How I Met Maria

How did I meet Maria?

Well, I was wandering the train tracks one day, stoned like a whore in Biblical times, when I happened upon two men, standing in the middle of the tracks. They had their hands on their hips and were staring, furrow-browed, into the distance. In the distance there was a tree. In the tree there were two bald eagles, mid coitus. In honor of my being chosen to share with these wonders of the natural world the culminating moment of what I hope to be their mutual attraction, I stopped with the two men and looked on; participating with what I thought was appropriately appreciative awe.

“Jaayeesus,” the one nearest me says. He turns and motions to the birds, “you believe this?” Uncertain about the nature of his concern, I try to manage a look that is both grateful and indignant. Upon the success of my countenance change, the man turns back to his friend who, shocked, murmurs something that I think is, but of course couldn't be: “them gay birds up ‘n did it to Jesus this time.”

“Those are two dude birds up there, pal,” the man nearest me says, “and they have skipped the entire wondrous bald eagle mating ritual and have started to bang each other. In that tree.” The man turns back to his friend. “God help them Jerry.”

“Bald Eagles can’t be gay Tom,” Jerry howls, “listen to yourself. They’re America’s most beloved solitary regal creature. They are America. And America is not gay. Therefore the Eagles can’t be gay.”

“Its right there,” Tom reasons, “clear as day. It’s a fact of birds, Jerry, and we have to deal with it.”

"What are you two doing out here?" I ask, concerned at this point that this debacle will cause me to miss my favorite show: the one where the Famous people dance poorly but sometimes goodly on Wednesdays, 10 pm Eastern, 6 pm pacific, on Fox.

"Bird watching,” he says. “Been doing it for a few months. It was therapeutic, until..."

Jerry, apparently overcome by his inability to reconcile the ostensible bird facts with what he knows in his heart to be true, throws down his camouflage hat: “you don’t know what they’re doing, don’t anthropomorphize willy nilly. That,” he points to the two birds fucking in the tree, “could be pruning. Can’t one heterosexual man prune another heterosexual man’s feathers and not have it be gay?”

 “With his bird penis Jerry?” Tom says, shaking his head “He’s pruning him with this little bird penis?” I alert Tom to the clocal. “Weird,” he agrees.

Jerry’s shoulders cave. His fists clench at his sides. He depresses into the fetal position.  “Oooo,” he explains. He has lost the ability to affect control in his voice; rather, it leaks out of him, not unsexually, like a super-personal fart from the deepest corner of his darkened soul.

“What is it? Jerry?”

“The depression is starting.”

“Stop it Jerry!” Tom kneels and administers comfort-stroking to Jerry’s back, “We can get through this.” He clenches the fist of his other hand and shakes it, ruefully, at the tree.

“Ooo,” Jerry begins the rocking, back and forth.

“Stop it Jerry, you must fight it. Don’t let it run you! Who’s my big guy?”

“I’m despondent.”

“What’s happening to him?” I ask.

“It’s his depression.” Tom says, standing up, “It’s being activated by that shitty thing those birds are doing in that tree,” He shoots a furiously narrow-eyed glare at the birds; one disapproving eyebrow goes way up. He kneels back down. “It’ll be all right,” he strokes Jerry’s camouflage vest, “we just needa get you away from those gay birds. Who’s my big guy Jerry?

“I’m your big guy,” Jerry said into his hat.

We were starting in the direction of his car when Jerry completely catatonic, then rigid, standing straight as a board. He shakes his head like Linda Blare returning from the beach, then vanishes.

“Jerry!” Tom attempts to reason before vanishing into the woods after him.

I debate following them. Very rarely do I go into the forest, and when I do, I usually get covered with ticks and smacked with branches. Both of which I hate, utterly. I think about the dancing I will almost surely miss.

I follow Tom’s red hunting jacket because, well, Jerry’s camouflage is actually doing a pretty good job. I find them, eventually, under a large redwood. Tom looks worried. Jerry is looking up into the tree like the Front Door Man and just found out about the Back Door Man. The Eagles look sated.

Suddenly, with the intensity of a man at least twice as drunk, Jerry lets out a mighty halooo. With the swiftness of a man half his size, he strips off the outer layers of camouflage, all the way down to his leopard patterned undies and leapt at the tree, and wraps two stubby, milk white arms around the trunk. He says something about going up there, motherfucker cannonball slick birdshit, fella… Jerry’s voice gets louder as he struggles up the tree and somewhere near the first branch we can apparently catch the tail end of that train of thought: “to stop the superfluous flow of semen in godless, sodomite, ungay married, symbols of national pride, like Jesus and sunsets,” he raises the finger of reckoning to the birds, “and by god, you keep fucking that bird like that, for chrissakes, I get so fed up, I’m not gonna take it anymore.” He digs his toes into the bark, “I’m just not gonna take it anymore, that’s what I’ll do, I get so fed up.”

Though he sounded like someone kept changing his channel, his tenacity impresses me. And what’s more! After this speech, in a hallucinatory moment unity, in a dignified sweep signifying Homo sapiens' ascent from base anarchistic animal to Measure of All Things, Jerry pulls an iPhone from his asscrack and makes a call. Now I, too, come to feel invested in his success: his triumph over his morbid affliction. “Go you!” I felt like shouting after him, “you crazy man!”

Jerry comes within pouncing distance of the birds but, alas, the birds (as birds will on occasion do), fly to a different tree. Undeterred, Jerry scuttles around for a bridging branch, feeling, despite his beer gut, like a natural canopy dweller, reverting back to his proto-human state, tearing around that tree like a great bleached and shaved ape. And, my god, he truly has ascended—neither wholly man nor ape but choosing beneficial aspects from both, as needed; “Go you!” I do shout, “Ubermensch!”

He swears the Eagles piously. He grasps branches from all around him, even tearing at the ones beneath his feet, to throw at the Eagles, to maim them, brain them, punish them as only a man in a leopard print banana hammock can! “I’m not sublimating sexual tension!” He screams into his cell phone, “I’m not sublimating sexual tension!”

Jerry’s metamorphosis into the Ubermensch is so complete now that it looks for a moment, gazing intently upon bough so thin no high wire act among men would dare attempt to cross, that he, Jerry of someplace near Mckinnleyville, might make it to the other side. The birds stare at him doubtfully as he straddles the branch, hip-thrusting himself away from the safety and into possible greatness—he went way, way out. Tom and I are stunned. The limb shook with each hip thrust, tiny nettles fell on Tom and me as we watched, gaping mouthed, Jerry’s death defying, anguished, design.

Alas, just as he was reaching for the nearest branch from the other tree, he slipped. Greatness was not for Jerry of probably near McKinnleyville that day. He was only able to keep himself from falling off completely by clenching his buttocks around the limb that he was currently straddling, but, because he was forced to use both hands to keep his balance, he lost hold of his iPhone.

The phone plummeted and as Tom and I moved to avoid it I was hit by a branch, goddammit. The phone shattered on an exposed root and Jerry began to cry. After some spit-filled sobs, Jerry was able to accurately convey the therapist’s home phone number to Tom through halfhearted, despondent semaphore. Tom called the therapist from my cell phone, relayed Jerry’s status, and delivered the therapists message back to Tom, via much more cheerful semaphore, who came down several minutes later.

 After I saw Jerry safe to his car, I parted ways with them. And then I ran into Toni who said she was having dinner with Daniel, and would I like to go. Anyway I said yeah and that’s how I met Frank. Maria’s Frank’s little sister.