A Real Cool Hand

For the life of me, I have no idea what made me jam the pedal down and take off running when the cop’s lights sprang to life behind me that night in September. Up to that point, I’d always been such a law-abiding citizen. You know, except for, like, two other times that I’d run from the cops back in Long Beach. But never when they were already right on my bumper, like this guy was. Because that would be suicidal. 

I don’t know, maybe it was the full moon. Or maybe it was because it was after midnight, and I was schlepping my ass thirty miles home from the Roxy Theater in Bremerton and the last showing of the 25^th Anniversary screening of Cool Hand Luke, and ol' Luke was just puttin' ideas in my head. As it happens, it was also the first time in my life I ever went to a movie alone. On a Tuesday night, no less. It wasn’t really by choice, I just didn’t have any friends for a thousand miles in any direction. Literally.

So when the red, white, and blue lights of freedom popped up in my rearview, I guess it was all just a bit too much.

Honestly, I didn’t even think about it. I didn’t weigh my options, consider the pros and cons. I just made a break for it. Instinctively, immediately, without hesitation, decided to run from a cop who had me dead to rights with nowhere to go. I was three miles from home, doing 65 in a 55, down a dark country road in Middle-of-Nowhere, Washington, a state famous for having no sense of humor about speed limits. None, at all. The cop dropped in on my six out of nowhere, probably off a no-name spur in the woods along Bond Road, just lying in wait for some sucker like me to make his day. Or his night, as the case may be.

It’s hard to explain just how dark a road like Bond can be at the witching hour on a weeknight, when there’s no chance that anyone but me and the cops were awake. The Kitsap Peninsula is a bucolic mid-ground between Seattle and the Olympic National Rainforest. Sleepy little Kingston, where I was headed, is one of the smallest towns on the peninsula, and every place that humans live is either in one of the scarce natural clearings or else just a spot carved out of an evergreen canopy that would otherwise blot out the sun. In 1991, the population was seven-hundred-twenty. I upped that total to seven-hundred-twenty-one the day I moved to town, one-thousand, nine-hundred, forty-eight hours and an odd number of minutes prior to my run-in with Officer Bacon. For those of you who have never lived anywhere in exile as a reviled pariah—and have thus had the luxury of counting your life off in months and years—that’s the better part of eighty-one days

Although the moon was really blazing in that inky rural darkness, the sky was only available via the narrow strips and patches, painstakingly carved from the stands of millennial forests by generations of hard men. So, with no street lights, the sparse smattering of houses invisibly nestled hundreds of yards back into the woods from the road, and only shards of moonlight making it past the canopy to the black-top, Bond Road was a long, dark gash winding between little Poulsbo and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Kingston. The only thing breaking up the meandering black ribbon of asphalt were the dots and dashes of glowing lane markers and the occasional road sign. It wasn’t too bad at a more reasonable hour, when one could count on other cars in either direction to provide ambient light and a sense of proportionate motion. But alone in the deep black, my headlights barely did more than stir the shadows fifty feet out in front of me.

With a V8 Police Interceptor just two car-lengths back, what chance did I have in my parents’ ’87 Honda Accord, a four-banger stick-shift? Before that thought could even form in my head, I’d dropped it down into fourth, and the pedal was in the firewall. As I surged ahead, pulling away from him suddenly, I don’t know which of us was more surprised by the impulse decision, the cop or me. In 1991, Nicole Brown Simpson was still alive and OJ hadn’t made police chases a thing yet, so somebody running from the cops in a podunk town wasn’t really a thing either. Thanks to that element of surprise, by the time he decided to flip on his sirens as well, I’d already increased my lead to four car lengths. Off to a head start, and already either home-free or prison-bound based on that one decision. Aces.

Of course, there was no chance I was going to outrun him on Bond Road. I guess you could say it’s a “major” thoroughfare for the area. I mean, you can do 55 on it, and you pretty much can’t get anywhere without connecting to it at some point. But it’s still only one lane in either direction, and over the span of nine miles, there’s only two intersections big enough to even warrant a traffic light. Otherwise, Bond was essentially a one-way trip that ended in the sea. Besides which, there were too many straightaways where I just couldn't compete with him on raw horsepower, and even if I could, his radio would always be faster, and there'd just be another flat-foot waiting for me somewhere down the road. But apart from Bond, everywhere between little Poulsbo and blink-and-you'll-miss-it Kingston was a labyrinth of gravel bi-ways, miles-long private drives, logging trails, unmarked spurs, and a warren of dusty backroads that took off into the trees never to be seen again. The only advantages I had were surprise, superb reflexes, and an extensive history of running for my life. And loneliness. Because you can’t discount the value of what loneliness can teach you.

And maybe that’s why I did it. I was an outcast in Kingston. A semi-goth freak from Southern California with a Robert Smith-lite hairdo, dressed head-to-toe in black in the mecca of lumberjacks and flannel shirts. The word “Grunge” had yet to be spoken, but its ethos was in the air and I was the antithesis of all of it. I’d only had two tax-paying jobs my whole life, and they were both in California, where I had the temerity to be from, which had rendered me an untouchable in Kingston. So far, I’d been looking for a job twenty hours a week, anywhere within a ninety-minute radius, for going on three months. By then, I had stooped to applying places that I swore I never would, only to discover that I somehow wasn’t even qualified to flip burgers or tear tickets at the local multiplex. Not on my merits, and not even after I’d fabricated a resume that was wall-to-wall bullshit and made me sound like the second coming of Lee Iacocca. I had run full-tilt into a wall of Shun, and it didn’t appear there was any way over, under, around, or through. I was completely  untouchable.

Meanwhile, deep in Deliverance country, with no college or job to fall back on, and still a year too young for the bars, I hadn’t met a single soul I could call a friend. The folks at the Kountry Korners gas station and convenience mart knew me on sight and wouldn’t give me the time of day. Kristin, the girl at Kountry Video, had rebuffed me with extreme prejudice, even though I was her best customer, coming in four or five days a week. In retrospect, it may have been because I had nothing to do but rent videos every day of the week…but anyways. There was just so much wide-open empty space, and after eighty-one days as an untouchable with nothing to show for it, it seemed I also had nothing to lose. So, pedal to the metal it was, and off I went with no plan and even less chance of succeeding. You’ll never take me alive, copper! (Note: To be read in your best Jimmy Cagney voice.)

Kountry Korners. No, seriously.

Although I I didn’t have a prayer on Bond Road, I did have one advantage that I knew no cop could hope to match. By virtue of my extreme solitude, I’d spent the last one-thousand, nine-hundred, forty-eight hours and an odd number of minutes with no job, no friends, and absolutely nothing better to do than hop in a car and drive for hours at a time. Every single day, any hour of the day, for eighty-one days. If I were in prison, that length of solitary confinement would literally be illegal, but whatever. Gas was just over a buck a gallon and I had enough mix-tapes to circle the earth and never hear the same song twice. So I'd head out on Bond Road, at two in the afternoon or two in the morning, and pick a street—any street—and just head down it.

Street have a weird name like Rova, Foss, Pugh, Gunderson, Stottlemeyer, Minder, Orseth? Let’s go down that one. Hey, where is that trailer going with all those horsies in it? Dunno, let’s follow them. Funeral procession headed back into the woods? Hail Mary, full of grace, here we go. With no destination, I couldn’t really go astray, because that implies that I had somewhere to be. I did dead-end quite frequently—with cows and sheep staring at me quizzically as I did a U-Turn in their barnyard—because what had seemed like a road turned out to be somebody’s half-mile long driveway. Sometimes I just ran into a creek with no bridge, because why wouldn't you? Other times, a road would turn into gravel, then dirt, then back into a paved street and emerge in another town like Eglon, Suquamish, or Indianola.

The whole area was an insanely verdant patchwork of lean-tos, shanties, dozen-acre blackberry thatches, turn-of-the-century homesteads, million-dollar chateaus, slash-piles and deadfalls, Alpaca farms, frontier churches, and microbreweries. It was a topographic nightmare of hills, draws, arroyos, ridges, and hollows, all populated by aging hippies, Scandihoovian crafters, First Nation Tribes, military retirees, and a surprising number of Russians. These backwater denizens were mostly a friendly lot, but could just as easily be surly End-time-Preppers, hoarders, or outright hostile get-the-hell-off-my-land-the-federal-government-is-the-beast-from-Revelations-fluoride-is-making-us-gay types. In these green and pleasant badlands, I was as likely to be stymied by a road that ended in a clearing where the locals held bonfires (or other rituals, about which the less I knew, the better), as I was to emerge into civilization again. 

I'd headed into the final frontier—seeking out new life and new civilizations, boldly going where no Goth had gone before—for two-to-three hours a day, every day, for eighty-one days and counting. Getting lost, found, and lost again, with nothing but time on my hands to do it all over and over again, world without end. No deeds to do, no promises to keep, and nowhere else to be other than wherever I found myself. So when, without warning, I pulled the e-brake and drifted through an obtuse hundred-degree right turn down an unmarked road, it may have seemed like a random choice to the cop on my tail, but for the first time in one-thousand, nine-hundred, forty-eight hours and an odd number of minutes, I didn’t feel lost at all.

That back road may not have had a sign attending it, but I knew that it was called United. I knew that it took off to the southeast and slalomed through a half-dozen switchbacks cut through an otherwise inviolable stand of old growth. Under the complete darkness of that canopy, without even a star to guide the way, we were in my element, diving into the heart of a no-man’s land that I knew like the back of my hand. Invisibility is a relative thing, sometimes all it requires are wits and a matchless knowledge of your surroundings. And I knew every swell and hollow, every curve and straightaway. Knew which corners I could take at 50, which I’d have to take at 25, where I could drift on the e-brake, and when we’d break out into the open again.

In my mind, I was already plotting how I could make it back to my folk’s place without ever getting back onto Bond Road, because there was sure to be an APB out on me now that I’d joined the ranks of Dillinger and DB Sweeney as a fugitive from justice. I hoped that I’d pulled the trigger on my run before he thought to call in my plates as a part of a routine traffic stop. Otherwise, even if I got away, I’d just find them waiting on my doorstep when I got home. There was no way of knowing, but since I was already pot-committed I just turned up the tunes to drown out those annoying sirens behind me. I watched the strobe of his lights recede back into the trunks as I left him to eat a rooster-tail of my dust, sliding ‘round another corner onto Minder Road. From there I was out in the open again and easily visible to him across the distance I’d put between us, so I punched it way up and made for the trees again on the next leg of my rally.

That section of Minder was a five-hundred yard open stretch but seemed like a million miles, because it was where I’d lose my advantage, and he’d just chew up all the distance I’d put between us by virtue of his vastly superior horsepower. But it also meant that the moon could be my guide for about fifteen seconds, so I turned off my lights as I approached the next turn. If I could drift through the turn on the e-brake, no tail-lights would give me away. And if I could just make two turns in a row that he didn’t see, there was no chance he could follow me through this rural Byzantium, any more than one of his fellow boys in blue could predict where the bottom of my escape route, miles distant, would be. That's a lot of ifs for an already terrible plan, but untouchables can't be choosers.

“Just two turns,” I said aloud to no one as I fishtailed through a blind left onto Port Gamble Road in the dark. 

With Love and Rockets’ “No New Tale to Tell” blaring from my speakers, I sprinted for the next tree line. Alas, I was overly confident in my strategy and underestimated his driving chops, as he easily made up the ground and followed me onto Port Gamble. Seeing him gain on me in the rearview, I felt like Wile E. Coyote watching an anvil drop from the sky. I could just hear the judge reading the charges, escalating from speeding, to evading arrest and reckless endangerment. I saw the ticket turning into handcuffs and the hundred bucks rolling over by an order of magnitude into thousands. Just two turns…just two turns. Again, the darkness and lay of the curves were my ally as my advantage reasserted itself and he began to drop back as he traversed roads he may literally never have been on before. Certainly not in the dead of night with the throttle wide open. 

When you're down, it's a long way up
When you're up, it's a long way down
It's all the same thing
No new tale to tell...

Just two turns…

I hoped the next left onto Gunderson would do the trick, because it was a 4-way intersection and thus there were three paths to choose from. But he either saw me or guessed correctly, because I caught sight of him as he got air coming over the rise after me. Still, he was far in the rear which gave me a little hope. Doing 90 in the straightaway, I was also headed toward the water at a breakneck pace. I’d run out of road if I didn’t double-back or shake him in the next minute. I’d had some success in my previous life ditching a cop by hiding in a neighborhood, just pulling into a random driveway and parking seconds before he went by. I was tempted to that try again, but that was in a busy city of millions, and if Kingston had taught me anything it was that everything about my old life—everything I’d done, everything I’d learned, everything I was—was nothing here. The concrete jungle and the rainforest played by different rules entirely. I sensed the net closing in ahead of me as well as behind, and knew I had to get outside their circle, right now.

When I hit the long parabola in the road, I knew I’d found my best shot, and last hope. Gunderson was about to spit me out onto Miller Bay, and if he didn’t already have his backup waiting somewhere along Miller, he was an idiot. It was another significant artery, and really the only way out of the midnight maze I’d been running headlong through, so in just a few seconds I’d have no choice but to take a right or a left onto it. But the end of Gunderson was a long, dark stretch that arced through two wide curves on a steep downhill right before I’d hit Miller Bay, and in those curves, I’d be invisible both to him and his unseen partner somewhere ahead. So when I hit the junction at Miller Bay I fishtailed the left, blowing through the stop sign and instinctively aiming for home. Turn number one. Then I clicked off my lights again and drifted through a blind right turn, riding the e-brake a hundred-twenty-degrees into the dark, trusting in the moon as Indianola Road switched back sharply to the south. Turn number two.

I’d only been out in the open on Miller Bay for a quarter-mile but had seen the ominous glow of a set of headlights just about to crest the hill in front of me. So, when I made my blind turn onto Indianola, I had no idea whether that car had seen me or not. I stayed in cloaking mode, killed the stereo, and darkly crept past the saw-mill, where the graveyard shift was in full-swing and ablaze with light. From across the draw of Indianola Creek, I saw my pursuer through the trees as he blew through the stop and made his left onto Miller Bay, hurtling through the intersection, just lit up like a Christmas tree. I held my breath, waiting. He might have seen me make my first left, he may simply have deduced from my original heading that I was likely going to Kingston, Hansville, or Indianola, which all lay in that direction. Or maybe the backup had seen just enough of me to know I'd made the turn as they'd crested the rise. No way of knowing. 

When he shot past the Indianola switchback at Mach-two, I breathed a sigh of relief.

The scenic route. Three miles turns into a fourteen mile detour.

I powered the lights and stereo back up, rolled all the windows down, and began a very leisurely, roundabout tour of the eastern promontory of the Kitsap Peninsula. Assiduously obeying the speed limit, I wended my way home, passing through eerily silent Indianola, past the abandoned Nike missile sites, skirting the wharves in Appletree Cove, through the neighborhood behind the Kingston Café, and past the only McDonalds within twenty miles. The little game of cat and mouse had turned the last three miles of my trek home into a fourteen-mile detour. Who knows how much farther for them as they crisscrossed in the night, hunting me. 

Untouchable? You got that right. How ya like me now, bitches?

With no deeds to do, no promises to keep, and nowhere else to be other than wherever I found myself, I was in no hurry to discover whether or not they were waiting for me on my doorstep. So when the Jesus & Mary Chain song “Head On” started, I cranked it way up and just cruised.

“And the way I feel tonight

I could die and I wouldn’t mind

And there’s something going on inside

Makes you want to feel, makes you want to try

Makes you want to blow the stars from the sky

And I can't stand up, I can't cool down

I can't get my head off the ground"

Nope, no hurry at all. Like the man said, sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.

Just Ol' Luke, waitin' on the Judgment Day...

A Moment in the Shadows

In the Spring of 1991, I had the privilege of going to see Morrissey at the Hollywood Palladium, thus fulfilling a years-long dream. Sadly, our seats were terrible; so far to the side of the stage on the semicircle of seats ringing it, we were almost behind it. We had an excellent view of the drummer's footwork and the backstage stairs, but otherwise had to settle for a lot of Morrissey's derrière. Don't get me wrong, he's got a nice one, but those tix were expensive for a guy working part-time, minimum wage at a pet store, so spending an evening staring at a celibate vegetarian's arse was a little anti-climactic.

So in spite of how excited I was to see Morrissey perform for the first time, the seats just about ruined the entire experience, especially since I'd skipped a day of work to camp out in front of Tower Records to get them. It was hard to believe they even sold seating at such an oblique angle, although we were down front in the rows of elevated seating enough to see a lot of stage details clearly, albeit from a weird angle. The best of the worst seats in the house. Which is how my friend and I spotted the lone figure skulking about in the shadows at the bottom of the steps, like they were waiting some cue to go up and head out on stage.

Curiously, he was well-dressed and not holding any guitars or sound equipment, so he didn't seem to be a roadie or any part of the sound team. Just a lone guy in deep silhouette, pensively waiting, shifting from foot to foot, as though anxious to burst from the starting blocks. I nudged my friend and indicated the lanky, well-dressed man, but she seemed annoyed that I had distracted her from looking at Morrissey's butt as he launched into the crowd favorite "Last of the Famous International Playboys."

Much as I tried to focus in on one of my favorite tunes of all time, I kept seeing the lone figure out of the corner of my eye, so I immediately noticed him spring into motion as Morrissey sang the words:

"And now in my cell

(Well, I followed you)

And here's a list of who I slew

Reggie Kray - do you know my name?"

As he burst up the steps like a kid on Christmas morning, the dapper silhouette took a proffered mic from a roadie and strode from the shadows into the limelight with a signature sashay and jaunty kick that revealed to my friend and I who he was several precious seconds before all the people with good seats could even tell what was happening. Those seconds belonged to us alone until, in an impossibly rich baritone that will live forever atop the Tower of Song, The Thin White Duke joined Morrissey in the chorus:

"Oh, don't say you don't

Please say you do,

I am the last of the famous international playboys

The last of the famous international playboys."

And the intimate crowd of just 4,000 people went insane. Seriously, we completely lost our minds for the next several minutes as Steven Patrick Morrissey and David Bowie duetted through "Playboys" and segued into a medley of "Heroes" and "Prisoner of Love".

And then the moment was over, just as quickly as it had begun. Bowie glided off stage and back down the stairs with that peculiar physical elegance he had, flipping us a jaunty wave and an open smile as he came by our wedged-in ghetto chairs. Such was the power of Ziggy that for one moment they became the absolute best seats in the house. And then, without fanfare or entourage, he slipped out the back door alone, and was gone.

Four billion years in the making, and I still timed it just right to not only exist in the tiniest sliver of civilization that contained David Bowie, but shared an unguarded moment in the shadows with him. Today that feels better and worse than I would have imagined.

"And I'm gone

Like I'm dancing on angels

And I'm gone

through a crack in the past

Like a dead man walking"

Turning Toward the Light

The days have grown as short as the year, and the compulsion to analyze and distill the essence of the year has come upon me. I can’t even say where this instinct comes from, only that it’s as inborn as a bird’s instinct to fly south. Perhaps it’s the end to the ebbing of days, and our turning toward the light. The beginning of the great renewal as we climb out of the imbalance of darkness and back into the sun where we belong.

It’s always struck me as strange that Winter should begin on the shortest day of the year. Like it shouldn’t be the beginning of a great cycle toward the longest day, but the completion of the cycle toward the shortest. Yet the long, cold nights and the frigid, icy days seem to deepen as the time goes on, not lessen as the increase of daylight would seem to necessitate. Yet nature, in her infinite wisdom, has seen fit for these beginnings and endings to sit right next to each other in harmony, even as we kick and scream our way through. There’s an old adage that says that an ox and donkey know their masters and where they are fed, but men do not know it. How true that seems today, of all days.

Every year, as I contemplate theses cycles—these wheels within wheels—I find something to bless, some grace and synchronicity that has chased along at my heels, and gratitude is all I find within me. But this year it occurred to me that though these cycles may be well-nigh eternal, they are only cycles for the world, not really for us as individuals. For us, the seasons aren’t part of an ever-turning wheel, but of an arc, with an ascent, an apogee, and a waning to a close. Our lives following the Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter as we gather the rosebuds while we may.

I’ve been aware for some time now that I’ve stepped into the Autumn of my life, and I find it to be a wonderful season. Insecurities, fears, and anxieties have given way to graceful acceptance of what is, and the calm power to steady-on, come what may. I’ve never been better at recounting my blessings and rehearsing all of the good that attends the passing of my days here, and choosing to see the good instead of the bad. That’s been an especially good skill to have this year, as they closing of 2018 has seen some deep disappointments. A falling out with a dear friend, being passed over for a well-deserved promotion, and the sudden confrontation with the mortality of my loved ones have all served to put a damper on the season.

But we most often find what it is we’re looking for, only to miss all the things that pass us by unawares. And since I’m on the lookout for the blessings, for the abundance, and for all the ways that life is on my side, that’s most often what I find. The heartaches and disappointments were not all that happened this year: I traveled to Alaska, Arkansas, California, Oklahoma, and Washington in 2018, and while I may have missed this shot at the brass ring, I got a better raise than my boss did, because he made sure of it. I made amends for a grievous wrong done in my youth. I held my first niece in my arms and welcomed my first nephew into adulthood, along with his first tattoo. Listening to him play the solo from Master of Puppets meant more to me than any promotion could.

Holding my niece Jade for the first time at Thanksgiving, sitting in the living room as the extended family ate, was a highlight of a lifetime. A soft, warm little bundle that couldn’t hold her head up and barely open her eyes, she purred and cooed her way through the hour that I held her, her little cartoon snores almost more than my heart could bear. It was one of those moments that you reflect back on and realize that it was the whole point of our existence here, except that I was well aware of it as it was happening. That’s what I mean by the joy of the Autumn, I don’t wait for the moment to pass to appreciate it in the sepia light of nostalgic reflection.

As I was holding her, I was subsumed by the love of my wife’s family, listening to the music of their conversation, the clink of their classes, the ting of their cutlery, as the symphony of our lives together played. I perfectly perceived the subtext of the friction between them, as they disagree on matters spiritual, political, and cultural, as the bumped off each other in conversation, knowing well which of them is annoyed by the other and how hard they are each working to leave things unsaid. But we have the rare gift of being able to vehemently disagree and then go right back to our meals, anecdotes, and fellowship. And I’m reminded again that none of it matters because love covers over the multitude of our sins.

And while my nephew Trevor got a tattoo that neither his Opa nor my wife approve of, he still helps his Opa up off the couch and kisses him atop his head as he towers over him, and thus the cycle completes itself. The boy that Opa held in his arms now hauls him to his feet with ease, even as Opa is finishing the arc that Trevor is beginning. I like to think that I’m somewhere in the middle between them, but I know that I’m closer to Opa than to Trevor on the trajectory of our lives here. I don’t know how I caught up to him, but somehow I have—as every session in the barber’s chair reminds me, since I well recall when Opa’s hair was the salt and pepper that mine is now. But hearing Trevor tell Opa unbidden that he loves him completed a circuit for me, and I told Trevor for the first of many times to come what a good man he is.

Between Jade and Trevor, two moments have redeemed all others in this year. In the shadow of these things I can hardly remember anything else, even as I turn toward the light. Always toward the light.