The Ghost Riding Shotgun

I met an amazing man in an amazing place, when I was not expecting it and when I was not looking for it.  My experience of knowing him and loving him was so profound, so rich, so full of unbridled laughter and a kind of joyous love I’d never had before, so shocking, transformative, and ultimately healing, that I was finally prompted to begin a serious writing project.  I have been working on a memoir about that experience, which occurred over a very compressed timeframe of about three weeks in December of last year and January of this year.  It had its beginnings in late 2011 when friends asked me to come with them to Slab City for the holidays.  In many ways it was the perfect solution to the dilemma of what to do with myself for Christmas.  I was raw with grief and loss at the time, having lost much of what I loved and still being engaged in the fight to save what I could from the wreckage.  Escape to the desert, to a place so completely different from the dreary reality in which I found myself, seemed like it would be a blessing.

And so I went, and that is where I met the man who a year later I would realize I had fallen in love with.  Because that is what ultimately happened.  It took me a moment to remember that falling in love is not about what is sensible or practical, it is not about keeping promises to oneself to never again become vulnerable, or to only be vulnerable to certain very “safe” sorts of people.  It is a force of nature which obeys only its own rules and which leaps on you when you are so completely unaware you’re about to be overtaken that it leaves you reeling. 

At the last minute I remembered this, I recalled what I had long filed away in dim corners of my memory, the titanic, other-worldly force of being in love that I had not really felt since I was 18.  How little time I had left to see this truth, to cast aside all caution and doubt, all reasonable arguments about what was seemly or practical, embrace this thing which I had not looked for, and tell the person three words he needed so desperately to hear:  I love you.  I did not know how little time I had left.

I fell asleep that night after saying those words.  I gave and received comfort and warmth through the cold desert night.  In the morning as the sun was just rising, this remarkable man, this drifter and womanizer, this drinker and wicked raconteur, this charmer and bad boy with the power to charm women and make them smile and become beautiful as they bloomed in the radiating field of his attentions, this trucker and bee charmer and carney and old Nascar driver, this man we knew as Tennessee Ken, sat beside me with his head bowed.  And then his heart stopped.  With no fanfare, no struggle, no pain or fear, he laid his head down.  I leaped to seize him in my arms, to call his name.  But with no fuss or hesitation, with no dithering or uncertainty, in that wonderful, steady, sure-handed cowboy way he had, he let out his last breath and shucked off his body and flew away from me.

It is an amazing thing to be present at the end of a person’s life.  It is both enlarging and humbling.  In many ways it beggars words.  In the moments that followed, I would have an epiphanous flash of seeing and knowing, and many things would become clear to me that I had not understood.  All this and more is the subject and purpose of my memoir, which I am having to set aside for the moment as I begin this journey across a country that I love deeply, a land that is my land and that I belong to.

Kenny knew about my plans to drive out to Indiana to get my trailer this spring, and when he knew I intended going by myself, he insisted on coming with me.  I had two other traveling companions who had been going to go with me and were not able to do so.  It had been a disappointment in both cases, but when it appeared that I’d have Ken with me, I thought that was why it hadn’t worked out with other people.  In the end, Kenny too had other places to go, and so I would not have his easy, unhurried guidance and help, that laid back way he had of showing you how to do something, whether it was hitching a trailer or coping with dirty dishes in camp or shooting a gun or playing poker or making love with wild abandon. 

But after he died, in the grief and shock and the chaos of dealing with paramedics and sheriff deputies and county coroners, I was able to get his coat, the big, fleece lined plaid coat that had holes burned into it from embers flying out of the nightly campfire, that smelled of woodsmoke and tobacco and desert dust and the very essence of him.  I slept with that coat for months, burying my face in the inside of the collar where it had rested on the back of his neck and breathed in his smell.  Now I’m afraid it smells more like me than him, but there is still a hint of him if I breathe deeply.  I still feel his embrace when I put it on and snuggle into it.  I’m going to put that coat over the back of the passenger seat of Goose.  I’m going to take it with me on this journey.

I have other dear friends who have offered to go with me on this trip.  But after three instances of loved ones dropping out of the field for reasons of increasing seriousness, I have come to believe I am meant to go alone.

But I won’t be alone.  I’ll have Goose.  And I’ll have the spirit of Tennessee Ken in the shotgun seat.  If I get into a jam, I’ll hear his drawly, gravelly old trucker’s voice in my head.  “Ok, honey, here’s what you do. . . .”