pigeon

mat: We’re at the Bearfield cave. we have Booze and CHicken--Ron

It wasn’t too long after Cael wrote that note — maybe a year or so at most — that he wasn’t even legally called “Ron” anymore. He changed his name to what he felt like it always shoulda been, when we were living in Seattle. Elsewhere in these pigeon posts, I’ve substituted “Cael” for the name he gave himself, so Cael he shall be here tonight as well.

He was my friend. I’d met him at one of the pagan festivals. There were several of them in Missouri within driving distance of Columbia. The one I met him at I had gone to with Glim. Earlier in these posts I started calling her PB, but PB sounds like peanut butter and it doesn’t sound sexy enough to be her pseudonym, so I’m gonna change it to Glim.

Glim was my first girlfriend in Columbia. There’s that stupid word again, “girlfriend.” Denim skirts, lollipops, pompom socks, I don’t know, it’s just such a bubblegum word. It’s a safe word, a corporate word. Glim was none of that except maybe the bubblegum part. She was short, powerful, scared, still grieving the loss of her dad, and working out her issues through a kind of raw but packaged sexuality. She symbiotized me and that was good and supportive for her and educational for me until I started being more of a parasite than a symbiote. Before we got anywhere close to drinking the elixers of living together and talking about marrying, we were still having fun under the stars, being profound, feeling the pounding of the fresh atmosphere against our bare asses, getting high, telling each other our collections of lies we told ourselves, weaving them into something mutual, hoping the aggregation of fabrications would amount to something true enough to be called love.

So we were pagans for a while. One of us had found a flyer around campus for one of the festivals. It said you were permitted to go “skyclad” on the grounds. Isn’t that an adorable word for buck ass naked? We went to the festival. It was fun, although glaze-eyed religious people eventually start to seem creepy, regardless of whether it’s Christ they’re zonked out on, or mystical butterflies that the Goddess put here for us.

There were a lot of apostate Catholics among the dancers around those bonfires, I can tell ya that much.

Anyway, that’s where we met sweet, miserable, doe-eyed, lost puppy, lone wolf Cael.

He was an orphan from Nebraska and pretty much everyone loved him. It didn’t hurt that he was kind of ripped, but not in a self-absorbed gym rat way. More of a self-absorbed nature boy way. Much more endearing. People said he looked like Tom Cruise. Certain people also said he only had eight facial expressions. I had only known him for a little while before I started feeling like I knew him better than these clueless cretins. I guess in a way I kind of started to claim him, almost right away, but without coming right out and saying so. I guess in a way I kind of fell in love with him, but without coming right out and thinking so.

He was pretty much straight though, so it didn’t matter? I guess? I wonder what he would think of this “in love with” revelation, if he were ever to read this. I hope it wouldn’t somehow diminish his memories of us. Is that a fucked up thing to worry about? Oh well, I’m not gonna delete it now. Regardless of how “true” it is or isn’t, it feels too good to say; I’m unwilling to not say it now.

The second night of that festival, a rolling tempest blew the campfire sparks horizontal, and Glim and I danced naked to the wild drums, taunting the lightning, and someone said to us later, “You know, for a lot of those people, you two were basically Pan and the goddess that night.” But the first night was pretty laid back.

What a coincidence! Cael — but he wasn’t called Cael yet, he was called Ron — also had a recorder! Yes! The notorious 4th-grade instrument that’s been assaulting parents’ ears ever since Telemann was a little brat! I had been sporting one — a sopranino — wearing it around like a little second cock in a pouch, ever since I had seen my dad’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Puck periodically whipped out a recorder from a leather pouch on his belt, and played a perfect little tune. That was basically who I wanted to be.

Some people around the campfire were trying to get Ron to play something on the recorder, but he just had the recorder, he couldn’t really play it, and he sullenly said, “Why don’t you ask Mat to play it, he’s better at it.”

I was, and I gloated inwardly, but I didn’t really want the outward win, because I wanted him to like me, not resent me. I guess he got over it, because we did become best friends, and stayed that way until the end of our criss-cross-country road trip a couple years later.

I remember reading something about how odd it is that the “Wild West” looms so large in the American imagination, has spawned a lifetime’s worth of movies, shows, books, songs — and yet the parts we mythologize really only lasted a handful of years. That’s how my life with Cael feels, in retrospect. A little like a Salvia divinorum trip — a parallel universe in a conch. An alternate lifetime in an earful of gloriously dizzy minutes.

So we started hanging out in Columbia, after the jingles and jangles and spangles and thumps of the festival had faded until next time — see you at Samhain, everyone! Ron had moved to Missouri because why not? He knew people there, he was enfolded by the gentle freak community. I was in college, he was not. He started working at Ernie’s, the most perfectly dineresque diner in the world. We also both worked sometimes at our home away from home, usually for nachos or store credit.

Our other home away from home was anywhere there were woods. In those days there were a lot of woods around Columbia, and they were easy to get to. Somewhere I still have a little map I made of all the best destinations, radiating out in every direction from town. Ron was not — by his own admission — exactly what you would call a naturalist. He didn’t know very much real, factual information about the woods, although he knew a few plants that you could eat, including wood sorrel (yum!). But he opened up when we were striding along the trails, off the trails, into the ravines, through the creeks, picking up sticks and having sword fights.

Damn, I can see him now, breathing like a colt, shirtless, necklaced, on invisible fire, always close to the veil. He said one time that if he were to be offered a choice between staying in our world, or stepping across that invisible faery veil to another realm, sight unseen, he would take the chance.

That made me sad and a little bereft, a little betrayed, because I wouldn’t, and I didn’t know or couldn’t say or didn’t have the vocabulary to admit I was in love with him.

I guess that’s also why, somewhat early on in our rambling tobacco-chewing ersatz tom-and-huckery, when I was still just getting to know him, although I don’t know how well I ever really knew him, I felt so large and buoyant the night I came home to my little 1920s brick box apartment and found his scribbled note on a scrap of notebook paper taped to my door:

mat: We’re at the Bearfield cave. we have Booze and CHicken--Ron

And they were, and they did. I don’t even remember who all was there. I think Jarn (we’ll call him that) was there — a gentle wispy man, tall as an oak, whose voice made me feel safe and mildly hypnotized. I think Glim was there, come to think of it. Maybe a couple other people, maybe not. They had built a small fire by the mouth of the cave. The cave was three fourths of the way up a bluff over a small anonymous creek, halfway through one of the woodsy areas denoted on my little map. You had to know which path, which way to turn, when to leave the path. I knew.

It had started to rain, gently, and we tucked ourselves under the overhang of that cozy limestone grotto, and the smoke chased us, and we talked and drank and ate chicken and if that’s as good as it gets, that’s fucking fine by me.

Later, after the wild west, after everything that happened after our trip, after the lost ring and the found ring (and later lost again), after sleeping in the cornfield and typing a letter to the latest loves of our lives, return address “Somewhere, WI;” after the bridges of Madison County, after not seeing Bigfoot, after heading towards the wrong Las Vegas, after trading hats and getting drunk and getting sick and getting lost and getting better and drinking rootbeer floats with brandy under a bridge I swear I’ve driven over since then, even though the first time I truly had no idea where we were, but this bridge — when I drove over it, I’m sure of it, again, recently, it just had a feeling, a vibe, like it was calling out to me, saying, you’ve been here before — after all of that, before Seattle, we were driving down the road that snakes along beside the Wisconsin River, on our way to god knows where, and out of nowhere he said to me, “The woods are never gonna be the same again, dude,” meaning after we parted ways, which somehow I guess his lone wolf senses knew we would eventually do. “Never gonna be the same.”

And they weren’t.