Sorry, I missed a day.
I have struggled with writing Journey, American since I wrote the first sentence. I have spent many hours on many walks and sleepless nights trying to figure out why.
After hearing a lot of my complaints, my friend Robert and I talked things out. What he helped me realize is that I was so busy pantsing (that’s writer slang for writing without an outline) that I honestly had no idea about what kind of life Journey would lead.
I am not talking about a step-by-step progression through his life. That’s too Godlike for me and boring for a reader. Writing and reading have to have some serendipity to be any good.
What I lack is a summary of a life he could live - the life he needs to live to allow me to bring his true message to readers. America is a wild, violent, unfair country that refuses to see itself as it is. No amount of patriotic jingoism can convince me I am wrong about this.
I now feel like I can write this summary of the lives of Journey, Louise and Max among others, knowing the major events that need to happen. The trail must be followed until it reaches the climax I know I will write.
That climax is already written in my head and in a few other real places. I only need to get there. Now I think I have the vehicle that will take me.
Part of this process also made me realize a couple of thousand words I wrote about the Bisbee strike and ensuing violence had to go.
I will set the table. Captain Martinez, now a full-time painter, is reintroduced to Journey by Lulu. His lover is Clintito, the wounded soldier from the French forest in the war. This is Clintito’s story but it wasn’t my story:
Max told his story. Clintito survived one of those American episodes everybody has forgotten. I told you about those earlier. America was brutal in the Twenties and Thirties. Hollywood and my stories about Lulu and the races make it seem all glittery before the Depression came. You kids preach peace and love but the Southwest and South back then knew neither. Hell, the whole country wasn’t too damn kind unless you had money and were white and Christian. You could get along pretty good then.
Ever heard of Bisbee, Arizona?
Bisbee was a Phelps Dodge town. America was getting ready for the war and mining was booming. There was enough for everybody - whites, Mexicans, maybe some blacks - until the people doing the pick-axing realized everybody really meant Phelps Dodge.
Big Bill Hellman of the IWW came to town and showed the workers the light. They were busting ass, getting maimed, getting killed, and making less - old fashion American thievery.
They held secret meetings in public places. Big Bill visited their homes, hidden bars tucked in hovels. Out on the trash heaps.
They decided to strike. The country needed copper and they wanted to be paid their fair share for it. All of them bought into the songs the IWW was singing
Capitalists don’t care for choirs singing songs about equality or justice. They want symphonies to themselves.
The strike began in June. On July 17, 1917, it ended when 2,000 fake deputies showed up with shotguns and clubs.
Clintito was home with his sister and her husband Santaestivan. They shared a tiny place.
There was a knock. No one answered. The butt of a shotgun came through the flimsy door.
“Get out of our house,” Julieta screamed. She took a club to the side of her head and flew across the room.
Santaestivan flew at them in a rage. A shotgun blast flipped him backward in a heap.
Clintito was beaten and dragged to the company baseball field. They shoved most of them into boxcars, locked them in like animals, and sent them by train to New Mexico.
Clintito knew he was one of the lucky ones. He always was.
He was thirsty. He had dozed off while the train slowly crawled the El Paso road along the border, headed east. The sun had burned him and his clothes were soaked with sweat and filthy with dust.
Clintito was lucky because the unlucky ones were beneath him, packed into the boxcars he and a hundred or so others had avoided by climbing to the tops when they were herded out of the ballpark back in Bisbee.
God damned Phelps Dodge. Santaestivan died for nothing. Never open your mouth when you can’t back it up. You will get a fucking smack you won’t wake up from.
The train stopped. Clintito saw nothing but empty desert.
Calvary approached.
“Oh, shit, now they are going to kill us out here where nobody can see,” Miguel whispered, so scared he almost hissed.
“That’s U.S. Calvary,” Clintito said. “They are out here fighting Pancho Villa.”
“Who the fuck is Pancho Villa?” Miguel said.
“He’s a hero but don’t you dare repeat that to any of them. Yes, we are Mexicans inside of America. There is a difference. Besides, you might be a Mexican,” Clintito said, looking straight into Miguel’s eyes, “but I’m American through and through.”
Clintito stood up and the rolling dust cloud of horses and men got closer.
“Stay down!” Miguel said. “Clintito, they will gun you down. Who wants to die in this fucking god-forsaken place?”
I will not die, he vowed.
Clintito waved his arms. Miguel’s eyes widened with terror. The lead troopers spotted him and trotted toward him on their horses.
Clintito brushed the dust off his sleeves and hat and stood straight.
“I thought you would never get here,” he said in perfect English to the troopers as they came closer. “Those fools in Bisbee started the train before I could get off,” Clintito said. “I was trying to get these men settled and bam! The engine engaged and I was on my ass and off to New Mexico.”
The lead trooper was an officer of some sort.
“And you are,” he asked.
“I am Clint,” he said. “Clint Davis. A pleasure to meet you, sir. Can I get down from here? It’s hot.”
“Climb down,” the officer said. “That’s no place for an honest American to be.”
Clintito Barbino and the troops led the bedraggled, lost and now unemployed formerly of Bisbee, Arizona on the long walk to Columbus, New Mexico, which was mostly fort, still shot up from Pancho Villa’s raid the year before. That was his last act. It only took him half a cigarette to come up with a new name.
Clint Davis wrangled an invite to the U.S. Army, got himself some new papers, went in and out of training then found himself stumbling, alone and blinded by blood, in a French forest.
I will not die again and again and again.