Flashback Friday: August - November, 2001

The hillside by the reservoir

The Girl Who (Owned A House, Yet) Slept In A Mustang:
Chapter 2

August, 2001

As the middle of August dragged toward September, my focus fell upon creating a dwelling on the hillside by the reservoir.
I set about doing so in earnest.
There was beginning to arrive, a perceptible chill to air on most nights, a harbinger of fall. Virginia winters are no joke; they can get a few feet of snow.
I entered myself in a race against nature, my goal being to have constructed a comfortable shelter in advance winters arrival.
I had decided as I sat by the fire, pondering my pit, that the dimensions would be 12 feet long, by 9 feet wide, matching those of a common jail cell, if for no other reason than the sense of irony it that, since I intended to enjoy a "freedom" from things like the burden of handing over chunks of money to a landlord, and from being physically intruded upon (I would be as hard to find as would Osama Bin Laden, should anyone set about trying). I would be free to do pretty much as I chose, in my "home."
I was working at the gas station and would ostensibly get off of work at 6 in the morning, but, more often than not, Modou would ask me to stay on the register (he pronounced it "Reg-iss-ter") until he had emptied the safe, counted the money and done all the paperwork; sometimes until 7:30, giving me an hour and a half of overtime per day.
Shouldering my backpack -which was of the mountain climbing variety; huge and divided into separate compartments with aluminum slats for reinforcement; a $120 value, -I walked first, about a quarter mile, to the Kroger's Market, for food.
My "special diet," a product of having grown up with intollerance of certain foods, was comprised of  about 12 ingredients -ones that I had determined through experimentation to be healthy for myself- fish, kale, spinach, broccoli or other greens, basil, oregano and other "Italian" spices, trail mix, salsa, garlic, apple cider vinegar, olive oil, mushrooms, onions, and an assortment of fruit juices and energy drinks; and a bottle of wine; every day, a bottle of wine, and of a different vintage each day; usually a bottle under 10 bucks, but occasionally one of twice that amount, if I couldn't resist the label, or words such as "Alexander Valley."
Then, I would walk another quarter mile to the Wal-Mart, where I would pick up "household" things, often from the camping supply section, anything to make myself comfortable, from oil for the lamps, to a carpet to lay over the floor at night, after I was done whacking away at it with the pick ax or shovel.
I also frequented the pet food section.
I was becoming a friend to the birds, chipmunks and squirrels, by my showing up each morning with nuts and seeds, ancillary to the ones that I ate myself, which I would place in a designated spot. Pretty soon they knew my schedule and would station a "watch bird" along my path that would sound a signal, meaning that the big underground dwelling creature with the nuts and berries was on his way.
I would first, upon arriving, build a fire in the pit, using red oak, hickory, walnut, live oak, or any combination; while the fish sat marinating in olive oil and vinegar and hot sauce and spices, on on a sheet of tin foil, folded up around the edges.
Then, the wine would be uncorked and sipped, while the bed of embers built up enough to throw a steady heat, suitable, based upon my nine years of experience, for cooking fish.
In between sips of wine, while listening to a battery powered AM radio, I would survey the clay foundation which I was hollowing out, trying to envision the finished dwelling, imagining architectural enhancements, such as the making of a latrine by burying a PVC pipe following the angle of the downward slope to the reservoir, making it break ground about 50 feet from my place, with a porto-let style bowl embedded in the wall on that side, complete with the little disinfectant bar which is ubiquitous to restrooms.
The place was going to have a roof at ground level, covered with dirt, as insulation, and planted over with vegetation. Only the chimney would protrude, hidden under a pile of brush.
The exit would consist of a ladder, made of two by fours, or a staircase, leading up to a trap door, hinged in the middle, which could be opened like a sunroof, for ventilation, or closed against the cold. That would be painted on the topside to blend with its surroundings. A dead tree could be dragged over it, before I left, so that even if someone stumbled upon the place, they might just walk right over the roof, never the wiser.
I spent almost as much time imagining as I did digging.
After eating what was always an excellent and healthy morning meal, and finishing the wine, I was invariably in a proper frame of mind for burning off some calories by swinging the pick ax and shovel and hoisting boulders up over the edge, chucking them as far as I could into a pile which was already the size of my car by the middle of August.
After removing the grill  and the carpet and shovelling out the ashes, I would go to work on the floor, measuring my progress by a few inches some days, several inches others, depending upon weather I was encountering granite, or clay .
There was a tendency for the hole to narrow as it got deeper it got, and I had to pay attention to shaving the edges, to insure that the sides would be vertical. Using a "plumb bob" which I had gotten at the Lowes Hardware Store, along the way "home"" helped.
I would be making a lot more trips to Lowes before my dwelling would eventually be finished. I took the, still llegal, Civic from where it sat, about 75 feet from my place, to get the heavier things, like lumber and bags of gravel and concrete (to finish the floor).
But, first the pit had to be dug out to the projected dimensions.
I measured my progress, daily, by how far up my body the rim of the hole aligned itself with.
It was just about shoulder height; or five feet deep, I remember; on September 11th, when, turning on my AM radio, the first words I heard were "The President has been evacuated to an undisclosed location..."
That was about 15 minutes after the World Trade Center attacls, and that is how I learned about them -standing up to my shoulders in a 9' X 12' clay pit. I must have been buying fish at the time the buildings were struck.
I usually worked on the pit from the time I arrived back there in the morning, after getting off work, until about 10:30, my consumed meal fueling an intense two hour workout, as I strained with all my effort to roll boulders up the face of the wall and push them out, and swung the ax like a madman.
I would then lie down and sleep peacefully for a full and healthy eight hours, pulling a tarp over most of the pit to attenuate the sunlight.
All of this eating well and sleeping well and getting a lot of exercise, put me in a shape approaching the best that I had ever attained, and at the age 38. I felt great most of the time.Time itself flowed like a lazy river and it seemed that I could be productive and unhurried, and get a weeks worth of enjoyment out of each day. I looked forward to work days as much as I did days off.
I woke each afternoon, only when I felt fully refreshed, usually as the sun was low in the western sky over the reservoir, a full five or six hours before I had to be in the little booth, ringing up packs of Newports and Philly Blunts, and the rest on pump 12, giving me time to enjoy some of the money that was filling my pockets.

The Bathtub
To the south of the pit, there was cut out of the clay, a canyon by a small stream which originated by the road and snaked its way towards the reservoir. Its rather steep walls provided much privacy as they curved away, out of sight, both upstream and down.
I dammed this stream up, using rocks.
Then, I vigorously agitated the water in the resultant pool with my shovel, making it became cloudy with leaves, sand, mud and other sediment dislodged from its perimeter. I then scooped out the muddy water, as if bailing out a boat, then let it refill with water.
I repeated this process (thirty two times, I counted). After each time, as water flowed in from upstream to replace what I had thrown out, the water became less and less cloudy until I could clearly see all the smooth rocks at the bottom, none smaller than a pebble. This would be my bathtub.
I would submerge my head in the invigorating 65 degree water, lather my hair with shampoo, and then re-submerge it, shaking it like a shark ripping apart its prey. Within a minute, all of the shampoo that had floated to the surface would have slowly drained out through the rocks of the dam, being replaced by crystal clear spring water.
I always bathed after having walked the mile and a half walk from the gas station to there, carrying my backpack which weighed an averag of 40 pounds. By then, I was usually starting to break a sweat and welcomed the thought of plunging into the cool spring water. It was always invigorating. All the way up until December 10th, a day when the outside temperature was 65 degrees, I recall, did I use that tub. Stepping out of the water, even on that day, the air felt great, by comparison.
I was a clean homeless guy.
I made regular, highly vigilant, trips in the illegal Civic, to a laundromat, transporting all of my clothes and blankets the two miles, in a bag which Santa Clause would think was huge. It wasn't that I lacked the physical conditioning required to tote it on my back, just that I was keeping away from the appearance of being homeless. There was a certain satisfaction which came from having none of the people whom I associated with ever wonder if I was homeless.
"Where Do You Live; The Woods?"

I only got caught once driving the illegal Civic. I can't remember now, where I was returning from, but, I was almost to the logging trail, when I was pulled over, perhaps due to the dark tint on the cars windows. The only legitimate place to turn off of that road before the water treatment plant at the end, was at an apartment complex named The Woods Of Jefferson.
The cop probably assumed that I was going there, and hence, was almost home.
He probably didn't want to deal with the paperwork involved in citing me for a cracked windshield, overly tinted windows, no registration nor insurance, and an attached licence plate from a Caddilac in Georgia, either.
He asked me: "Where do you live; the woods?," referring to those apartments, right up the street.
I said: "Yes, officer."
He let me go, telling  me to drive the remaining few hundred yards to that apartment complex, park the Civic, and not to let him see me driving it on the byways of Charlottesville, until I had made it legal.
I quickly uncovered the trail, parked the Civic back under the tarp about a tenth of a mile in, hid the trail, and resolved to be very careful should I again take the car out on the streets.
I had fallen into a sort of routine, by late September, facilitated by the regularity of my full-time work schedule at the gas station.
Before leaving the pit in the late afternoons on work days, I would bag up all of my trash, and then walk my "secret" path to the state road, cross over it to another path made by someone else, which emerged behind the Wal-Mart, by a dumpster, into which I tossed the bag. I was a clean homeless guy.
I would then typically go to a coffee house, called Brownstone's Coffee, for a cup of Java, and a newspaper. By now, I was an avid reader of The Wall Street Journal, as I was working 50 hours per week and had no real bills to pay. The barristers at that coffee house, most of them college aged girls, seemed perplexed over the incongruency of my appearance, and the smell of wood smoke which I exuded; with the fact that I would frequently produce a thick wad of money to pay for my coffee, then would leave tips in their jar.
"Do you work?" asked one of them, a very beautiful girl named Tiffany, one day.
"Yeah, I work at the East Coast station on the night shift," I replied, not helping to solve the mystery of the wad of money, in any way.
Then, I would often go to the library, or the mall, where everybody I met eventually got to know me and seemed to like me. 
I then went to the gas station, a little before 10 p.m.
I was never late; never missed a night. I saw no need to take off from work, having no pressing engagements nor obligations, one of the fruits of the freedom, which I had worked to obtain.
I was becoming interested in stashing as much as I could each week into the stock market by this time, also. The World Trade Center Attacks had caused a mini-crash, but things were starting to rebound, as the end of September approached.

Xanna
I began to take notice of a certain skinny lady with long brown hair who was pretty much a regular customer at the East Coast gas station, on Route 29, in Charlottesville.
She would stop her aquamarine Mustang, at the same pump (number 11), at about the same time each night, and would pump about the same amount of gas.
That particular pump was the one closest to, and right in front of, the booth where I sat. It was my theory that she did that to save time, in coming to and from the booth, and to keep herself within my sight, keeping things "above board," precluding me from suspecting her of anything shady.
She stepped out of the Mustang those nights, wearing a Pizza Hut shirt, jeans, work boots, and with a stubbornly determined expression set on her face, her lips pressed into a thin line, and her whole face pinched tightly. She was "all business."
A skinny wisp of a thing she was, with the light brown hair in a pony tail that hung to her waist. There was always something masculine about her dress, and it crossed my mind that she might be a lesbian. Those were some heavy duty work boots, and if it was cold, she would wear over her uniform, a heavy lumberjack shirt, of the "northern dyke" style, which I had become familiar with while living in Northhampton Massachusetts, a lesbian stronghold.
With her lips pursed tightly, an expression conveying equal parts determination, stubbornness and anger, she would take money out of a zippered wallet, that she would then place on the back of her car in about the same spot each time, then count out bills within my view, as if trying to show me that she actually had the money to pay for her fuel, and wasn't going to do a "drive off."
She would pump about the same amount each time, and then come to my window, paying to the exact penny. Her lips, pressed together like a vise so that she almost had to speak through her nose, would loosen just enough so that she could tell me just how much she was handing me, so there would be no misunderstanding, I assumed. "Here's $9.88!"
If the old-fashioned analog pumps which the East Coast station had happened to stop between digits, she would round up to the next higher cent. She wasn't  trying to take a penny from anyone.
She was all business; didn't smile.
I might have taken that as an omen.
The Challenge
Instead, I took upon myself the challenge of trying to make her smile once.
On each successive night, I spoke to her, trying to charm her with witticisms.
One night, I was finally able to see a quick, tight lipped half-smile, on her face before she said quickly "I'd better get back to work," as if sensing that she had let down a certain defense, and sped off.
Over the course of the next few weeks, our talks grew longer than two sentences.
I was able to find common ground with her by relating some of my past experiences with pizza delivery. She seemed impressed by the fact that, when I had that job, I had recorded all of my delivery data into a Lotus spreadsheet on my computer, including hours, tips, number of runs, miles and expenses, and even factored in the miles per gallon that my car had been getting, and had concluded that I was only clearing around the minimum wage, when it was "all said and done," over the course of a year.
One night; one cold night in late September, she arrived at the booth holding a cup of coffee. "Here, I brought you coffee. You must be freezing in there," she said through clenched teeth.
Coffee soon became a regular gift, and our conversations became a little more personal.
I found out that her name was Xanna and that she owned a house, 30 miles to the north of the station, out in the country on a route so "rural" that it had no name, only a number.
I wasn't ready to tell her that I was living in a hole in the woods.
Into October... 
Nobody in Charlottesville, seemed to suspect that I was homeless. Outside of the comment made by Tiffany, the barrister at the coffee shop that I "always smell like smoke," (which I explained was due to my "grilling a lot,") no one seemed to look at me askance.
As October arrived, Xanna brought me a sweater one cool night, saying that it had been in her attic, left there by a former roommate. It looked like it had never been worn.
Our talks became longer. After getting off of work, she would come back by, even though she had already gotten gas earlier. We would sit in her car and talk while she ran the heater, through the early morning, when customers of the station were few and far between.
Xanna was blind in one eye and had no sense of smell, possibly as a result of beatings by a father, who had wanted sons instead of daughters and who called Xanna the "runt of the litter."
She was demure and soft spoken, as were a lot of Virginia women that I had come across. They acted as if they had been conditioned to think that a woman was inferior to a man and that her place was to be "seen but not heard." She just about lived on Diet Dr. Pepper, too, by the way..
She had just ended a relationship with a guy named Tom.
She said that Tom hadn't worked, but rather, sat at her house drinking Crown Royal and playing video games and cranking Metallica on her stereo, while she worked two jobs to support him. She said that she came home from work with the wrong cigarettes once (he only smoked 100's) and he threw the carton at her and made her go back out to get the right ones.
She had finally come to a boiling point and asked him to leave, under threat of bringing the Law into the matter.
He left, but not before beating her and sodomizing her on the kitchen floor on his way out.
His black Monte Carlo, in a state of disrepair, sat in her front yard as a reminder of him. She was allowing him to keep it there. She never did call the law.
The name "Xanna" had come to Peggy (as that was her given name) in a dream, which spurred her to get a court order to legally change to it. "I can't stand being called Peggy because it reminds me of my past and saps my self esteem," she said.
She got $850 per month through some kind of Trust Fund which a departed grandmother had left to her (her siblings inherited real estate and larger amounts, but Peggy got the runts portion of the settlement, according to her); still, she was a workaholic, and would complain that they were working her to death at the Pizza Hut; taking advantage of her. She figured that she had no choice, because other workers would slack off, leaving early, or skipping shifts, altogether. She would cover for them. "Someone has to do the work!"
She worked many hours and then slept in her Mustang in the parking lot outside the Pizza Hut, ostensibly to be there bright and early to clock in the next day.
She complained about it and it contributed to the almost permanent scowl that she wore, yet, she continued to do it.
I finally gleaned enough about her to feel safe in confiding to her about the "house" that I was building by the reservoir. She nodded her head after I told her as if to imply that she had pretty much figured out already that I must live in a clay pit.
Once she learned that, she began to mention her house more frequently. She said that it had a hot tub, one of the finest, which had cost her something like five thousand dollars.
I told her how comfortable and private my dwelling out by the reservoir was. The temperature inside didn't drop below 49 degrees, according to my indoor/outdoor digital thermometer, which had a memory function that recorded the extremes of hot and cold. Without any heat source, the place stayed close to the temperature of the earth.
It was well hidden, with the trapdoor which I could drag a downed evergreen tree over, to make it invisible.
The fact that it was on city property meant that the land surrounding  it would probably never be developed.
I had plans to save about 12 thousand bucks per year, and after 5 such years, do something with the money to "better" myself.
She brought me a kerosene heater next, to heat the place in the woods that I had described to her. She said that it was an extra one that she had had in her attic. I could then add kerosene to the list of things which I loaded my backpack with for the mile and a half walk each morning.
Then, lamp oil, after she gave me seven oil lamps, which she said had been laying around her house.
By then, I had finished hollowing my house out to the desired dimensions, put a roof over it, waterproofed the roof, covering it with dirt. Inside, I had a small fireplace, which I used to cook food on. Over it was a "boot" from the "air conditioning duct work" section of Lowes, which connected to a six inch pipe that went up through the roof.
I was sleeping on an air mattress, had a high performance AM/FM radio with a tunable loop antennae on which I could pull in stations from as far away as St. Louis, Missouri (700 miles), an indoor/outdoor thermometer with which I could confirm that I was warm and comfortable inside my dwelling, while it was cold outside; at a glance.
I got a lot of satisfaction out of being warm and dry, while it was cold, wet, windy and nasty outside.
Sometimes when I was entering my path into the woods, on such days, I envisioned people driving by and feeling sorry for me, and wondering how anyone could deal with having to go sleep in the woods, especially in such terrible weather.
Xanna bought me an Ibanez acoustic guitar for my birthday, giving it to me a week early, as she was dropping me off at the head of my trail.
Xanna Sees My House
November, 2001
I invited her to see my home by the reservoir, around the middle of November.
It was almost "finished" by then.
The only additional touches that I had planned for it was the laying of a concrete floor with wall to wall carpeting to cover it, and the hacking into a nearby thicket where I would set up a bank of solar panels, running the current to my dwelling by underground wires in order to charge a row of "deep cycle" batteries (wired in parallel) during the day, so that I could have electricity, to eventually power a laptop computer, which I would use as a recording studio.
But, the house (ok, bunker...) was warm and dry, by that time.
I had gotten rib eye steak, and other sundries to cook on my grill. I got Zima for her, and red wine for myself. We had a nice dinner.
She remarked that my place was more comfortable than her house; "less drafty." We had sex for the first time that night, by the light of oil lamps and with the classical station playing on my high performance AM/FM radio.
I got the sense that she wanted me to move away, into her house, but I also sensed that she thought it would be a hard sell to get me to leave my convenient and draft free place to move 30 miles out into the country, even if I would be in a house. My dwelling was a tough act to follow.
She seemed to form a quiet resolve, though, and a determination not to give up trying.
I would have laughed if someone had told me that she would use witchcraft to get me to move there.
I didn't believe in ghosts, either...

Flashback Friday: July, 2001

The hillside by the reservoir

This is the first chapter of "The Girl Who (owned a house, yet) Slept In A Mustang."

The Girl Who (Owned A House, Yet) Slept In A Mustang

Prologue

Xanna was one of the sweetest girls that I ever have had the pleasure of knowing. At first.
I was working the "graveyard" shift at a gas station in Charlottesville, Virginia, sitting inside a little booth ringing up "A pack of Newports and a Philly blunt, and the rest on pump 10" a lot; when I met her. 
I didn't really believe in ghosts.

Chapter 1
How Did I Wind Up Here?

By happenstance.

July 7, 2001

I was driving south on Rt. 29, thinking that I was going to Roanoke, Va. in a 1983 Honda Civic which had a cracked windshield, one door a different color than the car, darkly tinted windows all around, 286,000 miles on the odometer, no insurance on it and with a tag affixed to the back, which could be traced to a sky-blue Cadillac, from Augusta, Georgia. I had paid 350 dollars for it, off of a guy in Jacksonville, Florida. 
Rather than stick around that city long enough to make it legal, I opted to flee that city, leaving behind the smouldering rubble and ashes of a (failed after one year) relationship.

Angela, as that was the girls name, had locked me out of the apartment in the middle of the night as a thunderstorm approached, after misunderstanding something I had said on my way out, to throw away some trash. I was barefooted and wearing only light clothing. I had my car keys on me.

I slept uncomfortably the rest of the night in the Civic, in a K-Mart parking lot, beside the Caddilac which looked like it had been sitting there for some time, resolving in my mind to get out of town at daybreak and start a new life elsewhere. A life with a lot less misunderstanding in it.

I had figured that slapping the Caddy's plate on my car, while illegal was better than trying to drive hundreds of miles with no tag at all, something which would be fairly noticable to officers of The Law. At least the Caddy was the same color as my Civic

Roanoke became my chosen destination.

This, a result of some online research which I had done at my mothers house in Massachusetts, which had been my "first stop" after an 1,100 mile drive away from Angela.

I used 12 different criteria in a database search, such as "climate and geography" (in which my tastes ran similar to Goldilocks' not too high, not too low, not too hot, not too cold), the presence of a University, health food store, gym, public transportation and ethnic diversity, to mention some. The search yielded Roanoke, and Athens, Georgia in the top ten that best matched my criteria. The other eight were in California.

I was tired of driving, as I neared Charlottesville, and especially tired of the constant looking in the rear view mirror for cops and the turning off onto side streets, or into parking lots, every time one got behind me. I had driven all the way up the east coast to my mothers house like that and, after spending about 10 days there, resting, and researching, I was back on the road, feeling like only 10 minutes had past since I had last been behind the wheel. The same ass cheek was falling asleep, and my back was aching in the same spot. The scenery seemed to be crawling past.

I then blew off the Athens idea (500 miles further) in favor of Roanoke, which was less than two hours ahead.

Charlottesville did, though, look very nice to me, as I drove the tree-lined corridor of Route 29, with its gradually descending hills, like a 20 mile long roller coaster which comes to rest in a valley where the University of Virginia campus was nestled. I later learned that Dr. Seuss had written his classic "Horton Hears A Who," while gazing down into this same valley...Route 29 had recently been paved, and the ride was smooth as butter, also.
Dixie Land

On the outskirts of town, I stopped at a Wendy's for a salad.

I had worked at a Wendy's in Jacksonville. It had actually been fodder for one of the many arguments between Angela and I, as she had wanted "better" for me/us.

I said to no one in particular: "Wow; this is set up just like the Wendy's I worked at in Jacksonville!," whereupon, a thin lady with short dark hair, wearing a tag which denoted her as a manager and as being named "Dixie," turned to me and asked: "Oh, really? What can you do?"

"I can run the grill, do fries, work the register...wash dishes, of course..."

"Well, I have an extra shirt in the back; do you want to clock in? We can do all the paperwork later," said the first person named Dixie that I had ever met in my life.

About five minutes later, wearing a medium sized Wendy's shirt, I clocked in, and started washing dishes. 

A radio was playing on a shelf above the sink, and every time I heard mention of Charlottesville weather, Charlottesville traffic or sports, I had to shake my head and think: "How did I wind up here?!?"

Where Do You Live; The Woods?

At the Public Library, I used Mapquest to draw a circle a two miles radius around the Wendy's. Within this circle, I found a wooded area near a reservoir -a reservoir formed by the damming up of a river. A road, which was maintained by the state, ended at a water treatment plant, near the dam.

Off of this road, I found the entrance to what had once evidently been a logging trail. It was overgrown with foliage and trees no bigger than a couple of inches in diameter, and discernible from the woods to its left and right.

Using a spade and a hatchet, I was able to reclaim enough of it to be able to back the Civic off the road. I then stacked a pile of brush across the entrance, hiding it as well as what had once been a logging trail.

I continued to work at the Wendy's. 17 days, I would work before I saw my first paycheck.  

I slept in the car those nights, living on baked potatoes and whatever else I was able to take with me from work.

Every day I put in time with shovel and spade, clearing more of the trail, then backing the Civic a few feet further into the woods, until I eventually cleared the way to open area about a tenth of a mile off the main road, which was large enough to turn the car around in. Here, I stretched a tarp between trees, as a makeshift carport, and parked under it. I slept a little more peacefully there, especially on the pitch-black nights when the moon was new.

My first paycheck of about 420 bucks came and gave me the means to buy foods of my choice, just as I was getting a little tired of cold baked potatoes and overdone meat.

I decided to dig a fire pit.

I slashed my way into the most dense and formidable patch of vines, thorns and spider webs that I could find on the hillside, an entangled mess that no one out hiking would even think of trying to penetrate. 
I soon learned that, to the above deterrents, could be added poison ivy.
I cleared the vegetation from an area of about 10 feet by 10 feet. In this spot, accessible only by having chanced upon the path that I had carved, I dug a fire pit -just a couple feet deep and four by four feet square.

My Nights were now spent sitting on the edge of this pit, cooking meals consisting of things such as fish and steamed vegetables and mushrooms fried in olive oil over the fire and drinking a quality of wine, fit for a man with a full time job and no real bills to pay. 

I'm sitting by a fire on a hillside, I  am surrounded by a tangle of vines and thorns and even poison ivy so thick that I feel safe from intrusion.

Looking overhead I see the undersides of myriad leaves, illuminated and dancing in the hot air that my fire is sending skyward. I recognize many of them as maple leaves, maple-green suffused with fire yellow; the sunlight which the leaves captured day after day and photosynthesized into the wood that I am burning is being released back, not as sunlight, but as firelight, and the leaves are capturing it and photosynthesising it into more wood; their undersides doing by night what their topsides do by day: catching sunlight...the heat from the fire having originated at the sun, 93 million miles away...Virginia trees...how did I wind up here?!?

Some stars were visible through little openings in the foliage, here and there. Their light has played a tiny role in cooking my fish, too, I thought.

As August approached, I began to widen and deepen the pit a lit more each day. This would further conceal the fire from the sight of the people in the houses atop the hills on the other side of the reservoir. And, since the heat would, within a couple months time, become something nice to lie next to and stretch out besides, I was making room for doing just that.

So, I dug daily into the red clay with spade and pick ax, throwing the rocks of mostly granite that I extracted -the biggest, the size of a breadbox- into a pile. 

This clay is sediment made from the completely decomposed remains of sea creatures, some which lived millions of years ago, and whatever else sank to the bottom of the sea; a sea which formed when waters rushed in, filling the divide where two continents had seperated, waters carrying sediment, dredged from hundreds of surrounding miles and deposited here; here in central Virginia. 

The granite boulders I am unearthing are crumbs torn from the face of the Smokey Mountains, dragged here by the departing continent which is now called "Africa"

...There are emeralds along the west coast of that continent around the place where it broke from North Carolina...At least one huge emerald has been found in North Carolina...I'm in what is called "The Piedmont," a gradual slope of clay, which descends to the Atlantic Ocean, 80 miles to the east...emeralds...maybe I'll find one...How did I wind up here?!?. 

By the end of July I was able to move out of the 1983 Honda Civic and into the firepit.

I hadn't met Xanna yet, that would happen after my being fired from Wendy's; and I really didn't believe in ghosts, either.

August 8, 2001

The Bread Stick Incident

My employment with Wendy's came to an end.

After narrowly avoiding being suspended from my job after having an outbreak of what my mostly African American co-workers called "poison ivory" (the concern being that poison ivory might be contagious), I was accused of biting off the end of a bread stick and then dipping the end which I had bitten into the large pot of chili in the kitchen. There was a witness.

What I had done was dip the end of a breadstick into the chili then, gripping that end with my teeth, I pulled from the other end, making the stick rip apart in the middle. I then dipped the exposed bread from the middle, which never touched my mouth, into the chili.

I couldn't get the manager to accept that explanation; this was worse than poison ivory.

I was summarily dismissed from the position of French Fry Man.

There was an East Coast gas station next to the Wendys.

I had gassed up there on those carefully chosen occasions when I drove the illegal Civic on the streets of Charlottesville, such as driving the two miles to a laundromat, hauling a duffel bag full of clothes and blankets (I was a clean homeless guy) and once -near the end of the 17 day wait for my first paycheck- to the labor pool.

Often, after work, I would go there for cigarettes or and energy drink and wind up talking at length to whomever was in the booth.

I talked to the manager the night that I had gotten the ax.

He was a black man from The Ghana, Africa, who often complained about the African Americans in this country, calling them "niggers" and "all teeves (thieves)"and saying that he would never hire one of them -funny, hearing that from a black man. "They tink dat everee ting is owned by white peepool and dat it's OK to steal it, and that's wrong!" said Modou Lamin Manga, as that was his name.

I told him about my being fired, amusing him with the bread stick story. "They are so ignorant!" was his conclusion.

He hired me, at a dollar an hour more than I had been making frying potatoes, and put me on the graveyard shift.

I was then in a position to meet Xanna. I didn't believe in ghosts, at that time.

Religious Experience #1

Coming soon, the story of my Religious experience of '84!!

File Under 1979

Flashback Friday: "The Great Moped Ride"
It was 1979.

The Cars were on the radio. it was the third day of school. I went to a Catholic "Parochial" school, which had a "strict disciplinarian" front to keep up..
I was starting my Senior year.

Every year, Sister Joan, the principal, gave an initiation speech to all the students. She broke the student body in half and gave the Juniors and Seniors one version of the same speech, and I guess the underclassmen their own variation of it. She may have relied more on scaring them.

Well, this was the day of that speech; and the day that I was going to try to sneak out of the building and ride my moped about 14 miles, round trip, to a Ticketron, where I was hoping to be early enough to get the best possible seats to see The Cars at the Boston Music Hall.

That concert would also be the day that Pope John Paul II would be literally right across the street from the music hall, saying a mass for 2 million people (I'll have to fact check that...) 


We were "fortunate;" us St. Bernard's High kids. You wouldn't ever want to do anything that might get you expelled from a joint like that. Our parents were forking out good tuition money.
I would look around the classroom at all the other young gentlemen, and future Christian leaders; in their sports coats, shirts and ties and shiney shoes, and I could figure out that our parents wanted to make it so we would not have to change clothes our whole lives.

We would all go off to colleges that had the same kind of dress code; and after we graduated we would be seeking positions that entailed the same dress code.

To be expelled would be akin to falling in socio-economic status; and all the kings horses and all the king's men, couldn't get you into Harvard, again..
It was the third day of the school year at Saint Bernards Central Catholic High School, early September.
Sister Joan  was up at the podium in the auditorium, in front of a boomy mcrophone.
She was telling a group of underclassmen exactly how to behave, if they didn't want to get expelled.
She mentioned specifics, all preceded by "There will be no..." (gum chewing, talking in the halls), or "You will..." ( wear your jackets in the hallways at all times; report to class before the bell rings, anyone caught in the hall after the bell for then next class has started will be, etc. etc)
Fear coursed through the auditorium like ripples in the veins of those underclassmen. She could expel you, and you would never, as long as you live, be able to list Saint Bernards Central Catholic High School on an application for college.
When Sister Joan got to the part about "No one is to leave the building for any reason whatsoever!!," and set down the penalty for doing so, she got very serious (i.e. talked to them like adults.)
She pointed out that, for reasons related to insurance coverage, for one thing, STB could really get screwed, should anything ever happen to a student who left the building without authorisation. Her tone of voice changed and she made it clear that this was the most egregious offence that could ever be committed. It was almost like we could "eat of any other fruit in the garden...."
I remember the words to this day because, as she was saying them, I had just tip toed past, behind the curtain which the podium stood a mere five feet in front of, and was pushing open the side auditorium door. I had stashed my sport coat in a janitor's closet, according to plan; and let the door close behind me while her words reverberated inside.
I would then hop on my moped, stashed under a staircase for this purpose, and ride the seven miles to Ticketron, in Searstown Mall, to purchase four tickets to see the band The Cars at the Boston Music Hall, October 8th, 1979.
The jacket, I left behind, so that I wouldn't look too much like a truant STB student, despite the tie flapping in my face, and I chose to fly down  Airport Road, and not the more busy John Fitch Highway, to minimise complications.
Tickets were to go on sale at 10p.m. sharp, and I would be there 15 minutes early, depending upon the wind conditions on Airport Road.
Caisse Of Irony

Mowing Down Twins Along The Way...

One side note: This particular concert was to take place on the very same night of Pope John Paul II saying a mass on Boston Commons, right across the street from the music hall, as a matter of fact.
Almost two million people would show up.
I mention this because I bought four tickets, two of them were to be for the Caisse twins, Jeff and Joe (pronounced "cayse").
They were fraternal twins and I was friends with both of them (even though another good friend of mine, Ted Broughey's opinion of the boys was "It's seems that they each have half a brain.")
It came to pass that Jeff and Joe were not allowed to go to see The Cars, because of the presence of The Pope. Their mother wouldn't let them. She thought that they would be in danger of being trampled by two million devout Catholics.
I wound up enjoying the concert with one other friend who had a braver mother, we sold the two extra tickets without much problem, a girl rubbed her breasts on me on the way out; and a splendid time was missed out on by the Caisse twins, Jeff and Joe.
(We would have been closer than row 23, had I bought a block of two instead of four tickets, but, after 32 years, I am starting to forgive the Caisses. )
I also got to see the pope from about fifteen feet away (my reward for braving to tip toe past Sister Joan at the same distance?) when his motorcade cut the corner where I was standing rather close, necessitated by the length of his convertible limousine.
There were no reports of trampling.
But, back to the story of "The Great Moped Ride":
How did I manage to leave the building without my absence being discovered, you ask, dear reader?
Herein lies the genious behind The Great Moped Ride!
Zero Places At Once
My first period class was math with Sister Cecilia, who was probably in her 80's.
Being the third day of school, she probably hadn't memorised our faces, no matter.
I purposely did not go to Sister Cecilia's math class.
I waited in the janitor's closet where I stashed my sport coat.
A few minutes later, Donna Dower, another student of Sister Marcella's walked past, carrying the absentee list, one which had on it, at least, "Daniel McKenna."
She had to go through the gym, because the auditorium was filling up with underclassmen for the "beginning of the year," speach by the principal, touched upon already.
A few minutes after that, there was a crackle from the intercom and "Daniel McKenna" was called to the office, by the raging voice of Sister Lourdes O' Malley.
She was a diciplinarian and feared by many.
She had checked my name on the absentee list against the general list, compiled first thing in the morning in homeroom, and learned that I had been in the building at 7:45 a.m., but had not made it to Sister Cecilia's math class.
This meant that I was in the building somewhere (because no one is allowed to leave for any reason, under any circumstances -except a fire drill, but we will cover that in a minute..).

The Motorcade, Then The Cars...

I waited for Donna to amble past on her way back to Sister Cecilia's classroom, effectively cutting the line of communication between that nun and the office. I made sure she didn't see me, in case she had looked at the list.
I then appeared in front of Sister Lourdes, repentant and giving her a story about having trouble with my locker.
She said that she hoped that I hadn't forgotten my combination, I had three days to memorise it, and if I couldn't do so, I wouldn't do well at Harvard...
I described a mechanical problem, wherupon she said "Well, you go directly to class, and don't let it happen again!"
Sister Cecilia thought that I was being detained (scolded) at the office, and Sister Lourdes thought that I was going directly to her class.
This allowed me to be neither place, and after having to sneak past the principal, at the high point of her speach,  I was on The Great Moped Ride of '79

The Target Ship

The Target Ship

Huge Crabs And Water Over Your Head

It was our family, and the Curtis family.
We were on Cape Cod for a two week vacation in August.


It was 1969 and the "summer of love."

I didnt' know anything about any "summer of love," as I was 6 years old, my sister was 7, and our parents were keeping a shield between us and certain knowledge of things going on in the world at large, like hippies and the Vietnam war, for starters.

The Curtis's had three sons, Billy, Bobby and Stevie.

Stevie was my age. He was more worldly than I, and a little tougher, because he had older brothers.

I imagine that made it harder for Tina and Bill to shelter him in the same way from "the real world." Those were his parents.

Tina and Bill were friends of my parents. They went out together or played cards around ours or their kitchen tables. They also took their two week vacations at the same time in the summers, with Cape Cod being the destination for about 5 consequetive years, during the Johnson and Nixon administrations.


Bill had played football with my father in high school. Bill hurt his back playing football with my father, and still carried the symptoms of "a bad back" with him.
Bill had been "Billy" when growing up.
Tina was tiny, and had had the nickname "Teenie," before becoming Tina. 10 years later she would be found one morning in the Nashua River in our home town, after an apparent failed suicide attempt. It would be attributed to her going through menopause by the doctors, and the card games with my parents would stop around the same time (too much akwardness when Tina layed the "suicide" jack on the table.)
Billy was almost 17 and too old to enjoy a vacation on Cape Cod. He had become Bill by then, and had more interesting things to do. Cars and girls were amongst the list. He was going to Woodstock with some other teenagers in a Camaro, instead of coming to Cape Cod with his family.
Bobby was 14, hadn't become Bob Curtis, and was there with  us. He would grow up to be a pharmisist.
Stevie was my age and a long way from graduating to "Steve." He would break into houses in our neighborhood as a teenager starting a couple years after the Nashua River incident, but not necessarily related to it.

We were all sitting on the grass outside an ice cream place in the town of Brewster, eating cones.
"Look at the hippies," said Bobby.
I turned and saw two men with long hair and beards, wearing colorful shirts; the first two hippies I had ever seen and at the age of six, no less.
My father whistled. It was a whistle that I would become very familiar with by the time I was a teenager. It was somewhere between the kind one would make while surveying the destruction left by a tornado and one made after having just carried a heavy object like a bag of cement a long way and placed it down.
He would often make this sound when confronted with anything preposterous.
"They're probably stoned!," said Bobby.
"What is stoned?," my sister and I said in unison.
Stevie was smiling as if he knew what stoned was and as if he was amused at my sister's and I's nievity.
"Never mind," said my mom.
"Quiet, Bobby. That's not a nice thing to say about someone. You don't know them, they might be nice people!" Vintage Tina.
The Curtis's had rented a cottage in Brewster, and we had stopped there for ice cream before driving to look at their cottage, and before my family continued on to Eastham, about 10 more miles up the cape.
We looked at the cottage, and then went to the end of the road to see the bay.
It was then that I caught my first glimpse of the target ship.
The target ship was an old barge, which had gotten stuck on a sandbar in the bay and then was sold to the military so that fighter jets could practice dive-bombing on it, using innoculous tracer rounds; usually at night.
The rounds emitted a loud report, though, and/or the sonic booms, which rattled the china in our cottage on those nights when the pilots were training to go rattle things near China.
From the angle of Brewster, the ship looked short. From the shores of Eastham, it looked long, as it was being viewed broadside from there.
It sat about 2 miles out, past where the tide ever receeded, and in my six year old imagination, it was in water way over my head and it's rusted, pock-marked hull was teeming with crabs as big as the water was deep.
In the five years that we vacationed at the Cape, I looked forward to seeing the target ship more than anything. It was the first thing I looked for. From Provencetown, on the tip of the Cape, you could only see the back of it.
Learning To Fight
One night, the parents all went out and left Bobby to babysit myself and my sister.
Bobby took this opportunity to teach me how to box.
If Tina was around, she would have told him something like: "Don't be teaching him how to punch people, that's not nice," but Tina wasn't around, nor were any parents. It was just us "men" (and my sister, but she was watching the snowy picture of a TV show; the Boston stations were a little weak out on the Cape).
Grabbing the little pillows off of a couch and handing me two of them, Bobby said "Come on, I'll teach you how to box"
We had to strip down to just our shorts. "You can be Mohammad Ali, I'll be Joe Frasier, he wears the red shorts."
He helped me with my stance and my crouch and how to hold the pillows in a defensive posture, and threw punches gentled-down to my six year old self.
I was hitting back and not wimping out, and I could tell that it made Bobby kind of proud of me. It was training that I just didn't get at home, with only a sister one year older around.
Then he said "You're just using your right, you need to switch them up to fake the guy out, here, try this!"
He showed me how to throw three lefts in a row and then (out of nowhere) a right, in order to fool the opponent.
"Now, you try"
I knew that Bobby already knew that I was going to throw three lefts and then a right (out of "nowhere") and I didn't like my prospects for success, but, for the purposes of instruction, Bobby played along.
My right pillow caught him "totally by surprise," whereupon he hit the cedarwood floor of our cottage hard, yelling "AAAAHHH" and rolled around in mock pain, saying "Frasier is down! Frasier is down"
And that was how I learned how to fight; in a cottage on Rolling Lane in Eastham, Mass which smelled like cedarwood, and where you had to put rice in the salt shaker, so the salt wouldn't cake up.
That night, I lay in my cot and listened to the sonic booms of the jets bombing the target ship, as boys much older than I learned to fight.