ofrenda

I’m reading a book that is disintegrating in my hands. Pieces of the pages break off because the book is an old Bantam paperback and I am trying to finish it before it crumbles into unreadable dust. I am not offering this as a metaphor. This is simply a slightly exaggerated description of something I did this morning before I made my oatmeal.

I read this old Chinese poem in the book:

“We eat, excrete, sleep and get up;

This is our world.

All we have to do after that —

is to die.”

A hungry ghost is shaped like a tear drop, they say.

Its neck is as slender as a needle, 

and its mouth as small as a needle’s eye,

and its stomach is as big as a mountain.

Damned this way by desire, greed, anger, and ignorance. Generating violence, and suffering, and unforgiven debt. 

Driven by the fierce winds of karma to searching for tiny pieces of food in sewage and garbage dumps on the outskirts of town.

Stop chasing phantoms, phantasms, and phantasy, and just sit down and be quiet and do nothing. Can you do that? Can you do nothing? Do you know how?

These demons and angels and ghosts and monsters are generated by your brain, so settle down and get sane.

It is 1221 palindromic time and I burned some medicinal herb, full disclosure, and I’m ascending with John Coltrane’s Sunship. I’m sitting at the window to the center of the world. I thought it was misty but I’m told it is raining and then I see the dust-like water particles blowing about. Watching the actions of the wind in rain and trees and inside air currents twist the smoke as it ascends to the ceiling and amid vibrations from long ago, ancient sounds in the sounds encoded in the CD, and carried by the air, carried from dead musicians, transmitted from the next world to me, carrying the Sunship to me.

It will rain tomorrow, they say, and it will be clear on Saturday and the moon will be full and it will be Halloween and Dia de los Muertos and we are building an ofrenda in front of the church and bringing offerings for those we lost this year, or somehow remembering them, honoring them, trying to pay our debts to them, but debts are only hungry ghosts generated by our brains, like an old horror movie. I look forward to the great spirit blowing the clouds away for Allhallowtide and the Moon giving her blessing, and we need to find a good mole connection.

Come live with me and share my pod and we can breathe together.

Conspire with me, go inside with me, come close, unmask, and kiss

We can perform alchemical rituals of bliss, 

blissed out, mixed up, entangled, interconnected —

and mutually infected?

We better get tested.

They say it’s only quarantine-age love,

but our love comes from God,

come live with me and share my pod.

Gary Luckey

Prompted by my bladder, I get out of bed around 4 am, and turn on the coffeemaker and head for the plumbing. Then I look out the kitchen window hoping to see Venus at the moment it rises above the rooftops, but I’m always too early or too late, and now it is too cloudy. I go into the dark studio with my mug of coffee and light the candle and sit on the sofa and look at my phone.

A message from my sister was sent at 10:35 pm:

Gary went to Heaven a few minutes ago. He loved you dearly.

It almost seems I was always conscious of Gary but I had already accomplished more than two years of infancy when he appeared at our church and our home. We were new arrivals to Florida and my earliest dim memories come from Midway, Kentucky, and Jamestown, New York. Lake Park was a small town. My father preached at a Southern Baptist Church on Park Avenue and Gary’s parents ran Luckey’s Grocery, also on Park Avenue, and near the railroad track. Gary worked in back as the butcher. I remember the grocery being a general store that sold feed in printed bags that country women made clothes from and I remember the smell of the butchery and the bloody sawdust on the floor and strips of fly paper the men hanging out smoking cigarettes and talking and arguing and a baseball game on the radio. The Luckeys, James and Lela and their sons Glynn and Gary attended our church and sang the hymns.

Until the 1970s Gary had greased back black hair. I believe he was named after Gary Cooper but he  looked more like Montgomery Clift, maybe, but not moody, and Betty was kind of Liz Taylor, but more Scandinavian. He and my sister were in love and they were a very good-looking couple. I was a little blonde kid. Gary said I would walk up and down the aisle at church, stop at each pew, and stare at the worshippers sitting there. When I was that age he rescued me after I was abducted by two teenage boys. They stripped off my pants. One of them said, “Here comes his brother” and they put me in a garbage can. Gary lifted me out and found my pants. I couldn’t describe the boys, I only remembered that they thought Gary was my brother. Gary isn’t my brother, I thought, he is Glynn’s brother. I am Betty’s brother.

When I was 2, Betty was 13, Gary was 17. Now I’m 66, Betty is 77, and Gary was 80. 

On his 80th birthday, Gary had symptoms of Covid and was waiting for test results. The next day he was hospitalized and eventually put on a ventilator. He was in the hospital four weeks and died October 15.

This is from the obituary:

He was born on September 20, 1940 in Ft. Myers, FL to the late James Franklin and Lela Stewart Luckey. Gary graduated from Palm Beach High School, and Palm Beach Junior  College. He was a member of the renowned Palm Beach High School choir. Gary was a quality control technician for Pratt & Whitney Aircraft near West Palm Beach for 38 years until his retirement in 2000. He owned and managed two restaurants at Brighton Seminole Indian Reservation called The Wind Mill Cafe and Alice's Restaurant. Gary was an avid hunter, fisherman and fourth generation Florida Cattleman. He was a member of Notla Baptist Church and loved signing in the choir. 

***

The first generation of Luckeys to migrate to Florida from North or South Carolina after the Civil War rounded up scrub cattle, feral cattle that inhabited the Florida wilderness. Gary was a cowboy, but had a regular job at Pratt Whitney. I helped him for a brief time in my early teens, feeding and herding and mending barbed wire fences and it was fun to play cowboy. I became a fan of cartoonist Ace Reid, who drew “Cow Pokes” on calendars sold in feed stores. I imitated Reid’s style, drawing lean slouching cowboys who evolved, in a couple of years, into drawings of hippies, and I also evolved into a hippie.

I’ve been trying to think of what to say about him for the past week. I finally talked to his son, my nephew, a couple of days ago. His name wasn’t in my cell phone and then I texted his ex-wife by mistake and then I called and left voicemail and then he called back from a tree stand in Missouri. I’m not sure what a tree stand is except that it is where hunters station themselves. It made sense to me Tifton would go hunting. Tifton is a lot like Gary. I told him I didn’t have anything to say and I wanted to say something.

Gary was one of the most interesting people I have ever known. Lori called him a raconteur. He was at home in wild Florida and knew the name of every plant and bird. He introduced me to the semiotics of tracking deer. His family ate what he killed — deer, hogs, rabbits, fish, gator tail. He cooked the best steak I ever had on a fire in a hunting camp. Sometimes, when he had a hankering for swamp cabbage, he would cut down a cabbage palm and chop it up with an ax to extract the heart. He also took me fishing when I was a kid, usually west of Palm Beach County, deep in the woods. One night, on an impulse, he bought a couple of rod and reels and took me snook fishing at the Jupiter Inlet near the lighthouse. He pointed out the phosphorescence in the water caused by plankton, but I don’t remember if we caught anything. Stuff like that. 

He impressed Lori when we were watching an alligator swimming in Fish-eating Creek toward the opposite shore. “Try calling him,” Betty said, and Gary made a sound in his throat. The alligator made a hairpin turn and headed toward us. Fortunately we were sitting in a pickup truck.

Some time ago, Gary read Abraham Heschel, the rabbi activist and author of God In Search of Man and The Prophets, and for a while was interested in converting to Judaism. When I last visited Betty and Gary they were attending a Baptist church on the Seminole reservation and she played piano there. His love for the prophets never left him and his favorite Bible verse was from the prophet Micah — “what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

I took refuge at Betty and Gary’s place during a personal crisis once and went to church with them. The pastor had all the men in the congregation line up in a row, all these men from the tribe, and Gary and me, and we sang a hymn we knew since our old church in Lake Park —

“He hideth my soul in the cleft of a rock, that shadows a dry, thirsty land.

He hideth my life in the depths of His love, and covers me there with His hand, and covers me there with his hand”.

One of the first memories that came to me when I heard he was gone

was of following him through a swamp at night. The water was halfway to our knees and I had on sneakers and he was barefoot, and I was staying in his foot steps, confident the water moccasins were getting out of the way of Gary Luckey.

the Chip Swan file

The other morning one of my neighbors texts me to say there is a big white envelope for me downstairs. I put on a mask and pick up a plastic grocery bag with the remains of three turkey legs from last night. I will get the envelope, go out, throw the bag in a dumpster and take the big white envelope upstairs. 

Is it the absentee ballot? I got on the elevator and the elevator goes down and the elevator door opens and I walk out and see the big white envelope and se the address and name of the sender.

Frank Eberling.

My high school writing teacher had messaged me often for over a decade asking for my address because he found my file, the CHIP SWAN file, and wanted to mail it to me. Each time, I sent him my address and kept watch on the mailbox and the shelves in the lobby -- and nada.

Now it is here, all the stories and poems I wrote for his Creative Writing in senior year, Class of 72, Palm Beach Gardens High School. Go Gators.

I grab the envelope and grab the elevator and get back to the sixth floor and on my way to my door realize I am still carrying the bag of dead turkey.

Frank wasn’t long out of college when he started teaching at the new high school. Frank had longish hair that tested the limits of the dress code. I was in ninth grade, and it was 1968. Nixon was running for President. He had a secret peace plan and would bring law and order. Everything seemed to be falling apart. The Democratic Convention was held in the middle of a police riot. In certain ways the time could be described so it sounds like the present, but in significant ways it was different.

The My Lai massacre occurred on my sister’s 25th birthday in March 1968, when I was in junior high, but the public didn’t know about it until November in 1969, when I was in tenth grade at PBGHS. That season rock festival was held at the race track with the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, etc. I couldn’t go, but Frank went.

Anyway, I wasn’t politically aware until near the end of tenth grade. Until then I watched Huntley and Brinkley with Mom and Dad during dinner. I knew enough current events to keep up with Johnny Carson’s monologues. In ninth grade Civics class we were supposed to give a presentation on the candidates and mine was about political cartoons. I drew all the time in class and didn’t pay attention or take notes. I drew cartoons and psychedelic album art inspired doodles that the faculty hated, including my art teachers, but my friends liked. I read many books, but most of them were not assigned reading. So I wasn’t a good student, but I was nerdy and hung up and stunned by the beauty of girls.

I was in tenth grade when Kent State happened, and then I became a radical almost overnight. In eleventh grade I got into an argument about Kent State with my art teacher. I called him a fascist. I got into trouble with my History teacher when I refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. I was not a good student, as I said, but Frank Eberling was my English teacher for a semester and I liked him, and I liked what he assigned us to read, but they switched teachers on us and I’m afraid I was a jerk to his replacement. 

I signed up for his Creative Writing class in twelfth grade

By then, Frank’s hairstyle was a variation on that of Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid, and my hair was hanging below my shoulders. I didn’t smoke pot or drink or use drugs and I was friends with Jesus freaks and I also hung out with the hippies who knew me as someone who didn’t use drugs but could be funny. 

One of the stories in the folder is about hitchhiking to the beach with one of those friends. I tried to write about the strange time when some of our friends joined a church-sponsored Jesus movement, were baptized in the ocean, and straightened up. I didn’t know what to say about it and the story was unresolved. I wrote second story that included a memory of a hunting camp I had been in a couple of years earlier. The description of the rowdy camp and the hunters as an army invading nature isn’t bad. The story was about my growing awareness that I didn’t really want to be a hunter.

A book report on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is in the folder. I liked the anti-war message, but I didn’t know what to think about the Sci Fi fantasy/ hallucination episodes. I thought they took away from the message (now I think of the parts about being “unstuck in time” as being about PTSD). 

I already had copies of the short stories, so the real gem in the folder is something I didn’t have, an assignment to write a dialogue based on a newspaper story. I remembered writing a dialogue with two people arguing about the Vietnam War. They were saying the same things I often heard people say about the Domino Theory and that we were fighting the communists there so we won’t have to fight them here. I remembered that the process of writing the dialogue forced me to think the opposing views and that it clarified my thinking about the war. What I’d forgotten was the part the dialogue that was taken from the newspaper. The men are in a helicopter, talking about the war, and they see many dead bodies below, civilians, villagers who they believe were slaughtered by the communists until they see American soldiers shooting children and women and old people. The article was about witnesses to the My Lai massacre who testified at the court martial trial that took place in 1971, in my senior year.

When I decided to drop out of school Frank called me. He already knew why I was leaving. I had explained it all in a monologue I wrote for his class. I thought the country had gone insane and I thought school was a brainwashing factory, processing me to join the insane society. School was getting in the way of my education, I wrote.

Frank wanted to drop out too, and he did a couple of years later by changing careers. He shot video essays for a local TV station and eventually directed independent films. Still a cool guy. He met John D MacDonald for a piece he was shooting and it had an effect on him, and he started writing Travis Magee - influenced novels set in West Palm Beach. You can buy them on Amazon.

The CHIP SWAN folder is full of clues to the strange student I was and who this cool teacher encouraged. Thanks, Frank