Seeing Things

The Borneo Mustang-2

Like many of us, Mike was more enamored of wanting than having. Desire, for Mike, was far sweeter than possession. When fixated on a target—a particular Guatemalan coffee, the newest waterbed, two front-row-center concert tickets, a blonde in the library—he would laugh out loud and shout, “Wild horses!” I loved the idea of these wild horses of desire, and the phrase stayed with me through generations that ensued.

Before we graduated, Mike fell in love with the idea of marriage. In my group, his wedding was the event of the season, of course. Mike saw—for the first time in years—the interior of a church. I was an usher, and I undertook my role with a studied lack of gravitas.

Mike rented the country club for the reception. In the beverage line, gilded cherubs pissed champagne into rented crystal. The region’s best rock group played until the wee hours. By previous arrangement, we had agreed that I could remain in the house only until Mike and his bride returned from the tropical honeymoon islands. His wife wanted me out, and I could not blame her, though I hated to move away from the style of living that long habit let me think I somehow deserved. They left for the South Pacific, and I stayed alone in their house, surrounded now by piles of loot collected from the bridal shower and wedding.

Laboring under the stupid belief that I was in a race, I saddled myself with an overload of courses year ‘round. At that time, copy machines were becoming common in libraries. Grad students paid a nickel per page to make copies of articles in professional journals. This technology made our lives easier. We could take the information home and study it there late into the night. We could underline passages and write in the margins. We could have it near at hand as we hunched over our huge, throbbing, electric typewriters. Two days following the wedding, after many hours of staring at arcane prose photocopied from The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I had ceased my labors for the night. No doubt I helped myself to a modest slab of Mike’s Stilton cheese, a small snifter of his Armagnac VSOP, maybe one of his smuggled Cuban cigars.

The Journal of Personality and Social PsychologyI drifted into bed, tired and satisfied from a day and a night of work well done. In the quiet, tree-lined street outside, a car pulled up, but its engine continued to run. Car doors opened but did not close. Footsteps sounded on the front porch. The screen door on the front porch opened, but no one rang the bell or knocked upon the wooden front door. I heard the doorknob rattle. I knew then that burglars had come, that the house was being robbed. People in general supposed I had moved out, that the house was untenanted during Mike’s honeymoon. The piles of treasure were too attractive for some thieves to resist. So, what should I do? Should I stay in bed and let the robbers smell my throat? Mike had a fancy shotgun in his closet, a pump-action ten-gauge goose g*n with filigree scrollwork and a burl-wood stock. I scrambled out of bed, padded across the hall, and pulled the shotgun from Mike’s bedroom closet. I jacked it open and saw it was unloaded. I decided not to take time to hunt for shells, and dressed in my tighty-whities, I pounded down the stairs and toward the big, oval window on the front door, brandishing the g*n and roaring like a maddened grad student. I heard a voice shout, “It’s Eugene and he’s got a g*n!” Then I heard the screen door close. I heard tennis shoes slap the wood of the front porch. I heard car doors slam and tires screech. I stood panting, cradling the heavy ordinance, staring at my reflection in the glass, and not recognizing myself at all.

Sometimes in emergencies we can’t react, and other times we can. Sometimes we watch as from a distance the sudden events that collapse onto us, and other times we fight for our lives.

To Whiskey

To WhiskeyWhen I was young and newly

given up to you,

one night I walked

to the outskirts of camp

and saw the green lawn

unfold like a bluegrass field

and decided against

your pleadings and promises

that I should walk upon it,

but slept with you instead—

while lightning bugs shone about our tent.

And in the bright morning

after you had left

only the taste

of your wanton self through me,

I found that the lawn’s verge

was a limestone cliff’s edge,

and I saw the tops of oak trees

two hundred feet below

that you had promised was soft lawn,

and I saw the space yawn up at me,

and I should have known you then,

Killer, I should have known you then.

* * *

One of my great joys in recent years has been the opportunity to cultivate pen pals and friends through email. I’ve a pen pal, a good friend, at Purdue University. He’s a professor of classics, a fellow tea enthusiast, and a gifted and generous correspondent. I’ve used, in our letters, “wild horses” to describe my excitement as we close in on some rare and desirable dian hong or an especially esoteric Yixing teapot. He says that his students refer to zealots, enthusiasts, and fanatics as having gone “utterly Borneo.” I like this term, and I’ve connected it to “wild horses” in order to refer to a certain and very special species of impatience and terror conjoined.

* * *

I’ve survived my share of close calls, those described here—and many others besides. Who has not? But they shrink to insignificance compared to one endless close call. There"s a voice, my friend, which augered into my mind seven years ago last month when I first began living under a sentence of death. Or rather, it drilled into my brain when the sentence of death we all endure came home to me in the sudden clarity of a medical diagnosis of terminal cancer. It shouts ceaselessly, "Now! Now! Now!" Tomorrow evaporated (poof!) and never came back. Tomorrow does not exist. Seven years ago, waiting became anathema, unthinkable. Even in restaurants, waiting for a slice of pie, I want to leap to my feet and shout, "What seems to be the holdup here? Sweet Christ, can"t you people hurry up?"

Yes, it"s ridiculous and maddening. The Borneo mustang syndrome is not pleasant. You know that. It sprang to birth from pain and terror and lives on buoyed by terror and pain. Every object, person, and event in my life took on a strange, vibrating glow and has never shed it since. My eyes snap open in the morning, and the voice screeches, "My God! Hurry! Now! Now! Now!" It is indeed a madness, but shaking me roughly and saying, "Snap out of it, fool" will not work, no better than it worked when I tried that approach on my friends Lance Hoagland, Mickey Hardcase, and Elizabeth when they too found themselves chained to their own larger-than-life dragons. I’ll introduce you to them soon.

I have considered myself a dead man walking for seven years, and doctors almost tap their feet in their impatience to see it all run its course. This is the genesis of my Borneo mustang, and it is, in a wild, unpleasant, and convoluted fashion, beautiful beyond belief—at least from my perspective. The voice says, “Look at it. Breathe it. Grab it all while you can. Soak it in." And I obey. The voice called me out of the closet. The voice called me to the corners of the earth—its jungles and shrines and far-off seas. It compels me to make friends around the globe—friendship being life"s single sweetest blessing and the main purpose of the evolution of the human mind.

But from the perspective of those around me, my Borneo mustang is an oddball"s exasperating quirk. I tell you these things so you can understand the single oddest part of Gerry Eugene’s vast arena of peccadilloes—not to suck up sympathy, but simply to tell you. Seven years ago I wrote the following poem, and nothing really has changed since then.

Trying to speak clearly,

Trying to speak clearlyTrying to speak clearlyTrying to wrap my scarred tongue around words

That not so long ago danced on the crisp air

For me—never this sober, trying to sound sober

With a voice smashed flat by cancer and radiation—

Trying to speak brave words

While locked in a brain gone crazy with fear—

Wanting to tell you, to describe to your bright ghost

This odd sensation I feel electrically

Regarding love, terror, life: abstractions

Born again as teeth gritting, eyes burning, and fingers flying,

Abstractions that touch the sage, the elk, the orchards

Where sweet cherries ripen in early July—

Trees flashing by as we ride toward Yakima—

Why must I come to this so soon?

Over my grave I cry, I bargain with God

And turn my back upon medical truth,

Words like lymphoma that rend me to b****y bits—

lymphomaRacing against now, the sweeping scythe, never this fast,

Racing—I am trying to set free

This living heart holding a pen to the page,

My searching heart so in love with this life.

* * *

I will bide and abide. I will (perish the thought!) wait. The Borneo mustang is a ballistic missile, but I have begun learning, at last, how to aim it as I ride it. Teeth clenched; I will wait. The plane is delayed, you say? No problem. The luggage got carted to the wrong terminal? Hey, I"m cool with that. I will learn not to let insignificant events assume monumental proportions.

Nothing will happen to me that will not happen to you, and nothing in my past makes me unique or even special. But for seven years I’ve been seeing things, and my family and friends, both living and dead, command me to write and praise me when I do. The narratives in this slim volume reflect what I’ve seen. While astride the Borneo mustang, one’s views change.

I have been working diligently to write a collection of narratives that

murmur to each other, that become one narrative in the sense of a collage, like twenty-three stones tossed at once into a Minnesota lake, their ripples

converging. The lake and the stones and ripples are time and the events that created me and the people I love. After a while, the ripples disappear. That"s part of our common experience.

My attempt has been to show that everyday events conjure forth significant, earlier events and the ghosts of those we love. We live each

moment amidst reverberations. Among other messages, I"ve been trying to say that in the very now we experience our entire lives. We are only our

memories—nothing else. I"m not considering this endeavor in terms of one huge, coherent mural on the side of a Mexico City edifice; instead, I"m considering the metaphor as pictures at an exhibition or (more apt) as a series of lyrical poems.

Ideas in the vein I"ve been plumbing are difficult to source. Once I spot an idea that fits with the collection, it"s easy to write and great fun to revise. I should rephrase that notion. I do not find subjects. If I run about looking for them, I never, ever encounter them. In a frightening fashion, the subjects find me when I’m engaged with washing dishes, brushing the cat, pulling weeds, or c*****g a revolver, and more than anything, it’s not a sudden notion of what I shall write, but rather, that I can write it.

I ride the Borneo mustang through a gorge along a river toward a city in the west. So do you. I’m seeing things, just as you do, and the voices command me to show you what I see. At night as we sleep, bears come to us all. We call them through our dreams, through birth, and grumbling, they comply. They push their wet noses to our throats. Sometimes they eat us. Sometimes they come in the night to steal our gifts and the gifts of our friends. What can we do but run at them in our skivvies, brandishing empty guns? Sometimes we paddle right up to the bear, but inexplicably it lets us go. It could capsize the canoe, topple the motorcycle, and some day it will. The Borneo mustang, the mind in extremis, knows this, and as we ride, he hurtles ever faster.

extremisOf course, none of what I tell you is true. None of it happened. The people in these pages? They’re figments gathered from thin air. The voice you hear as you read these words? You’re making it up. And the persona speaking through these lines? He does not exist. How can he?

Stay here by the fire. Listen to me. With so much camping equipment, you don’t need to rent a room. Tonight, as you sleep, a cricket will crawl into your mouth.