The Adventure of Love

From J P Dooley's book, Two for the Road, coming soon to Amazon:

Earth space, static vault of the heavens, sectioned like an orange:  longitudinal wedges inside which the earth turns and travels, the seasons divided by three into twelve personalities, styles, potentials, a ring around the ecliptic, a giant clock.  The cycling planets move through it, charting analogue meetings and destinies—squares, trines, and conjunctions, the slow precession of equinoxes toward that date certain, basis of the Mayan calendar, when the winter solstice coincides with the hole of demons in the Milky Way, before moving on.  Yearly the dark lord arises to drag the maiden of summer down to the shadow world and enslavement, drawing her warmth across the projected equator, then at the moment of possessing her totally, must let her go.

I propped myself up, looking over Lee, asleep next to me, at Ed Petrovich’s antique clock on the bookshelf.  Already light and the high atmosphere above Isla Vista was a bright blue in the open window of the bedroom at Marvin Manor, a place I had lived in and often returned to.  Six a.m., and it felt like we had just crashed out.

A phone a few feet away; groping for it, I dialed a number from memory.

“Hello?”

“Lenny, Jaymo.  I need a quart of milk if you’re out cruisin’.”

“Extra rich?”

“Please.”

“Be right there, man,” click.

Five minutes later I heard the tick-tick-tick of a bicycle on the landing, a soft knock and the front door opened, and then Lenny’s smiling face was peering into the bedroom.  Seeing Lee asleep, he tip-toed in, exchanged a foil-wrapped quarter ounce of hashish for a twenty dollar bill in an abalone shell at the foot of the bed, crumbled a gram from his pocket into my pipe, and handed it to me.

“Blonde-Leb,” he said.

Lee woke up, her lips a pouty frown.  I handed her the pipe.  She smiled.  Lenny struck a match and held it for her.  “Enjoy,” he said, laughing, as we passed it, and split.

Lee and I shared a glass of water; suddenly we were both laughing.  “He delivered it to us in bed—“ she croaked, “he even lit it!”

A diurnal dope dealer who got up early and delivered promptly, a new and unheard of ethic in black marketeering.

Ah, the Kingdom:  the pleasure of heaven on earth, the good old days happening now, unmistakable, and this plane of worldly endeavor, a thin lens in the glory, almost irrelevant except for the life of the body, hardly of interest.

So it is with your lover, the symptom:  more fun, more return, more interesting than careers and economies.  You feel the heat, the amber light and smoke that drew you from the Bardo.

“I came here to get you,” she said.

I have noted how we took up with each other as suddenly and totally as our war-driven parents:  so in retrospect, but in the moment our mating was still volatile, unbounded, and temporary in the eyes of old friends.  You wouldn’t have bet on its success or longevity, or if you were into laying odds, it would have been on Girard Duval, her handsome lover and housemate of several years, with me as a high stakes long-shot.

In safari shorts that complimented her tan strong legs, waffle-stomper boots with red laces, a straw-yellow shirt with a border of fringe, she had just hitched-hiked down from the Redwoods last week, six hundred miles alone, a fearless traveler, only slightly unnerved when a ride had taken her to the prison in Soledad.  Looking up at the sun low on the dark ridge of the Santa Lucia Mountains, feeling the freedom dreams and lust of five thousand prisoners and carloads of leering vatos, she had experienced the exquisite loneliness of the maiden about to be sacrificed to the beast.

That dark thing that young women flirt with, unholy, dangerous, forbidden:  “I could feel it looking at me,” she said.

A nice Mexican family from Oxnard, visiting their incarcerated son, had pulled over, frightened for her, and taken her all the way to I.V.

“I have to be back in Oregon in two weeks,” she said, passing the pipe.  “Ends to tie up.  Are you coming with me?”

“Of course,” I said.

Big Bob gave us a ride out to Ellwood, past the forlorn tower of the Barnsdale Oil Company, edge of the local world, to the break in the freeway at Tecolote.  Like everyone else, he was charmed by Lee. “I’m disappointed.  I thought you’d stay for a while.”

She laughed, “Well, we’ll be back,” and I smiled, amused to have my own welcome renewed.

Ten minutes later, we caught a single ride all the way to Palo Alto.

**********

From the Beginning...

Welcome to the blog that celebrates the code of guidelines for pleasure seeking bohemians through the writings of J P Dooley.  This is an exerpt from the first chapter of his second book, Two For The Road, coming soon to Amazon:

"From the beginning there were things I recognized:  the smells of kelp and tar, the licorice scent of fennel rising up from the slough, the aromas of sage and mountain lilac brought down from the hills by the night wind.

A newcomer then, drawn by a branch of the University of California with a point break, but my head was somehow already there, the Santa Barbara Channel, a south-facing shore, bright with sunlight, moody with fog; I seemed to know it in my bones.

Not as actual knowledge or even intuition, rather an identity, someone I connected with when my bare feet touched the faint if only spirit imprint of his on old paths and in areas gone wild.  An aboriginal component of my own psyche, originally accessed through surfing, a person of the always-world, pre-industrial, pre-electric, who has never heard of Jehovah, Jesus, the Buddha or Mohammed, has not read Plato, practiced geometric logic with Aristotle, and does not know or care that he lives in America.

 

A part of me and also a fantasy, something I wanted and because I was young, let myself have.

He bathes in the sea, plays in the waves, finds crabs and stranded clams in tidepools, and an abalone washed up in the surf that I stick in my new day-pack and take home for supper.  He collects colorful Olivella shells and grinds off the ends, stringing them on old fishing line as beads.

He follows secret trails through autumn brown grasses, from which I view the heart of his world, in which he is a lone hermit: a few square miles of tidelands and swamp at the back of Goleta Bay, surrounded by rising hills and the steep wall of the Santa Ynez Mountains, at high tide a continuous shallow lagoon with spits and ridges of land that were once villages and camps, and a mound of white shale topped by the airport beacon, last remnant of an island near the mouth of the slough where a confluence of creeks flows to the sea, the site of a town with a thousand huts when the later Spaniards and missionaries arrived; they called it Mescalitán.

A generic Spanish name for places processing agave and places that didn’t, the possible mispronunciation of something else from another language; abandoned, overgrown and forgotten, it had been leveled in 1942 to build the runways of the Marine Air Station.

I learned that from local lore, along with the story of a very old anchor found high on the backside of Moore Mesa, above the estuary of Maria Ygnacio Creek that separated Mescalitán from the mainland.  No one knew where it had come from, though there was a rumor it had been used in the Mexican era to winch over and careen a ship in the calm channel behind the white shale cliffs.