Django uncaged
Django and I are not at all sure about the quarter zip finance bros that are pouring out of UPF’s business school across the street. Disgorging by the thousands, torrents of them, all glinting like metal in the strengthening sun of Spring, trout swimming upstream, flinging, churning, flinging. To what, I don’t know. Up close, I experience them, the fin bros, at the eddy of the Aldi on the corner. At the volume expected from rescue operations, they talk from the back of their throats and brook and “brah” the stream of their life with 40 proof confidence, though they are one lesson removed from learning to “manger à la forchette.” Thus in the paralyzingly long line at Aldi, their voices keep carrying like freeway noise: “you find the salt bro ? Nah bro, just the pepper, they don’t have it.” Oh, I think to myself, no salt, the root of salary.
They’re here, at tremendous distance and choking the skies with carbon emissions, not for an education for them but for their career, or for others to exploit. They don’t think that way though, to them it’s the American Dream, the one you have to be asleep to believe, and they’re a meeting or a spreadsheet away from being Sultan rich. I’ll never understand how reading a graph is the same as brimming your eyes with literature and yet both are called a college diploma. One is really a certificate of compliance, the other a certificate of defiance or of self-definition. I digress but if I hear one more of them yell that these tapas changed their life, I’m giving Django our secret nod, we’re making a b line for Estación França and we’re gonna stowaway on a train along the Costa Brava, step off when we’re far enough away to not catch a glimpse of any money or ambition. Just God’s country red in tooth and nail, the cliffs plunging down to the soundless sea, to mix my poets horribly. Django would know exactly where to get off the train, Django would.
~~
One fast move or I’m gone Kuroac wrote presciently. He knew more is less, and all we have, in this glut of post plague, is more.
I’m not immune.
Cristina, the import admin of the company ransoming the sentimental effects we packed in that container what seems like a life ago in the choking early June heat, the truck driver, Mr. Coca-Cola Sprite himself, Ivan, lasering in his enormous truck in tight parking of that cathedral of clutter, Public Storage. Stuff, the substance of truth, apparently. Cristina wants to deliver it all very badly it seems, and has scheduled two deliveries without our consent, one to Jen’s work, if you might imagine the clown show of Grandma Sally’s 100 year old table being hoisted up to a conference room, my vinyls and my box of sweaters flanking 65 boxes of books, eloped of the USA and the current book bans, the coming book burnings. Then when she got our address and dug her keyboard fingers in, nearly delivered it all here, without asking, even with a delivery platform to crest that tsunami of stuff up to our third floor apartment. Easy Cristina, easy…. we’re asleep and then we’re not, aren’t we?
The fin bros are swimming swimming swimming across the street. I fire off some more emails coördinating the unwilling with the inattentive. This is starting to feel like a mandala, an elaborate exercise to learn to let it all go.
~~
When I met Django up at the shelter on the mountain he was in the middle of a convo with the other dogs. I’m not sure exactly what, but it was along the lines of “and furthermore,” over his shoulder. He was allowing for no misunderstanding. Then he turned to me, anxiously.
He calmed down on the hiking trail up the mountain, cresting up and giving on to views of the Mediterranean, gorgeous, blue, a mirror to the blue sky, a few white sails checkering off along the horizon, BCN stacked and clumped like Lego blocks between the mountains and the sea. You see how Gaudi saw God in nature here and how he wanted to bring as much Nature to the buildings he dreamed up, a rave of creativity, careening to the unhinged, and closer to God.
The second time I met him I brought Bounce and Pink. He wasn’t sure about them but I snuck in snacks, feeling confident he wouldn’t rat me out, good dog that he is. After we sat beneath an olive tree and looked out at the sea a bit he let them pet him. His breathing eased.
The third time we all came and I think he got it. All of us there, the walk, the olive tree a parasol and the ocean more diffuse, an aura of blues curving at the horizon, the clouds lower, eggwashing the horizon.
The fourth, he got in a taxi with me after some paperwork. A big barrel of a man first waived us off and then, when Django turned his face towards him, immediately relented and waived us in. “Es un bueno chico “ I offer as I get in and his voice purred like a small church organ, “Si si.” Sentarse bajo, porfa.” I lower him to the floorboards off his seats. “Claro, es normale, si” I answer back, my voice thin in comparison to his.
In movable church we parried and boxed through traffic, he telling me of his daughter’s dog, giving Django a scratch at lights to big resonate chuckles. “Tranquillo, tranquillo” he’d say like a plagal cadence growling, the colors of the city like stained glass. Django’s nose wiggling at the window, a panderia wafting the charisma of carbs.
~~
Kerouac is compelling in his cadence, his frantic attempt to fit all that he was feeling onto the page, ink diffusing, spreading, runnels and rivulets oozing, flowing, seeping, it all keeping a surface tension that hangs at the edges of his books, the edges of our lives and the edges of our hearts when we set the books down on our nightstands. So pleonastically written, so plainly compelling.
Django has made no mention of his past life but seems at times distant and sad. What emotions do dogs feel? Not as many as we ascribe to them but certainly they feel something.
In the morning the business school trout will be running and Django will set his brown wolf eyes on them on our walk, their endless exercise, throwing themselves at money. We all have Christs of our own making I suppose, and I’m no better. I’ll run the e-bike to the kids’ school to afterward linger with the stone cold tea in the stone silence, practice, unpack, tinker building my bookshelves, feed the email beast, now gouted with logistical considerations, problems to solve, perhaps partially, and not student complaints.
In bed tonight, in the close and bare darkness his line “no connection whatever with early perfection and therefore nothing to connect with tears” repeats in my mind and just inside my lips, a whisper filling a compartment of my heart I did not know was still open. Much like Django.
~~
One fast more or I'm gone', I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimism you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca you drink, or Mescaline you take, or Peyote goop up with-- That feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens with the fear of eerie death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders weave in the hot countries, the feeling of being a bent back mudman monster groaning underground in hot steaming mud pulling a long hot burden nowhere, the feeling of standing ankledeep in hot boiled pork blood, ugh, of being up to your waist in a giant pan of greasy brown dishwater not a trace of suds left in it--The face of yourself you see in the mirror with its expression of unbearable anguish so hagged and awful with sorrow you can't even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection and therefore nothing to connect with tears or anything: it's like William Seward Burroughs' 'Stranger' suddenly appearing in your place in the mirror- Enough! 'One fast move or I'm gone' so I jump up, do my headstand first to pump blood back into the hairy brain, take a shower in the hall, new T-shirt and socks and underwear, pack vigorously, hoist the rucksack and run out throwing the key on the desk and hit the cold street...I've got to escape or die...
Jack Kerouac