Lump Oak

My time here is finished. For now, at least. 

Lump Oak—that’s what my telephone’s speech-to-text tool wants to call this place, though I know it better as Lompoc. Or the Mission Valley. The City of Flowers and Arts. The City of broken down greenhouses and no more flowers. The city of hardscrabble people and liquor stores and dusty minivans and muffler dealers and chickens wandering though barren fields at the edge of town and wind always wind always wind, whistling, pushing-pulling-shouting at you.

I found my sobriety here in Lompoc during a month in a homeless shelter I can hardly stand, a shelter I also love. My sobriety, too, I can hardly stand and also love. Dearly. I’ve got to love it dearly or I can’t put up with it. Like a husband or wife or child. Like anything. 

This shelter makes me curse and sputter at those who curse and sputter. I put on my headphones and walk in circles around the enormous parking lot listening to public radio and 12-step podcasts. I go for miles, buffeted by wind, dampened by rain from a sky that weeps tenfifteentwenty times each day in little jags instead of in one triumphant bout. I go until my knees ache and my shoes are soaked and then I get on my borrowed bicycle and ride off whispering, seething “willingness, motherfuckers, willingness” from my sluggish, bluish lips on my way to another meeting, onetwothree a day, where there is blistering hot coffee and well-mopped linoleum and a list of promises written nearly a century ago that say that if I follow these principles in all my affairs, that before I’m even halfway through I’ll be rocketed into a new dimension.

Tomorrow I’ll be rocketed to Pasadena, California in a small truck driven by Pastor Brian, taken for an assessment at what I’m told is an idyllic sanatorium-style recovery hospital for drunks and addicts. I’ll meet a counselor there, and then a psychiatrist. With luck, they’ll take me. 

I hope to be deemed workable, not one of those who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. 

My constitution here in Lump Oak is strong. As is my will, which is not necessarily a good thing when it becomes necessary to give one’s self over to this simple program. Or this complicated program. Or anything directed not by self-will. 

Honesty with myself? I’m doing my best. (Which isn’t all that spectacular.) Most days I stop short of making others guffaw. So I suppose I’m doing okay.

This afternoon, the Air Force Base sent Bridgehouse a surplus crate of fleece-lined, all weather military dress coats. They're well made and sturdy with wide double breasts, thick sashes, and rows of buttons down the front. This was a chilly drizzly day, so we passed the coats out immediately and everyone put them on, turning the room into a ragtag squadron of WWII spies and private detectives. Men and women young and old leaned against invisible lamp posts and spouted made-up film noir dialogue. It was London, or Hollywood, and we were glamourous. And toasty.

A few hours later, on my last night here at the shelter, a group of Harley-Davidson Bikers for Jesus came to grill up hamburgers along with a sharp warning to accept Christ as Lord and Savior or we’d end up in the lake of fire with Satan. 

There were some hiccups during the preparation of the meal and the process took longer than expected. It was already half an hour past normal dinnertime when the jowly motorcycle pastor wearing baseball cap stood up in front of us. He cracked open his worn Bible, cleared his throat, and started in with pre-meal fire and brimstone. 

We sat hungry and unamused, most of us still dressed as spies and gumshoes in our fancy coats. Stomaches rumbled, expressions were sour, and one look around made it plain that ministering to the woebegone was headed south fast. 

Aware of this, a potbellied biker with a straggly beard grabbed a bag of Hershey’s Kisses and started walking through the crowd, handing chocolates to the women and children to keep them quiet. 

The pastor droned on a while. Then food was passed, first to the women, then the children and finally to us men. It took an eternity. By the time I was handed a plate, the burger was dry and shriveled. Forlorn. It seemed to have been lost in the wilderness for forty years. Perhaps with the Israelites. 

I nodded and muttered clumsy appreciation nonetheless. At this, the pastor beamed, his eyes twinkling beneath his low-slung cap. He lay a thick hand on mine. And suddenly, whatever distance had existed between us fell away. Jesus was indeed Lord and Savior. And the burger was delicious by default. 

Willingness, motherfuckers, willingness. And Jesus. And a full belly. And a fancy coat and a warm bed.

Goodnight, Lump Oak. I’ll miss you. 

L'Chaim

Recovery Journal

February 19th, 2019

Last night, sometime during the wee hours, Abuelita Cassandra got up from her bunk and started to cross the darkened main hall of the homeless shelter where I stay, heading toward the women’s washroom. Midway, her legs buckled under her. What came next was liked muffled thunder or the sound of a sack of potatoes hitting the floor. Then a moan. 

Stirred by the commotion, a couple of residents helped her up into a chair where she sat, wild-eyed, no idea where she was. We remembered she had recently reported having an aneurysm. Paramedics were summoned. Cassandra was calmed and helped back toward her bunk. Halfway there, her legs gave way again and she plopped to the floor on her bottom like a toddler. She looked around with a grim expression, pajama top buttoned to the chin, white hair in disarray. Her mouth opened and shut like a trout. 

In a few minutes, the ambulance got there, sirens silenced, flashing lights left dimmed. With whispers and leaning-in, Abuelita was assisted onto a gurney and rolled out through the double doors without a goodbye. Her bunk was left undisturbed, covers thrown back, a cooking magazine folded open to a recipe, a cellophane cookie wrapper crumpled beside her pillow.

I fell back into uneasy sleep. I woke again at six when the lights were switched on. I stood and yawned and stretched and joined the line for breakfast. Today we had dented boxes of Cinnamon Life Cereal and skim milk from the food shelf. When I was young, Life Cereal was my favorite. It was sweet, the only sweetened cereal my mother would bring home from the store.

There was a touch of irony in our being served Life Cereal on a morning when life’s fragility was so front and center. 

L’Chaim - To Life, I thought, knowing in my gut Abuelita Cassandra would probably not be returning to Bridgehouse. I remembered, then, her telling me about losing her pet goat when she was a little girl, and that it was her first experience with how fleeting things can be.

I sat alone for a while. Then a tall, thick-necked, thick-bellied man sat down across the table from me with his own bowl of Life Cereal and a styrofoam cup of coffee. Levar is his name. A new arrival. Levar has more tattoos than anybody I’ve ever seen in person. The ink blends with his dark brown skin in pictures and writing that cover his scalp and face and go down his arms to each of his fingertips. On one hand, in gothic script, are a list of gangs he’s been a member of. The other hand has the names of his children. Over each eye, Levar has a thin black triangle that points inward and downward. This leaves him looking permanently, thoroughly displeased. This morning, he wore a saggy white tank top and a pair of pajama pants decorated with many brightly-colored faces of Cookie Monster. The pants were garish and wonderful and made me grin. Levar returned my smile, all but his fake eyebrow anyway, and he winked, appreciating my approval of his pajamas. I didn’t have a coffee to offer him a toast, so I gestured with a plastic spoon full of cereal, and he wordlessly returned the salute.

L’Chaim!

As the sun rose, I walked out of Bridgehouse and climbed on my borrowed bicycle for the ride across town to the morning Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on V street. There was frost on the fields and ice on the bike seat. The bike’s mechanism was slugging and didn’t want to switch out of first gear, which was fine with me, because I didn’t want to switch out of first gear either. Today, it was too cold out to hurry. Hurrying would have gotten me across town quicker, but it wasn’t worth the windchill.

The 7am AA meeting is in a 1950s storefront and seating is salvaged sofas and end chairs. It’s mostly old people who show up. Like the slow ride over, that’s okay with me, because most of the attendees aren’t just old-timers, they’re “old-timers”, meaning they have decades of sobriety and lots of pithy wisdom to dispense. At those morning meetings, I mostly just listen. Today, I managed to get a big, worn, overstuffed lounger that tipped back and made me feel like the captain of nothing in particular. I kept the vow I made to myself to leave my phone put away and really pay attention for the full hour. 

On my ride back to the shelter, the sun had warmed the air by at least ten degrees, so I took the long route and explored some of the streets of north Lompoc I’ve not yet visited. There are more open fields there, with 150-year-old farmhouses that are both stern and ornate. The railroad tracks cut through on a diagonal, thus a roundtrip from the shelter sends me jostling over them four times instead of twice.

My phone vibrated. I stopped. It was a text message from the shelter letting me know Abuelita Cassandra had suffered two major strokes.

I looked out across the rolling fields. I thought of the generations of farmers and tradespeople who have lived in this town. I thought of the old-timers in the meeting. I thought of Abuelita Cassandra, confused and distressed, sitting babylike on the floor, her mouth opening and closing. I thought of her goat bleating. I thought of the big man with his painted on scowl and funny pants. I stopped a moment and looked out at the point where pasture met sky. It was quiet for a moment, save for the Lompoc Valley wind, which whistles past day and night, night and day. 

I took a slow breath, then continued on my way.

Pick an Institution

Recovery Journal 

February 17th, 2019

For me, living in a homeless shelter in a smallish American town is a hybrid between normal life and bedlam. It is akin, I am told by those here who know from personal experience, to living in military barracks, and akin in even more ways to life in prison. 

There is greater turnover here than at the federal correctional facility at the other end of Lompoc, California. And here, there are children, always crying, whining, delightful. They scurry beneath tables and around the rows of metal bunk beds, their hands and faces colored with magic marker or jam, their hair unkempt and damp from rain and vigorous jumping and whirling and twirling on the derelict playground outside the shelter’s main building. The older children go off to school each morning and reappear late in the afternoon. The younger ones are pushed around on strollers or hiked on hips or kept in cribs in the family apartments across from the shelter’s main hall. I stay in the main hall with the men who fifty years ago were known as “winos” and the women who, during the same era, were called “fallen.”

Lompoc is on the Central California coast, an hour north of glamorous Santa Barbara. It’s known as the City of Flowers and Arts. Once the flower seed capital of the world, it’s home to many small wineries. But now that it’s legal, marijuana is exploding as the region’s crop of choice. And three notable institutions, with interests in drugs and outer space, border the flat, sleepy town. 

There’s Vandenberg Air Force Special Command base, part of the United States Space force. Regular launches include a recent send-up of a new US spy satellite. 

Nearby is a low-security Federal Correctional Institution, which holds non-violent drug offenders and white collar criminals. Lompoc prison is notable for a 1980 escape by a convicted spy who sold US satellite information to the Soviets. The story was the basis for the movie Falcon and the Snowman. The prison currently holds a former Boeing engineer who sold classified US Space Shuttle and Delta IV rocket secrets to the Chinese. 

And then, here on the far end of town across the Santa Ynez river, is the Bridgehouse homeless shelter where I stay. At any given time, the shelter is home to a hundred or more men, women and children. It’s a “dry” shelter, meaning we’re given regular, random drug tests. A fair number of the residents have been through the US corrections system. There are Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings held in the shelter on various nights of the week. These meetings are well-attended. In addition, since I got here, I trudge or bicycle or catch rides with my fellow Bridgehouse residents to recovery meetings at several dingy but cozy storefront sites in town. 

Today, I rode a borrowed bike to two meetings in Lompoc, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Both were attended by grizzled, plain-dressed men (no fallen women today) with rutted, ruddied completions but good jokes to tell. The weather was dismal. The coffee was hot, sweet and lousy. And there was a palpable feeling of God in both of the rooms. I got drenched riding to the first meeting and walked in sputtering and late, my shoes squishing and noisy as I crossed the chipped tile floor and took a seat along the back wall. 

We went around the room and each spoke for a few minutes. We were addressed by name. Four weeks into small-town meetings, everybody knows my name. Most of them know my story. I don’t fit it, except yes I do. Based on my blessings and my flaws, which are equivalent to every other single person in attendance.

After my second meeting, it was twilight, and I sat a while on the porch making telephone calls and looking out at the rolling hills of Mission Valley. It was chilly and, somehow, both raining and sunny. And the moon was out. The collision of unlikely weather and celestial bodies was a metaphor, I decided, for Lompoc and my experience of it.

Then it was time for church, where soup and bread are served, and Pastor Brian gave a sermon on how we’re all just here for a short time, in God’s long view of things, and how there’s comfort to be taken in that.

The Beatles had it right

A couple of nights ago, I sat at one of the long folding tables in the main room at here at the Bridgehouse Homeless Shelter in Lompoc, California and talked with Abuelita Cassandra over a cup of coffee. Her bunk is on the women’s side, directly across from mine. She’s older, thick waisted with a bulbous nose, but has fiery eyes and sits with sharp upright posture. She’s hard of hearing, some days more profoundly than others. Cassandra’s snow-white, upturned bouffant makes her look like a painting of one of the founding fathers. 

This abuela was born and raised in Santa Barbara. Her papa was a gardener. The family’s house, she told me, was in a good neighborhood. It was large, two stories tall, with smooth polished floors and green trim around the doors and windows. There were dogs and cats and chickens. Cassandra had her own pet, a loudmouth goat who followed her around like a puppy. The goat died when she was eight years old. Her mother never told her how, or why. It was Cassandra’s first experience with life’s impermanence.

Abuelita Cassandra lost her mother six months ago. Shortly thereafter, her husband had a fatal heart attack. Then, a few weeks later, her son succumbed to an aggressive cancer. Cassandra got the news while in the hospital with a brain aneurysm that seems determined to move around and remains, today, a pressing concern (no pun intended.)

 “I’m here,” she told me, gesturing with fingers fat as stuffed grape leafs, “because I need to be around people. People who give a damn.”

This was a revelation. It had never occurred to me that anyone would actually volunteer to stay at a homeless shelter. It’s always seemed to me to be the end of the line, the last fragile bit of a safety net before a plunge into oblivion.

“The people you meet here,” said a young man, sitting down beside us and running a hand through his imperfect mohawk, “they get it. They understand the value of home. The value of family, you know? Out there, we take that shit for granted until it’s gone. Until you’re on your own. Tell you one thing, jefe, nobody here takes home for granted.”

The people I meet in the shelter melt into family almost immediately, with the willingness and appetite of the starving. Because we are all hungry for love, all hungry for belonging, every person alive. But many of us grow complacent in our appreciation for what we’ve got. Complacency, at a homeless shelter, is not an option. Everything here in in vivid focus, both our surplus and our lack. And while there’s a lack of material things and assurance of consistency every single day, there’s a surplus of love. 

All you need is love.

Love is all you need.

That’s the only assurance we have in life; if we are open to love, if we put ourselves in love’s path and refuse to budge, we will receive it in abundant measure. 

I have never met human beings as willing to offer love and kindness and a sense of home as the homeless. 

At dinner last night, I sat at one of the tables with a young mother and father and their three kids. We were all bundled against the cold. Mom was crumbing crackers into the kids’ soup. Dessert that evening was an enormous, donated pan full of chocolate muffins in paper cups. There were three bowls of frosting—chocolate, strawberry and cream cheese—and plastic utensils for spreading. One of the little girls had dolloped her muffin with pink goo and was proceeding to use her little plastic knife to decorate her own face with the sugary fluff. I talked to her gently about table manners, and how big girls didn’t raise table knives to their face, and knives certainly didn’t go into their mouths; that was the job of spoons and forks.

“Thank you,” the dad said, watching. Then he added, with a laugh, “Bienvenido a nuestra casa. Welcome to our house.”

And in the end, the love you take

Is equal to the love you make.

Cherry-flavored gob smack in the kisser

Things move forward slowly. Things move forward. Things move. Things.

Life is a game of wack a mole. Life is also beautiful and, basically, a hug from the universe. A cherry-flavored gob smack in kisser. 

Life is scary and huge and scary in its hugeness and scary in the way it threatens to swallow you up whole and spit you out, drowned. Only with more gravity, both physically and in a poetic way, the kind that makes you heavy all over and all-over heavy. None of the lightness of being underwater. Just the gasping and flailing. And chlorine. I imagine chlorine, even in the ocean. They say you can drown in a cup of water. That’s reassuring--there's always at least that much, isn't there?

This is Lompoc, California, with head winds in both directions. Lompoc, in which every trip is uphill both ways, and even on sunny days, it’s cloudy. This is a dead town. I died and ended up here and I’m trying to be reborn here and that's quite a process. I feel as if I’ve accomplished little of significance today, and right now I don’t have the luxury of days where I, little, don't accomplish a significant amount of things of significance. Time flies by and by the time I notice, it’s already passed. Also, it crawls at a drunken slug’s pace. I do a lot of grumbling. Here and in person. I do a lot of sleeping, mostly in person, but sometimes by just not being here. I do a lot of aching. Which is an actual place. The pastor tells me aching is near Fresno. Aching is my middle name. But no, it's not. Hey, fella is my middle name. 

Benjamin is my first name. I’m the youngest son of my father’s favorite wife, this he used to brag, as a joke, in passing or at parties. Parties were passing and then passed. He was drunk at the parties, parties mostly in French and involving coq au vin, or vin au fin. And then he was sober and there weren’t any more parties, mostly just church and reading things silently or out loud, and plaid shirts and yellowing teeth and unkempt hair and the smell of old man.

And now he is dead. But I’m still the youngest son of his favorite wife, who is also dead. I wish I was dead-sure of this, both their both being dead and his favoritism of her. I’m all for favoritism, so long as I or someone I like is favorite. I don’t actually care much about the significance of my mother being his favorite wife because she was his only wife and thus winner by default, at least in the day to day once the past parties had passed. She told me on the occasion of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, you better love the person you marry because there are going to be times you don’t like them very much. 

I wish I was dead-sure my parents are both dead, which of course they are but not if you ask me at two in the morning practically every goddamned night when I dream them alive, vivid and useless. They won’t sink to the bottom. They are floaters, her especially. The Unsinkable Molly Brown, five foot two, eyes of blue. Pale blue eyes that I got from her, eyes that refuse to close and finally rest, for decency’s sakes. Aren’t you tired? Aren’t you tired of being somewhere between sixty and eight years old and doing the same old same old, night after night after night after night? I want to let you go although, apparently, no I don’t. I keep you floating, not rotting but not fresh. Fresh in my mind, but useless. 

You died in a proper manner, with an appropriate measure of pomp and circumstance (everyone dies with same amount of circumstance, appropriate or not.) I told you goodbye before you died and afterward, too. I stood in tight shoes and a necktie at your memorial and read bits of poetry with my sisters and everybody cried; I cried, too, being a part of “everybody” despite my frequent aspirations otherwise. And I held your ashes in my hands, your actual ashes in my actual hands. 

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. But then we all get up, if you're me, against all reason and sometimes against the laws of decency. Dead people should have the decency to stay fallen, and the dead in each of us living people should have the decency not to get churlish and swirl like leaves around our heads, a head wind in both directions, uphill each way. But that’s Lompoc for you. And that’s everywhere for you. And that’s dead people. And that’s living people. 

And that’s one part of the hug from the universe. And that’s one part of the cherry-flavored gob smack in the kisser.   And I guess I’ll take it.

Quaking

I’ve been to hell and back. Today I’ve been to CVS and back, an hour roundtrip in freezing weather on a county highway on a rickety bicycle that isn’t mine. I got antibiotics I needed but now I’m penniless. Physically and mentally, I’m broke as a sapling after a good windstorm but I ain’t a sapling, I’m an old oak tree and you can’t teach an old oak tree new tricks except, holy shit, yes you can. Turns out. This one is learning all sorts of things. 

When true simplicity is gained 

To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed

To turn, to turn will be our delight 

’til by turning, turning we come round right.

What I have learned (among several things, let’s pick one) is that I can bend. And turn. And, in turn, I can bend and when it’s my turn to bend, I can. Until I come round right. Or at least that’s the plan. Hopefully I’ll have learned some new tricks along the way. Like humility. Like what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Like God will provide. 

“Provide what?” I shout at the windstorm and give God the bird. And God says nothing. I wait a while, shaking my middle finger at the sky and holler like this is going to break something loose and it’s going to rain down explanation. And God still says nothing. 

But I do feel a little better. Because, after all, God and I are talking. Well, I’m talking. With my up-stretched arm, I mean. So I wait. And God doesn’t say anything. It’s damned quiet. 

And then I realize that I’m breathing. And I start to listen to my breathing, ugly and ragged. And then I realize that God is talking after all. My breathing is the word of God, kinda sorta. My breathing is the will of God, see, and that’s his funny way of talking. And that’s the whole point of all of this. I breathe therefore I am. And I bow and I bend and I shan’t be ashamed. And the bowing and bending is God talking, too. Loud.

And then, of course, I burst out crying because I’m a sap like that. Blame it on my father. He taught me to cry by example. And to hug by example. And to be an addict by example. The branch doesn’t fall far from the oak tree. 

I should add that after my dad quit drinking, he became a Quaker. To bow and to bend and shake like a leaf. Call it spiritual delirium tremens. He died of pancreatic cancer from the drinking. He got the cancer twenty years after he quit. And a decade after he became a Quaker. 

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. But sometimes it just kills us. I should also add that my father died happy, peacefully, surrounded by those who loved him. 

To turn, to turn shall be our delight

’til by turning, turning we come round right.