Guide to Animal Behaviour (16 page)

Sylvia went to a doctor for tests. For the week we had to wait for the results, I remained in bed. Mother said I had a work-avoidance neurosis. Father said I was lazy. I could not face the world. My future hung in the balance. I was only a child myself. How could a child have a child? This was God's punishment for playing with my penis and not listening to my parents. The night before the test results were due, I confessed everything. I knew by then there was no hope for one so mired in sin as I was. Besides, my parents would need to make arrangements for Sylvia to move in. Probably my brothers would have to double up so she could have one of their rooms.

Afterward

I am fifteen now. Old. In a year, I will be able to get my driver's licence. Sylvia was not pregnant. But she had to tell the doctor who she had had intercourse with. The doctor said, “He's so young. I didn't think he was man enough.” I chose to regard this as a compliment. Sylvia and I have agreed to have a chaste relationship from now on and begin to see other people. I feel the adult world closing in — those brief hours of freedom before Mrs. Crotty's lesson are no more. My musical career also has ended.

Many things have changed. Petey's sister Diane got pregnant in Grade 9. Petey took it hard and now is in reform school for arson. Sylvia has found part-time work as an office assistant for the doctor who gave her the pregnancy test. The doctor has taken down his pants in front of her and invited her to go to Acapulco with him (he was only married a year ago!) during the Christmas holidays. Wanda has become a lesbian and cut her hair short. So far I don't think she has found any other lesbians in our school — perhaps she is only doing this to draw attention to herself.

The other day Mother and Father had a fight. Mother confided to me that Father had ruined the whole birth experience for her by saying he would be embarrassed if she screamed. Apparently, Mother had been looking forward to screaming. One begins (I am beginning) to realize how wounded everyone is, how many wounds there are. In my dreams, the future bears down upon me like a runaway horse.

THE TRAVESTY OF SLEEP

Far into the travesty of sleep we are making tracks for higher ground.

— T.C. Cannon, Caddo Indian artist killed in a car accident in the plaza at Santa Fe, 1979.

The Worm

I
was in Santa Fe the spring the prisoners rioted.

That was a terrible situation as you may recall. Prisoners broke into the pharmacy and took all the drugs, then tortured snitches and queers to death and burned buildings down around their ears. The State of New Mexico called in the National Guard. I remember uniformed soldiers racing through the streets to muster-points, olive-green Medivac helicopters ferrying the dead and injured to the hospital on St. Michael's Drive, smoke rising from the mesa below the city and TV reporters wading through the ruined cell blocks in rubber boots, speaking smugly of horrible things.

One incident the TV reporters liked especially to tell about was the discovery of a man who had been burned to death with acetylene torches, then had his head chopped off and stuck between his legs.

For days there were rumours that prisoners remained unaccounted for, that they were either ashes under the collapsed gymnasium roof or had somehow escaped into the
Sangre de Cristo Mountains where they lived in caves long since abandoned by the Indians.

On Good Friday, I drove to Chimayo with a friend. We entered the Sanctuario to dig a handful of holy mud from the mysterious hole in the sacristy and saw the glass-encased statues of the Infant-Jesus and the Virgin of Prague, the primitive religious paintings hanging along the walls, and all the prayerful, hand-written messages left there by simple folk.

Dear Baby Jesus, Take care of my brother Ramon who is in the prison and we have not heard from him.

Outside the church, I threw my holy mud (now dried to sand) away, though some continued to cling to the lines in my palm and beneath my fingernails.

I wondered about Ramon, where he was and what terrible crime he had committed, or not committed. I wondered if Ramon were the man with his head off and his own cock in his mouth, like the snake biting its tail or like the Worm of Ouroboros, the worm of the world.

Or if he had become ashes on the wind.

Somehow I did not see him as one of those who managed to survive by staying out in the prison yard, under the search lights night after night, while the buildings rang with shrieks and moans and cries of ecstasy.

Or, I asked myself, had he climbed through a gap in the wire fence, hidden from the search lights by night and the billowing smoke which ascended from the pyres of bodies and mattresses?

In the sunlight at Chimayo, with the passionate worshippers gathering to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus (a man about my age who died in Palestine two thousand years ago; also, I conjecture, about Ramon's age; also a prisoner — we must all seek release in our own way, or we must all seek transformation, that is what I say, we must transform ourselves whatever the cost), with the lines of passionate pilgrims hiking up the roads to Chimayo bearing their palms and crosses, passing the little white crosses and bundles of plastic flowers (shrines to motor vehicle accidents), with all this, shall we say, excessive religiosity going on around me and my companion, the Angel of Death (Dona Sebastiana, she of the death cart, with bow and arrow, in the museum at Taos — I will explain this later), frowning at me for throwing the mud away, as if my lack of faith somehow cast doubt on her own belief (we must all be pilgrims together say the sheep and the shepherds), with all this going on, I am thinking quite passionately myself about Ramon slipping like a wraith along the mesa, hiding beneath pinyon trees as the sun comes up, drinking his own urine in the heat, searching for a cave to lie up in, perhaps with a lion or a rattlesnake.

Brother of the rattlesnake.

I imagine — this is what I would have done, and have I not made it clear already that I see Ramon, no doubt a petty drug dealer awaiting trial, as a doppelganger, my other (better) self, the one who manages to break out, to evade, escape, translate? — I imagine that he has taken care to throw his captors off his trail.

Perhaps he found a body (I am nearly positive it was Ramon who arranged the man-biting-his-own-penis image; he is that sort, a desperate rogue with a biting sense of humour), somewhat the analogue of his own (we cannot escape, or make art, without this curious doubling), and used the acetylene torch to destroy its facial features and fingerpads. (This is gruesome, some of the worst killers in that prison are momentarily sobered and frightened by Ramon's single-minded indifference; they back away in awe, then splash giggling down the corridors.)

The teeth he smashed out with a ballpeen hammer, then ground into a fine dust and scattered over the sewage water running at his feet. (Once you decide to escape, to change yourself, you must be ruthless, you cannot be afraid — and besides, the man was dead, or at least unconscious, before Ramon began.)

I don't blame him at all. Circumstances had driven him mad, the prison, the hideous tribal retaliations, the images of torture and the walls that kept him in there, and the thought of his sister weeping, wringing her handkerchief in the kitchen beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart. (The note's hand had been female, a pious young woman's writing — already I am a little in love with her and plan, as Ramon and I flee together over the Blood of Christ Mountains, disguised, yes, as priests, to become better acquainted when we meet her to exchange news and acquire money and food.)

The woman I am with disapproves of my lack of faith and my sexual preference (like Ramon, I am a homosexual, one of those in the prison they like to rape with their fists, then kill). She thinks she can save me, would like to get me into bed.

She thinks I am the kind of man she could settle with for a while — this, I hasten to add, is an impression resulting from the fact that I listen to her uncritically, which is something many women miss in a man. And I like her, find her interesting. This is terribly flattering (considering the life she's led) and it's almost enough to make her fall in love with me. So, when I throw away the holy mud, it is as if I am throwing away her (mud) heart.

Everything is symbolic, you see. And I signify my petty rebellion by reversal, loving the mirror's reflection, not the other.

It was her idea to come to Chimayo — and, believe me, I am grateful. This Ramon connection is more than I could have hoped for.

Absently I scan the nearby mountains, imagining that I might spy him there, a naked man (he had to get rid of the prison clothes first thing; the prime rule of transformation is you must go naked, you must leave everything behind).

Without his clothes and with his identity left behind with that poor, mutilated corpse (after everything, he consigned it to the pyre), he is a new man up there on the mountainside.

He looked down at us with an other-worldly curiosity. Who are these strange creatures, these boxes that move and don't, their antennae waving in the sunsets?

It is my theory that the prison is the representative image of the modern world. You'll recall that Shakespeare let his characters strut their moment upon the stage. But nowadays we are inside a prison, the walls of a labyrinth, and there is no outside, or outside is madness and Ramon. I exult and wave to the hills. I lift up mine eyes unto the hills.

But the hills don't answer.

New Life Forms

My friend's name is Esmé Altschuler. I call her the Angel of Death because that is the work she does. She hires herself out to sit with the dying. When they see my friend coming through the door, these people know it is the end. Some welcome it. She will call me during her lunch break. In the background, sometimes drowning out her words, I will hear the moans and grunts of the dying. What's that? I ask, trembling. That's just Bruce, she says, and goes on telling me the gossip.

Bruce is a retired movie executive dying of prostate cancer.

Esmé's calling me from the deathbed; Bruce hears everything she says.

Esmé's from Chicago. Her first lover was a boy named Leopoldo, the son of an Argentinian diplomat. They made love in the ruins of a condemned tenement, in the dust and broken bricks. Her father was an alcoholic, and she recalls the day he left for good, when she was eight and had just climbed to the crotch of an oak tree in their yard. She watched her father walk out to his car with a suitcase in each hand.

Esmé married a man who does biological research, inventing new life forms. I met him once, in a bar called Richard's Horseman's Haven out by the race track, where we had a long, drunken conversation about the possibility of some of these life forms escaping. He said it was entirely probable that some had already done so. Generally, they would be too weak to survive in the real world, he said. They could not sustain themselves against everyday diseases or the attacks of higher animals or heat or cold.

Esmé and the biologist came west to New Mexico together and then divorced.

She married a Vietnam veteran and joined the Divine Light Mission. They lived in an A-frame near Taos. Twice they gave away everything they owned on the whim of their guru. After the second time, Esmé drifted south to Santa Fe, looking for another kind of light.

She studies at the Santa Fe School of Natural Medicine, things like massage technique and herbal remedies. She lives with two other students in a bungalow in the Spanish barrio behind the deaf school. She smells of saffron. Hanging over the shower curtain rod in their bathroom are the rubber tubes and bladders of three enema kits.

The Angel of Death.

Esmé and her friends eat peyote and take turns lying naked in the bathtub.

They give themselves enemas and see gods. She wants to sleep with me.

I smell saffron and hear Bruce's grunts (his screams inhabit my dreams).

I think of the image of Dona Sebastiana, mounted on a cart, a bow and arrow in her hands, in the Taos Museum and the strange, wooden Cristo behind the reredos in the church at Las Trampas, the Cristo with His ribs carved outside His chest, that look of mortified agony on His face, His body riding upon the nails.

Spanish Boys

When we drive down from Chimayo, it is night. East of the road, the Sangre de Cristos are tumescent and silver, sharp against the clear, moonlit sky. Westward, clouds creep over the Jemez and lightning bolts shatter against the slopes like glass rods.

I think of my friend Larry, a stained-glass artist from San Francisco. Larry can't find work in Santa Fe except as a labourer. He spends his days scraping bark from redwood logs to make the natural-looking beams contractors use in the modern adobe subdivisions out on the mesa.

Nights Larry wears black velvet gloves to hide his hands.

Nights he and I go to La Fonda to listen to a Panamanian salsa band and dance with the Spanish stenographers. (Two of the musicians are ex-priests and gay — they tell of a huge monastery in the mountains where bent priests from all over the country go to be purified or hidden; the drunk priests, mad priests, promiscuous, gay and pederastic priests, the sinful men of God — I don't know if this is true.)

From time to time Larry disappears, and I know he is downstairs in the basement men's room, having sex in the cubicles.

When I go down there to pee, there is always a Spanish boy at the next urinal asking me for taxi fare home, or a man sitting in a cubicle with his trousers down and the door open.

These Spanish boys have a difficult time. They are expected to be macho womanizers and, at home, in the towns and villages around Santa Fe, they act the role. But nights they sneak into the city for sex with white men, to bars like the Senate, the Gold Bar or La Fonda (La Fonda is the safest because a lot of women go there).

Outside, other Spanish boys in low-riding cars squeal their tires and toss beer bottles at the queers in the streets.

The boys are quick, passionate lovers; the sense of sin, of being lost to the world, of going down into the depths, of giving up, is a kind of transformation for them.

Spanish boys know something about miracles and evil.

Brothers of Light

This is in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as I have said.

Forty miles away at Los Alamos, men like Esmé's husband, with degrees from Harvard and M.I.T., are building bombs and fusion reactors and components for machines that will travel in outer space. At a museum there, they have exact replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The tour guides at the museum are wives of research physicists — even the wives have Ph.D.s.

Once in a Los Alamos bar, I met a retired army sergeant who had witnessed thirty-three atomic bomb tests, crouching as close as a mile from Ground Zero. (Note the numerological correspondence — Jesus was thirty-three when he died; it is Easter; I am thirty-three.) His greatest regret was missing the first detonation at Trinity in White Sands because of the flu.

Dotting the mesa roundabout are the ruins of ancient Indian villages called pueblos. Sometimes, at places like Puye and Tsankawi, you stand atop the cliffs amid the ruins like a man on the prow of a ship, surveying the vast pinyon country where these people once grew their crops of maize and beans.

Contemporary pueblos have Catholic churches and little adobe-walled cemeteries crowded with white wooden crosses. But the Indians (they survive by adopting the disguise of the other) also preserve the kivas of their own religion. As the calendar rolls around, they hold their seasonal rites and dances: the corn dance, the cloud dance, the buffalo dance.