Creative Writing

Posted on Creative Writing

beyond the green line


elderly ewes who know war
new children, speaking an ancient tongue
a man, both farmer and father, skin hardened by sun, passes by on a horse, reins in one hand, pistol in his pocket.

faraway orchards rise into distant heights. these rocks know violence.

nearby a school lets out, the schoolyard fills. the bomb shelter watches over the young
its doors locked, extinct. Or is dormant?

down the street a teenager sits on the porch his father built
reminiscing of khaki and smoke, dreaming of khaki and smoke.
the army awaits him. small earlocks curl down his ears,
his hair disappears under a knit yarmulke*, in the language of the old country.

*skullcap

Posted on Creative Writing

Translating a poem

Here, I try my hand at translating some poetry by Yehuda Amichai, the late Israeli poet whose casual integration of Biblical Hebrew into the modern canon revolutionized Israeli poetry. Read an essay I wrote on Amichai here, or browse through my presentation with some more examples of his poetry and a few of my own notes. 

12.

Jerusalem’s foundation flinches, alone in her pain.
Deep within her, a tangle of nerves.
Occasionally among the eons, masses gather:
into writhing, mobs: a new Tower of Babel.
But, God-the-Police beats them down.
Walls breached and houses laid waste.
And after, the city unravels again, while muttering
Prayers of protest, scattered cries from the churches
and synagogues, and screams from the mosque minarets
Each, an other, in his place. 

Hebrew, Yehuda Amichai

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Victoria

It was the first morning. I, a ninth-grader, watched cautiously as a jet-lagged stranger spread fish on crackers for breakfast in our kitchen, before sprinkling green powder on them.

At eighteen, Victoria had packed her suitcase in rural Sweden and flown halfway across the world to live with us for a year. We were her host family, and she was to study in the United States and teach us about her culture while she learned about ours. Through the ensuing series of misadventures, memories and experiences, Victoria instilled in me her joy in life, a passion for exploration, and a sense of wanderlust which has changed my worldview ever since.

That first morning, she offered me one of the crackers, holding up the stinky substance before my scrunched-up nose. “​Surströmming​?” she asked. Pickled herring​.​ I shook my head at this offering. She laughed and insisted I try it. Relenting, I took a tiny bite, then a bigger one. My former hesitation morphed into enthusiasm (it was delicious).

Soon, the distractions of breakfast had passed, and Victoria sat on the couch across from me: silence ensued. It was a sleepy weekend, so she suggested we go on a drive. She, my father and I piled into the car. Victoria, reaching for the clutch she was used to in Europe, accidentally slammed on the brake and we lurched forward. Driving would have to wait.

Over the subsequent months, which turned into a year, and then another, Victoria became a part of our family. I showed her things I was proud of: the warmth of the Hanukkah candles or my collection of favorite novels, which poured out of my overflowing “book closet.” I brought her stacks of my old photography, music and travel magazines. My brother and I showed her our favorite card games and bicycle paths: our July and August afternoons were a blur of biking through green trees and over bridges, with quick breaks for Swedish snacks from a shop in the city. Later, in the dead of winter, we drank ​julmust, ​Scandinavian holiday soda.

Victoria showed me it is okay to take risks, like she did by leaving Sweden and traveling to the U.S. just a month after high school. She encouraged me study passionately but leave time to explore. Victoria taught me to go forth into the world. Sometimes, we would grab our cameras or buy a disposable camera and go into New York City. Victoria would cover her eyes, point to a part of the subway map, and as she put it: “let the winds take us there.” On these trips we found old antique shops, hidden delis, new streets and sounds and smells. I documented it all on my camera and in my mind, capturing faces, buildings and street art to keep for later. As a journalist, I am a storyteller, and Victoria showed me that I can write my own life’s story, so long as I take the first step and try.

Victoria left recently; the winds took her elsewhere. She now pops up on my phone in pictures taken in Copenhagen, or a video posted from Crete. As of right now, she is somewhere in Thailand, probably inspiring others with her joy for living and travel, her understanding that time is in the present.

Someday I will live like Victoria, even if just for a little while. I am a journalist, writer and language-nerd. I yearn to see new places, meet new people and learn more things. I dream of colorful markets, unfamiliar cities and new museums. Victoria showed me to take my best qualities and set myself loose on the world, to breathe free and dance in the sunlight.

Posted on Creative Writing

Naubelt Saintil

My knee scraped on the curb as I knelt beside Naubelt Saintil’s taxi, but I wouldn’t notice the bruise until later. I was fixated on his story, and struggling to capture as much of it as I could in my reporter’s notebook. I wrote furiously, perspiring in the July sunlight. My journalistic senses were taking in his words, the frayed French Bible on his lap, and the multicolored idol of the Virgin Mary swinging from his rearview mirror.

Moments earlier, I had been wandering the unfamiliar streets of Evanston, Illinois, searching for a compelling feature article for my journalism class. The assignment, given that morning, was to report on an undiscovered niche in the city; my first draft would be due in eight hours.

A group of hair salons, located in a row, caught my eye: could there be a story here about business competition? I stepped into the first salon, ringing the bell as I entered, and found myself being sized up by a group of sharp-eyed Midwestern women. A teenage boy with a notebook and a backpack: I wasn’t there for a blow-out. One hairdresser, with bright blue eyeshadow and glossy black hair whipped into a halo around her head, asked, “Could ya come back next month?” My other inquiries for an interview were met with an echo of blunt refusals.

With just a few hours left, I returned to the street empty-handed. When I am on a deadline, I have no time to waste. I needed a story.

I scoured my surroundings, pausing to survey the street around me for something out of place, a hint of anything unusual.

As I passed the local Hilton I saw a line of idling taxis, each with an equally idle driver. Had they been put out of business by ride-sharing apps like Uber? Cautiously, I approached the first driver in the line. She frowned, answered a few questions curtly, and looked away. Undeterred, I moved to the next unenthusiastic driver, and the next. Still, there had to be something here, and I was going to find it.

Then I met Saintil.

The rumble of his taxi’s engine melted into the faint radio static. He returned my greeting with a resonant Haitian accent. “Parlez-vous français?” I asked, to his surprise. “Oui,” he said, sitting up in his seat and grinning. Saintil and I spoke for a few minutes in French, as I tried to establish the rapport vital to a good interview.

Switching to English, Saintil told me about his children, their needs, and his worries about finding a new job at the age of 60 as his business stagnates. He spoke of days when whole mornings would pass by without a customer, and of hotel guests who wait an hour for Ubers instead of using his available taxi.

I interviewed other drivers, including a Nigerian-American real estate agent and father of five, and a quiet, middle-aged single mother worried about supporting her family. One driver told me he had been on the streets since before sunrise, and had yet to find a passenger. There was a trend appearing here. I knew I had found a story.

I returned to class that evening with a notebook filled with the vibrant stories of once thriving drivers, who are now struggling to survive. I witnessed the human side of a collapsing industry. With their life experiences in my voice recorder and notes, it became my journalistic duty and privilege to make their stories tangible; their struggles and successes read, recorded and remembered. Though Saintil thanked me when we finished our interview, I realized that I was more grateful to him, for giving me, and the world, his story.

Posted on Creative Writing

night in the hills

next to us, an abandoned car adorned with na, na, nachma, nachman…
we had seen them around, read their slogan plastered on alley bricks
those crazy men, with their joy and certainty and sabbath cheer
we brushed them off, extremists, as we peered into our phones, searching for meaning
on friday nights and the extremists peered into each other’s eyes, having found it already…

they came through the streets, white caps topped with string, yelling
they were drunk, elhanan said, they used drugs and called it religion
the men jumped and ran in circles, grabbing each other and holding on
they made their way down mahane yehuda, through the shuk,
their bodies expressed their joy, their voices rose up in unison

the men were happy. the wome—

we had heard the na, na, nachma, nachman hasidim camping in the judean
mountains, that night.
we had pitched our tents, shaken ants from our pads and pillowcases
clutched each other in the dark, listening to their chanting

they clamored for hours, screaming and whooping
they had set up camp in the mountains, their cars adorned with graffiti,
parked by their encampment. they set up speakers, heavy with bass and whining with treble,
blasting rhythmic music
into the mountains of their quiet ancestors
we’re back, they screamed, without words, their beat shook our tent
their hopes have their home in the hills.
they danced and sang as i truly wished to dance and sing
i fell asleep, longing.

•••

the mystics descended to the mountain spring
the night had shaken with the breslover beats
we wiped sleep, little of it, from our eyes
we made eye contact with the men at the spring

g-d’s breath, a flash of sunlight too bright

a brief nod, a smile
at this spring, this ancient mikveh, i washed the fatigue from my body
the men took off their knit kippot, leaving them on folded trousers
they stood in the sun, immersing one by one in the frigid waters

Posted on Creative Writing

friday, jerusalem

it’s this way, Jeremy pointed, our eyes met his long finger
the masses all moved in one direction, long black skirts brush bricks
the whole world felt like it was closing in on m—
we merged inwards, absorbed by the mass, we made it to the left lane
i’m suffocating there are too many people, too much to think about
cars stop on shabbat but no one mentions the human traffic
we continue downwards, labyrinthine streets lit by belief—
people running somewhere, we’re all from here right, why do i feel so lost the old city feels like it’s mourning something, i don’t know what
the unknowable, untouchable Divine made himself present here?
only a few feet away g-d was right up there on top of that—
my great-great-grandfather dreamt about this place as he bound
pale, shtetl arms in the leather strappings of our—
gam al ha’af, the soldier yells, i pull my mask up over my nose
we turn the corner the throbbing crowd, screaming at g-d
pushed into one corral of prayer we stand and begin to sing
a group of men with black hats grab each other, sweating, vibrating
•••
a glimmer of the dome up above looks down upon us—
my friend, wouldn’t hurt a fly, points to it—
“one day, one day,”
“one day what?” I ask, knowing the response
“one day it will be ours”
but isn’t it idolatry to focus on this one pl—
won’t that involve unnecessary bloodshe—
•••
the merrymakers below are oblivious to the eyes above,
watching the streams of humans, the huddled masses
as they celebrate, but mostly writhe and sob and wander, utterly lost—
the eyes above could be g-d or could be soldiers with uzis does it
really matter, if both can smite—
•••
a knowing eye looks down upon us
and smiles at our innocence

Posted on Creative Writing

forty minutes till Shabbat at the Lev Yerushalayim Hotel

I lock eyes with the man hanging out of the hotel window.
His arm grasps the sill, the other waves in the breeze.
A cigarette hangs, precariously, on red lips.
a glance to the right reveals another man, cigarette clutched in teeth, farther to the right, another.
every window of the third, fourth and fifth floor, another man.
a hundred men, each to his own room, each to his own window.
the overwhelming cigarette smoke consumed us as we stood, looking up at them,
they peered down at us.
each man, in quarantine for a virus.

the New York Times said the virus has driven us apart.
here, these men gathered together. At a distance, between their windows
they joked, laughed, wisps of Hebrew drifting down from the third story.
one man sat on a fire escape, reading.
another man stood, adidas tracksuit, speaking Arabic on his phone.
took a virus to bring the Nusseibeh’s and Oz’s of Jerusalem together, perhaps.
but they were still divided.
in a window to the far right, a Haredi woman stood alone. It was closed, but she too looked out from behind a dirty windowpane, wig under black knit hat, white telephone to her ear.

all these descendants of Abraham, infected together, standing apart.
when it came time for evening prayers, the Lev Yerushalayim hotel became Isaiah’s house of prayer for all peoples, a diseased temple on the mount.

Posted on Creative Writing

isaac’s akeidah

nettle and thistle scratched me underfoot, drawing blood
it dripped down my leg, leaving a trail, like red teardrops, they dried
in the evening sun, which hung low in the sky like an ember
as it dropped, very slowly, into the western hills
there were oceans there, father told me, wide expanses of water
wade far enough, and you would fall off into the open yadayim* of g-d
i had never been to the ocean, no, my life was bound
to these hills, to this very hike, this path ever-upwards
my father, far along in his years and aging with every appearance and
disappearance of the gray moon. his face was gray too, partially
concealed behind a beard, and very solemn
he helped me over a particularly large rock, and we came to a clearing
father seemed upset, “what is wrong father?”
he was silent, busy in his work, the sun dipping farther and the air increasingly
cold.
father had split wood, many pieces of it, until his hands were splintered and
they too, wept with blood. i offered to wrap them and he refused.
he cried among the trees, he was preoccupied.
i sat next to a pool of water, small insects crawled on its surface
they hummed near my ears, i took a deep breath and looked upwards
the servants, whom we had left with the ass,
made noise and gathered around a fire. i wished to join their merrymaking
i could see its smoke escaping, free like a bird
father approached me as i sat, the sun dipped farther and the mood (and sky)
became very dark. i was afraid, suddenly.
father would not speak to me, his eyes looked wild and i saw the endless
ocean in his pupils as we embraced. i was a snake, caught between rocks.
only still images remain, the motion has been blurred out by pain
father bound me, we both still bled, he from splinters and I from nettles,
our blood mixed in the ground, soaking the soil.
the air was metallic and fresh, a knife appeared, grasped by evil gray knuckles

(inspired by Genesis 22)

* ידיים – arms

Posted on Creative Writing

Chasing the Sunshine of ’67

This short story is fictional.

Garcia 

Nan is always very dirty. Her old eyes, which she once told me had seen the whole wide world and better days which I would never know, are hidden behind many wrinkles which make her look like an old bird. Nan is very short, maybe five feet tall, with white hair in a messy bun held with twine. Nan does not wash, well, none of us wash. Mom says we do not need soap to clean our bodies, only the air of the forest and the purity of our faith in Leader. Still, when the days are warm and it is summer, we go to the creek to wade with the tadpoles and minnows and water-skipper bugs which make Nan yelp with disgust and shut her wrinkly, old eyes with fear. I also hate the water-skipper bugs but I stay very quiet because I do not want to upset Nan. I can’t upset Nan.

Mom says life on the commune is better than life outside the commune, and I know she is right. Mom is always right, and I believe Mom.

Indigo Johnson

My family lives in utter squalor. I remember my last visit to the commune as if it was yesterday, though it will be six years tomorrow. I stepped into the cabin, that same pathetic structure of my youth, with its sagging roof and dirty tie-dye curtains concealing even dirtier windows. Oh, the smell! It hits you from the outside: stale marijuana, unwashed clothes, the indescribable odor of twenty years of bodies and their tears and sex and sleep and filth. Sister and Ma and my poor ten-year-old nephew Garcia living in voluntary destitution. ​Oh, how thankful I am to have escaped the smell of the commune. I shed the organic drippings of the cabin and woods for my business suit and undergraduate degree. Oh, how New York City pulses in my heart at night and reminds me I made the right choice to leave. Do I miss the commune? No. Yes? Do I miss the Ma of my youth, the Ma of ‘69 when our commune was one of dozens in the Berkshire mountains*, well? Yes, I miss Ma, but I no longer miss the commune. Maybe I miss the Berkshires trees which surround the site and spread shade over the cabin and the well and the gardens. But, no, I do not miss Sister.

It is 1986, and the communes which we once counted as neighbors have since packed up and gone away, and the era of free love and peace is fading into memory for everyone except Ma and Sister and her poor son.

I called Sister last week, I talked to her on the commune’s landline phone and heard her voice which poured into my ear like the heroin she once poured into her pocked arms to soothe her troubled soul.

“Hi Sister,”
“Hi Indigo. Indigo, we are leaving the commune soon.” “What?” I asked, startled.

Jane Johnson

The shrill tone of the phone rouses me violently from my psychedelic stupor and stuns me into reality. Getting up off the bed, I lean across the sheets and put the receiver to my ear. The light on the ceiling pulses into my eye, the white beam dividing into dozens of colors, real and imaginary, which flood my psyche and touch my soul. I come back to consciousness and the phone, now pressed against my ear, and I manage to say hello.

“Is this the residence of Blue Johnson.” It is an unfamiliar voice.

“That’s my mother, she is outside, this is her daughter speaking,” I say.

“This is head Commune.”

My hand starts shaking violently, my head feels light and I sit down on my bed. “Ma,” I say. “MA,” I scream.

“What,” I hear her yell from the picnic table, where she spends every night sitting and smoking. Ma finally appears in the doorway, leaning on her wooden cane and looking at me with red, tired eyes.

“I think it’s Leader,” I say.

Blue Johnson

I hear Jane yelling from the inside. Usually it’s the withdrawal, her nightmares of days soaked with opium smoke and paranoia. She screams “MA” and I run to her bedside with water and a joint and she smokes and drinks and I say breathe and her frightened eyes quiet and she sleeps. But her scream now is not the scream of need but the scream of urgency so I yell back “What?” while I hoist my creaky body off the porch table which serves as my nighttime throne and I walk inside. Her eyes are filled with a new fear, her hand trembles slightly on the phone and her heavy breathing fills the cabin. “​It’s Leader,” she says. How could head Commune call now of all times? After nineteen years? We are one of the smallest offshoot communes in the country, just the three of us in my cabin. The marijuana in my brain floods my head with a wave of memories, I steady myself on my cane. Suddenly I leave the cabin and find myself in the sun-soaked summer of ‘67 when life was good and love was free for the taking and Leader was still publishing his ideas and peace was coming. Now I feel as though our goals have gone stagnant as society, even my own traitorous daughter, leaves us behind in pursuit of money and hatred and possessions.

Garcia

Nan says I must pack my things. Nan says it very fast, as though what she is telling me to do scares her and she needs to get it off her chest and expel it from her old brain. Mom stands quietly in the corner, looking at the picture of Leader and humming: “The forests sing out your praises, your gifts lead us to nirvana.” ​Mom cannot sing as well as Nan; Nan is a very good singer and she sings to the stars and animals and to Leader at night, I hear her outside, I see her with the smoke from her joint curling around her old head and her old fingers. ​Nan said we have been called to head Commune.

I have only heard them speak about head Commune in whispers, in quiet voices when they think I am asleep but the buzz of the crickets and the hot air and the nighttime din of the forest keep me awake. I only hear snippets: “Colorado,” “the dancing,” Mom says quietly. “In a plane?” Mom asks. “Never,” Nan whispers sharply, cutting through the quiet hum of the air. “The car then,” Mom whispers.

Nan leans on her cane as she hoists bag after bag into the trunk of the car. It had taken me all morning to scrub the car with the old towel Nan keeps in the cabin. Mom cries and cries and cries. Mom cries often, it is just her nature Nan says, but I think it is because she misses the needles. ​Even I can’t forget the needles. There were so many needles.

Blue Johnson

We receive word that night on the phone from head commune that Leader has fallen ill with cancer. It has been nineteen years and yet Leader’s smile and voice still infatuate me and fill my mind. I have lived for him since ‘67, when he accepted me and Indigo and Jane into the group and we lived in the sunlight. I miss Leader often, but I sing for him and I think about him so that I can’t forget him, his crooked smile with a cigarette sticking out​ ​and his bright, hopeful eyes​. ​I am an atheist, my God is peace my God is love and my God is freedom but I ​do believe in Leader. L​eader is ill and we must go to him despite the distance. I haven’t been out of the commune these whole nineteen years, besides maybe to the store and I don’t want to leave but I must, for Leader.

Indigo Johnson

My mother is in a cult, well I guess by proxy Blue and Garcia are in it too. Well, they call it a commune but once I arrived at college in the big city and learned how cults manipulate minds I realized Leader was just a man and his promises were also made of air and false sunlight, but mother thinks they are real. “He holds the keys,” she told me every night before bed in the

cabin. Oh, she’d spin elaborate stories out of thread and spread them over me like a delicate blanket as I fell asleep. Ma wove tales of free love and sex and drug-soaked days of her youth when music would play for hours and people would spin and spin and turn like tops until the stars studded the purple horizon over head commune and the sun went to sleep. ​Oh, I guess you could say I miss Ma’s stories and her faith but I now know that Leader isn’t really enlightened and head commune isn’t really paradise and I can’t bring myself to tell Ma.

Sister says on the phone they dusted off the old car with its yellow, chipped paint and left the commune to return to Leader. Oh, it is kind of a motley crew for a cross-country drive, given that head Commune is somewhere in Colorado now. In ‘67 it was in California where Ma and the hippies lived in the shadows of the redwoods and Leader and his dedicated followers sang and danced under the pacific rains and breezes. At least that’s how Ma described it but I have my doubts. I can’t remember it there, I was so young at the time.

Blue Johnson

I don’t know what it is that fills me with such an urge to pack up and visit Leader. Maybe it is his teaching that we “must be devoted to our kind” and “sow warmth and care upon those in need.” We three pack into the car and it shakes and shudders to life and we start off down the highway, my hands clutching the wheel. We fly down the interstate and cover more ground than I have traveled in years. We move like insects, crawling over concrete roads like worker bees traveling towards the Queen. ​Perhaps the Leader is like our monarch but I’m not religious I don’t believe in anything, except perhaps Leader and the power of a good joint.

Garcia’s young eyes look stunned out of the car window, as trucks scream past and the landscape changes from wood to fields to corn to woods yet again. The sun beats down overhead, lighting up his blue eyes and shaggy brown hair and illuminating his dreamlike face. Jane sleeps next to him, and Leader’s voice fills the space from the cassette player. “We are all here for but a short while, so we must spend it with those we love,” his voice crackles out of the dashboard. ​I love Leader, and I really do miss Indigo.

Jane Johnson

I often find myself dozing off onto Garcia’s shoulder as the minutes turn into hours and the hours turn into days and the landscapes we pass through blend into a forgettable canvas of greens and reds and yellows. ​I’d offer Ma to help drive but she wanted to go see Leader and I can’t even drive anyway from the heroin bust so I’ll just languish here in the backseat, stuffed between Garcia and Ma’s ancient trunks filled with our stuff and I can’t wait to get out of this fucking car.

Garcia

“Have you ever heard of Ohio?” Nan asks me a few miles after the car crosses into the state. “No, Nan.” Nan took her eyes off the road and looked at me with a smile. I look down, fiddling with my thumbs and then looking out at the corn fields which surround the highway. We left the house before sunrise after Nan got the call and we have been in the car all day. Well we stopped to pee at the side of the road and eat turkey sandwiches which Mom made but now we are back in the car and the sun is burning up the cornfields in front of us. “The sun sets in the West, Garcia,” Nan says, her visor shading her face as her old hands clutch the steering wheel. “Ok,” I respond. ​Nan talks about the sun a lot. She says once upon a time she danced in the sunlight.

Indigo Johnson

“Hi there” the voice rasps into a faraway telephone. The shrill scream of the phone had broken the silence which enveloped me as I studied in my apartment.

“Hello?” I respond, trying to make out the voice, though I guess it is Ma. “Indigo? Can you hear me?
“Yes, Ma,” I say.

“We are calling from a payphone ​and​,” I hear a truck ​whoosh​ by the phone booth. It drowns out Ma’s voice. Oh why are these people doing this, ​why couldn’t they just stay on the commune why did they have to do this, well I left, but they shouldn’t leave.

“We are in Illinois, Indigo. My gosh it feels like we’ve been driving forever, well more specifically it feels like ​I’ve​ been driving forever. Hah! My fingers are all stiff from clutching that darn wheel. What has it been now, Garcia? Two days?”

I hear Garcia chime in in the background, “Three, Nan, it’s been three days.” ​He sounds so grown-up. It’s been so many years since I have seen Garcia, with his dirty rattle and dirty toys and big crooked smile.

“It’s been three days,” Ma repeated confidently.
“I heard Garcia,” I said, looking out over the traffic which filled 117th street.

“We have been staying in motels, Indigo, and we’re heading out again tomorrow, should reach Colorado soon enough, Leader needs us, Indigo,” Ma says. I don’t respond, I hear Ma breathing in the other end and the crackle of the wind and distance.

Why is Ma so convinced? I take a deep breath, fill my lungs with air — sweet city air filled with freedom and opportunity and the breath of others stacked above and below me who don’t obsess over Leader and I come back to the call.

“Ok, Ma. Tell me how it goes.”
“I will, Indigo,” her voice sounds distant, I know she is looking off into the distance. “Bye, Ma.” The receiver clicks and the phone’s hollow dial tone fills my ear.

Halfway to Colorado in three days what is that ​I try and do the math, never been a math person maybe 9 hours a day? Oh, Ma. Ma, who is willing to do anything for Leader she will go so far for leader she will leave Pa for leader she will drive halfway across the country for Leader. ​Why does she do it all for Leader?

Garcia

The big purple mountains fill up the sky and seem to crack the earth in front of us and they have snow on them despite the fact that it is nearly summer. It is very cold at night here. Nan says we are almost at head commune and her voice is very excited and her eyes are very alive. ​Well maybe it is because Nan has not had her joint in a few days and she usually loves to have her joint like Mom once loved her needles, but the joint is not as bad as the needles since the joint makes Nan smile and the needles would make Mom shake and sleep and scream and cry.

Never have I ever seen such big, big mountains. They are monsters which rip apart the land and they are shadows to the big, setting sun which also fills the sky. My back hurts from all the driving, and my ears ring from the voice of Leader which still crackles out of the car speakers. It has been very quiet except for Leader’s voice on the cassette and the roar of the tires underneath the car. Mom especially has been very quiet during the rides, but I hear her voice at night when I pick up snippets of her and Nan talking in quick voices outside the motel room window and I try to drown them out but their voices fill up my head and and the picture of Leader which Nan brings everywhere looks at me through the yellow half-light of the room which pours from the neon motel sign through the broken curtains.

Nan says that at head commune Leader lives with many other followers like us, but that they live a purer form of Leader’s vision, although Nan never tells me exactly what the vision is but I know it is good and Nan says it is good and pure like the sunshine of ‘67.

Jane Johnson

As we near head commune, the Rocky mountains which spotted the distance only a few hours before surround our small car and disappear into the nighttime, becoming one with the sky until the galaxies appear and hang like jewels above us. Ma has since turned off the track of Leader’s sermons, and the only sound now is Garcia’s breathing (who has dozed off) and the quiet putter of the tired engine.

The dozens of hours felt like a blur but only now, as the mountain nighttime air dips into the open window and bites my nose do I feel alive, like I have come out of a coma and entered reality. Ma took this trip for Leader since Leader has fallen ill and she says she needs to see him once more. ​“I just need to,” she says. Maybe she just wants to relive the glory of ‘67 but I have always thought there was something more to it. Garcia begins to snore as the clock turns from 11:59 to midnight and ​wow this is the first time I have even looked at the clock this whole long way and man are we far from home.

“We are quite close,” Ma breaks the silence and I look at her, the same hands clutching the steering wheel as they have this entire long way.

“Yeah?” I respond.
“Next exit. Loveland, Colorado,” she says.

The word Loveland has always existed in my mind as the place where head commune, and Leader reside, but never has it felt so real. As we turn off the exit the headlights illuminate an empty stretch of road banked by pine trees. For miles, we fly down the road — no trace of human existence besides our humming car and the road beneath our tires. I see Ma become more tense, her breathing becomes hurried, and she grips the steering wheel stronger than before. ​Suddenly I feel an overwhelming urge for my needles and for the dope which takes off that sharp edge of life and dulls out the pain until all sensations blend into one and the grays and the blues and the sweet and the melancholy saturate your thoughts and placate your mind.

“We’re here, Jane, wake Garcia.” My body tenses as we pull into head commune, hasn’t it all been leading up to this? This was the place Ma would speak to me and Indigo about as children. She’d tell us of Leader, and how he captured her heart and mind and his vision spoke to her and she needed ​just needed t​o live according to his word. Well, Ma has never been to head commune after it moved to Colorado and she moved back to the East Coast but now we are here and it is happening and we are to see Leader and…

“It is so dark, Jane,” Ma says. Her voice cut me off from my race of thoughts and I looked around. She is right — the streetlights are off, all the light is flooding from our car and from one cabin in the distance.

“Well, it is so late at night,” I respond, but I feel worried. Something feels wrong, maybe it is just the mountain altitude. ​It feels like that feeling when the dope was running low and there was only one more pinch for too many hours and it felt so uncertain and I knew that the shakes would start if I didn’t get more.

Our car pulls up to the cabin with the light and Ma turns off the engine and gets out and Garcia stretches and we three ascend the stairs like we are entering the the kingdom of paradise and knock ​tap tap tap ​on the door and it swings open and the face which I have seen in the pictures and the mailings and the posters and in my very brain greets us, but it doesn’t seem right.

Garcia

I wake up as we enter head commune and Nan and Mom and I go up to the door and it opens and the man behind it has a very bushy beard. It takes me a minute to realize that it is Leader and I feel very excited but also scared. That face (without the beard) watches over our house and, for the past week, over our motel room with big thoughtful eyes. But now those eyes in front of us look strained and red and his hair, which is combed in the poster and images, is unkept and he does not look the same, maybe it is because he is ill which is why we came here anyway but I don’t know.

Mom and Nan say “Hi there, hello” and Leader looks at them blankly like he has never seen them before. Maybe it is because he is ill but he says “who are ya” and the smell of his breath is wrong and smells like whatever is in the clear bottle on the table behind him I think Mom once said it is called “Lick or” but I don’t know what she means by that because I think it is alcohol.

We go inside and sit on the bed and the cabin is a little bit cleaner than ours but not much cleaner, but it has a similar smell to ours and for a second I feel at home. ​A cone of patchouli incense burns in the corner and fills the air with its sweet, smokey aura like burnt honey and herbs. And the year is 1986 but I feel like this incense is the smell on Nan’s mind when she talks about the sunshine of the summer of ‘67. While Ma and Nan talk I look at the incense, watch the smoke curl and turn over and over itself into the air like the smoke which drips off of Nan’s joint and I watch the air dissolve it till it is no more.

I keep watching the incense that whole time while I listen to Leader and Ma and Nan talk and then kept watching it from across the room on the cot they set me up on until I fell asleep and the next thing I see is the morning light flooding the room.

Blue Johnson

The scent of patchouli and sandalwood gushes into the crisp, mountain air as the door swings open and we stand before Leader. I feel my eyes well up with tears and the years between us seem to evaporate into what felt like a few, long minutes. His face looks older, more tired — with new lines on his forehead and a beard which now conceals the chiseled jawline which stands out in my photos of him.

He does not recognize me at first, but I remind him of who I am and of the summer of ‘67 and of how I have lived according to his principles and brought my child and grandchild with me here to see him and he smiles and remembers me and invites us in and my heart pounds with anticipation since it is really him and ​I don’t believe in anything except maybe this man and he is right here in front of me.

I sit and smile and clutch my cane but I can’t help noticing the empty bottles strewn about and bottles of medication which are scattered around the cabin’s kitchenette. They reflect the light of one exposed bulb on the ceiling which pulses around the cabin and fills the space with an eerie yellow light like it is dawn though it is just past midnight.

Leader smells of alcohol and I am worried ​why is he drinking with the cancer? a​nd he says he missed me all these years and is glad I came and I respond that we had to come before the cancer gets worse. Leader always said to us alcohol detracted from the pure path which explains why I don’t drink and only smoke and use the herb which Leader believed in.

“What cancer,” he says, “it’s liver disease,” he says, and my head swims with worry and confusion and I just don’t understand. Was I too high on my call that night.? Did I not hear right? After all, I had stumbled into the room, heard the voice on the phone say “cancer” but they must have said “cirrhosis.”​ I think of the Wizard of Oz which my mother had shown me once as a little girl when we lived in Brooklyn and how the quadruplet approach the Emerald City and stand before the wizard and he is just a man behind the curtain and now Leader appears to be that man but I wonder who was the wizard and where was the curtain and I feel so tired and must go to sleep so we arrange blankets on the floor and a cot for Garcia and sleep and sleep until the sun rouses us in the morning.

Garcia

Mom and Nan and I wake up and then sit together outside Leader’s cabin and watch head commune’s morning ritual. The many people, who were hidden last night in the woods and dark cabins, come out in their tie-dye clothes. Some of the men and women are almost naked, and I can tell that none of them wash just as we do not wash. Nan joins them, and they stand in a circle with Leader and begin to sing the same songs which Nan sings at night on the commune. Now though, the songs come to life and their voices mix and rise together toward the sky. They beat drums and chant, and move in circles, spinning around and around for many minutes so even watching them is dizzying. ​The men and women spin and spin and spin like colorful tops and it becomes an optical illusion, a pulsing rhythm of bodies.

I hold Mom’s hand in mine, her fingers are so soft and warm — unlike when they were cold and dead and I am so happy that there are no needles anymore. We are at head commune and since Mom is happy I think I am happy and at least Nan is happy because if Nan is happy I am happy and isn’t that the goal anyway?

Jane Johnson

I remember when they took Garcia away from me. They had found me high, my eyes rolling like white marbles back into my brain and the needle sticking out from my dead, gray arm. They had found me in the apartment, Garcia was alone in his crib and his crying had woken the neighbors. They had found me with so much heroin coursing through my veins that I had nearly died and gone to the paradise.

Sometimes, I dream of poppies, bursting with rich opium saps and dancing gracefully to the tune of the wind in high, lush mountain prairies. Then I dream of the refined, crystalline powders which I would get from the man on the street to smoke and snort and shoot and I wonder how one led to the other. Garcia was taken away from me for a long time, and when I got him back I threw out my needles and dope and I moved back to the commune with Ma.

So now, as I sit with Garcia watching head commune’s morning dance, I grab his small hand and hold it very tight because I can’t let Garcia get taken away from me again even if it means no more needles. His hand is very small in mine, and I put my other arm around his shoulder and hold him so tight against me so that we are one. I watch as Ma dances around and around, spinning in circles, her lips moving along to the melody of the group and her old feet stomping to their beat.

Blue Johnson

The morning dance that first day at head commune fills me with hope. I step out into the field with the others, leaving my cane and Garcia and Jane behind on Leader’s porch. I felt a new energy fill me up as we gathered into a circle and took each other’s hands. I recognize some faces, each imbued with the same optimism and sense of purpose which had always captivated me.

We begin to spin, faster and faster until the pines around head commune blur and become a green river and my head is filled with the sound of the voices and instruments. My legs, creaky as they are, become agile and numb, my torso rotates and gyrates with intensity. I throw my hands up in the air and look to the sky, which is filled with light gray clouds. I feel dizzy, spinning and spinning but I cannot stop — the beat consumes me as it did in ‘67 and I lose sight of Garcia and Jane on the porch, they blend too into the green and it all becomes one.

So Leader is an alcoholic now, dying of liver disease and so ill he must sit down to watch the morning ritual. Well maybe if I spin hard enough he too will melt away into the backdrop and the past nineteen years of my life will have been worth something Garcia and Jane enter my view again as I spin in their direction, and who am I joking? It has been worth it for them.

The gray clouds continue to become lighter as the ritual proceeds, and while we stand and chant the various hymns I look up again and see a break in the clouds. The break becomes whiter and whiter until finally the final clouds dissipate and the sun gushes in like a golden waterfall, drenching my face and body and soul in its majesty. I know I have found it again, even though I didn’t know I was looking for it, and I feel weak and mighty all at once, standing there enlightened in the same sunlight which had poured over me in ‘67.

Garcia

I see Nan smiling at the sky, the sunlight in her face and her wrinkles hard to see in the bright light. She stands without her cane, holding onto nothing but the air around her and I can see her breathing in and out. I lean into Mom, who is holding my hand so tight that it feels tingly. She is also watching Nan, who seems alone even though she is surrounded by a busy group of people. Tears rush down Mom’s face and I don’t know why, but I know it is not about needles or about Auntie Indigo or about anything else. I know Mom’s tears are just because she is watching Nan and she thinks Nan looks just as young and beautiful in the sunlight as I do.