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El Dorado

Patrick Fealey

    This is where they found the gold. Today it is a dying town few stop to look at. The California gold rush began here in Oroville. City d’Or. Now California’s largest interstate runs through a town stripped. They came and dug it all up 150 years ago. For me, being in the breadbasket, which feeds most of the United States, means almonds, oranges, palm trees, and stultifying sunshine. There is that kind of gold. No ceiling/no limit. Imagine it is like this for people who move to Florida for the weather and wind up living indoors comparing their air conditioners. For me, gold is the color of the sky and whiskey.

    Marilyn is serenading me with 1940’s ballads from the living room. Her piano transports me to an innocence I never knew, a melancholy I know and appreciate.

    Whisky.

    Air conditioners.

    Margaritas.

    Hemorrhoids.

    We are again and always and we do not admit it with ONE CELL of our existence. How old are you?

    TWELVE! We are all twelve, whether we are trying to sell our Legos on e-bay or whether we are launching toxic chemicals on our own civilians. TWELVE! Spewing semen and blood when touched . . .

    One of Marilyn’s uncles in the Civil War was a deserter. Army deserter. Iowa. Neal Jonathon Perkins 1864 cavalry. Grey eyes, fair complexion, brown hair. Deserted July 27, 1865. This was two months after the war had ended and Lincoln had been assassinated, so you cannot blame him. He was apprehended after his two-day adventure to Alabama. There was a $60 bounty on his head and apparently nobody thought he was worth the trouble. I do not think a man needs to be executed for going to Alabama, especially since the war was finished. He was apprehended in Tuscumbia and was tried in Montgomery, Alabama and found guilty. He was returned to command and served and went home just before the war on Indians. The blood had cured him of all wars, beaten some sense into him, but his transgression cost him one mule, one saddle, one saber, belt, and plate. He was going to have to ride bareback without chivalry and eat off the ground. They let him keep his horse and blue hat. I suspect I would have also deserted the civil and Indian wars, no appetite for killing my brother here or brothers abroad, but especially my cousin Dan whose mother once baked us the best blueberry pie south of Virginia. I also have no interest in raising a good blueberry pie to ashes. Like all wars, the civil war settled little. We are left with red states and blue states. North and South and East and West. Democrats and Republicans who despise each other excel at doing nothing – except both sides cash checks written by the same people, and corporations, which they have decided are a single person. Democracy has fallen to the dollar, which is getting worth less and less. Tourism ties the states together, in other words more money. Lincoln freed the blacks into prolonged poverty. He said it was his greatest accomplishment. He has not been here to see the fruits of freedom for minorities, but he did predict to black leaders they were in for a nearly impossible battle against racism. Lincoln first offered blacks a new home in Guyana because, being a genius, Lincoln knew how the whites would treat American blacks, free blacks. Black leader Frederick Douglass refused and argued that blacks should remain in America. This was their land too. Lincoln saw the future but deferred to Douglass. After all, Douglass was black and had freedom of speech. Today it would be a lie to say that blacks have found any form of equal access. There are occasional exceptions, ones who know the plight. Our greatest President conducted a slaughter of Americans and left a legacy of food stamps and welfare. I have seen too many black men in America who are dying of despair and self-destruction. So we raise the flag and monuments to Lincoln, a great man who with great flaw presided over the sickest modern nation in the world. We revere Lincoln simply because he was the captain in the storm. That we now have a black President? He promised CHANGE to a country mired in corruption and conflict and then he took more contributions from bankers than any President in United States history. CHANGE, CHANGE, CHANGE, but he did not say he was just going to change his life. Change is all he said to be elected because our country was mired in so much Republican blood lust that citizens were sick of the stench. Our black President is responsible for and beholden to the top wealthiest 1%. In his term he has done nothing but pass a health insurance plan that is too costly for low income Americans to even contemplate and which republicans have pledged to destroy after he leaves office. Obama presided over the lowest increase in social security for the elderly and disabled. He presided over a procrastinated and meaningless increase in minimum wage, but pays a high school “friend” of mine $230,000 to test fly Lockheed Martin prototype jets that will NEVER be used. Baudelaire claimed that every Presidency is tied to the one before it. He inherits a legacy he must try to remedy. Clinton is the one who freed banks to get into the mortgage business, a move that bankrupted millions and brought the banks to their knees. Bush inherited Clinton’s stupidity. Being stupid himself, Bush and then Obama loaned the banks China’s money to keep them afloat. They say now we are out of our recession. Jobs and wages state otherwise. Graduating college students who sleep and eat with mom and dad say otherwise. The guts of the peppers’ say otherwise. Now let us get the hell out of stupid politics and move on to the human predicament, which is how much to drink on any given day until THE day arrives. I want you to pack your C-130 with yellow daisies and drop them over the city of Detroit.

    Prehistoric man moved far on his feet. They became the first natives of North America without ever claiming they owned it. White men came along with yardsticks and in response to questions from the Indians murdered them.

    Civilians sweat while soldiers make civilians bleed.

    Marilyn is looking through a family photo album that dates back beyond the 1800s. Wish my family could have hung together that long, but then again, it has been said by Baudelaire that great men succeed despite their families, not because of them. I am the man I am said to be and know to be because my family was a rabid package of indecisive neurotics and localized psychopaths. Believe me, I know the apple does not fall far from the tree and it frightens me. Therefore I have had no children.

    He supports the death penalty. I support free choice and the death penalty. My life was treated so cheaply for 15 years that homicidal thugs need to be gassed before they cost us any more money. As the years pass, Reagan looks more insane and paranoid than Stalin. Remember kids, ketchup is a vegetable because I need 15,000 nuclear multiple reentry warheads and the money to pay these Californian corporations owned by my friends has to come from somewhere just in case Bermuda attacks and then there are the Contras. Duck and cover, kids. Here comes lunch!

    Two air conditioners blasting away against this Monday afternoon heat. I wonder where “conditioner” came from? It is such a gentle word for altering the world’s temperature. We are drinking tequila and scotch on the rocks with mountains of rocks. We are heated and cooled. I do not buy scotch much anymore because there are whiskies which can best them for one-third the price. Marilyn bought this scotch, black label. In my 20’s I drank black, Glenlivet, and Bowmore. Maybe I have lowered my tastes as my life slips down my throat. I think its adaptation. I enjoyed the finer things before and enjoy the basic things now because I do not enjoy any of it.

    I suspect I have a hemorrhoid popping out my ass. So far as I can recall, it is my first. I suppose this is not bad considering I am 47. But then, I suspect I have had hemorrhoids flare up in the past and it was just an easy thing to forget. We all want to forget about our hemorrhoids. They are out of sight and need to be out of mind.

    June 19, 1896: PAYABLE IN GOLD COIN.

    Old Ritz crackers staunching the unmedicated near bliss. Almost time again to shoot up and fill my veins with the medication. The vein on the penis is good once your entire circulatory system has collapsed. After she shot me up she would give me head. How do you turn down such a sweet moment of degeneration and generosity in the face of avarice and hatred at every turn? If life sucks and then you die, blame yourself, not the junkies. They are dead already.

    Smashing Pumpkins on the TV. Billy Corgan. Does he bleed or sweat? He acts as if he has things together a little too much.

    I am going to make a film from one of my novels. One of the stars will be suicidal. He owns a Smith-Corona and a Smith and Wesson .45, but will not touch the pistol. Once in awhile he will open the drawer and look at it and it will change his mind because he knows what a .45 will do to his face. He is caught between despair and vanity. Vanity saves his life, the unwanted life. A girl saves his life, actually.

    I suspect I left my car keys in Arkansas in one of those X-Rayed TSA bins. They have not been helpful so far – or even reachable. Since the TSA specializes in taking things away from folks I do not have high hopes for looking into a lost and found box. This happened at 4 a.m. on one cup of coffee and a shot of 40 Creek Canadian whiskey. I can blame it on myself or TSA procedures. I think the United States of America and Homeland Security have lifted the keys to my 1995 Chevy Suburban. They are going to use it against us when the economy collapses and people really start to bear arms. I have to get it back so I can run down the right people.

    Discussing editing my film with Marilyn. She says, “You’re going to force me to do it?”
    “Yes.”
    “I should force you to become a nurse.”
    “you don’t have to do it.”
    “It sounds like fun.”

    “Easy Cheese,” made with real cheese under pressure – fromage squirts out of a can. This is the reason half the world laughs at us. We do not know how to make bread, but we have the DOD and NASA working on the cheese thing.

    Intestinal terrorists/pain-filled distraction. Unbutton pants and loosen belt to second loop. There was a time not too long ago when I was on the seventh loop. I had to cut loops four-through-seven myself as I vanished. I cannot figure out what happened, except for the scurvy and eight teeth falling out. I suppose fat is a common occurrence and consequence of a normal diet at this age, but I had always been immune while living on ramen noodles and water for 15 years. Now if I eat a Popsicle my dick shrinks.

    He said “never enough beer” after I said there have been too many news stories on microbreweries. He agreed and killed my enemy’s beer story. He was on my turf. The editor of The Boston Globe was on my side. I have shot up in port-a-johns and interviewed Presidential candidates. I try to mix things up so my boredom prevents me from running for Senate in a green military jacket and a Che Guevara beret.

    Seniorpeoplemeet. An email. I NEED A GIRLFRIEND. Got to admire the guy’s bluntness. I need a girlfriend. Guy looks sixty with a white beard. He needs a girlfriend. I will bet he has a dog.

    We need a dog. Our German Shepherd is in a small wood box with his name, Sascha, etched into a brass plate. Most of his 100 pounds is not in the box. We are going to release his ashes at one of his favorite beaches. Then we will truly need a dog.

    Sascha made a footprint in cement in Arkansas. I carved his name into the cement and spelled it wrong I was so drunk. SASCA. That happens to me after 30 shots of whiskey. Never trust my spelling after 4 p.m. when I am spilling . . . and tomorrow I will wake up with a hangover and you’ll still be insane (WC Fields).

    Would you prefer to have an intravenous tube inserted with or without a topical anesthetic? Imagine you are a child. There are hospitals out there which do not practice this. Arkansas is an example, whereas it has been protocol in California for 20 years. The south still knows how to lose.

    Keys still missing. TSA called and says they don’t have them. “Sorry, “she said. It’s possible I left them at home because I don’t need them. As it stands, I have no house key on the ring because I gave it to the handy man. The other keys include the keys to my truck, handgun, a lock to another gun which I refuse to use (the lock), and a lock I have forgotten about (possibly to my trumpet case.)

    Marilyn is in another room. The coffee, finished and burned, the pot beeps. A nearby dove was talking to a distant dove. I contacted them. I cupped my hands and blew; I learned the dove call a long time ago but I can’t remember who taught me.

    He met X-face at a bar after his wife divorced him for sexually abusing their youngest daughter, Jess. Jess’ mother awoke all three children in the middle of the night and stole them away. He never claimed custody. X’s make-up was horrific, but it lasted 20 years. She had money, a whole factory, but he broke it off. He had enough money, I guess. But he never gave any to his family. Some fathers feel obligated to pay off the daughters they raped. This dad remained mesmerized as she grew up and saw her on rare visits and holidays as the woman of his dreams. He caressed her hair and looked into her eyes. She was the best fuck he’d ever had and would have and he couldn’t forget. Sick then, sick now, sick always. Broken glass, that girl kept me on my toes.

    Next morning and the apples are out for the mother and her two tiny fawns who are still trying to suckle. We are at the cabin in the sierra foothills. We got here yesterday. Marilyn just asked me what time it is. Mountain time is Thursday, June 25, 2015. California time I can’t guess. The fans are blowing And the Scotch Marilyn bought is flowing. We found some Champagne here so we will appropriate it for the house in the valley.

    This cabin is decorated with ducks, moose, and snowshoes. There’s a stuffed golden eagle in one of the bedrooms. I am not keen on killing eagles. Maybe it was legal back then or maybe Marilyn’s grandfather found it injured or maybe dead. My friend’s uncle shot a bald eagle. In my experience with them, bald eagles are avid hunters and are not afraid of men or cars. They are bald eagles and Benjamin Franklin preferred turkeys. Renaissance men delight in hassling people with turkeys. But would you prefer a turkey on your money? I mean if you had any money.

    No air conditioning here. The fans are blowing. Our hair flies across our scalps. I am bare-chested and Marilyn is in a sundress. Yesterday afternoon I was nude. It felt like the low nineties. I suspect that some of my parents’ friends were swingers, but my folks never ventured into that, as far as I know. I mean. Looking at them in retrospect. sexuality was a cloistered and unapproachable topic in our family, but I know my folks fucked a lot because my room was across the hall. This is why our bedtimes were carved into granite by a diamond dickhead.

    Every horizontal surface of this house is jammed with ornaments and knick-knacks, as if by stacking the shelves and tables Marilyn’s mother will know if anything disappears or has been moved or destroyed. This house is a shrine to her father and if she notices a disturbance of a flake of dust we will hear about it for two weeks. Every fucking inch of this cabin is calculated like a trap.     . Even the Great White Beer (two bottles) were hidden amidst other bottles, one on the top shelf, one on the bottom. They know how I am, they think. (I drank them and replaced them with a six of the same beer placed right up front. FU.) Because I burned off the surface of the linoleum one time they know I will destroy something else. It is uncanny how full of shit this house is, from snowshoes to pottery ducks, nuts, moose, trout and bass, deer antlers, coasters (I once made an offense which appeared in a texted photograph to Marilyn’s mother; it showed a glass of scotch on the table, without a coaster. Marilyn heard about it for three weeks. There was no stain left by the glass, just all over Marilyn’s heart.)

    Marilyn’s grandfather built this house with a little help from her. It is a custom home designed by her grandma and grandpa, specifically for her. He worked with a missing thumb and one eye. A hunting accident in New Mexico when he was young: he was left for dead under a barbed wire fence, but went on to build the Golden Gate Bridge by lying about his age to the WPA. Angela was generous enough to put her mother on the deed, just because her father had built it. Now her mother is trying to prevent me from inheriting it by placing her grandson on the deed. He is twelve.

    Winters in Berry Creek are brutal for the one who must cut and split wood, and feed it into the stove. Just finding wood dry enough to burn will drive a man insane. It’s never-ending. And strange too because when the stove is burning it is too hot in here and when the fire has burned out the toilet will freeze within an hour. Here now in the summer I don’t touch firewood, just endure nature’s heat with only fans to prevent flight and summer insanity.

    Duck. Duck. Moose.

    Bears and geese. Roadrunners, which I must admit to never seeing them despite two cross-country road trips through the desert.

    “I don’t look after your hooks!”

    Rigged rod. Waiting for toast. The heel fell on the floor. Normally I would eat bread from the floor but it was the heel and I had choices.

    Drove to the cabin in the Sierra foothills. Green conifers up there, trees and eagles. The sun had burned the ground to dust. Then we drove nine winding miles into the valley where the Feather River ran and we jumped into it and cooled off. The cabin did not have air conditioning so we lasted a day there. We saw deer, a mother with two small fawns still trying to suckle in June.

    Scandal.

    Nude man walks by the window, the air conditioner shrinking his cock.

    Island High Sierra fawning fans of a bear wearing elk horns.

    Remember the man in Australia who bought a metal detector. He took it home to his trailer and tried it out in his front yard. He found one of largest pieces of gold in history outside the door of his trailer. Now I do not think this was coincidence. Somehow he knew the gold was there. Maybe the energy and magnetic field of the gold affected his brain and suggested itself to his subconscious. Had there been no gold to find, he never would have bought the detector. I wonder if he still lives in that lucky trailer?

    Anticipation of falling off my ride this morning.

    Bottle caps and eyeglasses.

    We close our eyes and block out everything in order to relax. Call us meditative. In other words, fuck Buddhism. It’s an exclusionary daytrip taken by useless men.

    We close our eyes and the ceiling screams them open. The center of the mind engages in unlimited dreams and warfare. Without five prescription drugs I take at night, I would never sleep. I like sleep. I’m not one of those highbred artists who claim he never sleeps. Call me an eight-hour retreatest, but what show is worth staying up for? Everything I have imbibed and put into my veins was my choice to tune in, turn on, and drop out. You may be a millionaire senator who pays for sex, but I cement relationships with the escorts, who are smarter than you. A newspaper editor introduced me to one idiot lawyer in an upscale restaurant I didn’t belong in. “This is Pat. He’s a poor writer wrecked by manic-depression.” I cannot tell you how many times he said to me: YOU ARE LIVING MY LIFE!

    Our eyes gaze upon the flames and we hear the choir in the sky. We tear a painting off the wall and jerk off on it to imaginings of our brunette girlfriend’s blonde girlfriend. So it goes. We are never where we are.

    The choir reaches a pitch, a crescendo which draws you to the window. You look out and the night is silent.

    My grampa loved guns and hunting. My dad enjoyed killing. He would kill woodchucks just for the fun of seeing intestines fly into the sky. After such a challenge he would throw away the bodies. Grampa ate everything he killed, including squirrels. My mother said she never knew what she was eating for dinner. Every partridge, turkey, and deer I shot was eaten and contentedly so by people in need.

    Three more hours till bedtime. Marilyn and I will sleep in the same bed, we will be asleep in the same bed, this is love. Fucking is fucking and sleeping side by side is love. I carved notches into my spear and only three I loved. This averages about one per decade. I have stayed with each of them for periods ranging from 10 months to five years. I am grateful for having these loves and learned that love dies, but three? Two more decades for true love to assail before I sink into the ground. Never married, no kids, but having known love. The only footprint I’ve got are the stories the publishers are blocking from my readers. It is not censorship or propaganda in the sense of the Nazis. It is far more subtle than a movie about rats. It’s about an agent’s’ assistant, usually female. She went to Wellesley or Bates and plays the role of decency when she recommends a book to her boss. Her father works high up in the military or a related field and helps her make ends meet in New York City. The book should be proper and preferably written by a soft-shoed smiling woman with a master in fine art. MFA – MORE FUCKING ARTISTS. There can be no explicit sex scenes, despite the billions of explicit sex that takes place in the world every day, including the assistants. She will suck cock and revolt against a passage describing it. This pre-agent editor saved her virginity until college and she is completely conservative and ignorant about the difference between The Bridges of Madison County and Tropic of Cancer, which she will admit to the right crowd she has never read. She got her job through connections and the “right” college. I have been rejected by 300 agents, 98% of them who fuck like rabbits but would never confess to alcoholism or owning genitals.

    The desert sky
    No ceiling.
    No limit.
    A marriage with the sun.
    Then: air conditioners and
    Swamp coolers.
    Children in the pool
    Cold drinks
    Ice, ice, ice.

    Marilyn and I spent the day hanging with different people. I was going through four shots of black velvet an hour and I did not see Marilyn drinking those margaritas spiked with vodka. She did not know that the bar tender, a politician who lost a California senate race, was spiking the margaritas. I did see her walking around holding that champagne bottle that would do her in. Then she sat next to me and her eyes rolled back into her crimson sockets and she asked for help in front of eight people. A girl helped me carry her to the bedroom. She threw up into a large pasta pot provided by the host, she vomited for 12 hours. I made sure that she was lying on her side. I’d fetch the pot, but sometimes there was not enough time and she messed the bed and covered herself in soup. All through the night she said, “I am so humiliated.”
    “There’s always one,” laughed Fiona, Marilyn’s best friend. “Usually it’s Steve, but he didn’t come this year.”
    I-5 home. Dick stuck to my leg. California is about sweat and jock itch, not Hollywood and surfers. Look, there are so many surfers now that there is nowhere to surf. One wave, 100 surfers scramble for it. The ASP pros catch them. ninety-nine percent of all guys who call themselves surfers, never ride waves. They are professional floaters, pissing through their wetsuits. I have seen the best ideas destroyed by the ones who are unable to share.

    So Fiona’s husband Brad and Jim and I got jamming in the house where the in-laws once lived. Brad builds his own guitars, acoustic and electric. He has an interview with Guitar Magazine after they discovered him and his guitars at a convention. His axes remind me of the playability of Rickenbackers, but they have wider necks, which is what I prefer. $2,500 is a fair price.

    Dove. Who Who WhoHoo . . .

    Why do doves arrive everywhere? Why such a successful species? Is it because they are mates for life? They say very little? Cooperation, shared purpose triumphing.

    The birds which sing the fewest number of notes, possess the greatest vocabulary. For instance, ravens and crows. It sounds like they know one word: CAW! But spend some time with one and you will hear a soft symphony.

    We awoke with dreams of submarines. Water is considered sexual. Submarines must be more so. Is it sick or healthy to be attracted to women and men younger than half my age? Marilyn called me a pedophile and kicked me out of the house. As I was heading out to sleep in my truck, she called me back. Suddenly my past did not matter so long as I was with her.

    Fan.
    Need to piss.
    Marilyn doing her summer homework at the other end of this long coffee table. We are both sitting on the couch. I am writing this story naked. El Dorado is in flames. Don’t come too close.
    She is listening to a nursing lecture on “sources of evidence,” also known as RESEARCH in our language.
    Fewer professorships around these days. In the 70’s you could pass with a C average and find yourself making $100,000 in a soft science at a state university. Buy waterfront property, accumulate a comfortable level of wealth, and raise your family with tenured superiority and stupidity. Today a C does not exist. For Marilyn, a B+ average means you pass. It’s either an A, B+, or an F in hard science. And these days you can expect to earn $70,000 at a state university that does not offer tenure. Times have changed, and the children of the retiring professors come and go like accessory snobs.

    I teach psychology and I am rich. I teach medical school and I am middle class. Do you see where our priorities are going? Down the toilet. Except the engineers are doing well in this age of technology. Marilyn’s brother, a civil engineer for the state of California, makes $15,000 per month dealing with pipes and irrigation. I never knew states would pay so much, not even to the governor. So he makes what? $350,000 a year digging holes? And he cries poor and asks family members for cars for his daughters. Marilyn gave him a heck of a Ford Thunderbird V-8. She didn’t want to give it to me because it would have looked bad to her mother.

    Sweet wonderful you. Christine MacVie told me that one. It must have been hard for her when Stevie Nicks came along. With the shredder Lindsey Buckingham came the mysterious poet with the voice. In a twist of irony, we would never have heard of Fleetwood Mac if it wasn’t for Buckingham/Nicks. We were all honored to see the original line-up perform to a sold-out crowd in Little Rock. It was also a make-up show after they had cancelled due to illness. Eighteen-thousand jammed into that arena and Stevie said our night was the last concert in the United States. They were off on the clouds and overseas to finish this world tour that began a year ago. It could be the last time they perform together. Buckingham seems to be the one having the most fun with this and he’s maintained his chops, yet he was the last one to sign on to the idea of a reunion tour. Sins 40 years past still simmer. Lindsey and Nicks will forever be an unresolved affair. Christine had trepidations as well and this was the first time she toured with the group in 15 years.

    You make me happy/with the things that you

    El Dorado is an American Horror Story. It exists and is easy to find. Just bring ice. Please.

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