Sitting in the Dark Looking Out on the Lights of Juarez

        --for Bobby & Lee Byrd

There was a time I read slow and methodical.  I had time then.  That is about all I had.  I was alone on the U.S. / Mexican border, my life spiraling out of control, angry at God and the universe for a deep shyness I couldn’t seem to get out of.  But books were solid back then.  I worked alone in a high office looking out over a bridge between two nations and I boxed up books.  The building was old, mostly vacant.  At noon I rode the elevator alone down to the first floor where there was a tobacco shop ran by an old man also alone.  I walked past the shop and out the front door carrying my book, whichever one.  I read a lot back then, even at my slow pace, because time was not an issue.  Usually, I crossed the street to a Chinese restaurant, a buffet, but not that good of one, and not that popular.  But it had a corner booth that was usually free and looked out on the street.  And there I sat and read. 

Poetry--Woven Stone by Simon J. Ortiz, The Selected Poems of Paul Blackburn, Pictures of Brueghel by William Carlos Williams.

Other times I went to the bar in the hotel next store.  It was a tall building, famous, and totally vacant except for some guy’s pent house on the top floor and the bar on the bottom floor.  I should remember the name of the hotel, but I don’t.  I should remember the name of the bar, but I don’t.  At night it was sometimes crowded and rowdy.  But in the day it was almost vacant.

I sat at the bar, drank rum, stared at an amazingly beautiful blond named Kimberly, and between spells of being mesmerized by her sparking blue eyes and dimpled smile, I read:

Fiction--Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Rick DeMarinis, The Year of the Zink Penny, Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits, Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, Burges, A Clockwork Orange, Waguih Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club.

I read and absorbed and looked into Kimberly’s eyes.  For whatever reason, she didn’t mind.  She invited me out once, and I went, but she quickly realized I couldn’t talk.  So I read.  She’d fill my glass now and then.  Then tell me about her abusive boyfriend.  I never knew what to say and she didn’t seem to mind.  She would go back to washing glasses and I’d go back to reading.

Criticism & theory:  The Outsider by Colin Wilson and Cubism, Steiglistz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams by Bram Dijkstra.

After lunch, I would ride the elevator alone again, box up books while looking at sunlight shark off the steam of cars on the bridge razor sharp--I can’t remember if they were coming or going--until the buildings turned pink and the lights begin to appear.

Then I would head back to the bar for a couple more hours.  It wasn’t as quiet.  Kimberly was busier.  But the books were still solid and I was just killing time, partly to avoid my apartment, and partly to go back to the now completely empty office building, ride the empty elevator up, open the office door, turn off the lights, and there in the dark stare out over the lights of Mexico.

Eventually Kimberly became pregnant; then we learned that the bar was being closed.  The regulars promised her a big party to mourn the closing of the bar and celebrate her soon-to-be child.  But drunks aren’t very reliable.  I bought something for the baby.  I had no car.  I didn’t know what I was doing.  I don’t remember what I got, but I do remember I walked miles through Mexico looking for the perfect way to say all my mouth refused to.  It wasn’t expensive, but it was right.  Or I thought so.  She might not have, except only two people showed up at her party--a girlfriend and myself.  The bar was empty, dismal.  I didn’t know what to say.  Neither did she, and certainly not her girlfriend, so she gave me a hug and I wandered out into the night with a hole inside me the size of the black void of the Franklin Mountains surrounded by the lights of El Paso.

I don’t miss that life now. Nobody would.  There were lots of astoundingly good people, like the Byrds and Kimberly, but I wasn’t in a place where they could reach me.  I have a great life now.  God, hearth, family, home, way too much to do.  It is foolish to want for anything more.  But, of course, I do. And on a night like this, when the snow is coming down heavy and the fire is dying low, I do miss reading slow and methodical--that and sitting in a dark, empty room of a much younger, much smaller Cinco Puntos Press and looking out on the lights of Juarez totally astonished.