with my brothers at the Isla Verde Airport
We were a group of renegades from the San Francisco Art Institute, holed up in a cabin beside the Russian River near Healdsburg, California. In 1971 it was still predominantly sheep country, although the gentleman rancher on whose property we stayed appropriately raised goats. I was 21 years of age; we were putting in an access road for a photography teacher at the Institute who had bought an adjacent piece of property. We were all pretty tight.
There was Joe the Rutgers graduate who was running away from his own success drive. Jesse was a lovelorn Jewish mystic who couldn't hack living in the cabin with the rest of us so he fixed up a roost in an old shed way up on the ridge, preferring to sleep there alone. Bruce, a dissatisfied Nam vet with a USMC tattoo on his wrist and a chiseled six-pack overgrown by a thick mat of chest and belly hairs, had grown tired of a girlfriend and came out to California with Jesse from someplace in New Jersey, presumably to keep him from going off the deep end. Jim Thorpe was named after the great Native American athlete. He was tall and skinny and didn't play sports at all, but just the same was a local legend back in Westport Connecticut for being more soulful than anybody else around. Living way out there in the cabin maintained him far enough away from heroin to keep him from getting strung out altogether, but you knew that sooner or later he would end up blue in somebody's bath tub back in San Francisco. I looked up to him in a funny kind of way, not because he shot up--I implored him not to--but because he was kind and gentle and philosophical even though he knew how messed up everything was. Wendy, his girlfriend, was a tall, beautiful model from a wealthy art family in New Canaan. She had struggled to find a medium of expression for what was inside of her, and had finally discovered massage therapy.
I was the innocent, the rookie pretty boy for whom everyone held high hopes to be a world class heartthrob some day. I'd come up there to Healdsburg to get away from the modeling scene in the city where most of my contemporaries were gay. I knew I wasn't gay but was too spaced out to do any kind of work that required more than just standing there with a vapid expression on my face. Going up to the country I could make money moving rocks and making stone walls while I figured out who I was supposed to be. It was the dawning of the Ziggy Stardust era and I wasn't down with that.
I'd grown up in isolation from mainstream society, a boyhood in Puerto Rico followed by exile to a Jesuit Prep School. I had no idea that the turmoil going on inside of me as I reacted to the cultural revolution of the '60's was common to a lot of people my age so I kept my thoughts and feelings to myself. I liked the country and working outdoors. The Byrds with Graham Parsons, and the Band; that was my style.
On weekends we'd go to Santa Rosa, a college town, to cut up at the local saloons and music venues. Because of my experience in Puerto Rico I didn't have a complex about guys dancing so I'd get out there and try to figure out how to adapt salsa moves to hippie country rock. My friends encouraged me to fulfill my potential as a ladies' man, and with my sporty little vest I had no trouble finding girls to dance with, but I had no killer instinct. I was completely passive. Except that somebody drag me home with her I was content to end up back at the cabin with my friends. I was afraid that they were a little disappointed in me, but I really didn't connect with anybody. How could I ... I was from another planet.
Then came winter of '72. Joe was getting into Elizabeth, the goat farmer's wife, and the scene was getting ugly. The husband, who had graciously let us stay in the cabin free of rent, was acting erratic like a "liberated" man trying to cope with rejection. Bruce suddenly picked up and drifted back East; Jesse became a hermit and went kosher with his beard. Jim began to spend weeks in some hole in the Fillmore District. Wendy had gotten her massage license and had a growing clientele, but came home in the evenings looking melancholy. Most of the time it was just she and I there for supper. I would usually wash up from my day of hauling rocks off the hillside or digging terraces, and fix something for her when she got home. One evening we drank some wine. Wendy gave me a free massage and then seduced me. Technically she was still Jim's girlfriend. I let it happen, but I was like a stone. I cared for her and I cared for Jim also, but my soul and my will were completely tied up in a knot. The message I actually had in my heart for them both was that God loved them, but it was trapped in there just like every other pure thing, held back by a mysterious, debilitating power.
I had to move. I applied to The Evergreen State College in Washington. It was actually the first time I had ever taken the initiative to do something for myself. In August 1973 I hitched a ride to Olympia and settled into a dorm and my first semester. I never saw any of my friends again.
Ten years later I got a phone call from Wendy's sister Judy back in Connecticut. I don't know how she'd gotten ahold of my number; I was in L.A. going to graduate school after a term in the Peace Corps. She said that Wendy was dying of cancer and wanted to hear from me. She said it was very important to her. I said that I was sorry to hear about her sister and thanked her for calling. After hanging up I put on some music I hadn't heard for a long time. The Band. There was the voice of Levon Helm, singing:
"The judge said 'Son what is your alibi, if you were somewhere else then you won't have to die.' / I said not a word, though it meant my life; I had been in the arms of my best friend's wife."
I felt conflicted, guilty, convicted, ashamed, yet full of compassion for my dying friend, yet still again confused. The fictional, posthumous author of this standard raised no protest on account of the fact that he had been executed for a crime he did not commit; he understood that he was guilty in a more general sense because he was a sinner, accepted the punishment of being banished to a restless, haunted existence for eternity, and consoled himself by gloating over the fact that she loved him still. He had the satisfaction of knowing he was the Man. All of these feelings and many more flooded me as I sat there in a dark room, listening to this song. In the end I never called Wendy or even wrote to her. After years of college, Peace Corps, and work, I'd been with many women, was now married with two kids, but in 1982 I was still locked up inside. I always felt sick every time I thought about letting her die like that, so I didn't, much.
God was very merciful to me. After a life full of extraordinary adventures, joy, pain and loss, he has thoroughly redeemed me and given me a deep, wonderful relationship with Him and with a beautiful woman. Because I now speak freely with Him who knows my very frame, I am able to express godly love not only to my darling wife but also to anyone who is lost and hurting as we were back in those days at the cabin. One thing I have learned to do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Today I woke up at our retreat in Norome with that song in my head. It was going to be one of those days in which the Lord periodically brings me back into remembrance of things past, to weep over my own brokenness and to be refreshed in the power of His absolute cleansing and forgiveness. It's funny that He uses hillbilly songs such as Long Black Veil. I wish He would just give me music in my head like he does for my son Brian or for Kirsten, I want so badly to come up with something original. He does give me poetry, words, but I have to piggyback them onto an existing tune if they are going to come out as music. It's humbling, even a trifle embarrassing, like some kind of cosmic karaoke. But in obedience I got up out of bed and scribbled into a little note pad the words I had heard in my sleep.
To the Tune of 'Long Black Veil'
A long time ago,
on a hill called Calvary
A King was killed,
He was hanged on a tree.
There at the scene
was all humanity
But when I gazed at the cross
He was starin' straight at me.
My heart was black
as the sun A-BOOOOVE
Did you see His face?
It was filled with LO-OOOOVE
Nobody knows
how this grace has set me free
Nobody knows but me.
The judge said, "Son,
what is your alibi,
If you ain't done nothin' wrong
then you don't have to die."
I spoke not a word,
for me there was no way
From the time I was a kid
I'd screwed up all of my days.
My heart was black
as the sun A-BOOOOVE
Did you see His face?
It was filled with LO-OOOOVE
Nobody knows
how this grace has set me free
Nobody knows but me.
In a barroom way down
South of Mexico
I was hittin' on a girl
We was gettin' ready to go.
But in a flash
He appeared to me
And He saved my soul
'Neath a silk cotton tree.
My heart was black
as the sun A-BOOOOVE
Did you see His face?
It was filled with LO-OOOOVE
Nobody knows
how this grace has set me free
Nobody knows but me.
I know there's a psychological explanation for how that played in my head while I was asleep. Four days ago, on Sunday morning, I heard a familiar song on the radio in Waspam. It was "The Dark End of the Street," which the Flying Burrito Brothers had covered a long time ago, but this was in Spanish, and it had been turned into a worship song. I'd called Nutie over to the radio.
"You hear that?" I said. "You know what song that is?"
She didn't. I explained how tickled I was that they had put those lyrics to a song like that. Now, a few nights later, dream logic must have kicked in. So the miracle isn't that I can write knock-off lyrics in my sleep. I don't care about that. The miracle is that God can so utterly transform past patterns in your life that he'll even redeem the songs you used to listen to. That's how good He is.
Under the ceiba tree where I met Jesus
