Groan in the Wind

WHEN THE WIND BLEW, THE ROADS CLOSED. THE air became a wall of sand impossible to see through. Only the foolhardy ventured beyond its prison walls, then to find themselves captive to gritty teeth, clouded lungs and closed, caked tear ducts. Restlessness, call it youth, has a way of obstructing judgment, creating misguided venture and giving way to planned disaster. A debacle like an explosion in a mine of which only its owner knew diamonds existed. I had lit the fuse not because I was the miner but because it was there, waiting to happen. And now it was in this place that I found myself looking for escape. Like Othello, whose name my home had embraced, I listened to what I had thought was truth, not knowing what I had believed was lies. I had longed for another life than my own, and I envisioned one in the image of peace, love and rock 'n roll, the alternative society which had crumbled from within causing one to grasp for a foothold in the shifting foundation of narcissistic mud. Here I had found myself recently released from prison, for possession of marijuana, standing on the street corners of Spokane trying to peddle someone else's dope.

Everywhere we went, there were longhaired freaky people, like us, standing on the same corners rejecting our wares, interjecting theirs. It was here that there was this one girl with long, dark brown poufy hair like it had just been washed without conditioner, wearing patched jeans and a T-shirt draped with a plaid shirt two sizes too big. What got me was the glow in her eyes and the smile on her face and the tendentious way she spoke to me. I wanted to run from her, but something wouldn't let me.

"Do you know Jesus?" she asked.

I must have looked puzzled, because she seemed to clarify the question, "Are you a Christian?" I thought I was a Christian, after all I had been taught in school that this was a Christian nation and I was born here, so I had to be, didn't I? My mind flooded with thought, in an instant.

When I was six years old, I went to a Baptist church and everyone had to wear their clothes backward. I was so uncomfortable the way my pants felt, it was hard to walk or sit down. Worse yet, I found out that most of the other kids hadn't participated that acutely and if they did participate at all, they only had their shirts on backward. But that was me, I always had to do things exact to feel I had succeeded, otherwise I wouldn't even try. There rarely was any middle ground and certainly no gray areas. It was called "backward" day because the point, I believe, was that most of us need to get our lives turned around. All I knew was I couldn't wait to get out of there and get my pants turned around.

Then when I was twelve, my parents got a visit from the local Lutheran pastor. My dad said he liked him because he would have a beer with him. My mom liked him because he was Lutheran, and she was Norwegian (on her father's side). The next thing you know we were in the Lutheran Church. This was the first and only time I remember the whole family attending church together, with any regularity. We went to catechism and got to keep the little book. My dad got a bigger book called the New English Bible, but he wasn't much on reading. I had a Bible, some neighbors my mom had called "religious", had asked if they could give it to me when they first saw me as a baby in the bassinette. I couldn't read it of course, but I asked my mother to read it to me when I got older; she tried but neither one of us could understand it. It had a lot of thees and thous in it.

When I got older, thirteen I think, I decided I would rewrite it, to make it more understandable, you know take all "the thees and thous" out of it. That was kind of a novel idea at the time and the book was big so I didn't get very far, besides the thees and thous made it sound holy and maybe we weren't suppose to understand it. Mom said it was a holy book and we needed to treat it with respect, so I was careful not to put it on the floor. I also was careful not to show her the crayon additions I had put in it before I understood how holy it was.

We also got to keep the little white cloths they had used to wipe off the water from our foreheads when my whole family had gone up to the altar in that Lutheran church to receive the sacrament of baptism. After that we never went to church much again, I think that beer drinking pastor had left.

My mind went on, back to when I was in the county jail awaiting trial at the age of eighteen for the illegal possession of marijuana. I had found a book positioned under a leg of the bed to keep it from rocking, it was called Good News for Modern Man. I felt strangely warm and kind of high when I read it, it made me want to pray and talk about it to my cellmate. And then there were those jailhouse preachers who came on Sunday to preach hell fire and condemnation and ask us to come to the altar to lay our lives down and repent of our sinful ways. There were bars and no altar that I could see. I had got saved each time they came. I raised my hand and they prayed for me. I needed all the help I could get. I was in jail and facing a maximum of twenty years. (Possession at this time in Maryland was still a felony. What I didn't know at the time was that state legislators had already voted to make it a misdemeanor, which would go into effect two months after I was convicted for being a felon.) That's what I got for throwing myself on the courts mercy without a lawyer and pleading guilty. I had been asked by a secret admirer who called me and said her friend had just gotten back from Nam and wanted some good weed if I could help her help him. I being the kind of guy who was always willing to be helpful, gave a lid to her friend. He paid me back (after I argued with him that he didn't need to after what he had just been through being in Viet Nam and all) for what I had spent, $5.00, and turned out to be a rookie policeman with a fake mustache he kept pushing back against his lip, undercover, hungry for publicity. He got it and so did I, eighteen months!

But I wasn't getting what my pursuant was doing, who was still standing with me on the corner, when my mind had wandered.

"Come on let's go," said a friend who...