As recalled from memory on 2/6/25 in Laguna, New Mexico
I stood outside Union Station Los Angeles next to a man I thought I knew. I had not the decency to say, “Hey, Mike, Mike Pope, how are you.” I just went with the 5% of doubt haunting my mind, begrudging the human left in me the fiction that Mike had a double, whose wife looked the same…
“James, James,” came a call in a friendly voice.
I located the speaker behind the wheel of a large, gas guzzling pickup and made my way there, using the double crutches, joined with the back brace, as a cane, dragging my 27 pound life in the other hand.
He directed me to put my gear in the back, with his other valuables: a pretty red-headed Injun babe who held “Bunny, the baby T-rex,” by a short leash.
Dragging the old sack of bone up into the front seat, I sat and admired a really thick head, owned by a legit meatshield. Wide-set eyes, a strong jaw and an easy voice went with a ready hand, and we shook. Then he roared off out of some indie artist’s vision of purgatory where heroes die in bed and told me something of himself.
A two hour drive east, into Yucca Valley by night brought some relief from the eye pain as we ascended. Frazetta Girl went to a Jack In the Box for dinner and brought me back two cheesy beef patties and we spoke. She is a petite and demure lady with a master’s degree in something important. She admittedly played hard to get with her suitor without explanation. When I suggested, that armed with her education, she would lose face with her peers accepting the embrace of such “an adorable meathead,” she smiled in agreement. The subtext was that he just looks like a comic book hero and is an avid reader and self-teacher who would like to write action adventure novels set in Texas and viking stories set in the Great Lakes.
My eye blew and I had to retire to a sitting bed, which she has nicely arranged with an army of pillows. They could be on a Conan comic book cover, if somehow we could get that “snow ape” to take a tan.
…
Interview Cues
-1. By marriage his ancient Texas family was somehow related to Comanche chief, Quanna Parker, to which he laughed from under his knit hat.
-2. His homeland is Wichita Falls, Texas, which he described as central to a cultural cracker region called Texahoma.
-3. His parents divorced when he was in single digits.
-4. He is about to turn either 29 or 30 and considers it time for him to establish himself according to his beliefs, as a man, not just as an earner.
-5. At age 10, while watching TV with his mom, sibling(s) and criminal step dad, a man with a revolver kicked in the front door of the TV room. John ran right past the two armed men, two doors up the street, not just one, and had the hippie couple there call the police. They comforted him with blanket and hot cocoa, I think.
-6. John’s hometown has a national wildlife refuge complete with bison in the Wichita Mountains, which he described as hills. John has a real affection for his home and, like every Texan I have met, considers himself a Texan first and an American second.
-7. There was a second step dad who lied about his military service and diverted John’s life to Tennessee and Kentucky.
-8. There was possibly a third step dad.
-9. There was, and is, a step mother, the same person, but of changing sentiments.
-10. In school John was given a creative writing assignment to write a story based on a dream, for which he did win notice in the school newspaper. That dream, which this old crumb thinks is central to his person, saw John as a dolphin, helping members of his pod survive the attacks of sharks.
-11. John had extensive Negro interactions his entire life and laughs at the general white American fear of African Americans as super aggressors.
-12. John seems to listen to metal music, much of it on vinyl, and has gone to what I think are called raves.
-13. As a skinny teen of 145 pounds, he was caught imbibing Granny’s pain pills as some kind of snort and assigned by Mom and Granny to in patient rehab, which meant a psyche prison. In this place he had to deal with Mexican violence, cracker slavishness, and system malevolence and its thirst for young souls to drink.
-14. The rehab experience convinced him to learn how to fight. Finding a place that actual instructed in combat has been hard, a search he is still under going 15 years in, and which is partially the reason for our meeting. A copy of The Violence Project was brought out alongside Crackerboy, my two biggest books, for me to sign.
-15. John experimented with certain drugs as a teen and smokes weed today, not drinking.
-16. He is deeply involved in physical strength training. The rack of weights in the garage are huge and the counter is full of protein and vitamin supplements. John is 5’ 10” 230 pounds, with 20 inch arms and hair down to his short ribs. He looks to me like the hammer wielding guard of Thulsa Doom in the movie Conan the Barbarian. The picture Frazzetta Girl, his woman, took of us makes me look like a captive wizard in gnome form. He does not use testosterone or steroids, just lifts and eats a lot of good food. “My cardio, admittedly sucks, and I should work on that.”
-17. As a teen and young man, John worked various grunt jobs. His best skill set was landscaping, a job that taught him a lot about plant life. He loves working with stone and was once featured making a stone lined pond in a home town newspaper. He is glad that he worked such jobs, to mature himself and give him focus. His last job in Texas was running a garden for a dining establishment that grew its own food.
-18. John’s father has worked in agriculture all his life and is a self taught plant expert. His grandfather is retired and keeps very busy making wooden craft ware, some of which I handled. He also forged a wicked Bowie knife.
-19. John acquired a woman and sought out a traditional church that was not officiated by celibate priests. His orthodox faith is level and interior, not worn like a ward.
-20. John works as a facility supervisor for legal weed growing in California. This is a very tough business to survive in. Illegal slave labor operations that out number the legal ones, are financed by Chinese money on Cartel land, and actually set the government prices, with the State preferring to buy criminal weed than legal weed done under strict state and federal labor practices!
-21. Of all of the people John has met in California he has only spoken with one man who holds a similar worldview and is not afflicted with progressive race guilt, and that man is 50. He points out though, that there are many traditional folks in his area of California.
With these 21 points as a frame, I intend, when next I meet the Vanilla Gorilla, to ask him about his first memories as a tyke. I will try to get John to crawl up out of his past one step at a time. Digressions and projections, though, will make of this investigation into one fresh soul’s masculine gestation, a story more rhythmic than that lineal intent.
The next afternoon, Bunny was left home, as she is afraid of cars. She was a stray dying in the desert, who John rescued, which makes his driving two hours in and out of LAX twice, in 20 hours, to keep an old tramp writer off a strange sidewalk, make sense. Also, he has a good relationship with his father and grandfather. This made me glad as he watched to make sure I shouldered my pack successfully as some twit Hindu sedan driver tweeted its horn at his tailgate.
Thank you,
Hopeful of return.
-James
