Last Ride of the Mic-Mic Men

The Beast was the gangsta-earthmother of the drive-by smile. In fact, she changed everything.

In the depths of the endless Fairbanks winter I wore the shroud of despair, creeping from my car where it idled in the parking lot of the Boatel, ducking into the all-day/all-night bar to meet the others who had momentarily stepped down from the train-wrecks of poor thinking to cloak themselves in the evanescent veneer of drink.

The Boatel itself arrived along the side of the Chena River much as we had, throttling along the current without a rudder, beaching on the rocks never to float again, re-opening instead as a round-the-clock tavern that appeared suddenly through the ice-fog like a ghost ship afloat on the vapor cast by idling trucks and cars that yanked aside into the parking lot as if by the steady autopilot of false remedy to the shoulder along Airport Way and stopped, with only the deep, black imprints of heavy boots leading from their doors to the port-holed hatchway to the Boatel.

From the back deck, you could hop up and down in your coat and fur hat to keep warm while you drank a toast to the aurora that streamed from the heavens, day and night, steaming through a black night that ached to the marrow, then blurred to a dull, steady pain the shape of everyday life.

By November, you couldn't tell the curbs and sidewalks from the center lane of the highway; the landscape was undifferentiated, where every color was a shade of white, and the roads, houses, hills, and dangerous gullies were all mixed in a flowing glaze, with the occasional raven hunched in the snow.

So to the Boatel we fled when we weren't writing, which became habit, leaving our engines running so that even a drunk could spin off into all that white without having to jump-start the car. It was bad enough that your tires flattened against the snow and when you pulled out they would thump altogether toward disaster until the air warmed and spread itself out again.

I was six feet and well over 260 pounds and Brian had played tackle for Bo Schembechler at Michigan. In the Boatel, we cornered a spot at the pool table and Brian kept us playing, or we sat wherever we wanted and military guys would come over, thinking we were specialists.

"You guys are 50 mic-mic men, aren't you?" some guy said while we were shooting eightball. He didn't add up to much of a threat.

"Sure," Brian said.
"We are," I said.
And later we'd ask each other, what the hell.

Later, after the Boatel died down, we'd drive over to Frank's Place, a biker bar over on the side of town that served the military: used car dealerships, gun shops, liquor stores, and strip bars where the new frontier met the edge of corporate brute instinct, spinning into view through the ice-fog as we drove along the misfiring beer signs and check cashing signs and signs that would never light again, driving slow and carefully until we got to Frank's, a biker bar that closed at 5 am and reopened an hour later.

We'd find a spot over by the roaring fireplace -- a visiting professor of English and a graduate student of writing-- looking a lot like 50 mic-mic men in layered underwear and plaid shirts and woolly caps, liquored up, and at just about 2 am, the strippers from across the way would thunder in to do some drinking on their tip money.

On any particular night at Frank's, you could count on collateral violence. I never got in a scrape, but I once witnessed the royal spat between two strippers slugging it out over a John. In the end, there were clumps of hair and ice-blood on the steps of Frank's Place.

One morning at five, after leaving for pancakes and single-malt scotch, we went for a light ski in 10-degree weather, Brian and I, although neither of us was really prepared. I wore trendy woolen gloves with the fingers cut out and after a half hour of skating cross-country through the woods off the Steece Highway, I had no feeling in them at all. I thought of the two- or three-fingered natives that wandered forlorn along the downtown streets in springtime.

But the mic-mic man pushed me up the trail while I warmed my hands under my armpits. And when my fingers were warm again, we went back to Frank's.

And so it went, night into day, never-ending winter of aurora storms from horizon-to-horizon, the noon-day-sun the tease of everlasting dopamine, or hope, then more weeks of students sleeping at their desks in the afternoon science-writing class, being arctic hibernation season, despite my endless rants about Berryman and Rilke and Hugo, claiming that, as poets, we had no allegiance to any syllabus. The examination of spacial narratives and confessional strings of meter outweigh all considerations of clock and date and sobriety.

Then sometime in the mid-winter we went to the outhouse races north of town, and on another weekend, drive north on the Steece toward the Arctic Circle to view the running of the Yukon Quest. Brian and his girlfriend and I drove White Pass, where highway stauntions stuck precariously from the drifts, designating chaos, and the road disappeared into the dim white soup of everything.

We found the turnoff to the race where deep ruts slashed away from the main road into a forest of permafrost pines. Spectators sat in folding chairs along the sled-track. At the first sight of the pack, they put down their mugs of coffee, stood and whooped as the dogs yanked their sleds into the firelight.

The huskies knew it was a stop because they pulled in-place, staked to the ground on beds of hay so the sleds could not be moved. There were bowls of hot gruel and fresh water for the dogs, and the drivers sipped coffee. And once the dogs had eaten, the driver aligned the sled, unpinned the stakes and the sled lurched off, blending into the horizon as a drying dab of paint.

In a photo from the day, I'm framed in the center of the image, shaped by a red patch of jacket, black snow-machine boots, black muffler and fur cap, suspended as if I had been parted out from construction paper and glued into a white backdrop.

My memory of the entire winter is blurred-- by alcohol, by infinite dark, by 68-below temperatures, by the occasional stump of caribou or moose left on the side of road where it had wandered into a snowplow, or spotting things you only thought you saw as you drove along the steady road that folded into the fog.

And yet, and yet, two weeks before Christmas and quite out of the white of everythingness, the Beast parked beside me in the lot at Khalsa's and flashed the drive-by smile. The I'm on-your-side-even-if-you-don't-think-you-have-one smile.

One time we had coffee. Another time we ran errands.

"Alaska," she said that afternoon when we had parked in the woods in search of a Christmas tree and she hopped out with her chain saw. "Alaska. Where men are men...and so are the women."

Before she disappeared into the snow and trees, the Beast threw another grin. It was a grin for traveling, a bolt you could tuck in just about anywhere, especially if you hoped to blend into the wood panels and cigar smoke and the furious, spinning wagonwheels of beer signs down at Frank's and still feel the faint pulse of spring, somewhere, some day.

And in the fading sun of an otherwise stingy afternoon, at the end of a year that faded out as if bent to the machinery of some cosmic dimmer switch, despite it all, etc., the smaller 50 mic-mic man opened like a late-year afterthought of bloom, white-upon-white against the biggest flurry of of the year, a Christmas universe of flakes streaming laterally along Farmer's Loop road so that you accelerated through snowy constellations toward the life that lay waiting, on the other side of the Earth maybe, where it was already dawn.

Men's Men

Bob Shacochis. He's a man's man, a teller of tall tales, noodler of great sentences set in the broth of political intrigue, a straight-talking lover of language with a delightful intolerance of hacks and pretenders. I had swapped letters with him long before we ever met, but when I first saw him, he was barbecuing leeks and asparagus that he had marinated in balsamic vinegar, a half-cigarette's worth of ash dangling from his lips, and what looked like a nasty case of windburn.

I had gone to Frisco in North Carolina's Outer Banks to visit him and his partner, Miss Fish. After dinner and oh so many cocktails, Bob drove me out to the dunes in his four-wheel truck, spinning us up the shore to where the waves swept across the black, moonlit sands and the cyclops eye of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse spun at you through the fog.

Months before, Bob sent the kindest rejection letter I had received during a four-year stretch of opening the most vile of commentaries. He was editing The Missouri Review and encouraged me to stay in the saddle, contending that the sorry world we lived in needed writers that could take out your eye with angular prose. He had come into the land of letters through journalism, using the same back door as I had done, as Hemingway had done. We were in fine company.

Shake, as some people called him, also waded ashore into travel writing because he had been mad about surfing. The waves carried him from his childhood home in Virginia to Hawaii, later to South America and, eventually, into the Peace Corps where he discovered the Caribbean. The string of islands opened up a trove of untapped stories that Bob mined for years, studying island life. Eventually, he penned two collections of literary short stories and a novel set in the land of heavy drink, heady women, and brutal politics. He wrote exclusively about the coup in Haiti. An avid outdoorsman, he wrote a cooking column for GQ while crafting journalistic gems for Harpers and Outside, along the way reeling in the Rome Prize for Literature, a National Book Award, and other noteworthy trophies. His writing about the Third World belongs on the shelf beside Graham Greene, Robert Stone, and Joseph Conrad. When I knew him, he was the book-blurb king, his nougats of praise appearing routinely on the jackets of short story collections and novels of his peers.

The last time we gathered, I had invited him to Fairbanks as a visiting author at the Midnight Sun Writer's Conference. He was a hit, carving off chunks of wry commentary on stories submitted by participating writers and holding forth on craft without waterboarding the audience with theory.

Toward the end of the conclave, I spirited him out of bed before dawn in my subcompact, and drove the 120 miles west to see Denali. The peak, better known as Mt. McKinley, had been spotted over the past few days and viewing--they said on the news--was optimal. Denali makes her own weather, so you can't trust conditions outside of the park to witness a rare appearance. But when she comes out, she is spectacular, rising 20,000 feet over an expanse that defies the human sense of scale. We had also packed some fishing gear, a couple of sandwiches, and a bottle of vodka, which somehow ended up open by 9 am, passing between us along the highway.

The park has six million acres of wilderness, so there are hours of driving just to get from the front gate to open views of the mountain. It's a track populated with grizzly bears, caribou, wolves, Dall sheep and moose--which of course we were there to see.

We had been motoring at a decent clip along Polychrome Pass when Bob brought out his field glasses. He had a feeling he said, and sure enough he shouted for me to pull over a moment later. We hopped out of the little car and stood along the road, steam rising off of our heads and shoulders.

"Up there!" Bob said, pointing to an overhang. His intuition was right. Seated on a boulder about 50 yards from us was a mature grizzly, his coat brown and red-ocher in the morning sun. If the bear saw us, we were of no significance. But I was impressed. The pass was long, pocked with crags and boulders, and Bob picked the bear out of an impossible backdrop of yellowing tundra.

Not long afterwards, we were finishing off the vodka, driving along the road to Wonder Lake, when Bob had another moment. He shouted for us to pull over and we hurried to a high point where we could look out on the massive valley carved eons ago by glaciers. The backdrop was equally confounded with jigsawed colors and shapes, yet Bob was sure. He pointed to a deadfall of spruce between the rocks and handed me the glasses.

His intuition was uncannily sharp as ever, but he had mistaken the beast's genus entirely. Sure, the chipmunk wore the same fall colors as the bear, and its shape, rising up on it haunches with its furry head certainly suggested a genetic relationship. It was as if I had turned the glasses backwards while looking at a ferocious grizzly, shrinking the image to manageable size for viewing by boys, wimps, or other undesirables who would never makes the rugged pages of Outside.

"Look out!" I shouted. And I shouted it again afterwords, after Bob caught an amazing creel of fish, and I would shout it out on the way home, and certainly a few times the following days until I had surely worn it out. I swear to God, Bob, I'm sorry. Mostly.

"Look out, Bob," I'd shout, "he's getting ready to charge!"

The Pursuit Race

Ernest Hemingway penned a fine story with the same title, which begins:

"In a pursuit race, in bicycle racing, riders start at equal intervals to ride after one another. They ride very fast because the race is usually limited to a short distance and if they slow their riding another rider who maintains his pace will make up the space that separated them equally at the start. As soon as a rider is caught and passed he is out of the race and must get down from his bicycle and leave the track. If none of the riders are caught the winner of the race is the one who has gained the most distance."

In my pursuit race there was a sad and lovely woman with blazing red hair who was in love with a man who would never give himself to her. In loving her madly, I was sure to maintain the space between riders, with the three of us arranged in tidy intervals in a constant spin. This all began one Fairbanks winter when I visited a Sikh chiropractor who had hired R-- as a masseuse. From the moment she put her hands on me, I was a gonner.

But R-- lived a holistic lifestyle, eating right, doing Yoga, and meditating her way into the realm of the spirit. I had no such inclinations. So, if I were to capture her heart, I would need to reform my errant ways.

By summer I had completely given myself over to the chase. I was avoiding drink, eating lots of fruits and veggies, getting regular physical exercise, and had agreed to visit a therapist that R-- had recommended.

The therapist suggested that I use relaxation tapes to get into the proper vibrational alignment. The tape began with the therapist's soothing voice, asking me to shut my eyes, then to relax them; to clench my teeth, then to slacken my jaw; to tighten my belly, then let it go loose; and so on until I had submerged my entire body into an ocean of sublime peace.

I was living in the home of a local poet who had gone outside of Alaska for the summer. It was a stunning log house in the hills of Ester, overlooking the Yukon basin. In the morning, I would get out of bed, lay naked on the back deck beneath a canopy of trees, and listen to the relaxation tape. Aside from hearing the sound of the wind and the occasional whirring of an insect, I was truly submerged. Surely I was becoming the living incarnation of what I hoped Miss R-- would find irresistible.

One morning as I drifted off into the rhythm of the recording, I felt an odd stirring in my loins. And when I raised my head to look, there was a wasp nesting at the head of my penis, gathering whatever wasps gather at such times. It seemed quite satisfied to be in the moment. I lay with the headphones on, asking for divine deliverance, yet the wasp took its blessed time before flitting off to the woods.

"Make haste my beloved, and be though like to a gazelle or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices...."

A few weeks later when fall showed its sudden chills, I decided to leave Alaska, for I saw only endless pursuits and losses, dark days, and endless winter. And when the poet returned, she had her eaves sprayed for wasps.