If undeniable love only happens once, and then it’s gone, what do you do? Shop, count your money, travel, remodel your kitchen, volunteer, protest, have babies, read, or disappear into your illusions, and your art. Be enlightened, shine in your art, in what you loved always, in the froth of life.
THE MIND HIKE & MUSIC
I WISH I’D TAKEN A PHOTO THAT DAY,ย on a gravely, twisted uphill hike to Mt Atalayaย a hike that Iโve hungered for because it looms in the rear view, jettisoned above the city, swooping hills, three of them, you have to criss-cross before you reach the 8,800 foot marker in the sky. The temperature was 70 degrees, the wind was napping. Easter Sunday, sprinkles of holiness on Santa Fe, church bells ringing all day long, restaurants hosts pushing metal carts of glossy preparations down the aisles, and the little children, in Easter bonnets, and patent leather shoes, if they still make them, are squirming at the table.
I had a hunger for universal meaninglessness and to end the chatter in my head. Hikes do that. They just erase all the sirens and alarms, the what ifโs and what knots in my head.
Afterward, we sat on the porch listening to Joe Bataan. You probably havenโt heard of him unless you dig into Salsa, as Rudy does.ย Joe is half Filipino and half African. His music touches cords you cannot even imagine, like Afro-Cuban-Filipino fusion rap.ย Everyone is hopeful on Easter; motor bikers, wanderers, ย the wait staff and valet that trot down the street, talking into their ear phones at one another, and guests, pushing baby strollers, swinging shopping bags, taking photographs of our house, and gazing at the sky. When they hear the music from our porch, they wave at us, and might think, we ย have the life, sitting on the porch,ย sipping a glass of wine. What they cannot even imagine is that the entire scene is Roman a clef, a fictional imitation! What we are actually doing is avoiding the avalanche. We were already defaulted on the mortgage, and then we repositioned into a vacation rental. And guests sat on our porch while we took the maid’s entrance. Hah
LOVERS IN YOUR LIFE
Sometimes I skim through the works
in progress folder and stumble upon something I never finished. This is from that folder, started in 2004.
They make the best friends, and you never have to wonder what itโs like to make love to themโฆ lovers from the pastย are not forgotten, and if they are, then they were not true loves, they were just flings.ย ย In my life,ย lovers have remained in my heart in a separate compartment, just as their letters, and photographs and mementos are kept in separate stationary boxes in my trunk.
Some lovers keep in touch with me, and others vanished after the break-up. Last month two former lovers contacted me. One from 1977, and one in 1984. I have always said one man is not enough; I need three or four circulating my life. Even if I was married, my mantra of โthe more men the betterโ would not be negotiable, and today, that holds true. I’ve been advised by Rudy, that men will read this and assume that I am intimate with my men friends; and I said not all men will, and he said, oh yea, that’s how men think. ย ย
This is a story of lovers reuniting, in different cities than where they met, older, refined in sentiment, and loved in a capacity greater than they once were, as lovers.ย To be continued.
SANTA FE, NM
Santa Fe, snow yesterday, today sunshine, tonight clouds, just like a woman.
RAN INTO TONY ABEYTA, WANTS TO GO SOLO JOURNEY, WAITING FOR THE UNIVERSE TO TELL HIM WHERE, I SHOUTED BACK, ME TOO.
THE COLOR RED IS THE COLOR BLUE
I have to turn the clock back to 1996, to the days of peeling back the first layer of family history. I was sitting at a dining room table in a casita in Taos, NM.ย It was winter, the first time Iโd lived in snow outside a few teenage weekends in Arrowhead. Snow silence that sucks upย every imaginable sound, and the absence of any neighbors, ย I was the only resident in the compound, left me to unravel a secret life, the one my father guarded with irreproachable tenacity.
ย The first layer came off from the Immigration and Naturalization (INS) files on Allen smiley, birth name Aaron Smehoff, tagged โArmed and Dangerous.โ
Allen married, Irene on January 16, 1926, (my fatherโs nineteenth birthday), in San Francisco. On July 18, 1926 Allen was arrested for robbery in a drug store on Geary Street with another unidentified boy who fled the scene. On September 17, 1926, Allen was convicted of first degree robbery and confined to Preston Reformatory for boys in Ione, California. On November 23, 1926 Irene, who remained in Oakland, gave birth to a baby girl, named Loretta. Allen was released from Preston Reformatory in December of 1927. He returned to Oakland to reunite with his wife and child; but they had vanished. This is what the INS gathered from Dad in an INS hearing. I read from the court transcripts of that hearing, about 300 pages of interrogation and the answersโ in my Dadโs own voice.
ย The snow sedated the choppy feeling in my stomach, the jaggedness of suddenly discovering, why my father was wired with anxiety. His whole life was occupy Allen Smiley; arrest him, convict him, send him to Russia, and never pull the tap from his apartment, or the FBI guys from his tail.
When I ordered all those government files I had no idea that the government probed into personal lives as much as criminal activities. They recorded all the household conversations, arguments with my mother, his betting on the phone, his visitors, discussions with his housekeeper about the ashtrays, and his hatred for the government, โI wish somebody would drop a bomb, just to get rid of some of these guys.โ
ย What would I say to this daughter now in her eighties, about the father she never knew?
It was a one of a kind experience, to pick up the phone and speak with Chris, the granddaughter, who discovered me from my columns.ย She went looking for the other Smiley daughter, and confronted her own family secret. The tension cross-circuited our conversation, both of us heaving with questions, anxious for an answer to the family puzzle, the answers we could not wait to get, that I cannot share, even though the names are changed, I do honor the right to privacy.
ย I paced the room moving unconsciously from one place to another, reaching for my fatherโs voice to soothe her, rewrite history in between dusk and making dinner. Then the unveiling of the tragedy; the loss and the family shame, surrounding a marriage to a gangster, a father whom they never got to know, as I did. ย In the passing of an hour or less, my voice resonated the stories of her grandfather; his health and humor, his disciplinary regulations, and his life long battle to remain anonymous, in the public eye of organized crime.
Chris asked if I wanted to speak with Loretta, my half-sister, and I said of course I would. She set up a phone call for the following Sunday,
with a forewarning that her grandmother did not encourage the communication, or the research, she was beyond asking for a resurgence of truth or pain. How does one retrace seventy or eighty years of believing the color red may be the color blue or least a bluish tint. ย Loretta was not proud of what she read about Allen Smiley.
with a forewarning that her grandmother did not encourage the communication, or the research, she was beyond asking for a resurgence of truth or pain. How does one retrace seventy or eighty years of believing the color red may be the color blue or least a bluish tint. ย Loretta was not proud of what she read about Allen Smiley.
In the days before the arranged phone call I sifted through my internal index of Dadโs history, and what might console her. I could tell her about the time, he sat me down in the living room, to discuss sex with a gentle sternness;
โ Once you get pregnant your whole life changes, and youโre not even close to being ready for that. It happened to a gal I loved, when I was a young man.โ
Was that Lorettaโs mother he was speaking about? When this young love of his said she was pregnant, he tried to persuade her against it, because he wasnโt โproperly financed.โ ย So I asked him what happened.
ย โWeโre not talking about my life; Iโm trying to get you to understand the consequences of sex. You see God made the act beautiful so we would procreate, and if you ignore the consequences, youโre not fulfilling Godโs wishes.โ
ย I waited by the phone until it was time to accept that the call wasnโt coming. During that time of waiting, I tried to walk in Lorettaโs shoes. ย I only had to take a few steps to comprehend the combustion of emotions sheโd face by having a Sunday evening chat with me.
I made the choice to be public, to be viewed by strangers all over the world, and to receive their rage as well as their rewards.
ย It wasnโt a year ago that I received an email from the most distant of childhood memories. The email came from Inga, our first Nanny.ย ย The last time she saw me I was six years old.ย She sent me photos of us in the backyard at Bel Air, photos of her watching over me on the swings. ย She told me by letter, that my father was so good to her, so generous, and she loved being a part of our family. โI had no idea he was involved in anything criminal, and even if he was, it wouldnโt have mattered because he was such a kind man.โย The color red is also the color blue, and because of my Dad, I learned to accept the contradictions in all of us.
Our interior life is uncensored, unsuitable to guidance from our parents, our husbands and wives, our lovers;ย ย it is uniquely you, red and blue.
STEPPING OVER
SOME ILLUSIONS ARE HUMAN ,THESE ARE THE MOST DANGEROUS
for the one who is viewing,
the maker of the illusion,
transmutes as the situation demands.
Man Ray – Jean Cocteau and Wire Sculpture (1925) (Photo credit: Cea.)”]![[ R ] Man Ray - Jean Cocteau and Wire Sculptur...](https://i0.wp.com/farm6.static.flickr.com/5269/5583267661_4e0e57e625_m.jpg "[ R ] Man Ray - Jean Cocteau and Wire Sculptur...")
BETRAYAL
Does not afflict those who have not betrayed, they weep and scratch the surface of defeat, but the betrayer explodes.
EXPECTATIONS
Some of us get more in life than we expected, some get less, and some never stay in one place long enough to
enjoy the harvest.
PATHS TO DOORS
The signals were all there, but I kept going in the opposite direction, on the road away from the new door, because I’d gotten used to the door I had.
Today the road is closing, it’s going to be shut before too long, hardly long enough to pack it all up, the newly purchased furnishings, drapes, lighting, towels———-and going in the boxes, into storage. The fifth renovate, refurbish, and move play. Three acts-repeating themselves.
Where the new door will open is uncertain, more of these adventurous in livingness tests that I write about.
MEN & WOWEN WHO DON’T LOVE
MEN WHO TAKE ALL LIFE IN THE BODY OF A WOMAN- WILL NEVER KNOW THE WOMAN OR LOVE.
OBSERVATIONS
Illusions are what deafens , and reality
is too loud.
“THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE MAFIA”
Growing up the daughter of a gangster meant that I would remain a ย little girl forever. My father died when I was 29, but emotionally I was still a teenager.
Had I had known that I was seated next to one of the most powerful and influential men in theย Mafia, Johnny Roselli, ย then I would have listened with sharpened ears, and repeated bits of explosive headline blood curdling stories to my girlfriends. That would have placed myself, my father, Johnny and my friends in jeopardy. An informant from the government may tag me on the way home from school, or tag one of my friends, ย or an enemy of the Boss, may pick me up from school and not bring me back.ย Everyone is suspect: an informant, or weak enough to become an informant, a loose lipped wise guy, a bragging connected businessman, a friend of a friend, a cousin of a brother, and a daughter of a gangster. We are all potential targets of this organization known as the Mafia, Mob, syndicate, Costa Nostra, or our thing.ย Growing up in this circle of gamblers, killers, fixers, enforcers, ย bookies was like growing up in a novel, it was a fictional tale all the way, until the end of my fatherโs life.ย ย ย There is a drop down board that appears every time I write about our family business that reads,
โ How dare you open my life to the world, what do you know? You know nothing little sweetheart, and thatโs the way I planned it. โ
โThereโs no such thing as the Mafia! If you ever mention that word again, youโre leaving this house!โย ย I melted down to the floor, and he was ominous as God standing over me. I would never mention the word again, I promised, and I would never believe in the Mafia.ย ย ย
ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS 