Hey Vern

When the porch is the perfect place to work, but the neighbor comes by for another charm offensive. This happens when he is in conflict with another neighbor. He and the yoga teacher’s boyfriend went at it yesterday. I have to say goodbye to the honeysuckle smell and shocking American goldfinch yellow and funny sparrows bathing in dirt and work inside.

I've found the only weakness in this wild garden here. There is one square of the porch latticework through which Dennis the neighbor can see me as soon as he steps past his screen door. Our eyes lock. My peace is over.

After a brief discussion of the longed-for effects of rain on his red gravel dust, Dennis skips the other project topics and tells me about Vietnam. That’s because I ask him. We saw eye to eye a few days ago (“I’d like to see socialized medicine in this country”). He told me the problem with this country is greed. I ask him now how serving in Vietnam influenced his opinion of this country. He did two tours there, the second one playing guitar with the Bob Hope band.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that we won that war because we lost only 60,000 men and we killed 3.5 million of theirs,” he says.

"You know Nixon wanted to nuke them," I say. "Kissinger had to talk him out of it."

His voice gets gentle then: “We’re not murderers.... We have a lot to learn from the Vietnamese. They live with nothing. Here it’s a disaster if your washing machine breaks down.... The Soviets wanted to take over the world, we went in there and showed them our might, and now it’s safe for Americans to walk around Moscow and for Russians to walk around over here.... Yeah, we had to go into Iraq. With or without WMDs. Saddam himself was a WMD.”

“I have noticed a lot of Russians on the boardwalk here.”

“Yeah, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea,” he said.

Worried he might ask for my testimony to the police, I nonetheless ask him why he and his neighbor were screaming yesterday. He says the neighbor sprayed his wife with water while hosing his flowers. “The problem with America is everyone just cares about themselves, their own little world and that’s it,” he says. “I’m going to have the police come by and talk to him.” He makes up a story about the neighbor coming over to his house and slamming the door on his finger. “I’m sorry you had to hear that,” he says.

I tell my friend Danny these Dennis stories, because Danny has met Dennis. I tell him how Dennis spent $3,000 to change the color of the gravel that covers every foot of his yard and driveway. I tell him how Dennis stands in the rain to watch the gravel change to a darker red. How Dennis got a free roof put on by complaining to the guarantor about cheap Mexican labor. “Worthless piece of shit,” says Danny. “That’s $3,000 that could have gone to Darfur or New Orleans.” It’s hard to argue with that. It’s also hard to see someone as completely worthless. There must be something in him.

Lying in the hammock out back reading Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, about a necrophiliac murderer whom we sympathize with, I notice the Jersey sky has gone crazy. The pink isn’t just to the west where the sun has gone but it stretches all the way straight above me and beyond. There are countless ripples in the western clouds and a pink bivalve over me. These things disappear quickly, so I put on my sandals to walk down to the bay. A friend calls on the cordless phone but I’m so transfixed by the sky I walk out of range and he’s gone. The entire bay is red. I stub my foot on a rock. Blood on the middle three toes. I sit on a ledge by the water and place the white phone beside me. A mother pointing to the water keeps saying did you see it did you see it to her kids. I look for a whale, then back to the water itself. Nothing comes to mind, but that’s all right. How often do you see water so red.

On the porch, writing about Spain. Closing my eyes and trying to remember. Staring at the breeze in the trees and trying to remember. Then a sound floats up, the most beautiful Spanish guitar. The fluttering leaves are showing their lighter undersides, like the twirling dresses of the Spanish dancers I never met, nor even saw. The music is not coming from some corner of memory but from Dennis on the porch next door. He's playing on the guitar that, come to think of it, he once told me he made by hand.