The body may be at rest, but the mind wanders as it will.
Two songs have been getting heavy play on my cranial jukebox: “Katmandu,” by Bob Seger, and “Bodhisattva,” from Steely Dan.
The first, from 1975, ostensibly about salvation via relocation, is actually what Seger described as “an exasperated song” written near the end of a decade-long stretch “where I was going nowhere fast. … I still had some of that defeatist mentality and you can hear it in there.”
The second is a 1973 critique of cookie-cutter spiritualism and its related divestiture of worldly goods that co-writer Donald Fagen once summarized as: “Lure of East. Hubris of hippies. Quick fix.”
Thomas McGuane was scouting that territory even earlier, in his 1971 novel “The Bushwhacked Piano,” in which the peripatetic Nick Payne’s father tells his wayward son: “I just find the Rand McNally approach to self-discovery a little misguided. … My rather ordinary human response has been to resent having to go to work in the face of all that leisure.”
That these musical and literary ingredients are suddenly bubbling to the top of my consciousness, such as it is, may be a consequence of having just finished McGuane’s latest story collection, “A Wooded Shore,” in which a selection of the damned find themselves adrift in various fashions and locations, Dante’s Sea of Excrement being among the hot spots. “I’m a realist, you see,” says that particular voyager.
“Sure rings a bell these days,” as McGuane told The New York Times. On the mark as usual, Tommy me boyo.
Or perhaps it’s that I’m rocking a streak of vivid dreams about bicycling in outlandish circumstances, perhaps as a reaction to getting myself locked into a small selection of predictable 20-milers, your basic hamster-wheel loops, for no good reason that I can think of beyond sloth and convenience. An assist from Rand McNally is not required for this sort of tour de meh. Trying to break the chain I recently took two rarely ridden bikes on short outings, one of them involving a few miles of singletrack I hadn’t ridden since January. I dabbed frequently and shamelessly.
I suppose it could just be that fall is upon us, and with it our local elections and the fabled “fall back,” slated for Sunday, Nov. 2. Oh, good, an extra hour of nightmares.
When swimming the Sea of Excrement, I recommend the backstroke.
“No, not the trans antifa, you fool! The irony-poisoned, terminally online, neonazi groyper types!”
Some days I feel the weight of every nanosecond of the 71.5 years I have spent on this planet.
I’m so old that when some fresh young bit of news rears its pimply head, references from books — yes, books! — leap to what remains of my mind.
For instance, there’s P.R. Deltoid, the “post-corrective adviser” to the ultraviolent 15-year-old Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess:
“What gets into you all? We study the problem and we’ve been studying it for damn well near a century, yes, but we get no further with our studies. You’ve got a good home here, good loving parents, you’ve got not too bad of a brain. Is it some devil that crawls inside you?”
Or the bruiser in the cowboy hat in Thomas McGuane’s “Something to be Desired,” who, upon seeing a used tampon land on his windshield at a drive-in movie theater, steps out to make a few inquiries among the usual suspects, which include the hapless Lucien, who had been preparing to continue a mutual infidelity with a casual acquaintance until a rare burst of discretion — “spraying ancient drive-in gravel” in headlong flight — came to seem the better part of valor.
“I got my fiancée here!” shouts the cowboy. “She don’t want to know about your little world!”
Alas, it seems that to gain some insight regarding the suspect in the Charlie Kirk killing I must leave the library and take a deep dive into the wonderful world of … Helldivers2?
No thank you, please. I just finished an oldster’s breakfast of oatmeal, fresh fruit, and tea. It looks like rain. And I’m feeling the cowboy’s confusion here, with a geezerly side of These Kids Today.
I remember when games meant Monopoly, Scrabble, or just tossing the ol’ pigskin around. I don’t want to know about their little world.
The patrón of El Rancho Delux, Jim “Jethro” Martinez, in his throne. The shirtless drunkard in the cowboy hat is Your Humble Narrator.
My old friend Jim Martinez went west last week.
We got the story from his brother, Larry. Jim had an episode at his cigar club: it escalated; he was hospitalized; it was bad. There was nothing to do but let him go.
He was 73.
Jim played a large role in my life. Hey, he was a large fella, nicknamed Jethro, the tallest in his immediate family — father Lawrence, mother Lucy, brother Larry, and sister Betty — and the joke was that the Martinezes must have had a very tall mailman Back in the Day®.
Jim lived large. too. While Larry and I and the rest of our gang were in college at the University of Northern Colorado in the early Seventies, Jim was working for a living.
He dressed well; fashionably, but not ostentatiously. Drove a Volvo. Your money was no good in his presence. And he loved a good party.
More than a few erupted at “El Rancho Delux,” Jim’s three-bedroom, one-bath, ranch-style rental on a rare handful of undeveloped acres in the Denver metro area. Hardly any neighbors to speak of, or to. A pub within walking distance. It doesn’t get any better than that.
The annual El Rancho Delux Welcome Back Summer luau in particular became legendary. Those free-for-alls recalled the parties in Jack Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums.” I swiped Jim’s copy, which I cherish and am leafing through right now:
“Japhy kept wandering to all sections of the party with a big jug in his hand, his face beaming with happiness. For a while the party in the living room emptied out the bonfire clique and soon Psyche and Japhy were doing a mad dance, then Sean leaped up and whirled her around and she made as if to swoon and fell right in between Bud and me sitting on the floor drumming (Bud and I who never had girls of our own and ignored everything) and lay there a second sleeping on our laps. We puffed on our pipes and drummed on.”
The Martinez brothers, always a persuasive pair, moved into politics, working with the likes of Ed Graham, Monte Pascoe, Michael Dukakis, Ted Kennedy, and Denver Mayor Wellington Webb. I stumbled from one newspaper to the next until I realized that they were all the same newspaper, which is even truer now than it was then.
My wedding, circa 1990, Santa Fe: In the foreground, (L-R): Jethro, Intercoursey, Shady (yes, that would be me); background, Rudi Boogs, Mombo.
More than once when I went overboard it was Jim who threw me a line. El Rancho was like Motel 6; Jim always left the light on for you, sometimes for days at a stretch. If the spare bed was spoken for, there was a couch. The couch was taken? Plenty of room on the floor. No, your money’s no good here. You need some? How about clothes? Jesus, Shady, you look like hell. More chins than the Hong Kong phone book.
In 1983 Jim really went the extra mile — miles, actually, and plenty of them — after I broke an ankle as I was preparing to leave one newspaper in Oregon for another in Colorado.
I had a start date, an apartment to empty into the truck, and no way to drive a five-speed manual with one foot in a cast. It took several friends — hey, you know who you are; there’s only so much room on the Internet, y’know — to get me boxed up and shipped east, Jim among them. He caught a flight west and drove my truck, me, and my dogs back to the Ranch(o).
We hit Denver just in time for the party.
Jim was one of the many good Samaritans who put me up, and put up with me, after I burned through that gig in Pueblo and another in suburban Denver in five years.
He had his own problems by then, but found time to school me on the ROI of a creative hair stylist and a small quiver of pro duds, because looking like a werewolf with the mange was not helping the job search any more than my résumé, which had more holes than the Albert Hall.
I finally found another newspaper job, my last one, about a week before I ran out of unemployment insurance and Jim ran out of Christian charity.
Jim and brother Larry enjoying a smoke in 2009.
Then time passed, and things changed, as they sometimes do when you’re not paying attention. Our paths simply diverged. We traded abrazos at our respective weddings, reminisced with other members of the club in ones and twos, here and there, and enjoyed a few those-were-the-days chuckles during a reunion of a select few of the El Rancho mob at Larry’s place outside Denver in 2009.
That was the last time I saw Jim. I thought of him now and then, recounted the legend of Jethro — maybe embellishing just a bit here and there for literary effect — but I didn’t know that he had a son, or that his marriage had ended. For a so-called newsman I wasn’t exactly up on current events.
In Jim Harrison’s novel “Warlock” a character who lives in the real world says to another who doesn’t: “Don’t you know everyone’s life is shit? You’re smart enough to do something about your own. Don’t be such a drag-ass.”
He also said, “Every time I pass the cemetery on the way to work I get the feeling we don’t live forever.”
I’ve read that book a dozen times. Own two copies, one of them autographed. Paid for them and everything. You’d think I would’ve gotten the message by now.
The most recent images of Jim I’ve seen show a smiling, silver-haired gent in glistening casual athletic wear, hobnobbing with various powers-that-be. La Eme meets the Sopranos with a side of Corleone (Mikey always dressed better than Tony). On social media, former mayor Webb mourned his old friend and assistant as “family,” dubbing Jim his “Luca Brasi.”
Jim knew about family, blood kin and the other sort. His father passed far too early, in 1984, but his mother, now 92, is still with us. He visited her every day.
Larry says there will be a celebration of his brother’s life once this unusually cold Colorado winter takes its foot off the throttle, a posthumous and perhaps premature Welcome Back Summer gathering.
Not at El Rancho Delux, though. Our old outlaw hideout is long gone, entombed beneath a jumble of “apartment homes,” though the pub remains.
And now its proprietor, the host with the most, is lost to us as well.
I miss my brother Jim Martinez. Peace to him, his family, and his many, many friends. Leave the light on for us, homes. We’ll be along directly.
The headline is an inside joke among family and friends, a line of dialogue lifted from the 1978 novel “Panama,” by Thomas McGuane.
And now it’s the title of a Radio Free Dogpatch podcast, an unsubtle bit of misdirection concerning an oversized orange turd that has proven impossible for a confused and bilious nation to flush.
There was no such turd when Chet Pomeroy spoke the line in McGuane’s book. But there is in the podcast. My apologies to Mr. McGuane. I hope he thinks of me, if he thinks of me at all, as having conducted myself with some forethought “as a screaming misfit, a little on the laid-back side.”
Meanwhile, always flush at least twice. It’s a long way to Mar-a-Lago.
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