The Daily Grind
SusieQ woke up Saturday morning feeling ‘pressed’; not depressed, repressed, oppressed or compressed. Just ‘pressed’. After Friday night’s wing-ding party, “Prince is Gone, so let’s Dance, Dance, Dance” she struggled to lift the downy bed coverlet off those sleepy blue eyes her willpower and effort focused on reading the oversized RED-LED clock facedial. 10am already. “Shit, I’m late to work,” she wheezed and reaching to the headboard counter, fumbled for her pink I-Thing call machine to dial in to the daily grind.
“Hello, Queequeg, this is your busy barista,
SusieQ letting you know I’ll be an hour latte. Please tell my Coffee-Mates, Stubb and Flask, to cover for me at
Starstrucks. I’ll be there as quick as I can.” Click.
The struggle ahead to get past blankets, into working attire and off driving in her canary-yellow Fit was definitely an uphill slog. Damn. She had “Purple Rain” on the brain and kept spinning last night’s DJ playlist into her jukebox mind. “When Doves Cry, Let’s Go Crazy, Kiss (me) and let’s do the Bat Dance”. Let’s face it – she always loved the artist formerly known as Alexander Nevermind / James Coco (not cocoa) and she did her best to brush the purple glitter from her hair as she prepped for the work ahead. She laughed as she looked at the Starstrucks company dress code (green apron, slacks and appropriate jewelry) she had taped to the bathroom mirror. With a flick of the wrist, she tossed the ‘uniform of the day’ into the laundry hamper. No green apron for her today, that’s for sure.
With ‘purple passion’ pulsing in her veins, SusieQ went back to her clothes rack and emerged as Prince’s Princess, dazzling in a polka dot pantsuit featuring a speckled black blouse and white pants offset with a dashing neck scarf. Just to get things right, she topped off the getup with a Starstruck hat, adorned with her Prince-ness picture, looking regal and rockin’. ‘Let’s get going’ she mused and motored off to the mall to get it on with the coffee crowd. As she made the scene at the Starstruck shoppe, SusieQ glided in the door just 45 minutes late to her shift. She was singing and toe-tapping her way and the food droid staff smiled and quickly picked up the beat. “Hey Queequeg, let’s get a double machiatto on the rush. Stubb and Flask, harpoon me baby with some Mocoa, White Chocolate Mud”.
“One, two, three, let’s work. C’mon let’s have some fun. We’ll work till the morning comes. Let me see you work”.
Do the daily grind.
Huerfano (meaning orphan) County’s Spanish Peaks, neither quite a fourteener but standing out from the Front Range (wa-ha-to-ya in the native tongue) were landmarks on the Santa Fe Trail. Population centers include county seat Walsenburg, sex-change capital Trinidad, Ludlow (as in Massacre), La Veta and a double handful of small dried-up towns scattered across the scrub oak and pinon of the hills and sagebrush of the high prairie.
15 miles up a county road, with no electricity or running water, our dreams become projects. Build a cabin, string a fence, lay in a cistern. Pour concrete walls. Pour lots of concrete walls. Stand up a windmill, dig a trench, pump water up a mesa to tanks for gravity-fed irrigation systems. Fix a broken tractor. The entropy of the land: we’re always building, and things are always breaking down.
The only structure on the property when we acquire it is a low shed, used to store hay, protected from snow and wind. Raise the roof, add some walls, add more rooms – piece by piece it becomes a cabin. Fred and Marigold, dreaming of Rammed Earth, design the next addition, pouring a foundation then presenting plans to Frank Noga, the county engineer. He never heard of rammed earth – pipe clamps secure sturdy forms aligned 15″ apart, sprinkle in a moist blend of clay, sand and portland cement, then tamp it till it rings, hard packed. Keep adding earth-mix, keep tamping and the walls rise. With a “hat and shoes” – protective roof and foundation – a rammed-earth structure lasts centuries. Well, Frank Noga’s seen plenty of hippie shelters – our architectural drawings are a step above. He stamps his approval on the plans.
The Kawasaki 175 (Estrella model) is a sporty, temperamental motorcycle for riding the Story Creek back roads and making quick trips to town. One day, Fred takes it out for a spin. Wearing sunglasses plus a helmet with a smoky visor, he keeps fiddling to kick this sucker into third gear. As luck would have it, he notches third as he comes over a rise, revving up to 30 mph about the time he sees, about 40 feet away, a three-strand barbed wire gate closing the road. Steve McQueen in The Great Escape would have leaped gracefully over this barrier. Instead, Fred goes for Plan B: dropping the bike, sliding wheels-first into the obstacle to save himself from painful lacerations. Almost. His right hand on the handlebar finds some nasty barbed wire that slices a two-inch gash in his middle-finger knuckle.
The next day, Fred wrestles his car out of the mud, driving home by way of the long-gone Red Rocks commune, the dome his cousin shared with thirty other hippies. Fred’s cousin, David, morphed into a film critic for Newsweek. The Red Rocker, Larry Lazlo, hangs his hat in here in Denver, with Co-Media Photography. His celebrity portraits grace Denver’s SIE Film Center today. Everybody starts somewhere.
April 1st, 1981
A dyad launched from the Alpha Motel,
Beneath the snowy Spanish Peaks –
I tried that harmonica
At last, here to get the ball rolling (so to speak), H. Ross Perot, one-time presidential candidate and patriotic business mogul, pontificates about the greatness of football: the pride they should feel at being chosen to stab their cleats into this august (frozen) turf; their mighty collision poised to take its place in the history of sport. Mr. Perot supervises the toss of the coin. Temple has won the toss. Let the game begin!
Fortunately, this psychodrama came to a merciful close. The love triangle between Grego and his amores (Belinda and Angelina) had been going on for years. This was just another episode of a Mexican soap opera, here in the neighborhood of Cerrada de Torreon. The evening melee was just a rite of passage and Wiley could now spend the night with his new acquaintances. In the weeks to follow, he was adopted into the Santillo family circle.
On an invitation from Belinda, Wiley joined a session of the Psychosinthesis experience
As that year came to an end, he arranged to take the 10 brightest students for a day-trip to the beach, only to have his plans cancelled by the school principal, who told him, “Take that trip and you’ll be fired. We don’t have insurance to cover these inner-city kids on a day trip to the beach.”
Within a few months, Grego found housing and later, Angelina, Belinda and Grego’s son made the crossing into Los Estados Unidos. As fate would have it, Wiley slipped into the ménage-à-trois. He and Angelina dated while she found her own home. They wined and dined and danced to Santana’s Samba de Sausalito. One afternoon, they shopped for a leather coat in LA’s garment district. Wiley later wore this jacket to his brother’s DC wedding and on a tour of the Carter White House, but that’s a story for a different day.
Years gone by and Wiley thinks often about his Mexican family and the hands across the border that brought their lives forward. He remembers the names of the barrio students who touched his life – Maria Gonzalez, Art Flores, Lily Butler, Felix Santillan, Otelia Campos, Miguel Aceves, Frankie Rico and Ora Dean Mason, the one white girl who came into his classroom early one morning, frightened and alone, to tell Mr Timmons that Lily’s brother had been shot dead in the street last night, after Wiley’s Open House party at school. In the rising and falling tides of Life, he remembers a near-drowning experience, surviving the pounding surf and struggling to the surface (from down under the waves) for just a breath of air. Last he heard, many years ago, Grego was teaching in the LA City Schools and performing puppet theater in the Latino communities he had moved into. Wiley still strums his guitar and sometimes sings these lyrics loudly into the night – Like all good stories, this one ends with the blues.
