My Name Is My Name
Prompt Work from Edith Bow: Interchangeable, Barley, Banter
My Name Is My Name
The harvest started too early. You were sitting out front of the tiny house on the gang block with Solomon and his dog. He’s got a farm in Humboldt, 100 acres, and two more weeks for the best genetics in the state to harden off before the rain comes and he goes out to oversee harvest. First time he’s ever not been at the property snorting cocaine, drinking Cuban coffee and staying up for weeks with a Mossberg 590 watching his fenceline with a spotlight and a headlamp because he moved to STL Misery because pot is legal because it’s a gold rush because he may be in the middle of his forties but he’s wise, knows when it’s going to pop off. Bought a renovated house the size of a shack for cash in the dope sets down closer than you are to the river and now in a half broke camp chair drinking Barleywine at nine in the morning. He’s got his .380 on his lap and gunners are walking the block.
He called you earlier. Had to see for yourself.
STL is the sort of city where on this block you’re going to be fine, you can be the boss, you have a crew backing you up, take two steps to the right one block over and one block up and a thirteen year old kid sticks a ghost Glock inside your car and puts three bullets in your face. Welcome to the Gateway to the West, fuck you. Light another KOOL and get over it. Once a friend got stopped by a cop with an AR pistol sitting across his back seat and the cop congratulated him on it. “Stay strapped or get clapped” your friend told. Street apocrypha.
Criminal on criminal crime isn’t the most exciting thing to investigate so mostly they let us kill each other. I know just how this thing ends.
The Saint takes a terminal velocity drop to her knees, a last act of Catholic prostration to end up hanging from an over the door clothes rack by a rope with liquid vodka shit running down her leg, pissed pants, blood pooling in her limbs by the time she’s cut down. You’re four states away decaying in Florida and the Oracle is watching her one perfect adopted daughter rolled out of a cursed house under a sheet with her blood mother who is just a wreck, thought the Saint was practicing? Practicing her suicide? Narcissist with lungs turning to leather and no memory, always playing dumb, her blood mother will die in the chair she sleeps in. Kiss The Saint’s corpse at the viewing. Cop a feel, tit is hard, cold as ice. Agree with your other best friend it’s what she would have wanted. Laid out under a purple sheet in a cardboard box straight off the slab and soon for the burner. Cut off all of her hair, make her look like the psych patient she is. Gorgeous black hair to get twisted into knots held together by rubber bands, still everywhere in the room along with 21 years of the rest of her.
To be a Saint you have to be a martyr.
And now the barleywine passes back and forth and the little teeny teenagers, their guns larger than them patrol the block ignoring Solomon and his guest both because you’re not on the menu. Solomon celebrates the planting of the winter barley, mostly in Russia. Just a few drinks.
Then a phonecall from his caretaker, some former Navy Seal, and the harvest has been jacked, at least twenty plants. Pop a Xanax together.
Then shots ring out the next block down but no one cares.
Then wake up going over the Confusion Hill Bridge early in the morning connecting Mendocino and Humboldt and sitting on the other side of the two lane span is a burnt out car torched sometime in the middle of the night, everyone in it probably dead by the time you pass, still smoldering, probably doused in kerosene unless it was tweakers who used gas because they wanted to blow themselves up too.
She lies on the bed while you’re lighting candles for the altar. Tea lights, burning twenty four hours a day, hundreds of them spent in a Trader Joe’s bag at your feet, and She says you have to carry the ritual with you everywhere you go, so you promise her that you’ll take the ritual with you when you leave and carry it in your heart.
It’s not unusual to get jacked for a crop, or part of it, but it is for Solomon, and he pops another Xanax. You do the same, but you chew yours, the chemical taste of home.
Ambitious but dumb tweakers is the answer.
Identified and clocked immediately by the caretaker.
And you see footage on Signal of some meth addled kids in Eureka at a gas station offering pounds for $150 and yeah, that’s definitely them.
Grief expresses itself how it wants. Rage. My grief expresses itself as pure rage white hot refined regretless. Our rage is what will save us in the end. But with your Saint gone who the fuck are you?
Half a person, everyone says.
Alive the Saint would say “choose your own adventure.”
Solomon, agitated, after a gold sun has fled and left the hood to night, throws up his hands and in his wisdom says “what’s another Body?”
You haven’t really been out west trying to be good as you can, paralyzed, getting coffee with the Saint and screaming in the park, but she’s gone.
“What’s another body?” you say.
Do they even remember who you are?
And you’re packing your bag and the Oracle is saying this can’t go well. You say it’s fine, you’ll carry the ritual with you, and She backs you up, grabbing a shoulder, but The Oracle washes her hands of it. Still gives a hug and kiss goodbye with clear eyes and no tears. She tells this is the only time you can do this, and you have to take the Ritual with you and remember it, keep that fucker sacred, and say you will.
The American dream is flying first class Delta with no layover getting glass after glass of ginger ale because you don’t drink much anymore after The Saint martyred herself a drunk, and watching the plane cut the air at 500 miles an hour and seven miles up all the way to SFO with a tailwind on the last flight on the screen instead of a movie. It’s sitting next to no one. It’s being first on the plane and watching everyone pass on their way back to the seats next to the shitter staring wondering who the fuck is that weirdo and the satisfaction of it. They don’t know your name and it’s alright.
But you convince Solomon to wrap up business in STL and come out in a week, you’ll leave in the morning and get it taken care of. How much is this shit going to cost? It’s going to be free brother, it’s going to be free, and he’s left in his tiny fully paid for house in the middle of the dope sets eight minutes from your house as rolling the Subaru home and put the next flight on the Delta Amex because the ship is already sunk and the debt is already going to crush you, but you have the ritual.
Hades stole the harvest.
The touchdown at SFO always looks like you’re about to hit a black hole in the bay right before the tarmac appears under the plane, and then the airport is a huge rat’s maze to get to the baggage carousels for your checked luggage and then up to where you can Uber across the street. They don’t ask for a credit card and anyone can pay for a rented shitbox from the Pakis for cash and habibi won’t even ask your name as long as you pay them and fill out a piece of paper promising to bring it back. The car is a five year old Toyota Corolla with 100k miles on it and a rattle, but it’s black or so dark silver it may as well be and so nearly invisible in the flow of traffic. Fuck South San Francisco. Burn north on the 101.
Shut up and drive.
Out in the forest, past the curtain, in Mendo and Humboldt, there are albino redwoods. Ghost trees. They have no chlorophyll and they’re pale white tiny spirits. Only survive by being parasites on other trees, sucking their nutrients. One legend says they protect the forest and people lost in it, another says that if you hurt an albino redwood, it’ll be worse than bad luck. Seen a few, been told that’s more than most people ever do.
Passing Oakland on the 580 there’s a tall white brick building with a red sign on it lit up, The Hotel California. Not a hotel, on the bottom floors there’s a methadone clinic where you can sip your morning coffee and watch the zombies line up for their daily dose just like you can watch the drunks itch and bang on the bars at any liquor store before it opens in West Oakland. Drink Takaa vodka because masochism is a close enough cousin to sadism and it’s eight bucks a bottle. Wake up with blood covered hands and glass in your hair in the Tenderloin two days later.
Just inside Mendo there’s this huge rock that looms over the highway. Legend says a native princess threw herself off the top of it instead of letting in to getting killed by white men. Who would blame her?
Familiar roads.
Then there’s a new bypass around Willits where you walk past police with a neon pink soccer bag with fifty pounds in it. The helicopters looking for weed patches in the Mendo National Forest circling overhead stop everyone on the street in their tracks, praying to everything not to find my patch, don’t find my weed. Marijuana Cultivation Eradication. Don’t drink Snapple or Snapple products, they SPONSOR that shit. Five hundred pounds has to come down from a grow all the way north. Set dumpsters on fire and keep radio contact with the RV driver when they pass through every town.
For the stretch of the 101 between Willits and Humboldt there are maybe two staties, ever, and they’re always busy or absent or looking for someone else.
Drive faster. Chew up two Mexican Xanax. Your bottle made it through TSA fine even with just a sticker from Temu on it that’s a cheap rainbow colored old style looking movie ticket that says ANXIETY VIBES on the side. Farmapram my friend.
“I’m choosing my own adventure,” you yell. “And I have no fucking idea who I am anymore!”
The truth is like everyone else in the game we’re interchangeable. Like Russian soldiers, one with a rifle, one following with just another clip for the Mosin Nagant in WW2, when the first soldier falls, grab the rifle, strip the bullets from the clip into it, and start firing. Runners from Oklahoma in STL are less than 25 years old driving murdered out rides with those hot chicks on their arms that go fuck Jodie once the feds have you clocked sitting in county fighting a case for running about two tons in six months and twenty trips, and they’re doing it for $25 bucks a unit. Drive the price down to $125 for everybody, for shit flower, in bulk, and not even double up.
The rule is you always double up if you’re doing a cross country move. 100 lbs on the drive from OK to MO is still life. They sell the shit right on the table at open air grey markets the cops are letting happen wild gateway to the west while they clock them from an overpass or the next street over, taking down license plates, building webs of association. You go to one, eat all the Xanax you brought and sweat through your shirt in thirty minutes then bounce because you did your time clean and they’re toy soldiers.
Next season there will be more.
And the season after that, more still.
And they eat each other over a quarter or a dime.
Thank God you have the Ritual.
Then you’re in Humboldt, drove the overnight pulling past Eureka and all their tweakers, passing that lonely row of Cyprus trees on the other side of the highway next to the water in the right before dawn decides it’s happening fog. Every surface up here covered in graffiti if it can be painted. A power box in the middle of the marshes of the bay has a Steal Your Face spray painted across it big enough to see the thirteen point bolt in its head from space. Fuck. Slow down. G.D.F. sprayed in unreadable graffiti script below the Stealie.
Then a Eureka local Sheriff’s unit passes you headed the other way and I know how this is going to end.
“They remember your name out there,” Solomon says as you walk out of his house. “Trust me.”
The Oracle says that your name is your name.
She says that as long as you carry the Ritual with you they’ll always know your name.
And you pull off the highway onto the shoulder that doesn't exist because the trees are crash and die close, will grow through the rails in another hundred years, in your favorite stretch of redwoods, in the middle of the night, so you don’t smoke in the rental. A pretty young woman with lightning white hair wearing a tie dye shirt for a dress, holes in it at the neck and bottom hem, dirty face, climbs over the rail and crosses the highway up to you. She asks if she can have a smoke and you give it to her. Light it for her. Where’s she going? Nods to the forest past the rental and the siderail. Wish her luck.
“You don’t need luck, all you need is to know where you’re going. It’s a long strange trip right?” she says then past the car, over the rail, into the redwoods. Always be nice to people up here in the middle of the night. There’s a forest witch that if you’re rude to her legend says she’ll lead you into the woods and you’ll never find your way out. Maybe that’s what happened to D.B. Cooper back in the day. Maybe that little chick was her and she just needed a menthol.
But legend says there’s tunnels under Eureka, vanishing hitchhikers, the Wiyot have a flood legend where all of Humboldt flooded like Noah wasn’t doing the same shit, and they survived by some of them ran up on Table Bluff.
The Square in Arcata never changes. All the humbums sit at the bottom smoking spliffs to stretch spanged weed or glass pipes scorching their lips for the magic chemistry set lung feeling and ten more minutes. Butterfly is dancing or doing yoga, no one can ever tell. Window down, roll slower than walking all the way around the square. More than one set of eyes at the square clocks you. Not everyone on the square is a Humbum. Some are kids. Some are players. Some have backpacks full of too much money and pistols stuffed in their packs. The light from enough cellphones glows in the millennial grey of morning, sun still not burnt off the fog.
Phone is stomped to pieces in the underground garage at SFO, just in case they remember your name.
The clocktower in the middle of the square doesn’t strike six when it should. Sticks at 05:59. Eyes all go up. Another Legend is the clock is cursed, and if it stops something bad happens to the whole town.
G street north, 9th west, H street south, 8th east, back to G headed north, circle the plaza. Identity crisis or grotesque show of power, who would know.
Clock at center square is frozen.
G goes to a right on East 11th, zig Bayview right and squeeze past a Grow dozer parked asshole proud and go left on Park.
Then Alice in Wonderland you veer right and you’re back in town but you veer just left, past some hedges, and you’re on Fickle Hill Road. It goes up above the bay, mountain tall and circling the town, the grade taxes the car whole hill goes up 4,000 feet but you’re stopping at about 1100, pulling off the road onto dirt, but first past these mansions they’ve cleared the west face of the hill and built, cheap architectural pollution. Who needs to fuck up a perfect view of the bay, now above most of the fog, rays of sun shining through a light mist, just so they can have fake Roman columns and a tesseract roofline. Fickle hill is McMansion Hell and then it levels close to the farm.
Familiar sky blue roof on the house gone to shit. Trash in the yard. Motors. Dead cars.
Sleeping on the floor inside on couch cushions because you need to hide for a second.
Eggs for breakfast. Friends live here.
The kids are all gone except the overgrown ones in the house tweaked out of their minds, them and Hades who stole the harvest. She said commit to the ritual.
Cut the lights, roll dead just onto the property. Open the pill bottle. Anxiety Vibes! Eat three bars. You can slow your heart rate and take your blood pressure down ten points breathing in through your nose for a deep four count, holding it for a seven count, and then letting it out in an even eight count. Repeat until life returns and get out of the car.
The sun shines in your eyes but you’re on fire, each step leaving scorch marks behind you burnt into the broken pavement from your Brooks running shoes. Just another civilian consumed by flames, honest, blue grey postman’s pants with one black stripe down the side, a baseball ringer tee in black and heather grey with a tattoo style jellyfish on it and an Adidas coach’s jacket in scarlet and navy, covered in clouds and tigers, the floating world.
No wallet.
No phone.
Nothing but a ritual.
At the door three sharp knocks, between a cop and a bag man. Inside chatter from dumb meth banter goes dead air but the bomb landing at the front door is just some guy. A fading sign says smile, you’re on camera.
There used to be horses here.
House is nice, walls aren’t thick enough to not hear soft talking about what the fuck?
Then footsteps and the door opens a crack.
Acne and a backwards flatbrim never been cleaned, crusty. Ask if you can come in, smile, say Bertha down at the infamous donut shop said y’all up here had pounds on the cheap. Just a custie.
The truth is you were lucky. Even Solomon is nothing but an interchangeable face in a sea of dreamers and strivers just like him, for every pot farmer that’s been doing it a decade someone’s been doing it two, and someone is starting their first grow. For everyone stole their first pound someone is out there jacking their twentieth crop. For every jewel runner trying to get rich before they get fed time there are a thousand to take their place even dumber. For every nameless bag man showing up in the morning on Fickle Hill this morning there’s someone out there stuffing someone’s toothless cut up meat into a plastic barrel filled with lye and getting ready to drop it so deep in the redwoods god won’t be able to geolocate the remains for the sixth time that month. Everyone gets clipped or they get out.
Learn early, or learn late, or lose your mind and end up where you are.
Hades is the leader standing there taking measure of you, bright jacket, stubble, black rings around eyes a hundred years tired, holding that custie smile tight as you can.
The rest of his crew, they all have trim trays on their laps, doing shit jobs processing Solomon’s stolen plants. From the old head view, they all look like babies.
“And who the fuck are you kid? Why the fuck did Bertha send you up to us without even calling? Shit don’t smell right.” Hades isn’t on tweak, he’s calm. Clockwork clicking. What’s the missing puzzle piece?
I’ve been around, it’s just been a while. I checked in with Bertha, old friend kid. I just need like, a unit. It’s whatever if you don’t want to do it, say and start to turn for the door.
In STL She hands you the Ritual. “This is the only thing I’ll let you come out of retirement for baby.” We know.
“Wait, wait, wait, you just need a unit, we got five ready to go,” Hades says.
Turn back to him. Seven feet between the two of you.
“But what was your name again?” and then he pulls a fuckin’ Glock 19 from his dirty pocket and dangles it at his side, tapping it against his thigh.
The Ritual is a CRKT assisted folding knife with a five inch long blade, a pearl handle with a blued stainless steel bolster and a wicked curve, Persian, flip it open and the near half moon curve of the blade alone says you’re about to have your heart cut out, and you pull it from your pocket and flip it open faster, whip and click, than Hades could have in his worst nightmare imagined himself pulling the Glock from his pants pocket.
My name is my name, you say.
“What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? Wasn’t that a rap album or something?” Chuckles because he has the gun.
“You’re too close to me,” you say…
In the spring they reap the winter Barley in Russia. Millions of acres of it. In a field being harvested by combines, two young children are playing. A boy and a girl. It’s the first day that’s not absolutely too uncomfortable to be in the fields pushing each other around and making jokes. There are three grey and orange combine harvesters working the massive field they play in. Getting in the winter crop. Where you come from maybe they don’t call ‘em combines, they may just call ‘em threshers, but their play is spinning in circles.
The boy pushes the girl, the girl pushed back, they have hoods and their ears are covered, only hearing their own screams, lost in their own childhoods. Best friends for two years. The girl is 9, the boy just 8.
They’re arguing about something no one can hear and a combine makes a turn, heading up a straight row within pissing distance of the two.
The machines are huge, loud, aggressive, their threshing blades lowered to get all the barley and spit the chaff, sticks, and stems, out its ass. They’re also slow.
The view from above of how slow they are doesn’t change a thing.
The boy pushes the girl, the girl pushes him back, they grab arms and dance in a circle, and the machine rumbles closer.
Who would know why. Motivation has always been a bad excuse for human behavior. People do things all the time just to see what will happen. And she tells him to stand where he is and cover his eyes. She’s his best friend. Of course he does.
Then just as the Harvester passes she kicks him in front of it, laughing innocent and smiling, red giggle faced, but when he lands on the threshing blades she screams and the operator of the combine yells a bellow in prayer.
Blood sprays the barley.
Story inspired by a 3 word prompt from Edith Bow from her stream of consciousness prompt workshop: “Interchangeable, Barley, Banter” which took me entirely too long to vibe with.
Stats:
3 hours straight, no stopping.
4k words exactly, wow.
Five next morning edits for typographical errors, one edit for very minor clarifying content.
Song on repeat, Father John Misty - She Cleans Up.
Well, shit. Fuck.
Yeah this was worth the wait. I love it.