from Visions Of A Mexican Wrestler

This night you could be hammering away at the padlock securing the storage shed’s rolling door to the concrete with an aluminum softball bat wrapped in a towel to muffle the violent reports of impact, this night by virtue of the fact that it began for you as a night even though its hours are now succumbing to morning and also all the doubt that brightens morning, but, as Drew might have said and probably has said, if not to you then to new friends, “Such is the power of contiguity”, this March 1975 night much like the night whenever the time is restless, pacing, whenever this night is it is deep blue but not black, and this night of violent 1975 searching the fuse that is Francisco has been lit. There is a time whenever—you have never used them interchangeably before now, which is when you are aware that soon it will be time, if time in fact is advancing, and you, anticipatory or not, are in fact not matching time’s epicycling ahead step by step—a time before this one when you think you could be the time of the bzzzzt of a soldering iron heating a special rhodium alloy to its flow point in the stingy privacy of Drew’s room. Whenever you cannot be, there is a gentler Drew in the great Rincon of Arizona where whatever is, is craggy, scrubbing a she-goat’s udders free of ticks. But if you accelerate this time to too ambitious a Fahrenheit, there is only an ex-communicated Drew’s putty-colored gurgles of protest as you both grapple in the muck of a manufactured lake not far from the neighborhood whose upper limit you and your family live and on whose lower boundary Drew and his mother are holding daily stand-offs. Which time contains the one afternoon in 1974 when Hispanic accents on the syllables that make up “Motherfucker” are carried in a tantalum Skylark launch sideways across Drew’s godmother’s Sylvia’s same Winslow, Arizona peneplain—racemic tamarisk, sage, a palomino, all being words associated with or about, as unwanted guests hang about, Sylvia’s same Winslow, Arizona peneplain and learned by you shortly before this afternoon in 1974 is ever eclipsed—into the stratified geological belly-button of the Grand Canyon which a smart-ass Drew never before has had the desire blazing enough to visit? (It did not happen that way, and never could have happened that way at all in fact, though it was a motherfucker all the same.) The time you possess or the time which is so soon to argue again for the validity of the claims it has on you? When it is time, finally, silver hauberks, older than the centuries that linger between their manufacture in old New World America, the punching of their assigned boletas and stowing in cargo orbits aboard the galleons docked at Acapulco, their middleman stop-over in the Manila over which El Novillo discovered himself as an anatomical syzygy, and their inflated arrival in the Iberian peninsula, these ancient defenses raised by the earth itself will be granted amnesty by the Native American activists who have formed one last war party and whose incursions on federal soil they know will soon enough make them into prisoners of conscience. If that time were not one and the same with this time, if these times were divorced somehow and aligned side by side, proud arms folded over pierced chests, you could ask Drew, “What sort of commerce is this?” You and Drew, drunk on hormones, you believed you grasped the hermeneutics of that mystery. But, as it turns out and after all, the times do not require any reciprocation.