“Whatever happened to S.?”

“Well…‚” Here it was. Truth, bubbling about beneath the surface of my friends lives for the last few days, and you’re left just wondering why the Fuck they just won’t come out and tell you. “I think she was really bothered by that story you wrote.”

“Bothered by it?”

“I don’t think she liked the way you didn’t capitalize God.”

There’s this face I make. Something along the lines of what the fuck kinda crack you smoking?!? And why the fuck are you being such an idiot?!? It’s a hybrid face, and a good one. My best bet when I have nothing nice to say, like: Who signifies anything with a capitalized letter?!?

I must say, that in these, my formative years, I could be, on occasion, a blithering ass. It was unavoidable. I wasn’t a flake. I was flighty, and idealistic, and entirely seduced by the wonder of life.

I never really listened to her. We’d have these really foolishly obnoxious conversations where we essentially tried to understand what exactly the other one meant when they said south, or next weekend, or ice cream. Communication was terribly non-existent.

Then of course, I stood her up or cancelled on her a couple of times. Sure, that couldn’t have been a good thing. Perhaps the uncapitlaized god was just the last straw.

Eh…

I remember another time, I once cancelled and rescheduled an evening with a girl I was dating something like five times in a row. Eventually, when I would call she would answer with “Oh no you don’t. Don’t do this to me again.” I must admit, the pavlovian response I got from just a phone call rocks. They answer the phone begging and pleading.

I thought it had begun in third grade, but thinking back, I can remember an earlier crush.

Every summer, my dad would sign us up for the swim team. He and my mom had spent their formative years as hippy surfers on Padre Island doing what kids do, which is mostly just kick back and relax in the river of life, just watching it mosey by. My dad had always been a believer in sports. He coached high school basketball and track for a couple of years in Kingsville, the girls’ teams — I always thought that was odd.

But, the coaching job, football in high school, and a firstborn son had him dreaming of a robust, active youth he could talk about over beers, in elevators, courthouse annexes.

So, every summer, he’d sign us up, me and my sisters, for the neighborhood swim team. We lived in Northwest Park and swum on the Stingrays, a venerable aquatics organization with depth, enthusiasm, and an awesome coaching staff.

Wendy was the coach for a long time. Kayla was her assistant coach. I remember when I was five, craning my head back to take in the full figure of her six-foot plus height, too young to appreciate the length of her legs. But craning up, the sunlight creating a halo that was accentuated by her blonde hair, I could’ve sworn she was an angel.

Some people just have a certain way with kids. Not like they’re on the kids’ level, but like they don’t believe in that level. They believe that kids are on the same level, or at least that’s how you feel, and that’s how they seem. That’s how I felt. Though probably half her height, I wasn’t taking scrubby handfuls of buttercups to my coach or an angel, or even some kind of adult. I was taking them to the woman I was determined to have as my girlfriend.

My friend Josh was just as bad. We’d purposely violate some rule just so she’d come over and pay more attention to us: cheating on sit-ups, holding onto the wall instead of swimming the full length of the pool. That was our favorite trick. She’d come over in pink flip-flops and step on our fingers. We’d grin big as rats and move our hands out of the way just in time. Still makes me grin. And we’d grin then, craning back to look up at her haloed face.

I think that’s where I learned to be cute. I can remember her squatting down in yellow shorts to look me eye to eye, accepting the wilted bunch of pink buttercups, tousling my hair and saying I was so cute, thanking me profusely for the flowers. That’s the kind of person she was. She wasn’t patronizing me. She was on the level. It wasn’t hard to have a crush on her at all.

And she’d trained me. Cute gets attention. I never really thought about it, never really sought it out, practiced at home in front of the mirror, but it stayed with me: my mutant cute power. I’m not as cute anymore, mind you. Taking life’s hammer repeatedly to the upper torso for many years tends to tarnish the smile a little. You move a little slower. You’re less inclined to just be funny and make people laugh. But every once in a while, someone I don’t know very well, someone for whom I haven’t even the slightest intention of performing for, will tell me to stop being so cute.

With Kayla, it got me her attention, but I should have learned, it didn’t get me the girl.

Her name is long gone, lost across crazy memories and a distance wrought by a sense of self-preservation, but God, she was beautiful. Dark cat eyes, the sides drawn out into exotica, that would pierce you with such intensity you’d look away. She was boundless, whether huddled to herself, her head buried in her arms shouting obscure quotes from obscure books, or strutting around a packed room of young men in a Holiday Inn wearing nothing more than a grimy t-shirt and a pair of panties.

She had one of those crazy smiles that hinted that she was always sharper than she needed to be, always a step ahead, and always a few steps off the beaten path. Her life during these times was bent on making new weirdness, constantly. Midnight rides to San Antonio just for a bottle of Pace picante sauce. Sneaking onto dormitory roofs and shouting at a world blanketed in sepia tones of sodium street lights.

Once on Riverside, she stood up through the sun roof, arms outstretched, shouting at the traffic, flying in East Austin. It was a scene stolen from a coming of age movie, and I remember wondering where I was. Did this mean those movies accurately reflected the lives of young adults? Had we seen too many of these, or were we just crazy enough that it was our story now.

It was her energy that was so beautiful. She was invincible. Perched on a rooftop corner four stories up exclaiming she could fly. Watching her bang out Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff was a good metaphor for her: dark, fiery, intense. Her head bent towards the keys, her black hair hiding her face, crazy gymnastic digits attacking the piano keys. And when she was done, you had that smile. Innocent. Mischevious. Beautiful.

But when she was ugly, she was ugly. Foul. Screamed epithets for a Taco Cabana boy twisted her face into something demonic. Cruel, cruel words for a best friend; a slap in the face; shouting, pushing, and dragging you all the way from her room to the dorm lobby where screamed some more in front of the desk and passersby before demanding the RAs throw you out.

She was scary intelligent, and when her darker moods came, she used it all to dissect you into the tiniest most worthless bits possible, telling you truths that not even you knew, literally digging out your heart and explaining, in detail, what defecation it was.

And then she was sad. Sobbing tears barely drowned out by the blanket she was smothering herself under and the Pearl Jam she was blaring. Black Black Black was all she ever played. And then the restrained sniffling, wiping tears away, the smile, thanks for being such a wonderful friend, yeah, she was ok, we’ll have lunch tomorrow, thanks. But you’d get that call at two in the morning. Slit her wrists in the shower, again. Her roommate had found her unconscious, foaming at the mouth, and vomiting from all the pills she’d swallowed.

Have you ever seen a psychiatric ward? They’re anti-septic like an orthodontists office. Soft, dark colors. Muted lighting. Generic furniture in the waiting room for friends and relatives. A nurse has to buzz you in, and someone else walks you down to the room. I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep the doors locked, but she wasn’t going anywhere. They had her tied down, anyway: thick white straps wrapped around her wrists. She was drugged, disheveled, groggy. But buried beneath all the sedatives, she was still there, brighter than she needed to be, a few steps ahead.

She said something funny about the nurse being a cock-sucker or something. We all laughed. It was funny. It was really funny coming from someone restrained and drugged and locked down. She was beautiful again.

She never dated any of us. I don’t see how. Too much crazy. Too much beauty. Too much everything, too fast. People like her live life in a way the rest of us can’t even imagine. At the top, they are life. They’re everything, on speed, conduits sucking it all down and spraying everyone around at full force.

I ran into her a year or so later in a video store in Austin after they’d gotten her medication right. She was doing pretty well. Living with a guy somewhere near Duval. Her last suicide attempt had been six months ago, but she’d been fine since. She was different. Her fire’d been reigned in with constant chemicals. She wasn’t as beautiful anymore. She was almost plain. Just another Austin girl looking through the cult movies.

I don’t know where I’ve been, or what, exactly happened to me. Used to be all my words were poetry. Baudelaire said “make everything you write poetry, even your prose”, and I lived those words.

It wasn’t just my words. It was every part of me. All I had was want, and all I wanted was beauty.

Baudelaire also talked about the magic of words. The power. We’ve all got the power, but how are you using it? What worlds have you created? What wrongs have you righted? What of your love has conquered any of the hatred that’s blighted this place?

How much hate can you take? How much power you got just sittin’ there?

All it takes is some faith…

A couple weeks ago, on a chance whim, hanging with Jade, I hit Beats for Peace, a benefit for KPFT I resented benefitting. But I believe in fate. I was there for a reason: a poet so fiery, so powerful, his rapid fire words nailed somethin’ in me. Reminded me about our magic. Our power. My power.

How long has it been that I’ve been walking alone and weak?

Used to, I’d hit ultra hip poetry mics and slams weekdays in Austin, always staying too late to make class in the morning, but the worlds I’d see…

I heard Thom the World Poet, a guy who’d backpacked the world with nothing more than some pen and some paper and the kindness of strangers who believed even, just a little, in his poetry. Poetry was his life. And he lived off his poetry, crashing in kindness beds and eating scraps from the tables of those who simply respected him, even if they didn’t entirely believe.

How much respect you got just sitting there, wasted?

And I heard another man who limped from polio with stories that started “once, I’d been doing some Mescaline” who read fierce fever dreams that tore at the doors to every heaven. Terrible demons fleeing mankind’s cold, cold hell.

All it takes is some passion.

I remember this one open mic, volume too high, the top inflected vocal range ringing on the PA. Poet after poet after poet. Simple sonnets and landscape poems. Exuberant invectives, and sexual adjectives that made me cringe at the young woman’s frankness. And then the MC stands and calls up this disheveled looking man. I think when he walked he leaned to one side almost as if he’d spent his life leaning against fate’s gale-force winds.

And I say disheveled, but that doesn’t say much. Have you ever seen the underground literati terrorists stalking obscure Austin mid-week poetry open mics? They crave disheveled. They live disheveled. A cast-off thread-bare and faded, forest green button-up sweater is like a treasure, and they casually toss these things on like rich men disregardin’ expensive vodka in their drinks.

But this man was disheveled. A cast-off thread-bare man, faded youth and buttoned-up resolve. And he leaned when he walked, almost obsequious to a fault, as if he’d spent his life kneeling against fate’s cold gaze.

I can’t even remember his name.

But he had this friend. Some homeless man, just like him, if that’s what you call walking between squats in Boulder and Austin and back again year after year after year.

He rambled on about hittin’ the road. The cops in Dallas are assholes, and its a looong empty step through New Mexico and how back in the day they rode the trains unless the railroads kicked them off and then they just walked the tracks.

Thom the World Poet musta’ been proud.

He talked about his friend’d sing for change strumming an old beat up guitar. All the songs he wrote on all the roads he roamed.

It must be tough walking from Boulder and back. Let’s be honest. He didn’t have a name. Didn’t have a face. Didn’t have a job or a place of his own. No family to speak of and no friends, neither. His friends didn’t have the same names he didn’t. And when they find you keeled over in a squat, dead in West campus, you don’t get no funeral. No obituary. No ceremony.

His friend was dead and this was his friend’s eulogy.

Nameless read some Melville. Some Shakespeare. But you could tell he wasn’t supposed to be there. Here he was, a man without a life commandeering an open mic without a single self-centered, misspent word worshipping some golden idol called poetry. How dare he. A heathen choking back tearful blasphemes: words with purpose that slowly carved away at the hypocritical beats.

Man, the MC got nervous, signallin’ time, sure this intrusion wasn’t right. But Nameless just kept goin’. “Just one more quick thing”, a cast-off thread-bare voice, buttoned-up tears and a faded resolve. And he seemed weak when he talked, almost anxious as if he’d spent his life fearing fate’s cold, cold voice.

That night he sang a song his dead friend had written a while back, sittin’ on some sunny, summer, Texas sidewalk. And I can’t remember everything he sang, but he pulled out his harmonica and let loose an ooold blues riff and a cast-off thread-bare song, buttoned-up blues and a long faded pride, almost as if he’d spent his life singin’ to fate’s deaf ears:

My soul’s in hock,
My soul’s in hock,
Oh Lord, What I’m gonna do
when the interest comes due,
My soul’s in hock

Those words have power.

More power than any of the self-righteous crap that kept creeping up on that mic night after pointless night. More tuth than the useless manifestos shouted and applauded by the revolutionaries who’d never fight for anything more than their cast-off, thrift store, thread-bare and faded, forest green, button-up sweaters.

Soft-hearted liberals who never had enough change, never had enough time for Nameless and his eulogy, the last grasp at some sort of pride, some sort of honor in a world where the only place he could go to be heard was an obscure, Austin, mid-week, poetry open mic.

The MC intervened and moved Nameless off the stage.

The poets rustled up their bravado, paging through the shit they’d brought to read. The next guy droned out some misplaced homage to Emmerson or Thoreau: soulless nature poems from someone who didn’t have a soul. But at least he had a name.

And suddenly I’m wondering who it is I haven’t been listening to. And what words I’ve got with nothing to do. Thumbing through my Baudelaire wondering where all my power’s gone. Wondering what’s left that’s good. Lookin’ for words to give names to all those things we never, ever, acknowledge.

…and we spoke about souls. I grasp only two things:

First, what some view as strength in themselves, others view as weakness, and what you see as weakness in others is seen as strength.

Secondly, I believe in soulmates and compatible souls, though the two are different. I’ve met many compatible souls. Not so many they’ve no value, but enough to give me hope of meeting more.

Whether you should settle for compatible souls in lieu of finding a soulmate, I cannot say, but you cannot wait forever, and once you have chosen, you have taken their skin, you’ve become their skin, even if the skin doesn’t fit you as well as you’d like, it’s your skin.

You cannot cast off your skin lightly and at a whim. It holds in the whimsy of your soul. Cast off your skin too often, and your soul will fly away.