How I Failed to Stop the War

above black rock hot springs

New Mexico was not quite ready for spring. Rain stayed away. Late-winter brown grass had many different shades, like the blues of sky. Hushed conversations among the paleface powers in towns concerned reservoir levels, while golf courses were noisily constructed on the outskirts. Unhushed talk centered on a nation oceans away, chatter of war and peace.

The loudest river's roar came from the highway's current of cars, ceaselessly driving toward a cliff they couldn't yet see.

Covering the state were remnants of our weapons of mass destruction, and their shell-shocked survivors. In Alamogordo, its name sounding like Armageddon pronounced drunkenly, sand glowed radioactively on certain new-moon nights from our first experiment with making the atom schizophrenic. The Albuquerque baseball team is called the "Isotopes."

"Behold I have become Vishnu," said Oppenhemer, head scientist for the Bomb, as he saw the first mushroom cloud unfold. "Destroyer of worlds."

Tours were available at the nuclear test site once a year, except during national emergencies.

Ancient Indian tribes decorated even older granite cliffs beyond the blast zones with their flute players and animal paintings. Land outside the unconquered pueblos left the natives was owned according to grants from 18th century Spanish kings and their missionaries, then given to the railroads in the 19th, and finally bought by comparatively monied rednecks and hippies after the second world war. Unbought beauty still stalked those with the eyes to see, swirling in high valley wind between the mountains. Even dry February's muted colors would send its female painters of a certain age to set up their easels beyond the adobe house's last fence, struggling to break through the visual glut swamping television-addled city dwellers.

The artists lined the low roads from Taos to Santa Fe. I planned on bicycling the high one. The pavement went past Outlaw Restaurant, at the top of a hill south of town.

I locked my overloaded bicycle onto a front railing, out of breath and thirsty from the long climb. The restaurant manager, hair pasted down with some kind of gel, asked my frizzy-haired self to move the machine to a dark corner. He didn't want the place feeling "too urban."

I had a long-awaited appointment with an old love. I could not have walked out. It was too late to do anything but wait, in front of an empty restaurant atop an empty hill, listening to song lyrics in my headphones:

Desolation of the rich in this biz--

Searching for what they desire,

Not what is.

We hugged tightly after she spotted me, not much room to breath. Her glasses were scratched so much they looked like miniature bug-flecked windshields. No wonder she had driven past me twice without even moving her head or eyes.

"I always thought I'd see you again," she told me though.

This was enough to start my engine. No sex, masturbation or drugs for a month had given me the acute sensitivity of an abcessed tooth. "I think about you when I wake up and go to sleep. I'm in love with you," I said before our soup was even finished, my words heavy anchors dragging heads and hearts below the waves of reason. She had warned me often to take my time.

"I told you not to say that," she said, staring at me with frosty eyes, the exact opposite of melting. Passion came quickly, a premature ejerkulation, drowning light-footed dancing reason like the cloying sauce that covered the restaurant's limp meat. She had sent me two e-mails, but love letters are battered inside the pixels of a computer. I felt her brave words about how we could spend a week loving each other again dissolving faster than the ice in our water.

A strong feeling can be its own worst enemy when it tries to short-circuit the long process of turning dirt into diamonds, or reuniting the estranged. Cubic zirconium and day-long visits ain't the real thing.

Passion inverted turns into depression. Pleasure often seems earned by pain. Man has an outie--watch him project his movie onto whatever blank spaces he can use for a screen, acting confused when the other actors don't follow his script. Woman has an inie--but even if you raise her from infancy she is never just that blank screen for a man's projections. This girl in front of me certainly wasn't. When she was scared, which was often in her shaky world, all orifices puckered up like a golden poppy on a cold night. The sane man, faced with the fear in a woman, puts away his fright mask. The masked man puts away his sanity.

I  did that as inconspicuously as possible, asking whatever renegade spirits haunted the rocks on which the restaurant squatted to protect me while I sat wounded and silent,  The waitresses hovered over us, my tongue thickened, I couldn't complete a sentence. What romantic illusions died such a hard death? She was telling me I had misread her letters, the ultimate sin for two who had met in a high school writing class. What was worse, my own words sent from library computers all over North America, had failed. Had I forgotten how to use my mouth for anything else besides talk?

Bicycling seventy miles a day for months had given me rude strength, and I felt the natural condescension of the physical for the sedentary. A short time ago, that had been me. I felt the dining room small and confining. A roof and soft bed are valued very highly. The same for a expensive meal at a pretentious eatery

It was unfair. She got me drunk on an unfamiliar brew, one part whiskey, one part shock, as we tried to stomach the bad food. A year of two wheel revolutions had given deep a yearning for a place that didn't move every day. That was what I wanted, I thought. A one week reunion with an friend, resting in the dry hills long enough to take some of the weight off my bike frame and shoulders, was not a dream that died easily.

I had to kill it. She invited me home. Here was the dream, attained. Peace, in an honest house, with a lovely woman, for a night, a week. Only if I love this woman tonight, how will I ever leave again? There are reasons, complicated ones, that divide two lovers from each other. There are always complicated reasons. Then the pre-emptive strike comes from the West, direction of the setting sun. The talk is over. Now it's time for battle. Love is gone, or soon will be. I can't just walk away. If this can't be a comedy that ends with marriage, and the tragedy of murder would be game over, I must let my emotions fly or swallow them and die of the indigestion. Stepping off the Golden Gate Bridge awaits then.

One week has become one hour in our mutual fog, how long it took to get from her house in the hills down into town. Suddenly, I realize she is driving me somewhere in Taos and my voice raises above the roar of the misfiring engine. I have become a nut about the car culture, feeling the intense rivalry cyclists have with the death machines from so many terrifying close calls and worse. I harangued their drivers on my rare car trips as we sped towards our destination, thinking this every Detroiter's right out of guilt.

It was an uncomfortable habit.

I lectured on how 40%  of our economy, according to my friend Lewis, the Volkswagen salesman, centers around our infernal combustion beasts, leading to the resulting pollution of the skies, ceaseless miles of asphalt laid over green meadows, destruction of center cities, sabotage of public transportation by the military industrial complex, and resulting wars due to inequitable distribution of natural resources, etc. I become a one-man critical mass.

My picture is in the dictionary next to irony for this behavior.

Fear of the beasts came from memory of having been killed, then revived, in one accident, and involved in so many horsepower-fueled adventures often ending with the smashing of metal and glass. The carnage, a smell of burnt bodies and blood running down your face, never completely fades away, just flickers less. A few weeks after a particularly hideous crash, still in my bloody head bandages and shoulder cast, I grabbed the wheel from my pal Conoco Bob (named for the gas station he once worked for) and refused to let him fishtail us at 120 m.p.h. down a Colorado dirt road to our car camping destination. I became a professional car salesman to revenge myself on gullible Americans who thought being able to drive fast--except during rush hours, after accidents, or during construction--would somehow solve our problems by speeding us quicker from one to another.

rancho taos

truchas, new mexico

At least I had a little more respect for the caraholics living in the outback like the one that was careening us through the mountain passes at high speed, their old motors flying ripped upholstery and rusty dents This time I kept the lecture, and my hands, to myself. Instead, I told her that I was staying in Taos for a few more days. She responded with a non sequiter, that she had a boyfriend, who I dimly remembered her complaining about to me during middle of night confessions. A bolt of lightning barely lit up the road through the windshield. The radio weatherman had not predicted a dark and stormy night.

There was much ammunition from two decades of the most intimate knowledge that I decided to use like a blowtorch on our cryogenically frozen hearts. No shutting up this time. I would not accept censorship of my first amendment rights, morphing into a one-man play combining the influences of the lyrics to "Get up, Stand up" with Charles Foster Kane rampaging his giant bulk through the Xanadu bedroom. No fighting fair, either. Some of my words were way under the belt, foul shots thrust blindly in the darkness of rage. A gust of wind bent the car's antenna. The last star in the sky was snuffed out. Whose idea had it been to leave so early in the morning before the sun was up? How much had we really drunk?

Out of the car now, dust from the heap's rear wheels covered me as love took off quickly back up the mountain. What was she in such a hurry for? Going back to the honest house, the beautiful woman. In the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos the tribe of refugee gringos lived off the grid with the remnants of ancient civilizations, following, sometimes, the rules of the earliest Christian churches--nature, poverty, art. The result was a combination of transcendent and tedious, often just a struggle for brute survival in an arid land that accepted visitors better than it did those who thought they had found home. Just ask the Anasazi.

A third thunderbolt came out of the black. I was beyond thought, and sat in the rapidly cooling air on top of my pack. Then into my sleeping bag, only twenty feet off the road in some farmer's field, dragging my heavy bicycle over the barbed wire fence's low point.

Three lightning strikes and you're out. The rain came quickly, large, freezing drops. I jumped from my bag like a champagne cork, raising my small tent clumsily in the dark. By the time it was up, my down bag and self were wet and cold. The rain turned diabolical, into snow. I was freezing inside a dead duck's feathers.

Then the nightmare ended. The sun was up. I didn't stop shivering until an hour after getting into the black rock hot springs on the Rio Grande. Steam rose up from four of us in the hot water. There weren't that many people living the northern part of the state scattered among the pinon pines, so I wasn't surprised that I recognized one of the other three as a man named Lionel. I had met him during a dinner with my old lover at a county supervisor's house during my last drift through the Southwest.

war protestors, los angeles

His gait was precarious and his body stunted, like Yoda or the miniature leader of the Martian revolution who emerges from a stomach in "Total Recall." He looked fine lounging in the springs, but at the party he was drunk and frantic, worried about his health, so I was not able to talk to my old flame alone. I had let Lionel know I was not really happy about that. Maybe it was better that he had interfered, so I could live a few more months with happy illusions instead of realizing sooner what angry words my foolish lips were capable of speaking.

Now I had a chance to apologize to him, and he handed me a peace pipe filled with smelly smoke. I sunk deeper into the hot water. Demons of steam rose from the water and pipe, forming strange shapes and faces before disappearing into the air. The three friends listened as I told them this story, knowing they would send it back to a woman I had loved much, Her burning ears had heard many truths and many lies. We would learn the difference between them later.

Then our foursome talked politics in paradise, hawks hovering lazy ovals over the river canyon. "I'm going back to the city to protest when the war begins," I told them.

"Stay here," Lionel said. "And don't say war is guaranteed to happen. What we believe, we make so."

"It's too late. Maybe next time."