The Celtic Wench

The Dream
"God damn it! I had that fuckin' dream again last night!" the Wench tells me.

Surprised at her outburst, I ask calmly, "Which dream?"

"Oh, it's the one where I am giving my cousin a blow job, you know...when I was six-years-old."

It's a dream where she is in a bedroom with her cousin. Behind her in the living room her mother is vacuuming. The bedroom door is open. The first time the Wench tells me the dream, I make light of it.

"Really...?" I ask her, not giving it much thought.

We all know how dreams are. Dreams play with our minds, tickle our thoughts and sometimes puzzle us.

We both laugh and have sex.

wench: Pronunciation (wnch) n. 1. A young woman or girl, especially a peasant girl. 2. A woman servant. 3. A wanton woman.

The Wench was all three.

My freshman English Lit class is my favorite. We read stories, write stories and study the masters. I am unlike most students in class and my appearance sticks out. My usual attire is a flannel shirt, Levi button-up blue jeans and my hair goes to my shoulders. At age 24, in 1975 I am older than most of the students in class. This also means I get to live in the foreign students dorm. It is quiet there, I can study AND I can have girlfriends over.

The first few weeks of class, I notice interesting people. But there is one student that sticks out above all others. It's not only her looks but her contributions, what she writes, her observations and how she carries herself. Her frizzy, orange-red hair falls to just below her shoulders. She wears a plaster cast on her right ankle and tells me she injured her foot playing touch football. I learn that the Wench is nineteen-years-old. I tell myself "Don't do it!" but I fall for her.

It amazes me how far I fall too. I am reeled in to the point that I am mystified. It is a grip that I can't shake, even though I know better. The Wench is like a single flower surrounded by bee hives and constantly being pollinated.

Her first tryst is the day after my father passed away. At 4:00 AM the phone rings she wakes up, answers it and hands the phone to me. Pre-dawn phone calls are never good. I hear my mother telling me my father has passed away. My friend Ram is spending the night with us, he's sleeping on the couch in the other room. I leave for home that morning on a bus to be with my mom and Grandparents. Not 10 minutes after I have left, she is in bed with him.

She carries on with Ram for another year, until he can no longer bear to keep the secret from me. On my trips back home to help my mother, she invites him over and they spend the weekend together. I suspect lots but say nothing. She was with me not them. I come home one day from out of town. Sitting on the couch I can see her in the bathroom. I notice that she is cleaning her diaphragm in the sink. If she didn't want me to know anything about it, she would have shut the door.

"What are you doing? Who have you been screwing?"

I question her a little shocked at her blatancy. Time to bring all of out.

"OK OK" she admits.

"Ram spent the weekend here; while you were away."

Amazed that she told me, I keep telling her that if she wants to have affairs just tell me, but don't be sneaky about them. However, for some reason she is compelled to taste them all. I suppose it was the thrill of it all. I am not sure why we didn't leave each other.

It doesn't run through the family, it GALLOPS...
It isn't just the Wench either, it's her whole family that's wacko, including both sides. Going to a family gathering is like going to a carnival complete with freak shows, tumbling midgets and evil clowns. I should have gotten the hint.

Then, there is the weekend at her parents.

We drive to her parents on a Saturday morning. They live on the plains in the middle of farmland, in a small rural town. The Wench and I aren't married yet and it was a pain in the butt not being able to sleep together. But this time it is different. Her parents let us sleep together and the idea of it doesn't seem to bother them. It's Saturday evening. Her mom is parading around the house excited that her sister is coming to visit the next day. Wine has filled up the refrigerator, the house has been practically remodeled with the cleaning she has done.

But I notice something very curious, almost out of place.

In the den amongst knick-knacks, pictures are scattered here and there in plain view...Polaroids. I notice this and pick one up laying on a stack of five or six. To my amazement there are various nudes and sex acts of her parents! The strange part is someone has taped paper over various parts of the photographs so that only the faces can be seen. If that was all anyone could see, it would be innocent enough...but I peeked.

I didn't say anything to the Wench about this. I figured that discretion was the better part of valor and kept my mouth shut. If the Wench stumbles across the photos that is one thing, but for me to go around to everyone asking about the photographs is quite another. Dinnertime conversation is the next interesting event of the evening.

"I can't wait for my sister to get here." her mother blurts out as I cut off a piece of charbroiled steak.

"When she does get here I am going to have her get rid of this boil on my butt. It really hurts too!"

She says this as I am about to take a bite of this luscious, blood-dripping and rare piece of meat.

At the very second after she said that, I fake a sneeze, kick the Wench under the table and stifle a laugh. This could get interesting.

"It's been bothering me for two weeks. I can't reach it either."

I almost gag...a "boil"?, at the dinner table? I don't believe what I am hearing. The possibilities that run through my mind are endless.

The next day, Sunday, starts out as a normal day, then the unbelievable gets weirder. Everyone goes to church except me and the Wench. I also notice that the Polaroids are put away as they are now nowhere to be found. I fix us breakfast, go to the den, turn on the TV and read a book. Around noon everyone returns from church and the Wench's aunt shows up.

There is Sunday lunch with lots of sandwiches, wine and talk among the women. I go back to the den to watch football with the Wench's father and brother. We laugh and joke and yell at the game on the TV screen.

The next thing I know her mother announces, "Me and Missy are going back to the bedroom and get rid of this boil on my butt. We'll be out in a little while."

This time I laugh out loud but no one laughs with me. My imagination gets a grip on me and doesn't easily let go.

The Wench's father grabs his son, "Let's go outside and finish cleaning the yard and haul it off to the landfill." This all seems to be quite normal around here.

Over an hour passes and I am the only one left in the house except the two sisters doing gawd-knows-what in the bedroom. I strain my ears to hear anything. I am even tempted to walk back to the bedroom and press my ear to the door. But of course I chicken out. The Wench, her brother and father are all outside doing yard work. After another hour, everyone appears in the house as if out of nowhere. I never talk to the Wench about what I thought was really going on in the bedroom. A boil...my ass!

"If you kiss me I will turn into a pumpkin"
I should have taken the hint. Why didn't someone hit me with a two by four and knock some sense into my pinhead?

The rest of my college years with the Wench are like that and worse. But I am busy with my studies and finishing my honors classes. In our Senior year we decide one night, after being blasted on mushrooms, to get married. There is only one place in the state that one can get married on a fluke and it is an all day trip to the corner of the state. After sleeping little that night we get up early and head out.

The town we get married in is notorious for getting blood work done, the marriage certificate signed and getting married at a preacher's house all in one day. We arrive just before noon and make our first stop at the courthouse. They tell us we have to find a minister to marry us first, then get a blood test, bring all that back and then pay a number of bucks at the courthouse and it's done. The clerk at the courthouse gives us addresses and a map to help us find a preacher. We pull up to one church and the minister is at lunch. The secretary makes a call to his house and we are told to go on over; he'll marry us right away.

I guess the mushroom effect really starts to wear off as I start thinking about the last couple of hours. I freak out and start to panic. I think the Wench does too. It's hard to tell what we both are thinking right now. I look at the Wench and realize that I might have to spend the rest of my life with her. With all the hints I have been given the last four years, I start to think about driving off a bridge somewhere.

We arrive at the preacher's residence and enter. We are greeted by a gentleman that I could swear just stepped out of a KKK costume. He looks at us like we are carnival workers just passing through. We chit-chat, laugh nervously and I then notice that the Wench hasn't said much at all in the past hour. My hands sweat, my feet sweat and my stomach is in knots. I feel like I have just swallowed a bottle of ipecac. The preacher goes through the ceremony. It is short an' sweet.

"I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride."

It sounds reasonable to me. To my surprise, she has to make a big scene out of it. As I turn to kiss her, she turns her face away from me. I control my impulse to slap her, pay the preacher $25 and quickly get the hell out of there. I shoulda taken the hint...long before now.

The beginning of the end, the Dream
Having hitch-hiked across the Western U.S. for our graduation gift to ourselves, I leave Oklahoma for the last time. I occasionally return for visits. We have to decide what to do with ourselves and whatever we decide, we decide we don't want to do it where we are living. We pick New Mexico as our destination.

We hadn't been there for more than a week and we are sitting around in the trailer we are renting until we get jobs and get on our feet. We both look for jobs during the day and at night we are left to entertain ourselves. We have no cable and no phone, just books to read and a sad portable TV with aluminum foil on the antennae.

One evening, for entertainment, we decide to describe and analyze the dreams we remember. We talk about the dreams we have which seem to recur from time to time. Everyone has them and everyone ponders their meanings.

"You remember that Dream I have every now and then? The one that haunts me, the one that is like a nightmare, you know, the one about my cousin?" she asks me.

"Yeah, I remember, how does it go again?"

She retells the dream she has about the sordid intimacy with her cousin and her, with her mom vacuuming in the other room.

"I had it again the other night. It gives me the creeps."

Then...it all makes sense to me.

There is a long pause and the feeling of crystal clear realization hits me. It's as if someone came up behind me and hit me in the back of the head. I shudder for a moment. Then chills and goose bumps erupt over my body like a wave of electricity in slow motion. The feeling is not pleasant and my stomach is instantly in a knot.

"Whats wrong? you're white as a sheet." she observes.

I start to speak but the words won't come out.

"Are you OK?" she asks still puzzled.

"The man is not your cousin and it's no dream."

"The man is your father."

With that, her mouth drops open and she does not breathe nor moves a muscle. The inside of the trailer seems to be frozen in time. She turns pale and stiff as the words that came from my mouth echoes through her thoughts.

Some time later, long after we are divorced, her father is seated on a lawn chair. He is staring at his fence where he has lined up three empty beer bottles.

He aims his revolver. ONE...he shoots the first bottle, TWO...he shoots the second bottle, THREE...he blasts the third bottle. He then places the revolver to his temple......FOUR......

She tells me a few years later. "My only regret is that he didn't go see my mom and shoot her first."

The Magician, The Chasm and the Jaguar Priest

"You were gonna do what?" I asked in total amazement. The Magician stares through me.

"Oh yeah, you see, I came home from college one day, and I woke up, sittin' in the car, in the garage, with the garage door shut and the engine running." The Magician tells me this as if he is repeating this story for the one millionth time.

We sit in the room and for five minutes there is...total...silence. The Magician does not twitch a muscle and I stare down at the sunlight hitting the floor in the room. My throat is thick, I can't swallow and I can't talk. I feel like weeping.

Thus begins my spiral down into the chaos, enlightenment, darkness and knowledge of The Magician. The depths of his plunge are infinite, twisted and broken. His soul is stretched with pain, brightness and horror. I know he lives where there are jagged edges constantly; it never leaves him. The terror is unrelenting and like a vicious junkyard dog it snarls and bites him every day of his life. The wretchedness flashes like lightning and rips his inner fabric to shreds.

The Magician's own existence is magic of the spirit, it is soul-wrenching, and it is powerful. It has a name and it's name is schizophrenia.

"Cat's foot iron claw"

During my student internship, I arrive at the clearest moment of realization; I can never fully know my own follies. They are the follies that wake me up in the middle of the night. I can only recognize their presence and I quickly learn this.

The class is a group therapy session with a psychiatric social worker. The class is developed by my boss, a psychologist. I live outside of town on her brood mare ranch with the Celtic Wench, where I work as a ranch hand. I shovel horse shit, dog shit, mend fence, and pick wild persimmons.

Two weeks into the class, we are assigned clients to talk with and help. The Magician is assigned to me along with a woman. The first questions that come to my mind are; what is he like? Who is the Magician? Of course, the psychiatric social worker doesn't tell us. We are left to figure out who they are. It doesn't take long for the class to realize we are working with people we won't be able to help. Discovering who the Magician is becomes easy. What to do with the discovery is difficult.

After a few weeks of talking with the Magician, I realize that I am face to face with a schizophrenic mind. This discovery is crystal clear. He goes into a reality that is unfathomable. Yet one lucid day I find out more. He sometimes mentions suicide.

"Magician, do you remember becoming this way?" I asked in one of the first times I met him. "Why did you want to kill yourself?" I sit and listen after asking the question. I expect to hear a nonsensical answer.

"I got a scholarship to go to Boston College." he starts out. "I received a bachelor's degree in Philosophy." he tells me. "Where did this come from?" I quiz myself not expecting his answer. I can see part of his soul bleeding through now. Is the Magician that educated? "I then graduated and received a scholarship to go to seminary at Southern Methodist University." He tells me this while lucidness is still with him. "I was home for Thanksgiving and I was depressed and wanted to kill myself. I tried to kill myself sitting in the car, you know, I've already told you about that time."

I can only imagine what his family and local authorities thought about his strange new behavior. "And then during that Christmas I found myself on top of the water tower. I want to jump off of it." He goes on to tell me how the police of the small farm town where he grew up, tried successfully to talk him out of it; that is when he first knew something was really wrong. He met with the doctors and they sent him to the state hospital.

I am taking Intro to Logic, so I ask him about the Informal Fallacies. To my amazement, he rattles them off with a description for each one. He does so in lightning fashion while staring into space. I come to learn that this indicates that he is partially off his medications and that he will shortly plunge into the depths of his own hellish realm.

The slide into oblivion begins when the Magician starts taking "walks". As the slide from our reality and into his secret reality deepens, he withdraws from everyone that knows him, until he no longer recognizes or acknowledges anyone. The slide is slippery and the line separating our two realities is a punctured hole and the puncture is growing ever wider.

There is no surprise for me when after meeting with the Magician for 3 months, he now slips away from my grasp. I am unable to see him until the following February. The Magician is hidden away from us all. The mental health center is the place where he feels safe and secure from our reality. The world we know does not shatter his world. He battles with his torments deep within The Chasm.

"Neuro-surgeons scream for more..."

Describing the descent into the hell of schizophrenia, is not easy. It is rather like this. Imagine taking every conscious thought, every memory and put them in a bucket, like multi-colored confetti and in a precise order. Shake the bucket up. Next throw it as high in the air as possible, from the edge of an infinite pit, with a strong wind at your back. Now, somehow go to the bottom of The Chasm and make sure you gather everything you had in the bucket. Put it all back in the same order you had it when you first started.

The drug Haloperidol (AKA haldol) is the Magician's transport to the bottom of The Chasm and back. The Magician is always running up and down the canyon of despair. While inside the mental health center three months he wanders, for three months, lost at the bottom. The Magician is searching for the confetti that is the structure of his existence. I am not allowed to see him or help him and I am assigned a new client.

Eventually, the Magician emerges from the depths of the spiraling hole. In February he is allowed to go home. I go to see him once again and to help him. I find out from him that the holidays were too much for him to deal with. The mental health center always becomes full during the holidays. The Magician stopped taking his medications during that time and doing so took him to the bottom.

I take him to lunch and we talk about him being inside the mental health center. He doesn't say much about it, so we talk about philosophers I am studying and logic. He enjoys those discussions and I revel in his knowledge of the subject.

"At paranoia's poison door."

Now, having emerged from The Chasm yet again, he once more has hope. This hope infects me as well. Yet for the Magician, hope is a Trickster in disguise. Hope is always there for the Magician but nothing about it can be achieved. Hope is another torn and punctured line between him and I. Hope is so thin, and so transparent for him. Hope is always just beyond his grasp. Spring arrives and with it comes new life and hope is renewed.

The Magician wants to work, to support himself and he's given the opportunity. I am encouraged and think that maybe a corner is somehow turned. But the Trickster called hope is never far away from the Magician. It's only a matter of time before hope fades away and the Trickster overcomes him.

He has a chance to clean yards with a crew and he gets picked up by the crew chief every morning. This works out for awhile. But one day I find out that he does not show up at the curb to be picked up by the crew chief. I am supposed to meet with him the next day.

"No...I am not here..."

I discover he is nowhere to be found and no one has seen him. I decide for the first time, to go to where he lives and ask around. As I approach the old two-story house where he lives, I feel my heart quickening. I don't know what to expect. In a way I am scared of what I will find. I enter and start asking people where his room is.

Approaching his room, I see that his door is open. Looking in, I notice the room is a total wreck and to my left is the Magician. He is laying on his back, and staring straight up into the universe past the ceiling. At first I suspect the worst. "Magician!, it's me Jaguar, I came to see how you are doing." I am uncertain what, if anything, will happen next. The Magician is straight and stiff on his bed; he does not answer me; his eyes do not blink. Dusting off a chair, I pull it up and sit down. Long moments pass. I watch him carefully and hopefully. Finally, I notice that he is taking shallow breaths.

"Huh?" I hear him say. Maybe he's coming back. Maybe I am the bit of reality that he needs to re-enter what we call normalcy. "No, I am not here." he tells me, still staring straight up. For a brief moment, the Magician recoils back to reality, from the thin thread he is treading on; then he is gone again back to The Chasm. My heart sinks as he re-enters his despair. I sit there for a bit longer, trying to contact him. It is as if I am Mission Control trying to reach a wayfaring space traveler.

Then all of a sudden, he raises up, barefoot and walks out of his room, as if I am not there. The Magician quickly leaves, as I follow walking behind him, I call out to him. He cannot hear me. He walks around the house a few times and then he is gone. I go to the center and tell them. "Oh yes, we will find him and have him picked up. Thanks". The lady at the front desk says this so matter-of-factually. "Shit! doesn't she know how important this is?" I think to myself. She doesn't care, Magician is just one of many.

"Twenty first century schizoid man."

Again, days go by and he is gone. I wonder about what will happen to him. I finish my student internship not seeing him again in a professional setting. I find out from people that he has been "walking" lately. He walks barefoot, on the streets until his feet bleed and are a mess. Upon hearing this, on nights when I can't sleep, I drive around the small town to see if I can find him; I drive and search and drive and search.

The police see him occasionally at nights, during their patrols and when they do, they pick him up and take him to the mental health center. Hearing this relieves me a little. But the loneliness he must have, the constant fear he must confront, at times overwhelms me. I ask around at the center about him. One of the psychiatric social workers tells me he is not doing well and won't take his medications. I remember a conversation I had with him once. "Would you ever consider taking your life again?" I asked him then. I remember the Magician telling me, "If I became myself again, if I became what I was ... I might." I am such a neophyte, an idiot. The insight he gives me is astounding, yet simple.

There are times during the summer that the Magician occupies my thoughts. The thoughts are not good and are burdensome. They are like copperhead snakes in my mind, always there hiding, ready to strike and easily provoked. I envision him swirling around deep within The Chasm, furiously grasping at each tidbit of his spirit. Yet with each step he must be tumbling further downward into deeper depths. There is no magic wand nor a silver bullet to save him the misery and despair he must constantly live with. No matter what, I cannot save him. I have no secret spells nor magic potions.

Then on a hot summer afternoon the Wench and I go to get an ice cream at the drive-in. As usual, I keep one eye to the road and one on the lookout, for the Magician. There on the side of the road, walking barefoot, is the Magician. I stop the car and yell at him as loud as I can. He whips back to my reality briefly and sees me motioning him over to get into the car. I run over and help him into the car. I tell the Wench to get in the back seat and when he gets in to lock the door and make sure he does not unlock it.

He is wearing a heavy leather jacket in the incredible summer heat. He has sweat so much that he is totally dehydrated. I look at his bare feet and they are bleeding and raw-looking. "Magician, let's get you a lemonade, OK?" He stares straight ahead and says nothing. "Then I will take you to the mental health center so you can take care of your feet." Magician must have been walking all night and into the afternoon.

At the drive-in I order two large lemonade drinks for him. He quickly drinks them down, realizing his own thirst. I order one more. But before it comes he crawls out the window of my Corvair. He did it so fast I couldn't stop him. My mind is racing about what to do. I decide that if I get him back in the car that I would be unable to keep him there and he might jump out while I am driving down the road. I call the MHC and they tell me they will get the police to pick him up. Maybe that is what he wanted. I ask myself what are the police to him?

"I talk to the wind, my words are all carried away"

I go on with my life and I suppose the Magician does too. He taught me many things. I often see people in the city where I live, walking and talking incoherently. I am briefly reminded of the Magician and his hopelessness. I try not to think about it too much. I look at them briefly...and then...I look away.

NOTES: I should note that the section headings are from lyrics of the first King Crimson album. The lyricist is Peter Sinfield.

The Pirate and the Death Chamber

What follows is a back reference to The Pirate character I wrote about in this story a couple of years ago.

I met the Pirate long after he was a 5-year old kid who on a fateful day decided to be a 'cowboy' in a game of 'Cowboys and Indians'. He was ambushed by the Indians with the result being a crude arrow slammed into his eye, squashed it like a grape and was blind in that eye ever since.

The time met him, I walked into his mom's house and immediately a giant red squirrel comes down the drapes and runs up my leg to rest on my shoulder. Pirate hands him a peanut in a shell. I didn't have time to even blink. It's like having a small cat resting on your shoulder. "Hi I am Pirate, this here on your shoulder is my furry brother. He doesn't have rabies either."

Yet, among other things he is one of the greatest artists you will never know and that doesn't matter either. This isn't about that anyway. You probably wouldn't care.

The Pirate Disguise

During that time in his life he was almost the perfect burglar. The Pirate and a couple of buddies would get in the car around midnight, drive to rural towns in Oklahoma and Southern Kansas, break into drugstores or auto supply stores (preferred) and lift all the shit they could carry of value and sell it on the black market, in a small college town. It was lucrative BUT they got lazy.

Their ultimate demise was that they started burglarizing closer and closer to home. One night a road block snagged them and they landed in jail. During their trial they were told to quit college and join the Army. Otherwise, they would be put on 6 years probation. The Pirate couldn't join because one eye was missing. A fact the judge did not find amusing.

"Why is there a patch over your eye?" the judge quizzed before sentencing. "Are you trying to be funny in this court and insult this court with this pirate patch over one eye?"

The pirate tried to speak but the judge did not allow it. In actual fact the Pirate thought of himself somewhat of a pirate.

"I sentence pirates to jail." the judge continued, "You would have been better advised by your lawyer had he told you to not wear that nonsense in my court room."

The Pirate obeyed but the moment the judge realized his own flawed request, gave the Pirate 6 years probation instead of 10 years in the McCallister Sweathouse; the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. I always knew him as the Pirate.

Moth Man...Butterfly Man

Years later I would visit him in his two room adobe shack in the middle of the Mother Primeval Desert. He lived like a fucking monk and celibate too. He was queer as a football bat but I didn't care. You don't get rid of friends because of that. Hell, I tried for years to get him to let my ex screw him (something she was more than willing to do) but he would have none of it. She would even try to sneak up on him in the middle of the night and give it a pull or two. He'd wake up screaming at her to go away.

Standing at the entrance to his place you could see a handful of furniture: a chair, a bunk bed, a door on a sawhorse (his meager studio), a chair and a tin stove. He cooked all his meals on a disca which is a Northern Chihuahuan wok. That morning we had to work for breakfast. We had to crack 50-60 quail eggs from his quail coop into a bowl just to have two omlettes. You don't want to know what the quail were for but I will tell you anyway.

I was trying to contain a tequila hangover from exploding from the night before by getting the quail eggs cracked, when I look over at the quail coop. The Pirate emerges with a small cage of 4 quail. He reaches in and takes one out. Before I could blink he took the poor creature and slammed it as hard as he could against his adobe shack. Quail guts splatter everywhere.

"Food for my falcons." he said seeing me about to puke. "The desert is a mean place. They don't feel a thing."

Cracking quail eggs for breakfast became a torture. The whole scene was out of whack at that moment...throwing quail against the wall like a baseball to feed falcons and cracking their eggs to feed ourselves seemed surrealistic. Yeah...the desert can make you mean, if you let it. The Pirate started dressing out the quail for 4 falcons. Everyday started out the same "sunshiney day".

"You want fries with that?" seemed like a reasonable thing to say.

The Death Chamber

What fascinated me the most on my trips to visit him that summer was the evening 'entertainment'. He had a small gasoline generator that he rigged up lighting inside the adobe shack and a black light that always sat just outside the door.

The desert for those that have never paid much attention to it, is overflowing with creatures and life. The only problem is that you never see it unless it is night. The black light attracted creatures for miles. The Pirate interest was in the moths. During the day he collected butterflies and in particular Swallowtails but at night the most interesting were the moths.

Each night we'd turn on the black light, sit on the ground and knock back a half quart of some nasty tequila; I didn't want to know how he got it either. Then we'd wait for them to come in and land on the black light. When they did, he'd inspect them, determine if he had that species and if he didn't the poor moth was put into a fruit jar that had cyanide in it and he sealed it shut. He killed on average two a night. Some were big moths and some were very small.

The next morning he'd pin them on Styrofoam boards to dessicate in the desert air. This only took a day. Then he would pin them on boards and entomb them in cases for viewing, studying and painting. His watercolors of butterflies and moths were stunning. Each stroke of his brush was perfect almost too perfect. He painted to perfection each one he killed. Then he placed the paintings on a pile on the floor. Many times I tried to get him to let me sell them for him. He would have none of it.

After a couple of years he moved away from the desert and in with some friends in another part of the state.

Blind Man's Bluff

I lost track of him for a number of years. I too moved away. One night I get a phone call. I knew his voice right away.

"I'm goin' blind" he said.

"You're already blind." I said jokingly. I thought he was kidding me.

One night he was mowing his lawn with an electric mower and had stretched the cord almost out to the end. He decided to unplug it by forcibly unplugging it by jerking the cord out of the socket. He told me it all happened in slow motion and he can recall seeing every inch of the plug flying towards his head. Because his arm was over his head the plug hit his good eye knocking it out of ITS socket. Horrified he somehow stuffed his eyeball back in and a friend drove him to the hospital.

I never talked to him after that. It is hard to imagine him blind.

The Super Nova

The Super Nova

Sunflowers In The Desert

Sunflowers In the Desert