Jorge: The motel

*

The motel the motel. It was such a grand hotel, no it wasn't, just a plain motel. Lots of babies conceived there and alas a few sent home.

Cast my memory back now. The feel of the past is what matters to the living because that feel still grasps you today and is the bed in which your present still sleeps. Or turns and wakefully twists, in guilt and discomfort. When you dismiss these sorts of things they laugh at you and still cling anyway.

Jorge. He was calling himself Georg at that time -- like the Hungarian conductor -- "gay-org" it was pronounced but hardly anyone did, not even himself.

Cast my memory back now. Smoke trees in the patio. The mysterious dried faeces of creatures one hardly saw. Little, scared and vastly hurried things. The landscape pale and denuded but the colors, they entered you at last, and once that happened would never leave. They were pale but so deeply pale.

Get their money, the boss would always say. I don't care about anything else. But don't you not get that money. You're not the caretaker, you're the cashier, I would ask you to remember. This place is on the edge. On the edge. We may not make it to the fall.

Most people in America felt that money was the secret ingredient of all abundance. Georg himself had none. Abundance yes, money no.

The young blondes would come with older companions. They would linger at the desk and chat. Mmmm, the smell of their necks spoke a language of its own. Oh no no! the maid would say. That's a mujerzuela. Shouldn't let her talk to you.

She's not going to bite me, Georg said.

The blondes were so pretty and so was the maid. But Georg was sufficiently immune to them that he saw them as friends.

*

Mindy Sue, the most beautiful, Mindy Sue with the lofty lifted body so brown beneath her heavenly gold hair. So tasty, so lifted, such a high surrounded her, even when she smoked. Her perfume was suffused with the essence of her. Which was? She was? Because it was impossible to tell just what sort of being hid beneath that gorgeous body, like an apparition surrounding her. Her beauty felt like an absence of pain. She would hold her little putter at shoulder height as she circled the motel's putting green, followed by stout Mr Rolex and sinister Count Patek-Philippe. They were fighting over her. She was like the richest item in an auction. But I am not to be bought, she said. And she would cling to the hotel clerk, her "little Georgie", like a kitten. I just know you're so immune to me anyway. That predatory macho thing, I don't even feel it. So she clung to him. And that was when he sort of came to love her.

That woman's a wh*re, the maid said. No she's not a wh*re, Georg said, accenting the *.

Anyway the currency that buys such women is security -- a sense of security -- not money. For them the money comes and goes just like people in a motel.

And anyway. And anyway.

Anyway it is not a crime to give yourself as trade for security. Only maybe it's a crime to lean for security onto something so insecure as a man. Look, the beautiful God-filled heaven lies right over you, shining in the gender-neutral pallor of an open desert.

Abundance. Abundance. Prayer always feels better than sex.

Listen. Listen, beautiful one. I think the men who love you have very good taste, Georg said. I don't think they're wrong at all. I think they're on to something. At about that time she began to spend less time on her "torn and damaged" golf swing and Mr Rolex silently fell away. The other one had won her hand or won her heart or won her. Then they traded up and were no longer seen at a mere motel. They became 2 more examples of the people who came and then went. Cast your memory back, recall the way they looked when they walked together -- she a foot taller than he. The golf club twirling like a baton. The pale sun. Then one night Georg was going to the store in his old used-up Pinto and passed Mindy Sue walking alone on the desolate road when it was still much too hot to be out.

Her jewelry was replaced by bruises and tears. They all get tired of me eventually, she said. They come and they go. So Georg bundled her into his car and snuck her back to the motel, which is how he eventually got fired but that was later, another story on a tangent from this one.

*

She would cook for him, cut his hair, pray with him and even offer amatory advice, of little use to one without a lovelife but anyway. And that phrase "but anyway" contained a world. Listen, listen, she said. Just because I'm such a mess doesn't mean I don't know what other people should do. Advice is easier from a distance. A friendly distance. Then they would go out to the club,, maybe dance together, while all the straight guys envied him his fantastic luck -- she was so beautiful that it hurt your eyes to look at her. She didn't need jewels. She didn't need anything. You are just right as is, he said. But they never went to bed together, and each day they didn't, they became closer friends. Because sex is really overrated, she said. Most guys do it so they can find a way to forget about you. It's like putting out a fire so you can go on with your life. You must know that already from your side of things.

Meanwhile the boss got suspicious when he smelled perfume in Georg's cabin. If you're harboring someone, I will turn you in.

I run a clean place here, the boss said.

*

She came out of the bathroom when he left. She had a book in her hand. Well I got my reading done for once.

Look at this: "I have not sat with the worthless, * nor do I consort with the deceitful." Who was this person?? Did he spend his whole life in a coffin?

There are not any people who are not, you know, that. That way. You can't even avoid worthless people when alone because, after all, you yourself....

Nobody could say this authentically, not really.

Meanwhile there was a rhythmic low thump on the wall. Some bears were cutting up.

In the Old Testament they were always talking about their righteousness as giving them access to God -- almost as though there were cause and effect.

What Jorge -- this pseudo-Georg -- could not understand or even cope with was the feel of God, when it was so strong and binding, and yet you didn't feel even the slightest righteousness inside you to match. Righteousness was totally God's, in no way yours, there was a terrible disconnect. He knew he was immersed in wrongness, top to bottom, and it was just something he "processed" through. It was inside him and was him. He felt indeed abandoned. And yet this same being who felt so deeply wrong also could not shake the feel of God. And the 2 feelings were not so terribly distant.

There was a different and much humbler way of being a Christian.

And the on-again off-again so-called career girl, with her lofty cushy boobs, was now his deepest spiritual buddy, a sister of agape. And the wispy sound of those fabrics swishing between her legs had become an innocent sound. She was like Thais in the opera.

"I will wash my hands in innocence... I will not sit down with the wicked." These words just had to be some wry Jewish humor. They had to be tongue in cheek. Dry desert cheek.

*

The feel of God is the feel of the past but that doesn't mean it's dead. It has been millenia that the Bear has stalked our night sky. God has always had a leash on that naughty Bear.

*
Listen. Listen. Here's the thing. Outside in air so cold that it dissipates your warmth in a second. Stars bright but not seeming close. A lit cross on the hillside opposite, if you can call space "opposite", if anything is positional or conjoined in such a structured way to be called "opposite" or "near" or "far". Oh, this is scary! This is rockbottom fear. The smoke you smoke has no reality, it doesn't even linger before it goes. And you say to yourself, this is my life, I have only one. What am I doing? Why am I wasting it? Why am I letting it disperse right through my fingers? Que hago. Que hago. What do I do? What should I do?

It would be so great (so they thought then) if that cross over there had lips, if it told you -- in the clearest possible terms -- what is to be done next. Not just to believe, not just to pray, but to do. To act the behavior that the rightness in the world says is right. But exactly what act is that?

*

Don't think so much, Mindy Sue said.

You could let the way guide you the right way without piercing it with so many holes.

*

There is a mediation to the desert sky. The holiness of the heart's affections.

*

I love you, Mindy! Georg said.

Yes, she replied. But only in an abstract sort of way.

*

On the very next day Georg's boss found her underthings in Georg's room and fired him "without appeal". Sad because just before that she'd left for good, going back to -- was it Idaho? -- together with her daddy. (Was it really her daddy?) In the morning the man had suddenly appeared in the motel office. No, I don't want a room. I want my daughter.

I want her to sacrifice all her fleshy things and come home with me, lead a good moral life like before.

There are no perverts in our home town.

We are a very churchy town.

*

He had the sober look of a heavy father in a melodrama. Mindy Sue couldn't look him in the eye. Either one of them really. He asked her what she'd been doing in this crazy town and she wouldn't answer. Georg said: she hasn't been doing anything wrong. You probably haven't been doing anything, Mindy, her father said. You have probably just been wasting your life. People came into the office and floated out while he talked -- bears, gamblers, derelicts, prostitutes, ordinary people -- and they all seemed to underline his words. You have got to come back home, the altar girls have been going crazy without you.

This was the exact moment that Georg's boss stepped into his, Georg's, room, which he wasn't strictly authorized to do. Georg took his eyes off the woman and somehow never managed to get them back on target. She was crying. Her home town must have been a dreary place.

She turned to Georg and whispered: Marry me. Marry me. Right now.

Oh you know that makes no sense, he said. Nobody screws up a woman like a husband who just won't play the part.

All right, Daddy, I'm coming home, she said and Georg's boss, simultaneously, at the same millisecond, said: What is this stuff, Georg? I warned you explicitly.

When that conversation was over, Mindy was gone and George didn't have a job. The bear that kept him from starving was a businessman from Los Angeles named Carl.

He turned out to be a rich man by desert standards -- temporarily superrich as he described himself -- and that by no means rare type, the perpetual traveler. A restless fellow. One of those people with a "second" home in every town, yet he somehow didn't live in any of them, really, and didn't live anywhere. So he was a nomad more precisely. He had a good eye for spotting good-hearted fools and a very good eye for spotting out-and-out frauds. You would disagree with him but just wait, he tended to be right. So..... You know that so-called daddy of Mindy's? he asked. Well, he was no more her daddy then he was your daddy. Not by any means. That relation was not so pure. That daddy had some very bad ideas in his head. I can always tell.

*

Carl would clear his throat whenever he was about to dispense wisdom. Then the wisdom would come.

You know, Georg.... You should have saved that girl somehow.

*