God and Casey Jones and Bourbon

John Henry died with a hammer in his hand and a woman at home who could drive steel like a man.  I wonder sometimes, when I’m drifting through another night of studying and struggling to understand esoteric truths that are not necessarily immediately useful, what it would be like to be a steel driving man.  

She tries to tell me things, sometimes.  It’s passive aggressive and almost always a means to end something that never was.  Ending with her was not like watching someone die.  I’m sure it would be hard to find that someone was no longer alive.  That what they were had ceased to be and would never be again.  That they had lost their individuality to the greater morass of life and left nothing for you to love or care for or talk to.  This was more like turning over in bed to talk to a lover and discovering a corpse, cold and long dessicated by the desert wind and the blowing dryness of the high lonesome, dead for months.  It is not waking to find the lover gone but to find them long gone and forever lonesome blackened dust.  It is always hard to see someone change, but worse is to see them not change and suddely become what they have been all along.  

John Henry may have existed.  He’s like Jesus or Buddha or that one girl named Connie in the Philipines.  Maybe real.  Maybe not.  In the lens of gone and covered by years of shielding deposition, whether or not figures were ever real is immaterial.  The idea of John Henry remains.  The steel driving man, born to die, locked in dubious battle, for no other reason than a hammer found in his infant hand.  He never had a chance.  But he may have been happy.  Probably was happy.  A shack with Polly Ann may have been a good time or a rough time.  Impossible to say.  When he pounded in that last stake, did he know that his work was over?  When he fell dead, did the Casey Jones yet to be tip his hat to the John Henry that was?

When she turned out to be dead, she drifted away a little at a time.  I didn’t care, really.  She tried to tell me about her biological father in a straight forwardly passive aggressive way I ignored.  I hadn’t cared in months.  Half the time I told her I had to do some important work, but I was sitting with a game of Madden paused waiting impatiently for her to wrap it up.  Her stories about her struggles, and there were so goddamn many struggles, strained through the the colander of the TV I was watching and the video games I was playing.  She never thought to ask me any questions that may have incriminated me as the attention deficient, unconcerned and terrible person I was.  I guess she did eventually.  She left.  One could argue I had it coming.

Was it the blasting?  All that suspended silica dioxide hanging floating in the air; invisible murderer, shackled menacer.  Did John Henry hesitate?  Did he keep hammering away through those blasted tunnels, driving steel like no other man?  Did he ever cough blood and scratch his eyes until he went blind like I did long ago at the concrete plant?  Probably.  But John Henry was a steel driving man.  That was what he was, not who, not what he thought.  He was a steel driving man, Descartes be damned.  I will never be.  I can run a sledge damn good.  I can demo out a sidewalk in a hurry.  I can make any large fixture small and manageable with a doublejack.  But I can’t die holding a hammer.  

It is appointed every man once to die, and then face judgment.  That’s what the Bible says.  We were loading up the van behind a cowshit smelling bar in Hanford, California. We had played hard and lived and died the rock and roll one more time.  The drums were carefully placed one in the other and battened down.  The amps went in first.  Then the carpet covered PA speakers.  We had done well as a band and had some enviable gear.  The close, wet air of the Central Valley, a tubercular disgusting strip of land on its way to rifting, pressed in on us and the heat, a yellow disgusting smelly city heat colored by the nearby stockyards, brought sweat out of us.  The gig had went well.  We sat politely through the opening act and the closers, a ragtag bunch of pretentious college kids from Visalia.  They had praises to sing to the sinking, transform cesspool of the Golden State.  Typical pop-punk.  She was up at the bar.  I knew she was but had long since given up on her giving up.  She would ride that sick and petulant rush to the very bitter end.  And she did.  She did without me, but she did.  I wasn’t the one who had to bury her, at least.

 It’s all the same.  The girl at the bar gig had her hammer in her hand.  The pointless pretending ontological chick-lit philosphy of the vapid zombie is a hammer.  My thinking and reasoning and damned rationality is a hammer.  I will die with it in my hand.  In my heart.  Written on the tendrils of my influence stretching out into the network causality of all humanity.  

Some of us were not born to be looked at.  some of us were born free of aesthetic expectation.  Were were born with hammers and hard heads and broken noses.  

I still think of them, though.  Not like they would want, but I think of them.  They were my hammer.  It could have happened no differently.