciting. I’m, at times, frustrated because, as a neophyte, there seems to be very little I can contribute to the community. I am, however, proud of my financing of the ozone rejuvenation pods. Love to you and your mother.”

Perhaps I should have consulted a lawyer. Maybe track down dad, accompanied by a professional deprogrammer. But, really, he’s a grown man. None of my business. Although, I became a bit more concerned when the second letter arrived.

“A vibratory fold of the seventh manifestation has surrounded this region of the mountains. I wonder, will this letter reach you? The sun never sets. It perches stationary in the sky surrounded by a ring of lavender clouds. Not a day goes by without half a dozen saucers landing or departing. The goats keep getting smaller. They are now no larger than a toothbrush. Soon they’ll be gone altogether…or at least become too small to see without a microscope. Yesterday my roommate, who has the bunk beneath me, revealed himself as one of the great Ascended Masters, but I suspected that from the beginning. It’s been rumored that soon the sun will begin its descent to the eastern horizon and those who don’t make it into the caves further up the mountain before nightfall will be left behind on this, the third manifestation.”

It sounded so ominous. Portentous. Like some sort of eschatological suicide cult. I shrugged it off. Just a pathetic cry for help. Screw him. I had my own life to live.

A year later my cousin Vicki, passing through town, stopped by for a visit.

“What are all these?”

“Those? Nothing. Just some letters from my father. You know, he’s living in some new age commune in Mexico.”

“No he isn’t. I saw him last week. He’s the night manager at the Food King.”

“The fuck you say. But those postmarks. Those stamps….”

“You haven’t even opened these.”

“Yeah, sure I have. Well the first two. I probably should just throw them away.”

“Can I have them?”

“Didn’t know you to be a fan of abnormal psychology. Go ahead. Enjoy.”

Vicki left, and the letters from dad stopped coming. Two months later a letter arrived from Vicki. It was postmarked Cielo Vista in Mexico. I threw it in the trash.