Foggy Mountain Breakdown

By Maria Padhila

After a couple summers spent chasing blues and roots music, I can tell the towns where they’ve still got some hope from the ones where everything is gone. In the downtowns formed by the cross of the essential streets called Main or Market or Court, there’s the old courthouse or city hall, restored or shuttered; the green is adorned with banners or a fountain, or it’s a bald patch and a few baking benches; there’s a strip of shops with fetching vintage wear, cute home goods, some struggling galleries, the smell of craft beer and good bread and fair trade coffee from open doorways. Or there are bare old shop windows and a social service agency.

But go as little as a block from the center and the gloves and hat are off. You see the bones: the bail bondsmen’s shops, the jail, the liquor and lottery windows. And the bus station.

I was not going to cry anymore, because a woman with scratched legs and unkempt hair standing next to a tough looking man in that part of town can manage to slink by if she’s well behaved. If she’s crying, the cops might take a second look, and I didn’t want to have to explain anything to anybody.

“No drama. There will be no drama,” I had told Chris before we got his overstuffed bags out of the car. He gave me his cigarette to hold and went inside the station to get his ticket processed. I stood outside and took a hit, and another, and another, too fast, filling my already aching head with smoke and chemicals.

A group of corner men had colonized a tiny, bricked-in patch of shade near where I waited, sitting and drinking discreetly by the dead bushes. They were talking about women and jobs. I tried to eavesdrop, because I could maybe learn something, but my ears were ringing too loud to hear anything much.

A younger man rode up on a banana-seat bike and received their greetings. “I’m keeping it on the road,” he told them, offering fist bumps all around. “Keeping it on the road.”

Chris emerged, silently fuming from the half-dozen petty grievances the ticket counter clerks had managed to impose in as many minutes. He took his cigarette and put his hands on my shoulders. “It’s going to be OK,” he said. “It’s OK.”

But it was not OK. I’d either ruined everything, or I wanted to.

We’d been careening through the mountains for a week, camping at a burn in a mountain rain forest where the rain was so steady and hard I could shower in it, hiking, listening to the spirits of the land — and for me, they were not friendly spirits at all, Bullwinkle. Every time we got into the car and he drove, I would have a panic attack, convinced that he was more interested in speeding than keeping me safe, seeing nutjobs and drowsy truckers heading over the line and straight at me.

What I see on the roads is reality; it’s the true behavior no one who drives regularly can deal with, so they re-shape it and deny it. Other people think nothing of driving next to a truck for miles. I remember when I used to hitchhike long distances, sitting in the cab of the truck talking to the co-pilot and laughing and then seeing the car in the lane next to us getting closer and closer and calling to the driver, who had nodded off. He sheared off the side of the car before he got the truck under control, and then he pulled over and I jumped from the cab without a word and ran down the shoulder as fast as I could.

Bad enough that he’d been in an accident; picking up a hitcher would mean firing and maybe a lost license. No one had been hurt, I could see that, but this was just one of so many times it was proven to me how fast it could happen.

I saw it about to happen over and over. I couldn’t take a full breath for hours between the crying and the panic. I was trapped — between my body and mind and my own insane reactions and my conviction that there really was something to fear.

After nearly a year of believing I had made it through menopause, I was having what I hoped was the last period of my life. For the whole week it played on me a repertoire of recurring blood flow, both dull and stabbing pain through my body, throbbing headaches, ugly facial blemishes, and intense waves of desire for immediate sex followed by the sense that I’d belt anyone who even breathed too close to me.

I was not the cool girl, I was not the fun girl, I was not the sexy girl. I felt I could talk to no one, I felt invisible, I couldn’t catch my breath, I couldn’t stop crying. I was probably dying, bleeding to death, and that would be a mercy. All the beauty of the natural setting was being stomped into mud and bits of sequins and feathers. I kept seeing crumpled beer cans — at a burn! Trash at a burn?!? Where the ethic is Leave No Trace?

Someone I thought was a friend passed by me twice without even saying hello. I assumed it was because I was an irredeemably toxic person and probably had invisible demons flying around my shoulders. A sculpture I loved was burned as the temple on the last night — and that’s the point of a burn, that art is temporary — but it hurt.

I was writing poems again, but what did it matter? No one would ever want to hear them or publish them. I forced myself to go to an open poetry reading being held at one camp, and a boy there was reading Whitman aloud, and I felt ashamed of my poems. They were sharp and weedy little things, like that dried, broken off stalk of grass that cuts your legs as you walk through the meadow. The meadow looks like a soft and rolling golden carpet from a distance, but when you get close, it’s all these spikes that can rip your skin open.

It was like that.

By the last night we were both seeing faces in the mountains and words in the woods, and I was convinced I was under psychic attack. Despite my efforts to keep us fed with things that wouldn’t trigger our allergies and reactions, we still both felt ill. At one point I wailed: “Why does every vacation I take have to turn into The Sheltering Sky?”

I still had a little bit of a sense of humor. It’s always the last to go.

Chris and I used to long for whole nights to sleep next to each other, and we were sleeping at different times and far apart. He simply could no longer love me, it was obvious to me, but for some reason he just wouldn’t admit it. The dishonesty infuriated me.

“I love you,” Chris said, holding me, outside the bus station, as the corner guys looked on. “You’re everything to me.”

You want to make a clean getaway, I thought. You want to keep me hanging on so you’ll still have a home girl when you get back from the desert and the weather’s getting cold.

He had that voice I recognized, the tone that a man gets when he’ll tell a woman any damn thing just to calm her ass down, like he’s talking to a horse. There was no room for honesty, for my outrage, for my insulted intelligence in that afternoon heat. I ran my hands over his back, so hard and strong, and breathed in his smell and let his voice rumble and purr in my ear. Sometimes I think his voice and his smell are the only reasons I don’t call it all off.

I don’t trust you, I don’t trust you. Why can’t you tell me the truth? You don’t love me. I can’t be loved.

And with the bus leaving in two minutes, I couldn’t say an honest word myself. I couldn’t lock him into a six-hour ride with my last words accusatory, vicious to him or to myself. But I was angry. Damn, I was angry.

Keep it on the road, I thought, and pretended myself into a smile and a goodbye. Just keep it on the road.

I walked back and got into the car and turned on the air conditioner. I took off my sunglasses and checked the rear view mirror. My eyes were red and swollen from crying and the tears had made white streaks in the tinted sunscreen, which had turned orangey in the heat. I look like fucking John Boehner, I thought, and that actually made me laugh. I dug in my backpack for my wet naps and sunscreen and cleaned my hands and re-applied. Better all orange than tiger striped.

The car was packed so tight with ready-to-spill-over bags and boxes that I could hardly move. I managed to find the pretty gift bag of little presents I’d gathered for my daughter, Tobi. Then I plugged in the magic phone and started searching. First a post office, so I could send Tobi’s care package to her camp. Then a place for Isaac to eat — he’d been on the bus since 8 a.m. and was texting me that he was starving. A chicken and waffles place looked good for him — I’d walk by and check it out to be sure. With his cast-iron stomach and boot-camp fitness level, he can eat anything.

A clean place to pee — that was going to get critical soon. My weariness amazes me, my weariness amazes me… the fragment of song stuck over and over in my head. There is not much worse than having Bob Dylan singing in your head when you are feeling sick and heartbroken. I remember once reading about a good revenge spell: curse them with an earworm of Bob Dylan singing “The Farmer in the Dell.” Think about it. Wouldn’t it get you ready to jump off a bridge in a matter of hours?

I mailed the package and saw that the chicken and waffles restaurant would indeed be a good place for Isaac to eat. And on the map in the magic phone showed me an art museum was only a few blocks away. That would be a clean and free place to pee.

Inside the museum, the entire three-story foyer was roped off and a crane and men in hard hats worked in the foyer. They were piling huge blocks painted with hearts and arrows and more, placing them like a giant playing with blocks, to make the totem the artist devised. What a lot of trouble so many people were going through to get the huge piece to look precisely right.

I went to the ladies room and cleaned up, and then I went to the galleries upstairs, walking into a four-artist show called “Alter Egos and the Magical Other.”

For the last two decades, the gallery notes on the wall read, a number of leading-edge artists have pursued figurative work as a way to explore alter egos — ambiguous imaginary selves that express alternate personalities, drives, fears and desires. Often placed in surreal or magical narratives, these “others” are rendered in hybrid styles that in part are informed by the figural traditions of folk artists, a strategy that uses the authentic or “real” to heighten the fantastic scenarios.

This must be the place, I thought. The works were creepy, disturbing, bizarre. Because that’s what art does sometimes.

Female Doppelgangers have populated Amy Cutler’s (b.1974, Poughkeepsie, NY; based in Brooklyn) gouache drawings and prints for over a decade, where brown-haired multiples toil at mundane, sometimes odd, manual activities. Cutler creates unique myths that circle around the oppression of women, and the desire to replicate one’s self in the face of an overwhelming “to-do list.” Influenced by fairy tales, personal memories, Medieval history, and Indian miniatures, her scenes also echo the work of outsider artist Henry Darger and the dark undertones of Brothers Grimm.

That is my reality — and that’s why I’ll never be the cool girl for long. I sat and thought and wrote for a little while, the museum was a few minutes from closing when I got a text from Issac. His bus had arrived. We were headed to a music festival south of here to camp for a few days. We met up after he had crossed the magic invisible line that separates the part of town they want to hide from the part they show off. I saw him from a ways off; his walk is distinctive, always full of energy even when he’s weighed down by a backpack.

I was so happy to see him and he looked happy to see me, too. We hugged and kissed under a mural outside the museum. “This is a pretty nice town,” he said, looking around. “I’m starving.”

“I think I might have broken up with Chris,” I said. “I don’t want to say a lot but it was like being trapped in a car with my father.”

Isaac knows that Chris is much like my father — but without the bad parts. Except, it appears, the driving.

“He’s not like your father, though,” Isaac said. “I know he really loves you. So don’t be too hasty. You know, maybe you two just don’t travel well together,” Isaac said. “So don’t travel. There are lots of other things you can do together.”

And that kind of thing is the reason I will always stick around.

After dinner, Isaac took out his phone. “Are you looking for a place to get good coffee?” I asked. He pointed a finger at me. “See, we travel well together.”

We went to the music festival, where I saw two shows with an artist I thought would be too accessible, too NPR, and who surprised me with how complex he was. Chris and I are still OK. We’ll be together for the first time since the bus station in just a few hours. I’m ready to jump to the conclusion that he doesn’t love me and things will never be the same at any given moment. I simply tell him “that makes me feel like you want to avoid me,” and he reassures me kindly, and we keep going. Maybe he’s lying. Maybe I am. Maybe we’ll turn this into something new. I’m just going to try to keep it on the road.