Destry James and Alabama

February 10, 2013, nearly 3 am. update 27 May 2017
  
 The True Myth of Destry James & Alabama

Destry James and Alabama

Since I was teen and living in Orange County, I  have been carrying around the poems of my first boyfriend, though I'm not sure it's even fair to have called him my boyfriend. We were both so shy. He named me Alabama after mention of that state in Neil Young songs and the fact that I wore woolen mens' suit vests over 'wife beater's t shirts (STELLA!), didn't shave my underarms or legs and was a hillbilly and Cherokee from the Carolinas originally by blood. I wore old lady dresses that buttoned up the front or 501 jeans with a girl scout Tshirt. My grandmother who had been terribly rich at one time had given me some beaded sweaters that I wore in the winter and felt lush in. But really, it was Des who made me feel lush and wet and full of the vocabulary of sex. The language of skin-poetry. Later, after graduation, he found me living through the manipulations of a terrible-now-deceased-uncle as an indentured nanny for a passel of children where I received no money, not even to buy tampon. Des lit up my life that day. He kissed me, asked me if he could hold my breasts and I trembled at his touch, oh god, I felt my skin's hair rise like Robert Grave always said it would under the influence of poetry, the Muse, and I melted into his chest. Why did I leave? Why didn't I ask more questions? phone number, address...Why didn't he offer it? I was determined to be a poet more than anything, but I wanted him with me. Pretty please, I asked God every night, sobbing into the bunk bed I shared with a five year old girl who wet the sheets.

 I finally ran away to Berkeley and San Francisco with a box suitcase full of poems and a library copy from the fifties of Jack Kerouac's On The Road stolen from a public library... and Destry's poetry he had given me. I have held carefully onto that work like a vestal virgin carries a lamp of oil shining out into the darkness of a savage world.  I stupidly married two times, producing two wonderful sons. When I went home, single, in my early twenties, for a visit, I looked through the yellow pages for Des's father's church; for Destry's name himself (his father was a preacher and I thought it might be a way to find him.) If Destry was married, I could at least give back his poetry. It hurts me that he might be yearning for this beautiful work. A conversation between Thomas a Beckett and King Henry and another long one of a journey up the side of a shiny mountain with his best pal Puppet. And a few others. They were of course in those days seeking Illumination I believe. Like I was. My education is all my own, though kind poets gave me books and names and books bought in used stores or found in the free boxes of Berkeley. I learned to read in open mics and stop trembling at the knees, the paper, the hand after six months or maybe a year. I shook like a child, like a leaf, like a wild glacier coming down a Finnish mountainside when I first began...

My love, Des, was a miracle of a poet. He also played a beauty of a guitar. He wanted me to sing harmony with him, But I had no voice at all to sing. I wasn't even allowed to sing in the church choir.  Neither of us knew at that time my performimg voice would ripen into the throatiness of Peggy Lee, as poet Larry Beckett, one of America's finest once said to me.

I felt married to Destry at thirteen in the eighth grade when he would play with the ends of my hair from the desk behind me in Honors English, play with it so delicately I nearly came mid-class. We were both Believers in Jesus and so we were honorable unlike any other schoolkids I knew. He had a girlfriend (I prayed not to hate her or be jealous at least) and when I had a boyfriend, he was more than polite when I would have rather he stole me into his arms. We were together to a degree in junior high at Fremont Junior  in Anaheim in the late sixties. We would stand at lunch or breaks in classes and talk Neil Young and Crazy Horse, our hero. We would talk about poetry, Christ, his friend Puppet, and stare at each other. He gave me an abalone shell I wear as a necklace. I used to just wear it on a string around my neck and then I found an old chain and two old silver  engraved beads and I drilled a tiny hole in the shell because the one natural hole I had been using, finally broke through. I keep it now in a small gold box with our names written inside. Then I got paid for reading twenty minutes, and I went to a jewelry store and bought an honest-to-god sterling sliver chain that the abalone hole was big enough for the chain to go through.

When I was a little older we found ourselves in summer school together. I was always failing math, and one day he took my photograph at La Palma Park, Anaheim, which I still have. My son will put it up in this here blog for me someday he tells me. Oh, that summer of everyday in his presence! I remember one day in junior high, a clique-y cheerleader type made fun of him mending a hole in his black stovepipe 501 jeans with white thread and I bristled like the little wife I considered myself. I defended him, I believe I might have punched her if she didn't quit her teasing, but I believe she saw the glint in my eye...


We'd meet at bible studies on school nights at cheap apartments across the main street from me and I would I dream about him even though I am married to a good man who has saved my life so many times. (I have had a heart condition since I was ten years old.) I love Daniel and am faithful to him, but he understands. He had  lost a companion of twenty years who was afraid of doctors and so died of ovarian cancer perhaps six month before we met. He once told me that anyone with the cool name of Destry James deserved to be loved by one of America's best poets. My dear husband thinks that well of me and I am filled with gratitude.

I have nearly died so many times that my only real goals are to make sure Destry gets his papers back before I do die. If I am lucky to have someday done that and had more than four chapbooks published and a number of CDs with musicians behind my words, I will feel my life is complete.  Also an almost 200 page book of thirty stories about an eleven year old girl named Redbud Jane who lived in a trailerpark. I used up a lot of years raising two fine boys, raising them the way my mother never never seemed to have had time to raise us. Long chapter books at night, art projects on raining days. We had a thicket behind the Victorian and we played Elf Quest back there, costumes made of bits of fur and leather; beads and colorful string, exotic cloth from foreign counties via the thrift store of a hippie county, Mendocino.

When the ability to recognize a soul mate comes over one like a rush of waterfalls or silent tears, I believe it's a terrible tragedy to ignore those feelings. That's why I've never forgotten Destry James nor turned away after the poetry reading in Gualala when Daniel said he wanted to talk about my poems. I would have missed out on  all these years of companionship. We be going on thirty years pert'near.