The Look

“I wish, I wish, I wish in vain …”
There’s a song in there somewhere. A pendulum swinging through the years. And a life, a life rolling it’s merits and its endings between its fingers.

*

There’s a bit of discontent in wishing, to go along with the ‘wouldn’t it be great …’ affirmations. There’s something of the face on the screen door of the way it tends to be, and something of Moses on the shore, able to get across after so much desert, unable to cross. Unable, or it’s just not given to him to get over.

*

A few of us have been on the road now for a bit. Eating well is a hard go. Eating at all in a way that’s not just ‘refuelling’ stretches the likelihoods until they can’t hold much.

The circling satellite, the eye in the sky that’s as close to a good God as the current regime permits, pointed us to a ‘unassuming’ spot clearly meant for locals. One source said it was open at 1 pm, another at 3. We were there for 3 pm, an hour of the day lethal for any culinary standards we might have been clinging to, and we were sort of default-ravenous. We just wished we could eat already.

We scanned the place for any sign of life: no lights, no open sign, no traffic of any kind. Until we spotted a door ajar down a weedy, debris strewn alley along the north side of the squat building, that was, more or less where the unassuming kitchen was likely to be. And there, feasting on who knew what detritus or gunk or kitchen alms, tails up and in earnest, probably seven cats and – go figure – a skunk, in ravenous detente.

And we stayed, waited until the Open light shone out on the desert glare of 3:30 pm where we ate mostly liquid on paper plates with throw away spoons, regaled by a local hard luck Miguel who suggested we should call him Michael Jackson and lived on green chili hamburgers from the place. Later, under the substantial hands of local masseuses, we wished deep into our entrails that we hadn’t waited and gone in.

Even still, when we made to leave, fouled in our innermost, my wife quietly approached the waitress at the cash-only register about covering Miguel Jackson’s bill, she was told that Mike was in every day and was never charged for his fare. He was a kind of foundling whose loneliness they provisioned. Grace and quiet hospitality, there in the unassuming desert.

*

I’ve been working in the painted desert these last weeks. There’s an epic, vast, aweful, almost monstrous beauty laced through the place. There are a few things that could kill you, too: rattlers, getting genuinely lost, almost any dose of hubris or caprice, no water, misanthropy, a bottomless quest for a truth that will survive when you go back to town.

I’ve been, surprisingly, talking a lot. I say ‘surprisingly’ because built into the architecture of this event was the seeming likelihood that my stand and deliver sessions, those events when I’m on the prowl, seeking out allies and the shards of standing culture, were all but done. But the keenness of the crowd roused and riled me, and I was feeling summoned as in days of yore, and one day when the power suddenly died and the sound system failed, I upped and sallied out into the epic no man’s land in front of the stage, and for an hour or more found my beautiful fate again.

Now, this place had within its fences the living and working adobe buildings of Georgia O’keeffe. I was alert to the woman’s ouvre, and the genuine influence and reach the place exerted on contemporary design aesthetic. We passed the place every day, there behind the coyote fences and the padlocked gates, and every day I thought I’d like to see it somehow. Between my work schedule and my reticence to make a nuisance of myself, it didn’t seem likely.

Mid way through the last full day of work, after a victorious session, Kim Johnson and I were walking the two mile walk to our compound. We heard the uncommon sound of vehicles coming up behind us, and moved off the narrow road to let them pass. The lead van pulled over, and two very keen people with walkie talkies and clipboards got out.
Were we locals?, they asked.
Not even a bit, we said.
Doesn’t matter, they said. We like your look. We want you in what we’re doing.

Affable, slightly hyperventilated niceties dispensed with, they cut to the chase: did we mind talking, in fact being interviewed, in fact being taped and filmed for a little project of theirs. There were maybe twelve trucks in their retinue. There was nothing little about whatever it was. We had to eat yet, and were to be back at work in less than an hour.

“What’s your project?”, we asked.
“It’s a socials project.” Kim seemed to know in general what that was. I’d no idea.
But the whole thing was crazy enough …

Forty five minutes later we’re in the middle of a Banana Republic fashion shoot, on the strength of our look, in the middle of the painted desert. In Georgia O’keeffe’s painting studio.

Ah, you never can tell.

Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom