Yesterday I had a rare business meeting where I had to leave my house. The meeting involved issues of silicon valley vc investment and issues of warrants, bonds and the mind numbing boredom of corporate complexity. I still wonder how me, a hitchhiking, backpaking runaway writer of love stories and poetry ever got into such a world… but then, when I got home, I realized that I hadn’t bothered to pay attention to what I was wearing…. check out the very formal belt…. and I thus feel fairly good my soul is still mostly intact (as is my friend Michael A. Fitzgerald’s)….

Pepper had her 84th birthday party on May 6th at Bernice’s Bakery.
I’ve known Pepper since I was a little kid.
We used to sit on the bench outside at Bernice’s and talk.
She would complain about politics and I would buy her coffee and listen.

Here are some photos. There are a lot more on my facebook page.

Memories of a friend of mine who died several years ago, come to me. Today they came because a while ago someone wrote me a letter and asked, “Did you know Greg Bechle, the poet?” And in thinking about him, I wrote this:

For several years I was a close friend of Greg’s. That’s a sad sentence. How can someone be close in past tense? He’s dead, died in 2009.  I saved his life once by convincing him to get drunk. I also left him down by Ennis — we had driven together to an Earth First! Rendezvous where we were supposed to have worked on a story together, him writing, me taking photos, for a national magazine where we had gotten a paid assignment, but he had recently become so strange and then got very drunk on top of it, that I left him there and drove back to Missoula alone. I didn’t understand what was going on with him.

I liked how Greg wrote. I was living in the ten by ten foot shack behind my friend Raz’s on Alder street in Missoula. Greg would come by my shack late at night and we would take turns reading each other  poetry from my notebooks or from his notebooks. I had a woodstove. If either of us didn’t like what was being read, we would rip the pages out of the notebooks  and throw them in the stove. And sometimes I would play my saxophone as he read, loud enough that several times the police came to tell us to be quiet. But I was about to move out with my girl. She was pregnant. I was about to start a very different life, one without room for craziness.

Then I saved his life. When almost everyone else had stopped talking to Greg, before he had started getting treatment for his schizophrenia, he was down at the corner in front of the court house next to the World War One memorial. Greg said he was going to stay there until all the troops came home from Kuwait. This was the first gulf war. 1990. It was also right before my son was born, and I was freaking about how-in-the-world would I be able to support all of us. I was trying hard to stop doing what I have always done: giving away all my money, agreeing and have my writing thrown into fires, befriend people with sparks who seem to be waiting for a friend…

Greg was camped there by the statue of that soldier who is running through barbwire and throwing a grenade. A statue with names of dead boys on its side. I went and tried to talk to Greg when he was first there, and he said something like, “Whenever Bush talks I see black bombs come out of his mouth.” He wasn’t being metaphorical. He was psychotic . He was also dressed in his worn out thin cotton clothing and near-worthless, thin shoes.

Greg had been at that statue for at least two weeks. Other people came down there to protest the war, but they would stay on the opposite side of the statue from Greg. It was social for them, standing close to the street, holding signs, being yelled at by rednecks, and yelling back. For Greg it was personal crazy and bad lost and alone. Then it got suddenly cold. Sub zero with a bit of snow and wind.

I had a big bed with piles of blankets. A kitchen with a coffee grinder and a cutting board  where my girl and I would put our fresh baked loaves of bread . I looked out side and saw the blizzard and the darkness and said I had to go somewhere and would be back soon.

I drove down to Wordens market. I bought a pint of half and half and a packet of hot coco. I mixed it in a big cup and heated it in the microwave. Then I drove over to the statue. It was 11pm. I thought Greg was dead. He was laying under a blanket, and he and the blanket were covered with 2 inches of snow. His feet, in the worthless shoes, were sticking out of the blanket and were covered with snow. I grabbed one of his feet and shook it until he was awake. He wasn’t dead. He sat up. He said, “Steve.” I gave him the cup of hot cream. He drank it. “It’s too cold out here,” I said. I took out all the money I had. It was less than $50. I gave it to him. I said — and I lied –  “All the troops are home and they are here in Missoula down the street in Charlie’s, and there is a big, hot stove there. ” I said, “I’ll give you a ride there.”

But I didn’t come in with him. Later he said I saved his life. I’m fairly sure I had. It got down to about negative 15 that night. No one would have woken him.

He also told me a story about walking 24 hours and forty miles to the newspaper publisher down in Hamilton and how when he arrived they were closed up for the night, and how he then threw a rock through the window.  He was angry at the paper for its publishing of pro-war editorials. He stood around on the side walk for several hours, yelling at passing cars, until finally he was arrested. Then he was taken to and locked up in Warm Springs — the mental health hospital — for a few months. When this had happened, the article I read about Greg in the paper, the Missoulian,  only described him as if he was simply nuts. The stories he told me though were much more than that. He said, “I lost my mind but I’m better now,” and then took a notebook from his back pocket, looked at me, and  read.

We lean on words because they make us human. . .

I wish I had made more room for him in my life, the life “without craziness,” because, really, he was a good one, a rare one. I wish I had those pages we burnt. I wish he could show up here somehow, this big house, and knock on the door and say to me, “You want to hear some new words?”

I would turn off all the screens and pull up some chairs and open the saxaphone case…
I miss Greg.

A memory that has no photo: myself, my brother and her, we are in a doctor’s office. The doctor is upset, he does not like me. He tells my mother to come back latter without us, or to leave us in the waiting room. She tells him, “no,” and leaves. She is pulling my hand. We go down some stairs. The doctor comes after us. “Wait,” he yells, “I need to tell you things your children should not hear,” and his voice echoes off the cinder-block walls of the stair-well. My mother picks me up, pushes open a door that lets the three of us outside where it is hot and bright. My brother is walking behind us. “Mom,” he says, “we’ve got to go back.” But we keep walking. This memory of her, my only true memory has no sights. It is just her arms around me, and my arms around her neck, and my face against her face, and both of us crying while the doctor is coming, running after us, to stop her there on the sidewalk where he will tell news that she and I already know.

I was ten when she finally died. In October. There were baskets of fruit and vases of flowers on our kitchen table for weeks. My mother had talked easily with strangers, and brought friends into our lives. They tried to stay connected to us, but my father was not someone who people were comfortable with, and the baskets and flowers all became good-byes.  From then, I was mostly alone, and until I left home as a run-a-way, was wild and vandalous.

This isn’t a story about any of these things though, but I want you to know some more of where I came from. For years I didn’t talk about my childhood, and its early ruin. There were many times when, after I had gotten into trouble — getting caught steeling or burning things or for getting into nose-bloodying fights with  neighbor boys — that my father would remove his thick, black belt and whip welts into my arms and legs. Not just for the trouble, he would also beat me out of frustration when I would argue and not listen to him. Sometimes it was the buckle, and sometimes it was the flat leather, but mostly he used the belt sideways and the welts would last for days and then turn into thin, yellowish bruises.  He would come home in the evening worn out and stooped, and I would be waiting fresh and angry. Its true, I did goad him. He would ask me a simple question, “did you turn that homework on time?” and I would tell him to screw himself.

The world has many worse stories, ones that end in gunshots or years of drudge jobs in convenience stores and fringe towns. I came close to those things. I drank in oil-field bars and listened to bragging stories about violence and grit. I looked in mirrors at my own reflection behind the rows of bottles, and I saw where I could end up. Once, in Sydney Montana, I was standing next to a man when he got shot in the head. It was over some pointless argument between him and his friend, and I just happened to be there. It shook me, but not much. I walked out into the midnight winter, the street lights smoking in the darkness and the wind swirling new snow like smoke, and all I thought was I was glad I had been able to leave before the police came. I was very drunk, and grim like an old thing. I was 21 and had been drifting for years.

But this story is a love story. My love story. You see, I met a girl, I met this girl, and she noticed the colors of the sky and could talk with strangers and could make friends. I met her in a bar in Missoula, Montana. She was a nurse, and had just finished an evening shift on an oncology unit. I had just gotten to town and didn’t have a plan. We talked about travel, about dreams. I told her stories about  Oregon and the beaches, about other places I had been. I climbed a spring-time mountain and collected flowers — glacier lilies, shooting stars, flax and lupine — and knocked on her apartment door. Latter she would cook me meals late at night. We would hold each other and I would feel her heart beat against my face, like fast water slowing into a deep, slow pool. In the mornings we would go to bakeries and drink strong coffee. And I thought I was given a second chance, no, I was given a second chance.

She married me. Such eyes and hands. Her laughter in the dark and in the bright sunlight. Her habits of collecting things, the way she would choose her clothes, the way she would touch my face. And she told me stories about the people she took care of, the sick and dying people, and how she tried to make them comfortable, and how the doctors made her mad. She would come home from work and I would be there. And when I came home from work she would be there. And we would drink wine and tell stories at whatever kitchen table it was.

I remember details though I don’t know any one point where the poison started seeping up. But I would come home and be alone, and she would come home and be alone. I worked  hard and she had her points of deep focus too.  And somehow we both stopped listening, stopped telling stories, stopped pointing up above the evening mountains and saying, “see where that dark blue is turning to night, isn’t it perfect?”

We had children. Beautiful children. A boy who looked like her, and a girl who looked like me. They played outside, swung on apple branches and swam. They collected bugs and bottle caps, and we filled a house full of toys for them. She took them to music lessons and dance classes, had birthday parties and picnics. Sometimes I would teach them about rocks. Picking up old ones and telling stories of times before oxygen. But I mostly worked. Worked through weekends and evenings, worked through family visits and through holidays. Tried to figure out how to make money, but soon I was going to be living alone again. Soon I was about to ruin what was good. Trying too hard but not doing anything right, not taking care of her, not listening and not remembering that it was, perhaps, a last chance.

In Texas, once I was arrested for hitchhiking. I was seventeen and had no money. I was put in jail for five nights and when they let me out, I walked back to the same highway where no cars had stopped before. It was a hundred degrees, summer, and I was hungry. I used a pay phone and tried to call my family for help. The woman my father had married — and who had watched me being beat and watched how I was able to just stand and make my father sweat and swear — answered the call but wouldn’t accept the collect charges. There was nothing else to do — I waited until a ride finally stopped and took it to where it went, far past Texas, deep into the south. Then I just kept going, and it was years before I tried to ask anyone for help again.

Love shouldn’t be a war of holding in what aches, but it becomes that for some of us; pushing away what you love for ancient, wrong, reasons. Taking care of the concrete and steel world and letting the living one gasp for water.

She takes my hand – this is a memory – and holds it in the dark, and turning my face into her shoulder, I shudder.

<– Part one of ‘How to Make Ten Million Dollars.’

(c) 2012 Steve S. Saroff

Dim light, so the photos are a bit grainy…

My hermit ways, but tonight I went to my friend and co-worker Karen’s art show, and took a few photos before I left. It was a nice place, since it was not in downtown, and thus not crowded. The space is some kind of converted auto shop, with a large garage door, which was wide open and people were sitting outside talking. I spent time talking with Stephen Glueckert about Jim Crumely and how we missed him, and traveling in Montana on not-so-traveled roads. I then asked him to come inside and stand at the end of a line of his interesting sculptures so I could take a photo of him. I like his smile so much, that I have to include several of the photos… I also asked Karen if I could take photos of her. So here the photos are…

This book was esspecially bad. They got nearly all of their recommendations wrong!  I paced back 45 feet, shot at it 7 times, and didn’t miss once.