“Slick,” I told my writing coach (though not nearly in so many words, otherwise known as fictionalized), “first came into my life in Cut Bank, Montana, as he rode into town, born in the sunset blazing red, purple and orange on the horizon. I had just cracked open my second 40, leaving my religion behind, laughing for the first time in a year, blasting the Beastie Boys’ ‘Live at P.J.’s’ from their (then) new album Check Your Head. The world bent toward him as he rode that tall dark horse under the town’s sign. The full-spectrum light of the crashing sun and all it contained — the greens of street weeds and grays of sun-bleached buildings, the air-borne dirt and hoof-trampled sewer-mud of Main Street, her yellow dress — pulled in toward his curved slouching torso. His head tilted at the pommel, a long-ride’s slog, the flat and wide brim of his open-crown, desert-rider hat cutting into the High Plains horizon beyond the gates and pens of the cattle yards. As he rode past an object caught in that light, it relaxed back into its quotidian shape, back into the world it came from.”
“__________,” my coach said, alluding to the Saboteur, the part of my mind that protects me from the hell that is others by freeing me from obligation to be stupidly obedient …
“__________,” he contradicted me.
… but who also hinders me from finding new ways to be in the world, new futures to explore, new choices free from the limits of habits and ruts carved into the hardpan of the high-desert prairie, the deep cuts of a million wood and iron wheels on an endless loop of out and back, strike and return.
“__________,” he suggested.
“Late one night in a Cut Bank fever dream, down in the hellscape of an 1930’s concrete-wall basement, where I butchered poached deer, linoleum glued to the floor, a chipped iron and porcelain sink and counter top plus cupboards drilled into the wall, I charcoaled him into a scene to capture what he meant to me, to demonstrate his power to knock me out of my cage of ignorance, my hesitation to break out into the wider world. A gallon of wine, The Doors deep in my ears, I drew him from behind, his back sagging above the cantel of the saddle, black hat set far down his head, brim a wide wave, horse in bold outline. Among the pedestrians on the crowded sidewalk and Main Street is a boy in charcoal, startled like a cat, under a cowboy hat, arms out and legs splayed in a burst of fright that was aimed at Slick, who had merely glanced at him. At the top of the painting I printed: ‘Slick scared a boy, and the people went wild.’
“He never spoke to me back then, but in those paintings I tried to present him, to show him. He was always a presence, a force. He was around only a few key years between my attempt to be a Christian and my rejection of a world in which God may reside, but Whose world He’d created to be a universal cage, the only escape into Heaven was through a funnel infinitely constricting toward an infinitely receded exit, in which no conversation is ever complete, no love fully realized, no acceptance ever fully granted …”
“__________.”
“Paige saw him as dangerous, like a powerful drug that warps the very fabric of your mind. Maybe it would all turn out alright, stretched but not torn; but maybe I would become a strange creature, unrecognizable, who strode bizarrely maniacal out of our family, out of our sacred circle. That was never my impression of Slick, though. Through Slick’s influence I would laugh again, I would whistle and hum again. I stepped out of doubt and self-loathing, fear of the rejection I felt all around me, despair of my ignorance, my bad spelling, congenital trouble with the order of the alphabet and months of the year … my ragged uncoordinated handwriting … my dull wit and sharp confusion about complex structures and origins of persons and cultures.
“He said to me through his presence, like the visitation of an angel-demon, ‘Give up and go forward, don’t look back but push into life, let the world’s resistance sharpen you, hone your edge; but don’t reject them, learn from them, hear what they are saying. The witty banter will come. You can do this. Doors will open and you will step through without showing or even having credentials. And yet, work day-by-day and you shall have those, too. No one will keep you from them, from the engagement that leads to understanding: Here, let me show you.’ Then he killed his horse with a pistol blow to its head. He butchered it where it fell in the tall grass, in the dark lit by fire light, and cut and charred flesh for me to eat. A ritual I practiced when I felt cornered or weak and envious.”
“__________?”
“First and foremost, I would tell him: ‘Thank you for showing me a path to Identity, for scaring me out of my fear, for showing me a vision of happy insanity and for the alcohol.’
“‘I didn’t show you anything. You saw on your own that life is pointless fun, dangerous frivolity.’
“‘Hopeless promise.’
“‘Laughable outrage.’
“‘Generous loathing.’
“‘Lifeless ego.’
“‘Warm ingratitude. Ignorant teaching.’
“‘Inchoate epiphanies and broken doors.’
“‘You want nothing for me, and I feel nothing for you.’
“‘Your coach seems to be suggesting you do, and it’s bad for you to do so. I limit your choices.’
“‘I feel a rush of cliches coming on!’
“__________.”
“I asked my wife what would she call a mind without a body. ‘Impotent,’ she said. I said, ‘An angel!’ I accepted then that Slick would fade into the background, that I was intellectually maturing. And yet here I am making excuses for him again as I enter old age.”
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