Little Coches Dances With Ghosts (edited from 2007)

Part 1

(A couple, in conversation while leaving Saturday’s farmers market in the old downtown mall in Las Cruces, New Mexico.)

Woman — “Did you see her?”
Man — “I wouldn’t even look at her.”

I’d been looking at her for the previous two Saturdays. The first time I spotted her, she was camped on the ground on the north side of the planter outside @CoasBooks. She sat on the concrete, a blanket spread before her. On the blanket lay various wrist wraps and necklaces. In the center of the blanket were several primitive looking dolls made of various earth-toned fabrics. The faces were, well, they didn’t have faces. They reminded me of voodoo.

She’s not going to sell much, I thought. She looks like a bag lady. Toothless, from what I can see. I wonder how in hell she can pony up the farmers market seller’s fee? Or maybe she hasn’t been hit on yet by a market official. I felt bad for her.

I bought a purple wrist wrap, spending my last dollar. (Purple is my color, for, somewhere in time, I am Phoenician.) I sat down on a bench and tied it around my wrist. Lovely, I thought. I got up and began walking to the car, while, at the same time, reaching into my right hand trousers pocket in search of a tissue. My fingers felt, not a tissue, but… something.

I pulled out a dollar bill. And so began the magic.

The next Saturday I again watched from a discreet distance. This time she was accompanied by a younger companion, a bearded man, dressed in black (I think). And there was a dog, black with white markings, lying at his feet in the shade. They sat in the same spot as before. I approached and again admired the wrist wraps. I bought two. I said I was interested in seeing more. She said come back next week and there will be more to choose from.

As I walked to the car, I checked my pockets.

Empty.

Yesterday I continued my observation. Gray hair, tied in a short pony tail. Clothing ragged but clean. She and her companion sat rolling smokes as I approached. The dog lay at his feet. Something was different. She had constructed a little stand, thus raising her display off the ground by about three feet. The new setup allowed her to sit on the bench. I started thinking in symbols, and I felt glad for them.

I bought three wrist wraps. A deep purple, a lighter purple with some floral designs, and a white one with tiny colorful flowers. (When I got home I learned that she’d cut them a bit short, making them almost impossible to tie. Next week I will ask her to cut them a bit longer.)

The ink in my blood rises to the surface. I sit down next to her. I introduce myself. I tell her about Teachers’ Lounge. I ask her permission to write a little something.

“My name is Little Coches,” she said.
“Co ch es, that’s how the Comanches spell it.”

She is not full-blooded Comanche. Old Pueblo and Charauhwa (Ch ar a uh wa) Apachee are part of her ancestry.

Little Coches is albino. “I am of the Buffalo children.” She invites me to look deeply into her eyes. There is no color there, only gray iris and black pupil.

“I grew up in old Tombstone,” she said, still attempting to roll a cigarette. Loose tobacco falls on my trousers and on to the ground as she reaches over to help me with my spelling. “My playmates were the ghosts of Tombstone,” she laughs.

Well, I bet we could swap some tales, I said. She mistook my statement.

“Oh, these aren’t tales, this is all true. I’d walk down the streets at night, and everybody’d be locked away in their houses, and it was just me and the ghosts.”

They live in Las Cruces, for now. “I inherited the Tombstone ghost towns,” she tells me. “But I’m not claiming them because of the inheritence taxes.”

The bearded man with the dog is Thomas Goss. He works maintenance at the Pan Am Center at New Mexico State University. (Oh, the stories he could tell… ghosts of a different kind) The dog is Miss Tombstone, a sixteen-week Australian Shepherd/Blue Heeler/lot-a-lab/Chow-Chow. Her face reminds me of my best friend, Sark, a black lab who died at 16 years.

I took my leave and walked around the market, dressed in white pants and shirt, sunglasses and green Kona ball cap. I’d picked the wrong shoes. They were brown and wobbly and made walking difficult. Wobbly man attired in white. He who wobbles. Perhaps I should paint them, the shoes, like @hrheingold, and then let them graze contendedly in a dark closet.

Part 2

Update — A number of people have told me they don’t understand this post. To help you, please go back and read my original encounter with Little Coches. With that background, you will understand how she Zen-whacked me upside the head on Saturday, May 12, calling into question everything she’d previously told me. During our rollicking (mostly one-sided) conversation she said she was Katherine Hepburn’s daughter and, as a child, had been on the boat used in the filming of “The African Queen.” She told me she’d won an Oscar. She said she was a Marine Corps nurse with the rank of colonel during the Vietnam War. She said she has a license to haul federal material for the U.S. government. She said she is licenced to carry a weapon, and is not hesitant to use it. She told me everything I put in the poem, Preface to Chaos. (Note- the poem has been lost.) And, she told me, without a trace of self-pity, that she and Thomas are homeless.

At first I despaired of writing up this encounter. Later Sunday morning I hit on the idea of a poem, Escher-esque in tone, and prefaced by a quote on chaos magic and a lyric from Bob Dylan. And that is what you will find below. I suggest someone with some solid Hollywood connections talk with this woman before she disappears. I now think of her as the Little Big (Wo)Man of Las Cruces.

Rather than trying to recover and maintain a tradition that links back to the past (and former glories), Chaos Magick is an approach that enables the individual to use anything that s/he thinks is suitable as a temporary belief or symbol system. What matters is the results you get, not the ‘authenticity’ of the system used. So Chaos Magic then, is not a system — it utilises systems and encourages adherents to devise their own, giving magic a truly Postmodernist flavour. — Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos

You walk into the room With your pencil in your hand You see somebody naked And you say “who is that man? You try so hard But you don’t understand Just what you’ll say When you get home Because something is happening here But you don’t know what it is Do you, Mister Jones? — Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man

Preface to Chaos She lived, as she often asserted, “like a man,” by herself, paying her own bills, and answering to nobody. She “chose” not to marry, not to have children, always, as she was fond of saying, “paddling the g — d — boat by myself.” This expletive was familiar on her tongue — she helped initiate the easy familiarity the modern woman shows with vulgar language. See Hepburn and Mephistopheles

Little Coches and Thomas are homeless now, which is fairly odd, because Little Coches is Katherine Hepburn’s daughter; the two of them strong necked, east-west, always the contest of wills.

Little Coches wins round three; she turns to acting, even winning an Oscar, while soldiering in Vietnam, a colonel in the U.S. Marines, camped out somewhere on the wrong side of the DMZ, she and her comrade nurses blown off their intended course while coming under friendly fire, and so they run in the wrong direction until they can’t run anymore, and they set up a base camp, and Katherine walks the perimeter while Little Coches drinks gallons of bad water while filming “The African Queen,” and her little girl sits cross-legged in the boat, hunckered down, so she won’t appear in the frame.

So many suicides; Little Coches will not speak of them this day. She is intent on scraping together some cash money, so she can help Thomas get his truck back, the two of them hauling federal secrets -

(sometimes only a single paper rides alone in the cavernous compartment of an 18-wheeler) -

at $80,000 a pop, New York to L.A., and she’s not afraid to use her gun, if that’s what it takes to get the job done, and,

somewhere,

deep in space, a supernova is busy rewriting the rules of science while,

somewhere, Katherine is breaking the rules

again.

Part 3

Little Coches is reading my write-up of last week’s encounter as I pretend to look at the strolling visitors. There’s a man standing about eight feet from us. He holds some flyers in his hand. He wears a Star Trek insignia. He is dressed in the period costume of the twenty-first century. He appears quite out of place, and he is plainly uncomfortable with the job he has to do, which, I assume, is to accost passersby with his flyers and shoo them into COAS Books behind me where I sit with Little Coches, who continues reading my piece, while I pretend to look at the strolling visitors. I do not feel woozy, although I was feeling woozy about 3 a.m. because of too much whisky (bourban and water, no ice, which is a sin, I think, unless you live in India) the night before, the drinking enhanced by a loud and boisterous argument with my older brother in their new home, the argument ending with me leaving under a cloud, wishing I could drink a beer so I could work up some kind of appetite, stopping at a local joint and buying an oil can of Fosters, quaffing the dark brown Aussie brew while fixing a plate of sprouts and pine nuts and yogurt.

Little Coches is smiling. “I like it,” she says. “I like it, but there’s one thing. I was a lieutenant colonel, not a corporal.” She has misread the word ‘colonel.’ “Ahh, yes, I see,” and I say something about being sorry for omitting the ‘lieutenant’.

Little Coches is not homeless anymore. Until Thursday, when the motel room she and Thomas and Miss Tombstone share will disappear unless she and Thomas can earn enough for another week’s stay. It’s a real crapshoot, I think to myself. She sits here every Saturday, but sales are dismal. People are afraid of her. And Thomas is layed up at the hotel, not working, an attack of bad back, he rests, Miss Tombstone kissing his hands, his face. Little Coches is feeling a bit put upon. So much load to carry, and time is growing short.

(I do not tell Little Coches of my daily prayers on her behalf, a mantra that I repeat as I do my morning yoga — “God is love and is taking care of Little Coches and Thomas.” I feel blessed when she tells me she and Thomas are in a hotel.)

We talk of Vietnam. “Do you remember the little girl who was sometimes a guest star on The Bob Hope Show?” I look her in the eye and say, “That was you, wasn’t it?” She grins.

She tells me how Hope arranged for her and the other nurses in her unit to fly to Germany with him in the closing days of the Vietnam war. “He was always telling jokes. He was always there to lift your spirits.”

I buy a purple wrist wrap and tie it to my left wrist. My right hand is nestled in a brown calfskin glove because Friday I’d noticed a pre-cancerous lesion the size of a matchhead between thumb and forefinger. During my morning at the farmers market, I notice the gloved hand is doing it’s own thing, and I think, how queer, I must experiment with this. Michael Jackson meets Dr. Strangelove.

Suddenly Little Coches asks me the question I’d hoped she would not ask. “Did you find out when the crafts show will be held at the university?” I sheepishly admit I’d intended to find out, had thought about finding out at work several times during the preceding week, but never did more than think about finding out. Feeling as if I’d let her down, like I’d failed in this simple quest, I walk into COAS Books and ask around, but I find nothing useful. I return and tell Little Coches I will bring her the information next Saturday.

As we sit talking, people keep their distance. “We should hire Mr. Star Trek to accost people and funnel them our way.” I say this jokingly because Mr. Star Trek is clearly uncomfortable talking to people. He stands there, smiling, as people walk past him. He never actually stops anyone. He is clearly doing a poor job of it.

Little Coches bristles when I mention Mr. Star Trek. “He’s stepped between my display and people walking up to it,” she snarls. “Several times now.”

I shrug my shoulders. “Okay then, he’s fired.” We laugh, the tension gone.

“Well,” I say, “I have a keyboard just like the one that kid is playing there, and I could bring it next week and play next to you and maybe we’d get some lookers.”

Little Coches is not enthused. “You’d have to check with the…” The person who runs the market, I guess. I explain that may not be necessary. “I’d be part of your display. Just tell them I’m your monkey.” She cracks up.

I’m getting ready to take my leave. (I am driving my older brother and his wife, who have bought a house here, to Hillsboro. I am hoping for reconciliation somewhere in the cool, high desert.) “May your house be safe from tigers,” I say, setting her up for the punchline, which I dimly recall from Alexander King’s book, May This House be Safe from Tigers.

Litle Coches does not know the punchline. Instead, she informs me that “May your house be safe from tigers” is part of a Buddhist prayer which asks that blessings and peace be on your house. She whisks me to India, where Bengal tigers have been known to attack and kill people. “Even little babies?” I ask. “No, they do not kill babies,” she says. I’m thinking Disney now, so I ask if the tiger will grasp the infant in it’s cruel mouth and take it to its den and care for it as one of its own. I think I know what her answer will be.

“Yes,” she replies. “They will do that.”

So I tell her the punchline. “Have you seen any tigers around here lately?” She beams approval.

I just finished Googling “May This House be Safe from Tigers” and found this -

The title itself (of Alexander King’s book) comes from a Zen Buddhist pal who always uttered “his senseless little orison” on leaving King’s apartment. After three years, King exploded, “What is the meaning of this idiot prayer?” “Well,” said the hurt friend, “have you been bothered by any tigers lately?”

And wabi-sabi to you, my good friend

Little Coches and Thomas and Miss Tombstone are homeless again.

Friday night’s storms dumped so much hail that their tarp collapsed as they huddled inside. As we packed up our gear at the conclusion of Saturday’s farmers market, Little Coches asked me if I would drive her to Wal-Mart so she could buy a roll of plastic sheeting to repair their shelter. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I arrived at the market at about 9 a.m. Little Coches was putting the finishing touches on her display. I gave her a printout of the May 20th post. She read the title (Little Coches, Bengal tigers, Bob Hope and Zen Buddhism), then looked at me.

“It’s Zen-I Buddhism, not Zen Buddhism,” she instructed me. “Zen originally came from India, where it was called Zen-I.”

I couldn’t find a “Zen-I” reference on the web. Then it hit me. Zenai. I found a solid reference, The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism but couldn’t access it.

(During my search I rediscovered an old friend — wabi-sabi.)

Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. It’s simple, slow, and uncluttered-and it reveres authenticity above all. Wabi-sabi is flea markets, not warehouse stores; aged wood, not Pergo; rice paper, not glass. It celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather, and loving use leave behind. It reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet-that our bodies as well as the material world around us are in the process of returning to the dust from which we came. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace liver spots, rust, and frayed edges, and the march of time they represent.

I set up my keyboard a few feet from Little Coches. I hung the monkey sign. I loaded six D-cell batteries. I was ready.

My camera (a 1997 Kodak Digital DC50 Zoom) refused to zoom properly, so I was forced to take this shot from about 15 feet back. When I “developed” it this morning I saw it was out of focus, so I turned it into an “arty” shot.

The boy with the keyboard arrived about a minute before I did. He set up to the left of COAS books so he could plug into the juice. Ha! I didn’t care. I had batteries and could play wherever I fancied.

Little Coches rolled a cigarette. My hands were shaking some, probably due to my continuing experiments with Nikola Tesla and the fact that I don’t normally play a keyboard unless I’m drinking whiskey, and I only play for my own pleasure — not in a public place where I can make a damn fool of myself. (Caveman sometimes joins in by jumping on the keyboard and hitting a few notes.)

“Little Coches, may I please roll a smoke?”

She hands me the pack.

“It’s she nah in Cherokee. That means ‘please.’

I repeat it… she nah, she nah, she nah…

“No. Now listen. She nah ah. She nah ah.”

I roll a skinny smoke as I repeat aloud. I take her BIC lighter. I inhale. The smoke hits my lungs like a sledgehammer. I double over. I inhale again, but not so much. Hey, this is really good. Tastes really good. I’m just gonna sit here and smoke the whole damn thing.

Which I do, until it burns my fingers. I field strip it.

I AM READY!

I punch the keyboard’s power button.

Nothing.

I punch it again. Nothing.

I flip it over, pull off the battery cover, making sure they’re inserted properly. They are. I flip it back and punch the power button.

Nothing.

The boy with the keyboard has moved to another part of the market, so I shlep the keyboard and stand over to the empty spot and plug in the AC adaptor. I punch the power button. I AM READY! I select church organ and strike a C chord with my left hand. Oooh, it sounds so good on a Saturday morning… until… what the hell? A Cha-Cha-Cha rhythm stampedes from the speakers, making for a most disquieting musical juxtaposition of latin soul and holy spirit. I jab the “stop” button. Silence. I restart the keyboard, setting everything to factory specs.

I am wearing my monkey sign. “What’s the sign for?” someone asked earlier.

“That’s the name of my act,” I explain. “I’m the Monkey.”

“But who’s Junebug?”

“Beats me,” I reply. “I’ve never met her, but I think she’s watching me.”

Again I key in church organ. I set the sound to max. I play with my balls. People are curious, for no one has ever seen a musician play with his balls. I’m just making it all up as I go along, and it sounds pretty good. I close it out.

I key in a Samba rhythm and a breathy sax. I let the rhythm flow unimpeded for a bit, then kind of creep in with the sax. It’s sounding okay, I guess, but I’m not really grooving on it, so I bring it down.

I key in Goblins. No rhythm. My two balls are resting on the keyboard’s upper registers. I begin to play with my left hand. My right hand jumps in and does its little improv thing, moving crab-like over the keys, calling down the angels. A woman appears out of nowhere (my eyes are glued to the keyboard due to shyness and concentration, although I am quite able to play this way without looking) and places a dollar on the keys.

“Oh no, thank you, ma’am, but I’m playing just for fun.”

“It’s so beautiful,” she says, smiling at me as she withdraws her offering.

I figure I ought to go out on a high note… I’ve been playing about 30 minutes… so I play upper and lower registers, rolling my balls, caressing them, really, and the music is ethereal and people are looking at my balls and they’re thinking, “I never thought about playing a keyboard with my balls. I must give it a try when I get home.”

Done. I shlep everything back over to Little Coches, who is packing up her wares. She holds up a doll for me to inspect. I take a picture. It too is out of focus, so I play around with it and I like the way it turned out because it reminds me of the crone or hag, one of Jung’s archetypes. (You’ll see what I’m talking about when you read The Anima or Animus in the above link.)

So we drive to Wal-Mart and Little Coches comes back to the car and she’s pissed off because a roll of plastic is like seventeen dollars and it’s recycled plastic for God’s sake and recycled is supposed to be cheaper and she’s not going to pay seventeen dollars for something that costs maybe a dollar or two to produce.

“I’ll buy a bunch of black plastic trash bags and cut the bottoms out and duct-tape them together and that’ll do,” she says.

I tell her I’ve got half a box of those black trash bags at my house and we’ll just drive on over and she can have them cause I never use them.

Once the bags are loaded, we drive to Save-Mart, where she picks up some groceries. Then I drive her to the TA truckstop where we part ways. I go home and unload all my stuff. I pour a stiff whiskey. It’s 3:30 and I’m quite famished because breakfast was at four that morning. I drive over to Dick’s Hamburgers and drink a Corona while devouring tortilla chips and hot chile and that’s just the appetizer because here comes a huge beef burrito swimming in red chile and there’s refried beans and I eat everything in sight and by golly I’m in the sack at 5 in the aftrnoon and I wake up at 2:30 this morning and it takes me a freaking hour to get my camera to communicate with the computer and I take two shots to try to get the camera working properly and it worked cause now 16 pictures are downloading to my hard drive and here’s #15 of me doing my best Tesla impersonation. And I’ve been sitting here since, what? 3 this morning? and my computer clock reads 8:43 a.m. and I’m starving and I need to get out in the sun and I expect this will be the last of my articles about Little Coches and believe me I’ve left out one helluva lot of stuff about her — stuff you wouldn’t believe anyway so let’s just say I’m dancing with Don Juan and leave it at that okay?