NIGHT FOREST AND THE SEA

NIGHT FOREST AND THE SEA

by

Val Killpack

simon says

            His protests:  “What?  Are you a sissy?  A little faggot?”  Each time, every word.  Father rang bells in my head.  I shrank from his icy jibes, huddling under trees.  I cowered in the adjacent forest, sharpened spruce needles probed my face.  I bantered in my mind, to myself; taunting echoes meddled my thoughts: “Stop crying!  Be a man!”  I loathed the prodding, the expectation I would follow in father’s footsteps.  I was an army brat, but confused, with soft skin.  Schoolmates pushed me away, like my family.  Striking-out at kickball brought the unabated wrath of innocence and youth.  Cheeks flushed red from my misdirected foot, I sprinted from the game, but not fast enough to escape their words, which rushed faster than lightening into my ears, twisting inside my head.  I was shamed.  Running from playgrounds, I turned to fantasy, to sci-fi, seeking escape.  Until or unless I was found, squatting behind the lower bow of an old spruce tree:  “Queerbait!  Bookworm!”  I ran from them, my broken wings never used, tucked into my throat, clogging me to silence.  I wanted to fly.

            A mother’s love breaks like nothing else.  Her tender breast was not so far away.  A few years, a dream, a nightmare.  I knew she loved me.  Even after all this.

            Simon came later.  My first car and my first boyfriend arrived the same week.  A beat-up Honda Civic and a nineteen-year-old skinhead.  Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice, he said.  SHARP.  Whatever, I said, let me kiss you.  I was not tough like him; I was a Nelly, a shy little fairy of a boy, barely able to speak in public.  Steel-toed boots and tight Levis stole my heart.  We whispered under the covers.  “Don’t tell anyone,” he would say.  He had an image.  But, at my house, he could let go, there was no one to see, no crowd for which to perform.  We laughed a lot.  We listened to music.  He played aggressive hardcore: Minor Threat, Agnostic Front.  I slipped in some R.E.M., some Erasure.  “Don’t tell anyone,” he would say.  I just smiled.

            Mother loved Simon.  More than the skate punks, the goth betties.  “He’s just so sweet.”  He was more than sweet.  She had never seen him mosh at the 930 Club, seen him walk the streets of Georgetown.  Our home was a refuge.  Uncoiled.

            Simon listened.  He wrenched the feathers from my throat, sucking out the debris, swallowing old insults like Jell-O shots.  His ears became velvet grass.  We lay in a bed of turquoise and shine.  Touching skin we glowed.  “Let me see that sweaty shirt,” I mocked, “I’ll get you something fresh.”  He loved it.  Slowly he began to peel it off, eying me with a wry smile.  Calmly, with a comfortable grin, he dropped his shirt and walked to face me.  He carefully pulled my shirt upwards, removing my inhibition with it.  “Lay on your back,” he said. “Relax.”  I let him take over.  With a delicate caress, I let him in, right at that moment.  That was the moment I lost myself.  The sky opened and I went through.

            A few months later, I graduated from high school and moved out west.  My parents had found Simon on top of me, glistening in the candlelight, and I had not left their sight again.  Not until the day after graduation.  I boarded a Greyhound fated for San Francisco.  The Castro quickly suffocated me.  First, I hung around the alleys and teahouses, turning to frantic anonymous sex.  Later, I escaped into dimly-lit gay bars.  I searched for Simon with every fuck, and over time, desperation and loneliness consumed me completely.  I avoided friendships, preferring emotional distance.  The rush of sex kept me high, at least for a few brief moments.  The seasons spun past, but the fog was persistent.  I loathed it all, deeper and deeper.  I gave notice to my landlord and hitched a ride north to the Lost Coast.  I rented an old shanty and worked in Shelter Cove.  I went to a rocky ocean cliff and watched the sun fall every evening.  Nighttime found me in that salty air, alone, but landing again, touching my feet to earth, soaking my bruises in the cold Pacific water.

Bannock – noun: a usually unleavened flat bread or biscuit made with oatmeal

           

Sunlight bleaches his face from view, his radiance blends into overwhelming brightness of day, and before even a cloud can reveal him, he disappears into blue sky.  Light, on principle, turns to night, unless kept alive by fire or electricity.  Inaction fails to define him, anticipation of unrequited desire barely keeps him alive.  Flowing blonde hair trails behind him, like sparks of a flame, and a light-hearted smile guides him.  He glistens.  Bannock catches but a glimpse as he walks along the ocean cliff.  The apparition does not phase Bannock, who likes to daydream, though usually somewhat darker.  A reflection of the sun, some kelp on the shore.  Perhaps the wind.

            Bannock walked, and walked only.  Automobiles removed him from direct experience, whereas walking established paced interactions with the “real” world.  Buildings whizzed past on a bicycle or bus, blocks spun by.  He abstained from such inanities, and walked.  One step at a time the world arose before him, inside him, and Bannock missed not a breath of it.  “Life is short,” he would say, “I’m in no race.”  One time he said, “I don’t want to get discombobulated.”

            In pre-industrial times, Bannock would have been at one with culture.  Currently, the California coast wrought disparity.  Society challenged his mind—his truth constantly at odds—he was fraught with angst.  Walking promised hope, temporary relief.  When he stopped, even to contemplate under a tree, or to have tea at a café, nibbling croissants by the window, he lost his footing.  Gray clouds loomed, the air seemed to thin, and his head pounded, like spikes being driven into hard earth, like sharp screams echoing on the horizon.  He must get up and walk.

            He cloaked himself in brown—he sported a weathered Mexican poncho, a tattered leather cowboy hat, a pair of well-worn wide-corduroy pants, and dirty-tan work boots.  At six feet and one inch, or a meter eighty-five, and muscular, he pushed himself out of his outfit, bulging flesh threatening to protrude, with long, brown, stringy hair attempting to hide his angular face.  Bannock walked with a cane.  The cane came from a craft bizarre, and had an aura of authenticity, being hand carved from local American Beech (Fagus grandifolia), the wood used to make baseball bats, the tree that housed passenger pigeons before they went extinct.  He slouched and tried to lean on his staff, but upon closer examination, it was apparent that he was feigning.  His hunch looked awkward, and the cane, itself, appeared to cause the limp, being drug behind him like a beloved hindrance he could not part with.  His gait was small and slow, with self-imposed restraint, and a lethargy, not of body, but of mind.  He squeezed the bones of his skull together tightly, as if trying to suffocate his brain.  His breath was shallow and from the chest.  He walked with locked hips and head hung forward.  A chiropractic nightmare.  With a little yoga and massage, or some Feldencrest manipulation and postural alignment, he could easily gain two inches in height—five centimeters—and maybe some respect.

forest

           

Simon taught me more than love and sex.  One morning in spring of senior year, while skipping another day of high school, we chose the reservoir for repose.

            “I scored a quarter ounce.”

            “You’re the man, Simon.”

            “Want to smoke it?”

            “All of it?”

            “Yeah.  I think so.”

            “I don’t know if that’s possible in one session, Simon.”

            “You’re going to learn a lesson today.”

            “I guess so.”

            I didn’t know marijuana could bring on the vomits, but I couldn’t refuse.  This was a rite, entry into the land Simon walked, the landscape of hardcore truth.

            “It gets better.  Like being fucked up the ass the first time.  Painful but delicious.  Soon you build a tolerance and you want it all the time.”

            Marijuana merely broke the surface of an ocean of debauchery.  Simon showed me how to party like I meant it.  He taught me how to blaze head-on into the flames, full throttle, without flinching a nerve.  Drugs and alcohol were meant to be taken to the edge of death, quickly and unrepentantly.  This lesson applied to life, not just mind-altering substances.  I stood taller, firmer, and began to push my guilt aside.  I was a faggot and a heathen.  I stood reckless and proud.  A fresh bag of green could not be approached tentatively or casually—it should be devoured and celebrated.  We made love the same way.  Passion above all else.  Our delicate caress—a precocious sexual exploration—fell into the recess of memory.  Our love hardened, turned primal, yearned full expression.  We took cocaine and whiskey, or anything and everything we had.  We went to the forest and screamed, punched each other, fucked like thunderclouds seeking release, lightening striking orgasm.  Climax.  We fell, treetops spinning above us, dirt against our backs.  This is how we knew we were alive.  How we validated our breath.  It was the only path we could reconcile.  Every other road was false, shameful, and sinful to walk.  There was no other choice for us, we had to ride through the night with a gallop.

clasher

           

Bannock: insatiable thirst smothered his sexual desire.  Running—no, not exactly running.  Perambulating.  Anything but running, really.  He imagined well-dressed men packing weapons.  Hot in August and blue sky.  Bannock Parkinson fled from his oppressor.  Bannock Parkinson: not a name that existed alone.  Bannock the Banished: part of a series of identities.  He detested the name, all the names, in fact signifiers of any kind caused an itch.  He chose irritating names for himself as incentive to quit the habit.  Bannock had stuck, though.  His nom de plume.  But, why had he written a book?  Such a fantastical idea, yet forces fell upon him and the book wrote him.

            Insolent youth full of rage.  Vehement middle-aged men—angry religious elders.  The book provided a scapegoat.  Actions preceded the words.  And images before that.  He had always known.  Becoming an insurgent occupied every functioning fucking cell of his gaunt and wafty mind-body.  Television must end.  He sighted that intention and never flailed.  Incited.

            First it was an aluminum baseball bat.  Then wood—solid elm.  He walked back roads to neighboring, middle-class communities.  But he never stole from the burbs.  A crowbar to the side door and a smashed TV.  Families returned to splintered-glass living rooms.  He set the bat aside for the flat screens; a buck knife slashed through the plasma and LCD.  He turned them on and slashed the flat faces that appeared before him.  Daytime soaps, the late-morning news, and incessant talk shows all succumbed to his sharpened blade.

            Bannock signed his executions with a zine.  He created a graphic novel, staying up late-night to make copies and staple them.  He left zines at the scene of the crime, and at local coffeehouses and independent bookstores.

            Then he went into exile.  It was a self-imposed exile, one that he imagined.  The agents that followed him existed only as delusions.  He pushed them away and clung to solitary confinement.  The Lost Coast would serve as refuge, and he could finally let go.  Let go.

nun

           

Nighttime sky and broken headlights, screeching tires and death.  The wisp of consciousness lost in the breeze, ending with an out-breath.  Blushing with fire, wailing.

            “I want more!”

            She always screamed with the wind.  She howled spunk and shook like a banshee.  She predicted death, felt it, and actually existed for it.  Life pushed her out.  Forgotten.

            “Yeeeowww!”

            She ripped off her robes and ran circles nude, her glittering whitish-yellow-pink skin under moonlight and streetlight.  Trees shuddered from the storm.  She soared above the ground and celebrated the coming of the end.  With the extinguishing of momentary, spontaneous arising, nothing would be born into mind.  She woke from her slumber and tried to warn the living.

            “Death is foretold!”

            She knew it could not be avoided, and the cessation would end her millennia of running circles around and around, cause and effect, over and over again.

            “I’m extinguished!”

            Lightening pounded her mind/body into oblivion.

(Extinction.)

sailor

She smiles to herself again, then stops in embarrassment.  Embarrassment is form itself.  Her mind composes itself, holds it for a beat, then lets go and skips away into the sun.

She runs, sprinting ahead, then slows to a jog.  She wears psychological blinders.  She walks through downtown Portland, heading toward Burnside Avenue.  A parking attendant watches her.

            “Can I use the phone?” she says.

            “We don’t have a phone, miss.  This is just a parking lot.”

            “Do you have a cell phone?”

            “You mean a personal one.  Of course.  Is this an emergency?”

            “Of course it’s a fucking emergency!  Do you think I usually look like this?  No!  I don’t!  I’m an enlightened woman—I’m realized.  But, look at me now!”

            “Okay, lady, relax.  Go ahead.  Make a call.”

            She holds the phone by her side and catches her breath.  Her composure returns and she smiles to herself for being so dramatic.  It worked of course—the phone is in her hand.  She dials her contact.

            “Sailor?” she says.  She listens.  “Yes, I’ll be there.”

            She hands the phone back to the man.  “Thank you, sir.”

            He looks at her quizzically, “Uh … yeah.  Of course.  No problem….”

            She is already back on the street, leaving the man in his confusion.  No time to waste.  She boards a public bus and gets off at Laurelhurst Park.  Under the trees toward Burnside, she will find her man.  She walks.  She hopes he will be good—brilliant even.  She isn’t exactly a queen, but it will have to do.

            “Sailor?” she asks a man dressed in leather pants and a sailor’s jacket and cap.

            “Yeah.  Sequined Nun?”

            She smiles coyly.

            “You ain’t no queen.”

            “Well….”

            “I want a Queen.  You know.  A fucking drag queen.  Not a real woman.  What the fuck?  Jesus!  What a waste of time,” and he turns to go.

            “Wait,” she says coolly, “I’m not just any woman.  You’ll see.  Collapse the binary.”

            Sailor is a tall, dark man.  He stands many feet tall, thirty at least.  He is a dream.  She licks his thighs in her mind.  A leather-daddy sailor and a false drag queen combine in ecstatic convulsions.  She shakes her head to awaken.  Her sequin-covered robes glitter in the summer breeze.

            “Let’s walk to my apartment.  It’s on northwest twenty-third,” says Sailor.

            “That’s all the way across town!”

            “Walking is my practice.”

            “Okay, I can respect that.”

unknown

           

San Francisco had eaten me—devoured by the Castro.  I was a victim of culture, my identity a result of media images.  It all drove me to extinguish the media-viewing machine: television.  But agents began to follow me around, tracking my every move, and I escaped northward, walking all the way to the Lost Coast of Northern California.  There, with blistered feet and a cluttered/clear mind, I changed my name to Bannock and avoided technology completely.

Eventually, the solitude began to sour me, and I walked north again, a pilgrimage to find my home.  To find my self.  Though, everything seemed so empty.  Like a wave rolling out to sea.  I stood alone on the beach and felt the tide flow outward, away from me, toward the horizon.

I walked slowly, sleeping in the forest at night, following Highway One to Seaside.  Then I turned inward, leaving the glittering wave crests behind, and headed for the city.  Portland became my home, and culture began to infiltrate.  I became a Sailor.  It seemed the only costume that fit.

The Sequined Nun pushed me to the edge.  She began to whip my mind.  I knew she was merely compassion, and had been for many lives.  She told me she had been a male in her last life, before her journey through roads made of silk, into this new world, a land of sequins and television, where compassion needed her the most.  She handcuffed me to the truth, and I saw my incarceration.

“Please!” I pleaded, “let go of me!”

But everything held on, and Sequin would not let me escape.  This sparkling Sequin would not let me escape—she dragged me down into my own mind.  She refused my sexual release, and made me hold my seed, my thoughts, my quest.  I yearned for the primal scream I had found with Simon.  I yearned and suffered, until one night I finally gave up, and we sat alone together, watching the gentle drizzle of the Pacific Northwest.  Watching the streets shine in the filtered grey light.  Watching ourselves.

tea and coffee

           

A car whizzed past with a hum.  The flat grey sky lit everything without shadow.  Late morning on a weekday, and a woman walked briskly down the sidewalk, holding her black umbrella close to her head.  The air was thick with moisture, somewhere between a drizzle and a fog.  Hot coffee sat on a small wooden table, sheltered from the elements by a large glass window.  Behind the cup sat a smiling human; she motioned me inward.  I opened the door and stepped through the threshold into the warmth.

The smiling human wore sequins and a robe.  I had dressed as a sailor.

            “I found you.”

            “That was my plan.”

            “I’ll be right back—going to get some tea.”

            The barista smiled.  “Can I help you?”

            “I don’t think so.  But I’ll have some Earl Grey.”

            As I relaxed into my seat, the sounds and smells overcame me.

“This is the perfect day.”

            “Sailor, they’re all the perfect day.”

            “You speak the truth, Sequin.  Everything is alive.”

            “How about that tea?”

            “I am this tea.”

            Sequin smiled.  Orange bergamot filled the air.

simon does

            Before I left the east coast, before San Francisco, there was Fugazi in the park.  Nothing like live hardcore-punk to wake up the spirit.  We soared through the crowd, and Simon entered the pit.  I didn’t dare mosh, but Simon tore it up.  Fourteen-hole oxbloods—Simon’s boot of choice—with yellow laces and matching braces—those narrow suspenders holding up his life.  I tried to hold back my passions.  I aimed.  But my grotesque homosexuality piled out, and I embraced Simon at the show.  Slam dancing had soaked his shirt, heated him up.  He looked so alive, awake, so bounding with presence.

            “I love you, Simon.”  I approached and went for a kiss.

            “What?  You faggot!”  He shoved me and walked away.

            I knew it was a show for his friends.  I knew he had to do it—but a heavy, black door slammed shut in that moment.  I would escape out the back, I would find another world, another way.  I would board a bus destined for my next life.  I ran out of the park to fend off my leaking eyes.  In less than a week I would graduate, and then I would be free.  I would be.  I would.  I knew there was another path—and I vowed to enter, to pass through the gateless gate.  To drop away the nagging parents, the yellow, suburban town laced with wannabe-gangsters and domestic-thugs.  To lose my high school so-called friends, my parents, my family—to release the past in its entirety.  I released a shark into the sea.  Flushed some goldfish down the toilet.  To set myself free, that was all I could do.  I stopped off on my way home.  I was on my way home.  I stopped and bought a ticket.

I told no-one about the future, and quickly it came—my graduation ceremony in the waning sun, my dusty folks forcing congratulation—then packing my bags in the night.

“I’ll show you!” I screamed toward the blackened streets.  I boarded the bus.  I collapsed into my seat then peered through the murky-grey windows.  Black diesel smoke poured into the sky; I bid farewell.  With a growl, we moved slowly ahead.  I’ll show you, I thought.  I will.  I would.