Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

I was in the choir with a boy named Ramón. His family moved from Santa Ana after only about six months so I didn’t get to know him that well. But I’m sure the heavenly fathers got in their licks. O they were jackals! Ramón’s family settled in Covington, Kentucky, God knows why, must have had relatives there because no one moves to Covington, Kentucky. And that’s where the real damage was done — the diocese in Covington. They fucked, sucked, diced and sliced that poor little Mexican kid to an inch of his life. When he was of age, he was pissed. It’s good to get angry. It’s healthy. He sued the shit out of ’em. But the trouble with Ramón was he jumped the gun. I don’t know how he found his lawyers. Wound up settling in ’93, before all the public hue and cry. At that time, see, people still were saying it couldn’t be true. That it was all hyperbole or plain bullshit. I think he got $25,000. What’s that, 15,000 after the lawyers get theirs? Good representation— stellar representation — is essential. An attorney has to know his way around these lawsuits, it’s become a very specialized area. The attorneys learned from the mistakes of those who preceded them. Poor Ramón! Goes and hires a fellow who’s an expert in marine law! How about that! And they just sue too early. See, back in the day anyone who made an accusation got tarred with being fringy or perverted. The Church had the total upper hand. They were moving priests around like musical chairs, we only found this out later, it all came out — to Mexico, Scotland, Manitoba… hell, they were moving them around in California. To Fresno and Riverside from LA, what have you. The early bird most assuredly did not get the worm, not with these lawsuits. The priests got the worm, boy did they ever! Sucked the come right out of it. So you see it literally didn’t pay to be too far ahead of the curve. Failed suits like Ramón’s paved the way. They were the pioneers. The “visionaries” who went blind to spite their face.

Ramón tried to sue again but got his case thrown out. That was just a few years ago. Waited too long! No, that wasn’t it… there was a double jeopardy issue. A new lawyer promised he’d find a way around it but didn’t. We still keep in touch, sporadically. He sends me these wacky, hypersexual novelty postcards, the type you can buy in a porn shop. He doodles tiny hearts and cocks on them — oy. I never had the heart to tell him I walked away from the courthouse a wealthy man. If he does know, he’s never mentioned it. That kind of discretion is actually typical Ramón. He’s never asked me for money, anyway, though if he did I wouldn’t deny him. It’d make me feel good to help. The last I heard (it’d be comical if it wasn’t so heartbreaking) was that one of the guys who was a part of my settlement who loves to follow this stuff said that Ramón’s been suing the Church, acting as his own counsel. He said they were going to nail him on vexatious litigation, but Ramón doesn’t give a shit. I have to admit, the kid’s got heart. The diocese in Covington eventually forked over $200,000 per plaintiff. It ain’t the lottery but it’s better than whatever Ramón got. But he seems to land on his feet. I won’t start worrying until I get a postcard from Club Med.

Can you hear the rain?

There — hear it now?

A big storm’s coming.

How grateful I am to God for making Big Sur!

Big Sur took me back, you know. Spit me out once, and broke me too. But took me back…

It’s really the strangest place. You can not come here to be healed. That’s the mistake most people make. Big Sur does not feel your pain; it doesn’t even notice your awe. It’s easy to leave here worse than you came. Those who do best are the ones who allow themselves to be erased.

The waves were tall as buildings today, did you see them? Before we met, I parked the van on a turn-out near Bixby Canyon, a half-mile from one of the dizzying, drizzled bridges, towering and hallowed, jaundiced and strange — forgive my poor poetry, but the topic always gets me talking like a fool — their stony span and scope otherworldly, like something from a Piranesi etching. I sat and meditated on the place — Big Sur — and had the revelation that something about it was wrong , which I suppose is the normal human reaction to the unknowable. The sea distorted everything, and set off a chain reaction that charged and changed the very molecules of the air itself, the landscape too, until nothing resembled anything ever seen before… you couldn’t put your finger on it except to say it was wrong. Those waves: at times they rolled north to south, contrary to God’s order, like mischievous ghosts running alongside the shore instead of crashing into it — rats through a witch’s wet hair! And there I was stuck staring, like a child hidden in the shadows watching the forbidden rites of some malevolent cultus supervised by the impetuous, unforgiving, predatory chorus of those waves, the whole scene so majestically wrong, a sacred, supererogatory mess, and me , struck dumb by an unnamable, eons- old sorrow… the permanent impermanence of water engaged — enraged — in ancient, secret activity. The waves took the shape of hunchbacked buffaloes, bristle-foamed brides and grooms in tumbling betrothal, spewing and spuming their vows, exchanged in a cauldron of blackness, each driven in succession by the taskmaster moon to spawn upon the shore then freeze upon reaching it — sudden death upon sand and rock. If that membrane of water could speak it would plash “I go no further no further I go,” slipping back to primordial jellyfish’d infancy, hibernating in Silence before rearing up again, slowly then speedily, all gaudy and cocky, imperious, thundering its bouillabaisse of white noise! Then: all business again — always, again and again and again all business — the business of predatory indifference — in poised, crashing lunge, snatching what it can of my comfort. Endlessly watchable, I watch, we watch, so easily mesmerized by artful anarchy, the mindless, mindful in-and-outness of it, for what else is there but in-and-outness, anarchy, death and indifference? But Jack already said it all, didn’t he? In the “ocean sounds” poem at the end of Big Sur. “One day, I will find the words, and they will be simple.” That’s Jack too, from one of his letters…

I looked up at the Heavens, supreme and resplendent with dark latticed clouds and found nothing truthful in Dr. Williams’ neatly turned phrase “an excrement of some sky.” For the smallest part of this one, the only one we’ll ever know until those other unknowing clouds come, could make nothing but midnight blue Silence—

I know.

The words are just a defense.

I promise I’ll step up the pace.

You’ve been so patient.

I suppose I am finding this more difficult than… anticipated.

I keep saying that.

It’s hard to focus.

Too much sadness.

Know who I was thinking about when I woke up just now? Basho the poet. Do you know Basho? Have you read the haikus? Basho was the absolute god of the Beats — they all wanted to be him. Kerouac came closest but I suppose Snyder’s taken the crown, out of sheer longevity. In sixteen-hundredsomething, Basho’s house burned down. That’s when he went on the road. I have it somewhere in the van, a chapbook, a lovely limited edition of Basho’s The Recordings of a Skeleton Exposed to Weather. Beat that , Beats!