The Divine Sweetness of the Opposite Sex

A Possible Premonition?

Or, The Participant Patriot, A Hooked-on-Phonics Profile

The first of the fictional hooked-on-phonics silly symphonies.

Estelin Nixon hung haggardly along the west wall, aside an artist’s imagining of falling gold-frosted linen-leaves blown airily back. Archaic, he found it, his mind often drifting instead in daydream doldrums. Once, he thought of those safely tuckedaways, those sepia towns beneath spearmint mountains—how he would love to live beneath spearmint mountains, the Appalachians of the geographic mind—and another once, of kaleidoscopic Kansas City, that jazzy city of two-state segmentation. An inquisitive, a “Chagall?,” a “ahem, the Road at Chantily?” would break him from his removed reverie—“Room Sixteen”, “Left at this turn, two doorways down, then right, sir.”

Estelin had often thought that discouragement came easy, came frighteningly fast, and that courage—that lion’s share of stability in life—often came empty or enervated to the point of all-too-erratic distance. The dilution of courage carried him enough—he of that motley band of morose men marching to solitary strikes of their hesitant heartbeats—and even haphazardly he could miracle a dewy teaspoon, a tame tindrop of daring—enough to vanish the very instant of its audacity. One dogged charade of courage, he knew, could lift him from the sapping muck, but mustering that must mentality from his thirty-three year old body seemed stretching, a limitless plain towards the immaculate past. He often thought himself that hurried horse he would see on the highways, one held in a sixty mile-per-hour hurrying cage on the highway. A peculiarity to him, this phenomenon of an animal of instinct and instant mobility immobile, for it to see the strange, shifting cityscape with still feet. Not that he was cagey about his past or person.

Like all armchair anarchists, of discouragement he often spoke; a woman is a woman is a woman is a woman, or he passed her, he passed her, he passed her. Women—wanton, graceful, normal—were trees to him, planted in a salutary soil of their own constituency—ardent arms swimming in their single sex. Their terrific tendrils waylaid his walkways, driving him dense with unreturned desire. Befuddled by bodies, bemoaning himself, his angle towards the opposite sex was often awkwardly askew of graphic elements; that is to say, within uncharted waters. And these waters often swelled within him, heaving, halting, hallucinatory. Dreams dreamt, he would wake, even at his age, with that private envying of what it couldn’t have, what it couldn’t carouse for itself.

He had never had to meet any parents, speaking that strange malarkey common to impress-speak, that “impress me” etched menacingly on already foreign faces. He remained glad that the destined day had not come; he didn’t believe in sipping gin gimlets, playing gin rummy, or that scripted, ginger mimicry of generational grace. His own missing mother—how he missed her saccharine scent—had vanished twenty one years prior, off to one of those umpteen, uninspired sideline stops along the sinuous highway, working week-by-week at one of those bright-lit hotels hovering hugely amidst the obscurity by value of its wattage.

His father shivered in the room next to his, a hazy hallway saunter away, sleeping soundly during the hours he was at work—contact between them remained minimal. Not that he held any sense of disregard or disdain for his docile dad. His recently retired father—Alan Nixon—had been, “in his past life” he would now recall, a play-by-play sports—particularly baseball—broadcaster for a local Los Angeles channel. Estelin, on guard-duty generally, would imagine that close-to-castrato voice spewing rambling reportage, then howling bracing bursts of pleasure and displeasure. He would often wonder at the lonesome, beautiful gesture of a local broadcaster’s lovesome lamentations, and deeper still, their evermore effusion of good-and-bad adulation. Such was it that he often found his father with his blue four-snap crewneck jacket on, even in the halting heat. “Like Duke Snider” he would say, “Garvey ain’t no comparison” he would brag.

When he informed his father that he would be the modern art museum’s night watchman, his father was supportive and strengthened his son’s resolve with his point-by-point breakdown—he would have plenty of time to think of his real future, similar thoughts of self-comforting fancy. Five years later, amongst life’s other trifling trivialities, Alan Nixon had forgotten what his son did and cared only about his second, semi-mad idea for a clothing-cum-café store he would call Caps N’ Chinos. It was during his father’s dream store stories that Estelin would think of his life as his childhood castle-in-the-still-sky as a cartographer. Every map is a different way of seeing the world, from the flatness of Ptolemaic maps to the crude tracings of kindergarten kids.

At the museum, he’d often reflect on art; for him Art, capital A, seemed no different than art, little a. Appreciating all endeavors with the human mind and in mind, he distrusted the museum and its members spouting arty argot. For Estelin Nixon, a table had as much real weight in the real world as a Monsieur Monet piece; he believed that an object, whether painting=photography-sculpture, was beautiful only insomuch as it was imagined as an object of remembering. A made map means the findings of human exploration, a handmade table means the tempering of human hands, a sandwich a connective tissue in our collective skeleton. In short, he believed, as Whitman before him, and Blake before him, and the nameless nomads of personal histories before them, in the ecstatic exquisiteness that is human achievement, artistic and artisanal alike, and its shared history.

A woman, a Matisse maiden materialized, approaches, “Is there any..” How strange to know an entire person solely by the intonation of an inquiry! For Estelin Nixon, the job offers him an opportunity for osmosis, absorbing the world through observation. He hopes to save enough to one day move to the Paris of the Plains—that Charlie Parker song he loves hopping happily in his head—and settle near Kaw Point, where the Missouri’s southerly course sweeps suddenly eastward toward the Mississippi’s majesty. He would want to map it himself, he thought.

Days of Being Wild

Perusing old photos I found a friend's blue-sky beauties:
(all taken at the Emma Wood campground in Ventura County)