Just Don’t Go Back To Big Sur

So much for the city and the streetlights he thought. They’re never going to guide you home, only take you down to the edge of town where the sidewalk ends and there’s something more than darkness in the air.

She just laughed and said that no one here forgets their past. They’re just condemned to keep on repeating the same dumb mistakes over and over again until the wheels come off the rails and they crash and burn in a blaze of something less than glory. Has beens chasing the tail of the American Dream, hoping they’d marry a Kennedy.

Whatever happened, my friend, I found myself thinking as I gazed into her swimming pool eyes. She was wearing that dress, the one she wore when I’d first seen her across the dance floor, bathed in the lazy orange light, a million tiny stars from the mirror ball reflecting on her ruby red lips. She’d asked me for a dance but I’d dipped out, taking a rain check and promising to take her up on the offer another time, another place. I wished there was some kind of way I could get through to her, but too many days had passed since we’d first met and a spark had ignited her eyes and my heart, a heart that now beat to the sound of a different drum. I felt the sour taste of regret rise in my throat as I remembered leaving King City and heading up 101 towards Salinas in search of the ghosts of George and Lenny, remembering the sweet young kid corrupted by the harsh realities of ranch life and a brutal husband who wanted her only for a treasure, but not to be treasured. I found myself wondering if I’d treated her the same, looking for things in her that never existed, even though I’d tried to convince her they did.

I remember how her strawberry blonde hair shone in the sunlight as we headed along 68 to Monterey and the Pacific coastline, as the wind tossed her curls around like a wild ocean spray. Christ, I recalled thinking, she’s so beautiful it hurts, although she never flaunted her looks or used them to gain any sort of advantage. Well at least not while I was around.

After that we headed out towards Carmel and hooked up to Highway 1 and the coast road down to the area known as Los Padres. We’d stopped to eat sandwiches and drink Coke and I felt the ghosts of the Ohlone drifting on the warm winds that blew lazily across from the Sierra Navada mountains. They say that Juan Cabrillo knelt down and kissed the ground all those years ago, believing that he’d discovered The Garden Of Eden, and at that very moment in time I swear to God she was my Eve, biting on a ruby red apple and turning her face from the sun, oblivious to the temptation that surrounded her.

That night we stayed in a log cabin at Bixby Canyon and I read Lawrence Ferlinghetti to her as the flames flickered across her face. Like Dulouz I could sense a gradual deterioration, a withering of both my mental and physical condition and realised there and then that I’d never get out of this world alive. I felt that here, within the confines of this wilderness, I could perhaps find some kind of respite from my condition, and that maybe, just maybe, she would see her way to staying out here with me. For an all too brief moment it felt as if she’d agree, but it wasn’t sympathy I was looking for, at least not then. Maybe now, but like the past, now’s another country.

She’d just laughed and said it seems like no one here forgets their past, and she ran and ran until she was so far away from me that we became lonely satellites orbiting each other from within touching distance, although it might as well have been a million light years away. I don’t love you, I just love myself, she seemed to say, as my very world fell apart around me. So I left her there in the canyon, along with the ghosts of my past. They say you can’t put your arms around a memory, but you sure as hell can hide it in your heart.

Which is why I’m sitting here writing this down before the priest comes in to take that final confession, before I step out to meet my maker. I don’t know where I’m heading, but I sure as hell know where I’ve been, and there’s no amount of eternal damnation going to feel anywhere near the hurt I’ve been carrying since I sent her on her way. After all, if I couldn’t have her then nobody else would. She may have loved God but it was me who believed in her, and you can’t put a price on that kind of love. But like Jack, heroes grow old, and we end up forgetting what we ever saw in them in the first place. She’d just laughed and said that no one here forgets their past. I never did get that dance.

Perhaps I’ll get it on the end of that rope.