Previously: Here’s what I’ve found … Maybe she really believed what she said … Was she being serious? … Are you being serious?… It’s not as simple as you think it is … There are ghosts and there are ghosts … I finished her scone and paid our bill.
Take it from the top:
fernweh (fern-way) n.
1. An ache for distant places
2. Being homesick for anywhere but home
What she did know about where I was from, she laughed at. Granted, there is much to laugh at, but she laughed at most everything, the most basic facts, the very idea that I, or anyone, would live in the country. Ana loved calling me a hick, thought it was fascinating that I grew up on a farm, couldn’t get over it really, the fact that she had a friend in Chicago who grew up on a farm in Oklahoma. When I told her this for the first time, her eyes grew wide and she put her hand to her mouth. She would have been less amazed if I had told her I grew up in a submarine. I was the most exotic person she’d ever met, and, as is often the case with the exotic, she felt at once drawn to and repulsed by me and my world.
“Did you have cows?” she asked, as if proximity to cows constituted the single most fascinating fact of my life.
“Yes,” I confirmed. “We had beef cows. We fed them and everything. And, yes, we killed them. All the way to the death.”
She couldn’t get over it. I told her about the chickens, I told her about the horses, I told her about the fields of grass that turned to hay. I told her about the greenhouses filled with lettuce and spinach. I told her about the prairie that my parents restored on part of their land. I told her about how I played on the kitchen floor while my mom canned the tomatoes that we grew in our own backyard and that I told her that my brother and I played with wooden spoons and pots and pans because we didn’t have a television. Then her jaw dropped, and I mean cracked against the table, when she put it all together and realized my parents were hippies. Honest to locally grown, organic goodness hippies. Mark Hoffman and Susan Dixon, my parents, met in San Francisco during the Summer of Love (I shit you not), then moved into an aging farmhouse twenty miles outside of Guthrie, Oklahoma with the goal of bringing a piece of the hippie revolution back to my dad’s hometown.
The farm belonged to my dad’s grandfather, and his mom didn’t want it, and his uncles didn’t want it, and the neighbors all agreed that it wasn’t worth the trouble to do anything but let the damn house and barn fall down and then take a match to the piles. His mother was glad to let him have it, even if he did plan to live in sin and be the laughing stock of Logan County. She signed it all over to him, didn’t want to keep any part of it because she didn’t want the police knocking on her door when they found drugs and orgies and any other manner of devilry going on there. My dad hugged her tight and made her promise that she would come by for lunch after church on Sundays. “Fine,” she said, “but only to keep an eye on you.”
My parents worked hard, too hard to spend time on drugs and orgies and I’d rather bleed out on this floor than consider otherwise. They had housemates come and go, most committed to the trappings of the revolution but not so much to the work and commitment and responsibility of the revolution. Shit won’t grow on bad singing and even worse poetry. They had one couple stay with them for four years before I was born, the Turners, originally from Atlanta. I remember them coming back to visit a few times. According to my parents, they didn’t flake out or drop out or sell out, they just moved out. They missed the city, so they went to Oklahoma City to carry on the movement there.
If you know anything about Oklahoma politics, you know how successful my parents and their comrades were at bringing the revolution to where they lived. No sooner did they arrive than James Inhofe began his climb from the depths of hell to the United States Senate. I kept my permanent address in Oklahoma as long as I could because I considered it my patriotic and Christian duty to cast my vote against that monumental motherfucker. Him and Coburn. Christ almighty.
Though every election seemed to bury them further and further under piles of nonsense, my parents loved Oklahoma. My dad still does, even with everything that happened, even though he’s all alone down there.
My earliest memories are occupied with the faces of the visitors and transient workers who stayed with us. To a young boy, they were all fascinating and kind. My favorite was a Mexican migrant named Francisco. He lived with us from the spring to the fall of 1983. He showed me how to make slingshots and use them to kill mice. He spoke almost no English, but my mother spoke acceptable Spanish and he was happy to teach meany Spanish I wanted to learn incluyendo los malditos, pero no dije tu mama.¿Entiendes? Francisco was on his way to Chicago where he hoped to find work in a factory or as a laborer, something that paid more and more often than seasonal farm work. He had an uncle there somewhere. I think about Francisco often, especially when I stand on the bridge at the Ashland stop and look at the city, rolled out from one end of the horizon to the other like wall-to-wall carpeting. I wonder if he is out there. I wonder if he is working, if he has a place to live. Did he even make it to Chicago? We never got a letter or anything after we dropped him at the Greyhound station in Tulsa.
The visitors stopped in 1984, the year my little brother, Max, was born. My mom gave birth at home, in her bedroom, and Dad said he thought she was going to insist on delivering the child her own self. She pretty much ran the show right up until she became incoherent and handed the birth over to her two midwife friends. Though I had been close to the birth of several cows and goats, this was beyond me. I spent most of the time playing outside under the bedroom window, one time going back inside to peek my head around the door jam.
“Honey,” my mom said, buck-naked, hair stuck to her face, gasping between contractions, “It’s okay, you can come in if you want.”
I did not. I fell asleep in the hall and woke to the sounds of crying, my mother’s and new brother’s. Before I could sit up on my own, my father lifted me in his arms and carried me into the room to meet Max.
“Look, Jackson, this is your new baby brother. His name is Max. You have to be nice to him and teach him how to be a good boy. What do you think?”
I thought he was all crying mouth and twitchy, unpredictable arms. The fact that my brother was born at home did not win me any popularity points at school. In fact, it erased the few I’d earned by being able to build a slingshot, kill mice and curse in Spanish. Nobody but nobody knew what to make of me and my family. Their confusion was manifold:
1) My folks were not married, at least not officially sanctioned-before-God-and- these-witnesses married;
2) they were farmers, which was good, noble, respectable, but they were organic farmers, which was strange, irresponsible, reprehensible;
3) they were registered Democrats, but what did you expect when;
4) they just went ahead and invited Mexicans to come into their house and eat at their table.
And then giving birth at home, like animals or worse, like Indians. I was like a strange Moses, parting the seas of my fellow students as I walked down the hall, no one wanting to get too close to me.
“Jackson’s got his mom’s pussy juice on him.”
“Jackson had his hands in his mom’s snatch.”
“Jackson always has his hands in his mom’s snatch.”
Never mind that these same bastards, the base of the base of today’s GOP:
1) pulled guts from deer on the regular (Tough, yes. Manly, yes. It also puts you close to deer snatch and deer ass and involves many juices),
2) came to school with cow shit on their boots (nothing wrong with cow shit, but wash your damn boots),
3) spit gobs of tobacco in drinking fountains and lockers and text books and lunches (this is indefensible) and,
4) in the locker room, after gym class, threw each others’ clothes in the toilet right after taking a massive shit. Laughing and calling each other dipshits, they fished the clothes out, rinsed them off, and wore them the rest of the day (this is inexplicable).
By the time I was ten, I knew I had to leave and never look back.
I miss the sky, the tall grass, and the air in between. There were nights when, even though I was chattering my teeth loose, I couldn’t bring myself to stop looking at the stars and go inside. The relentless wind, which drove some early pioneers insane, filled my head with white noise as it pushed the grass like a wave. I loved that it gets so goddamn hot in the summer and so goddamn cold in the winter. In the spring, nothing was better than sitting on my parent’s front porch and watching a storm approaching, seeing the sky get black then blacker, all shades of black, green-black, then smelling the rain before its arrival, knowing that as it moved east over the land people moved inside, powerless to do anything but sit and watch and wait.
There was a storm when my brother was just a year old. Huge storm, but it mostly missed town, cut a big swath through a wheat field, lots of tree branches bit it, power was out for two days. Everybody knew somebody who lost some cattle. Overall, though, the sense was we were blest, the prayers of the faithful availeth much, the storm missed us because God loved us more than others.
My parent didn’t go to church. This was a big deal, further proof that we were beyond hope. My grandparents went to church, Prairie Presbyterian Church (The Little Local Church with the Great Global Mission) and they took my brother and I there most Sundays. Presbyterians are generally a well-educated and reasonable breed of Christian — which made us threat level orange in the eyes of the Southern Baptists — but they were not reasonable enough for my dad. He was raised in that church, had nice memories of that church, but when it came time to be confirmed, to officially join the church in junior high, he declined. It just didn’t make sense to him. He always needed things to make sense.
One of the things that appealed to him about farming was that it made sense. If you did this, then you got that. If that didn’t work, you changed the way you did this. If your plants were too large and the fruit was too small, there was too much nitrogen in the soil. If you didn’t rotate your crops, the soil got depleted and nothing would grow well. If the chickens wouldn’t go in to roost, then there was something wrong with their coop. The symbolism in the Bible drove my father crazy. Wasn’t it enough to notice the goodness and beauty of the land? Why did it have to represent anything beyond itself? The Parable of the Sower, with the seeds that died and the seeds that thrived, is just sound farming advice. Consider the lilies of the field, see how they grow. Stop. That right there’s your lesson.
My mom didn’t go to church because in the year she turned fourteen and her sister, Stephanie, turned sixteen, her sister did proclaim, over a dinner of roast beef and mashed potatoes that she was in love with a girl in her class. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and then verily did her parents cast her sister into the outer darkness in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The following Sunday, Father, Mother and Remaining Daughter stood in the front of their Four Square Gospel Church in Cheyenne, Wyoming and were hailed as conquering heroes, exemplars of Christian faith and conviction, because they showed neither grace nor mercy to a girl in love. After the service, many people remarked about the brave choice the Father and Mother had made, and what a fine example they set for Remaining Daughter. Yes, she was sad and angry now, but, in the fullness of time, she would see they did they right thing and she would thank them.
In the spring of that same year, Mr. Parker, her math teacher, asked my mom to stay after class to talk about her last test. My mom stayed in her seat in the front row while the rest of the class left, and Mr. Parker stood behind his desk. When they were alone in the room, he closed the door and moved to the front of the desk, leaning back against it as he spoke to my mom.
“Susan, you’re not here to talk about your test. You’re here because I have something for you.”
My mom was confused and scared and silent. She sat still with her hands in her lap. Mr. Parker went back behind his desk and opened a drawer and removed an envelope. He came back around to the front of the desk and held the envelope out for my mom to take. She didn’t move, she didn’t know what it was. She looked at Mr. Parker and listened to the clock ticking on the wall in the back of the room.
“It’s a letter from your sister. She sent it to my house. It came in a larger envelope with another letter to me. She wanted me to give this to you. She asked if she could send other letters to you like this. My inclination is to say yes, if that’s what you want. Is that what you want, Susan?”
My mom took the letter and nodded her head yes. Mr. Parker leaned back against the desk once more.
“I had Stephanie in homeroom. I knew what was going on. What your parents did wasn’t right. I won’t tell them anything.”
He looked back at the clock.
“The next class will be here soon. I’m so sorry, Susan. I hope getting the letter helps some.”
My mom put the letter in her backpack and held in the tears. She nodded in Mr. Parker’s directions as she left the room, but she was feeling too many feelings to be able to look him in the eye or tell him thank you.
I ask you, then, of these, the parents, the church, or the public school math teacher, who showed the greater kindness?
Mom got letters in this way for the rest of high school, letters from Boulder, Denver, Santa Fe, El Paso, Tucson, Los Angeles, San Francisco. The letters confirmed that Stephanie was alive, left a record of where she had been, and hinted at what she was doing — meeting, learning, singing, planting, creating, living. As vague as she was on the details of her activities, she was clear that she was doing them with the most amazing and beautiful people.
My mom studied hard, got a scholarship to the University of Wyoming, was told she couldn’t go, turned eighteen, accepted the offer anyways, graduated, went to a party, never went back home. She slept on sympathetic couches until school started. Four years later she had a degree in nursing and a goal to find her sister.
They continued to write while my mom was in college. In the spring before she graduated, mom got a letter from San Francisco. Stephanie said she planned to stay there for a while, maybe for life, and gave an address and invited mom to join her. So after college my mother followed the waves of hippies to Haight-Ashbury, even though she was scared to leave Wyoming, she didn’t know what she was getting into, and she didn’t make sure to wear flowers in her hair (For the umpteenth time, no! Your father was the real hippie, not me. Honest to God, I don’t know why you think that is so funny).
She never had a chance of finding her sister. Haight-Asbury was overwhelmed with humanity. Every plan that was in place — plans for housing, plans for food, plans for medical care — fell apart. My mother found the house where my aunt was supposed to be staying, but she wasn’t there. Could they check again? They checked again. She wasn’t there. Did they mind if she came in, to ask if anybody knew her? No, that’s cool; ask away. Nobody knew her, but it was totally beautiful that she was trying to reconcile and reconnect. There was a church two blocks away; a lot of people without housing went there.
“No, Stephanie wouldn’t go into a church, not even here.”
“I can dig it; maybe try the park.”
It was in the park that she met my father, who was noticeable, not for the fact that he was bare-ass naked, but because he was wearing a baseball mitt and playing catch and almost hit her in the head when he overthrew his partner. He was in San Francisco because things were so obviously broken, man, and when shit is broken, you have to fuckin’ fix it. There’s nothing magical or mystical about it.
“We’re just fixin’ a flat tire. We’re replacing the fuel injectors. We’re the new fuel injectors.”
She explained that she was looking for her sister, explained why she hadn’t seen her in so long. In deference to the gravity of the moment, my dad put on some pants. Together they moved through the park, looking for Stephanie, telling each other about their lives, and marveling at the spectacle. My dad offered to share his tent, an offer my mother accepted.
My mother never found her sister. She looked steady for three full weeks. She heard some wisdom: You’ve been a good sister. There’s nothing else you can do. She heard some drivel: She belongs to the world now. She’s out there she’s in here she’s everywhere. Everyone she met, even the drivel-spouters, was kind, concerned and willing to give her ample consolation drugs. She decided to stay for the summer. She and my dad lived in the tent in the park and spent almost all their time together. Some nights, after my dad fell asleep, mom would walk to the church, the church she was told about when she first arrived, and sit in the sanctuary and, not pray, exactly, but hope really hard that Stephanie would walk in. She never did. Years later, I remember my mom getting a letter from New Mexico. The letter said Stephanie had died and been cremated. Her ashes were scattered in the desert.
Mom and Dad were in love by the end of the summer and by August and they began to make plans for the fall and beyond. The scene in Haight-Ashbury was played out. There were new and creative ways to live together, but there, in that place, with those people, was not it. My father told her about his grandma’s farm, about how it was theirs if they wanted it. Did she want it?
She would never go back to Wyoming, she had nothing in San Francisco. She only had Oklahoma, and the idea that she could be happy there. They never made plans to marry; they didn’t see the point. My dad held the door of his pickup open and asked,
“Susan, will you do me the honor of getting in my truck and driving with me halfway across the goddamn country so we can change the world.”
She wanted it.
Then: The country got angry, people got killed, we went to the moon, Nixon resigned, Nixon got pardoned, I got born, Reagan got elected, people got AIDS, Contras got aid, and people with televisions enjoyed M.A.S.H and the Huxtables. People without televisions missed Cliff and Clair and Punky Brewster and the Super Bowl Shuffle and Game Six. People without televisions remember going to their grandparents’ house after school and sitting on their living room floor and watching the Challenger take off and explode and fall back down in pieces.
I watched the Challenger in my grandparents’ living room with my family and my friend Steve. Steve was one of three friends I had growing up. Ernest, Paul, Steve. I spent the most time with Ernest, who lived in the next house over. He was two years younger than me, his mom cut his hair, which was pin straight and the color of hay, and he often walked alone with his hands in his front pockets. I was his only friend. On many Saturdays, he would already be sitting on our porch when I woke up in the morning and came out to feed the animals.
“Hey, Jackson,” he would say.
“Hey, Ernest.”
“Are you feeding the animals?”
“Yes, Ernest. How did you guess?”
“Because you’re wearing that blue shirt that you always wear to feed the animals and I always see you feed the animals when I come to sit on your porch.”
“Do I always wear this shirt?”
“Sometimes you do. I bet the animals love you. Do you love them?”
“I don’t think so, Ernest. I think I just take care of them.”
“Oh, I thought maybe you loved them.”
I wish I could say I was nicer to Ernest in school, but I wasn’t brave enough or sure enough to be kind to him in public. He was the buffer between me and the very bottom rung of the scholastic hierarchy. I was never actively cruel to him, but I was indifferent to the cruelty of others. When his books were knocked out of his hand, or when food was thrown at him at lunch, I would look the other way.
“Hey, Jackson,” they would taunt, “isn’t that your best friend?”
“Fuck off,” I would reply and keep walking.
During each denial Ernest would look at me with eyes that said he understood what I was doing and he wasn’t surprised, but still had hoped that this time would be different.
Ernest. His house was falling down. His mom was drunk. His dad looked like he was 98, and an old, hard-lived 98. His oldest brother was in jail, his middle brother moved to Stillwater and didn’t come back to visit much. Their yard, their porch, their kitchen, their living room was covered in goose shit. The whole property smelled like rotten eggs. The only well kept space was Ernest’s room. His bed was always made, his clothes were always folded and put away, and his shoes were always lined up neatly along the wall.
“Someday I’m going to be a pilot and fly anywhere I want. What about you, what are you going to be?”
“Don’t know, Ernest.”
“Do you think a pilot would be cool? To be way up above everything?”
“That would be cool.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m going to do.”
Paul lived in Guthrie, right in Guthrie. He might as well have lived in Paris, so sophisticated and exotic did I find his circumstances. Paul’s father traveled a lot, and, like a good guilty father, filled his son’s room with gifts collected from far and wide. His dad got him a jacket in Atlanta. He got him shoes in Dallas. He got him a sweatshirt in New York City. Paul had, get this, been to New York City. He said he was going to move there, no doubt. He had a map of the East Village on his wall.
“The Village still has cool shit if you know where to look, but it’s so fucking gentrified, you know?”
I did not. I was eleven. So was he.
Paul also had cable, which meant he had MTV, which meant I would spend the night whenever I could and we would stay up late and watch Yo! MTV Raps. In the wee hours, De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest crept across Paul’s yard, opened his bedroom window and climbed on in. They showed us postcards and told us stories. “Bonita Applebum” was the outward sign of an inward truth that I had known but never before seen: Logan County was not enough.
Steve and I played Little League together, me at shortstop, he at second. For reasons that defied geography we both cheered for the New York Mets. I because I saw Q-Tip wear a Mets hat while giving a tour of his old neighborhood for an MTV special on gun violence, Steve because the Mets won the first and only major league game he had ever been to, against the Cardinals, in the old Busch Stadium. Though planted far from the five boroughs, the roots of our affection were deep enough to sustain us through Pendelton’s homerun in ’87, and Scioscia’s home run in ’88, Strawberry’s departure in ’90, and then those sad, lost years when Bernard Gilkey was our best player and the oh-so-close pain of ’99 and 2000 and then 2006 and 20 — Christ. Fucking Mets.
Steve lived on the edge of Logan County where the cows could have taken over in ten minutes if they had any gumption; such was their numerical superiority. Tornados could lie down and roll along the ground and not come within miles of anything built by hands. His dad still thought they lived too close to town.
Such isolation fosters either insular thinking and paranoia, zen-like attention to one’s immediate surroundings, uncontrollable weeping, drug use and cutting, or creativity. Steve’s dad was paranoid; Steve and I tried to be creative. Our attempts at creativity did not always pan out.
One summer afternoon, around three-o’clock in the afternoon, Steve and I thought, Hey, let’s shut Pete in the foldout coach. Pete was Steve’s cousin. Pete was game. With the couch in bed mode, he laid across the width of it. We made the first fold.
“Can you breathe, Pete?”
“Yes.”
We pushed the couch into couch mode. “Can you breathe, Pete?”
“Yes.”
We replaced the cushions. “How you doin’, Pete?”
“Good.”
We sat on the cushions, just for a while, just long enough to make it official. High five! We removed the cushions. We gave the couch a pull. The couch didn’t move. We pulled again. It didn’t move.
A muffled voice: “Guys, I’m ready to get out now.”
“We’re working on it, Pete.”
Again, we pulled. Nothing. That couch was stuck, and we were pretty sure that Pete being folded inside had something to do with it.
“Guys, it’s getting hard to breath in here.”
“Pete, don’t panic, but the couch is stuck.”
Pete panicked.
“Stop fucking around! Let me out!”
“We’re not fucking around! The couch is stuck!”
“That’s not funny, assholes! Let me out of the fucking couch!”
“Pete, I swear to God we are not joking. You are stuck in the couch.”
Steve called his dad at work and explained what we had done.
“You gotta be fucking shittin’ me! That’s the goddamn dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!”
His dad was Paul Bunyan, a monster whose singular presence may have been enough to keep the cows of Logan County in check. He didn’t drive from work; he strode across town with lumberjack steps. He stomped in the room and freed Pete with a mighty tug. Our creativity was lost on him.
“Jesus Christ, I’m going back to work. Next time you’ll stay stuck in the goddamn couch. Dipshits.”
Thank you for reading. Next week starts like this:
The next time I saw Ana was over drinks on a Friday night.
Then Jackson and Ana do shots.