I have to admit I get a secret joy out of having a car that burns oil. Weirdly enough, I had always wanted one but never had the pleasure. I remember the first neo-pagan witches I ever met. They had an old silver bomb of a car, with Alaska plates cuz theyd driven it straight down all the way from Ketchikan to Denver, and thats where I met them, in my college friends apartment, smoking pot and playing the flute. Helena and I were playing flutes, that is; the two neo-pagans were either singing or laughing or moving their stuff into her apartment because they were all going to live together, cheifly so that she would be able to afford the rent and stop writing hot checks all over town. That was stressful, the always being broke and trying to slip a postdated check past a clerk at the grocery store. So while they moved boxes and burned sage, we smoked pot and slowly but surely got worse and worse at flute-playing until our lips stuck to the mouthpieces and we laughed and gave it up. One of the witches, the tall, stringy one, gave me a bead. A little black one, fat in the middle and small on the ends, with little white markings around its equator. He told me where it came from, someplace special, some old crone or something, but I dont remember. I wore it on a piece of leather around my neck. Over the next couple of years I would add other significant beads one or two at a time, but I always liked best the one from the tall witch, and I always loved telling people, This came from the first witch I ever met. The other witch was gay. He was shorter and glossy lipped, sort of pretty in a short, slightly puzzled way. Helena found a whole stack of gay porn magazines in his ex-closet when she was helping to finish cleaning out their old apartment next door to hers, which was now theirs too. She called him a bad boy. She really didnt like the magazines. She felt there was something vaguely immoral about them, but she didnt know quite why, and I dont think she completely wanted to feel that way. Like maybe it was an old habit. Other things happened like when the witches and I were in the old apartment, going through some things. I think this was right along when the bead turned up and one of Helenas other neighbors came along. Sun, she called herself. She was either a stripper or a prostitute or both, I honestly dont remember which. She had a threadbare white dress and a voluptuous if slightly tired body. She had blond hair that looked like it remembered being brown. She was making conversation, and the tall witch chided her, or perhaps just teased her, for trying to make conversation. She offered to show us her tattoo, and the tall witch made fun of her a little bit for that somehow, too. I said, yeah, show us the tattoo. So she lifted up her little old dress, and showed us her inner thigh. There was a tattoo on it, all right. I dont even remember what it looked like. But I do remember that inner thigh, looking so tough yet vulnerable, so delectably soft yet weathered that I wanted to stare at it, drink it in with my eyes all day. But I couldnt, of course; she put her dress back over it, and the conversation went on, under the humming thrumming slanting sunrays of Denver. Helena and the witches gently made fun of her more, later, when she was gone, but I have another secret. I really liked her, in fact some part of me loved her and still does and always will. Anyway, the four of us decided to drive across the mountains to a hot springs they knew about. The witches, Helena, and me. We went up and up and up, over for a couple of seconds, then down and down and down gradually until we were on a smouldering wide plain, with rusty fences, bent trees, a yellow-grey look to the sky, curlicue winds, space space space, level and low and flat and stretched out for miles. It was really a totally different place from where we had been that very morning. It was like some huge ashtray in a burnt driftwood universe, where before we had been in happy little satyr grassy bouncy land. So we plyed across this plain for a long time, looking for the little unmarked dirt turnoff. We took a wrong turn and ended up at someones house, the only house around. The guys went inside to ask directions, and when they came back out they said she was really neat and sold tie-dye and incense and what not. We called her Sister Moon, and blessed her and laughed and rolled on. The sky grew lamenting. Snow lay about. We finally found the place.You had to park and walk up a ways, and then there was this big old house, just standing there open and fairly warm and tidy inside. There was a kitchen that just anybody could use, complete with dishes and some condiments and odds and ends of food in the refrigerator. There was an old raggedy piano that I plunked on a little bit. We went over to the main pool. There were a few naked people inside. The witches got naked first, got in, and after a moments hesitation, not because of the witches or the strangers or any general problem with nudity, but only because Helena, my friend and never girlfriend, had never seen me naked, I did too. I guess Helena got naked, but maybe not. I dont really remember. The main pool was the biggest and lowest. But the problem was, if you just sat there, eventually you would get cold. So me and the short witch and this labrador dog that jingled alongside us made a pilgrimage to the high pool. It was steep, snowy switchbacks, and we were winded by the time we got there, wearing nothing but sandals. It was worth it. In this little pool, under an overhanging lip of rock where steaming water dripped, held back from flying off into the wide wide Colorado sky by a little row of stones, you could truly sit still, as long as you wanted, and be quite warm enough. Closer to the source. Ahhhhh. Some deer came up, stood there being deer in the steamy dewey snowy alive place, and then flew away. After a while we went back down to rejoin the others. It was getting dark. We found them and we all went inside another structure. This one was a little hut built right over the hot stream. It was a little sauna, and you could put your feet in the warm water. You had to duck down and just about crawl to get into it. Very womblike. Very nice and wooden and dark and glowing and close. We sat there for a while, then eventually decided to get our clothes on and leave. I have to say I have NEVER felt so relaxed as I did sitting there in the back seat of that square old wide American car, letting someone else drive, being dry and warm and plump and rosy in my clothes in the car with the heater and some music going, and the witches and Helena all around me, rolling away across that wide impossible plain at night under a clear moon sky. And then the problem with the oil started. Well, first it was a problem with the weather. It started snowing, snowing hard, just as we were climbing back into the mountains. We got somehow lost and way off our original route, so we had to feel around for a pass over the divide, which took us through some tiny little top of the world town where the streets were sideways with height and gas was like eight dollars a gallon. All was dark and swirling. The roads became icy. The witchs knuckles became clenched. We had to switch off driving to not go crazy. Much of the relaxation flew out the window into the haze but a certain warm green light of it stayed at my souls center and I dont believe has ever quite left. I think that is why I enjoyed the death-defying journey back so much. With that little green light going, I knew it was all okay. All part of it, or something. Or maybe I didnt know that. Maybe I was just having a good time way the fuck out there in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, I think thats it. So in addition to not sliding off the road we had to worry about the car acting up, which evidently it sometimes did when conditions were inconvenient enough. We had to stop every fifty feet or so to put more oil into its smoking hole. And you know, I admired the wry humour with which these witches poured oil into their car. They called her she, they called her bitch, they laughed and cursed her, but they bought the oil, and they popped open the hood and poured it in there and we drove on another little treacherous ways. That was how it worked. When we got back, we lay in bed in boxers and T-shirts, and the short witch gave me a massage. Ever since then, I have always driven a car that used virtually no oil. Im miles away in flat smelly old Milwaukee now, and things are different. I cant smoke pot any more, unless I want to feel sad and heavy. I need a massage so bad I ping when I walk. I lost the string of beads long ago, and I regret that. I have put gallons and gallons of gas in my car, and thats always been all there was to it. You pump the gas, you pay, sometimes with your TYME card in lieu of real money, and you go on and do something else. But just lately, my car has taken the next little step on its way to becoming an honorary junker. A car thats Been There. A real Piece of Shit, if you know what I mean. And it has Been There, that is. Its been out West to another hot springs, in fact, back, out again, back, down South, up North, and finally all around and around and around this honking screeching town in search of a little something and its really starting to show the wear. And now, today, I realized, yes shes using oil. Today was sunny, almost Colorado sunny, and I pumped my gas, leaning back against the frame and looking at the inside of my head. Then I thought, what the hell, if I dont check the oil Ill just have to do it later, so I checked the oil and it was about a quart low! So I replaced the nozzle, let the hood down lightly, and sauntered into the quick shop wearing boots and jeans and a flannel shirt. I went authoritatively over by the automotive supplies, passed knowingly over Heet and washer fluid and filters and such, and picked out a quart of oil. Pennzoil 10W-30 will do fine. Or whatever you got. Everybodys got Pennzoil. And I plunked it down on the counter and said, This, and Pump #7. I chatted with the lady, felt very sunny, walked back outside and raised the hood, and poured that sombitch in there. It oozed out, murky/clear, slow/fast, slurping a little over the rim of the hole where I knew it would smoke and that was okay; sometimes you spill a little and it smokes. I replaced the cap, tried to find something to do with the beautiful little bit of grime on my fingers, and let the hood slam back down with a definitive THANG! And I drove away looking for this one love-you-forever song on the radio, this ultra-pop, little-too-sweet, superficial, utterly soul-wrenching song that I really love. I couldnt find it of course. It only comes on when Im not expecting it, or have missed half of it. And as I pulled out of the gas station parking lot, I thought, you know, there is a secret joy in having a car that burns oil. And a little green light went on inside of me somewhere. ---- ## rev. 072925 The heart of the city is low, cracked, dirty, greasy, salted with trash and lost souls. Heedless car tires erase the bike lanes. Fighting is in the air. The shattered glass indicator. Unresolved urgency. It’s scary. What am I doing to make it better? OK yes it’s systemic, does that necessarily mean individuals are utterly powerless? Adjectives are like coyotes. The nagging edge of dissatisfaction rides my rib cage. It’s OK. Pedal. Let the mindlessness of motion percolate the sadness, the enervation right on up out of my guts. Let it wash to the surface. Let the hot wind brush it away, leaving me naked, sweaty, empty. Lock the bike outside of my current [favorite little coffee shop](https://roastcoffeecompany.com/cafe/). Go inside so I can look out the window. You don’t always have to be happy. You don’t have to assume the responsibility, the burden of always being that. You don’t have to be the perfect parent, either. You did quite a bit of work. They survived this long. You can work on some other things now if you want to. Your kids don’t get to be the judge of how you did as a parent. Did you know that? Surprised? You don’t get to be the judge of that either though. Surprised? You seem on edge, says the window. You can be so transparent sometimes. No but seriously, it continues. You seem like you’re having a hard time existing as a point source of spacetime. I mean — if that was, you know, if that was what you were trying to do — I don’t want to assume — No, you’re right. I was. Yeah, I’m still interested in existing that way. It’s been a bit of a challenge lately, you know? Next to the window, window’s friend the front door opens. In walks a human being who looks just like David Foster Wallace woulda looked if he’d been less famous, or maybe before he got famous, and (obviously) before he decided he could no longer exist as a point source of spacetime. I want to smile at this young man, so I do. Therefore I exist for one small moment. He chats with the guy behind the counter, asks for his latte to go. He’s getting ready to drive for Uber, hopes the chance of rain doesn’t keep potential customers from wanting to go places. As he turns back toward the door, I realize he also looks a little like the thinner taller one of the two witches I met in Denver back in the early 90s. # pigeon ## playing the flute in Denver, with Leann, with the witches *Let’s consider this a guest post. This was written by a past version of me, circa 1997 (slightly edited by current (aka slightly less past) version of me, circa 2025):* I have an odd little secret: The idea of having a car that burns oil brings me joy. Weirdly enough, I always wanted one but never had the pleasure. I remember the first neo-pagan witches I ever met. They had an old silver bomb of a car, with Alaska plates cuz they’d driven it straight down all the way from Ketchikan to Denver, and that’s where I met them, on one of my spring breaks, in my friend Leann’s apartment in a building that looked like a cheap motel, smoking pot and playing the flute. Leann and I were playing flutes, that is; the two witches were singing, laughing, and schlepping their stuff into her apartment because they were all going to live together, chiefly so that she would be able to afford the rent and stop writing hot checks all over town. That was stressful, the always being broke and trying to slip a postdated check past a clerk at the grocery store. So while they stacked boxes and burned sage, Leann and I smoked pot and slowly but surely got worse and worse at flute-playing until our lips stuck to the mouthpieces and we laughed and gave it up. One of the witches, the tall stringbean one, gave me a bead. A little black one, fat in the middle and small on the ends, with little white markings around its equator. He told me where it came from, someplace special, some old crone or something, but I don’t remember. I wore it on a lace of leather around my neck. Over the next couple of years I would add other significant beads one or two at a time, little gifts from various encounters, but I always liked best the one from the tall witch, and I always loved telling people, *this one came from the first witch I ever met.* The other witch was shorter, broad featured, glossy lipped, sort of pretty in a soft, slightly puzzled way. Leann found a stack of gay porn magazines in his closet when she was helping to finish cleaning out their old apartment — which had been right next door to hers. She called him a bad boy. She didn’t like the magazines. She said there was something immoral about them, but she couldn’t quite say why, and I don’t think she completely wanted to feel that way. It seemed like an old habit, feeling that way. One thing I knew about Leann was that her parents had originally sent her to a religious college near Kansas City. My roommate and I at UMKC used to clamber into his Delta 88 battleship and go on quests to sneak her out past the borders after her curfew, to drive around, shoot the shit, probably drink, probably, of course, smoke pot. Eventually Leann had defied her parents and transferred to UMKC, to continue unimpeded the process of being corrupted by secular society. While the witches and I were in their old apartment, going through some final odds and ends, one of Leann’s other neighbors wandered over from a few doors down. Sun, she called herself. She was either a stripper or a prostitute or both, I don’t remember. She had a threadbare white dress and a compact, voluptuous, slightly tired body. Her blond hair looked like it remembered being brown. She was making conversation, and the tall witch contributed to the conversation by teasing her for trying to make conversation. She offered to show us her tattoo, and the tall witch made fun of her a little bit for that, too, but I said, yeah, show us the tattoo. So she lifted up her little old dress, and showed us her inner thigh. There was a tattoo on it, all right. I don’t remember the tattoo but I do remember that intimate glimpse of her thigh, tanned, tough yet vulnerable, soft yet weathered. I wanted to stare at it, drink it in all day. But I couldn’t, of course; she dropped her dress back over it, and the conversation wandered on to nowhere, under the crystal clear sunrays of Denver in the early spring. Leann and the witches continued gently making fun of Sun later, after she was gone, but I have another secret: I really liked her, in fact some part of me loved her and still does and always will. Anyway, Leann and the witches decided we should drive across the mountains to a half-hidden hot spring they had heard about somewhere. We headed west — up and up and up, over for a couple seconds, then down and down and down, finally cruising across a smouldering lowland, marked by rusty fences, lone bent trees, yellow-grey sky, curlicue winds, and empty space, level, low, stretched out for miles. It was like a huge ashtray in a burnt driftwood universe. Looking for the little unmarked turnoff, we took a wrong turn and ended up at someone’s house, the only house around. The witches went inside to ask for directions, and when they came back out they were gushing about the hippie woman that was in there, a holdover from another era. She sold tie-dye and incense at festivals and whatnot, and of course knew all about the hot springs. We dubbed her Sister Moon, and blessed her and laughed and rolled on. The sky grew lamenting. Snow lay about the desolate plain. We finally found the place. You had to park and walk up a ways, and then there was a rambling old house, just standing there, open and fairly warm and tidy inside. There was a kitchen that anybody could use, complete with dishes and some condiments and odds and ends of food in the refrigerator. There was an old raggedy piano that I plunked on a little bit. Just beyond the house we found the main basin, several feet wide and two or three feet deep, edged by tufts of grass and a little rough-hewn deck, at the foot of the hillside the hot spring creek meandered down. There were a few naked people lounging in the warm water. The witches got naked first, got in, and after a moment’s hesitation, not because of the witches or the strangers or any general problem with nudity, but only because Leann had never seen me naked, I did too. I don’t remember if Leann got naked or not. The main pool was the biggest and lowest. If you just sat there, eventually you would start to get a bit cold. So me and the short witch, with an amiable white/yellow lab jingling alongside, made a pilgrimage to the high pool, wearing nothing but sandals in the snow. The path was a series of steep slippery switchbacks, and we were winded by the time we got up there. It was worth it. In this steamy little bowl, held back by a humble row of stones from flying off into the wide Colorado sky, you could truly sit still, as long as you wanted, and stay quite warm. Closer to the source. Ahhhhh. Gentle music of hot water dripping from the rock outcropping overhead. Some deer ambled up, stood there breathing visibly in this secret snowglobe hideaway, then flew away. After a good long soak we went back down to rejoin the others. It was getting dark. We found them inside another wooden structure I hadn’t noticed before. You had to duck down and just about crawl to get into it. It was a little sauna, straddling the creek, with a wide hole in the floor so you could dip your feet into the endless flow of warmth below. We huddled together in the womblike dark, until we were ready to put our clothes back on and head home. I have *never* felt so relaxed as I did sitting there in the back seat of that square old wide American car, letting someone else drive, dry and warm and rosy in my clothes with the heater on and music on the radio, with the witches and Leann all around me, talking or not talking, rolling away across that wide impossible plain at night under the clear bright moonlit sky. Pure, physical, effortless perfection in the body, with absolutely *nothing* to worry about. How often does that happen? And then the problem with the oil started. Well, first it was a problem with the weather. It started snowing, snowing hard, just as we were climbing back into the mountains. Somehow we got lost, way off our original route, so we had to probe around for a pass over the divide, which took us through some tiny little top-of-the-world town where the streets sat sideways with altitude, and gas was like eight dollars a gallon. All was dark and swirling. The roads iced over. The tall witch’s knuckles clenched the steering wheel. We had to take turns driving to not go crazy. Much of the relaxation flew out the window into the headlight haze, but a certain steady green pinpoint of it stayed lit up in the center of my soul. With that little green light going, despite the death-defying journey, I knew it was all okay. Or maybe I didn’t know that at the time; maybe I was just having a good time way the fuck out there in a little bit of danger in the middle of nowhere with my friends, one old and two new. In addition to not sliding off the road, we had to worry about the car acting up, which the witches admitted it did sometimes when conditions were inconvenient enough. Seemed like we had to stop every couple hundred yards to pour more oil into its smoking hole. And you know, I admired the wry humour with which the witches performed this automotive rigmarole. They called her *she,* they called her *bitch,* they laughed and cursed her, but they bought the oil, they popped open the hood and poured it in there, we crept on another little treacherous ways down the road, and then they did it all over again and again. When we finally made it back to the apartment building, we all lay gratefully in bed together in t-shirts and boxers, and the short witch gave me a massage. Ever since then, I have always driven a car that used virtually no oil. I’m miles away in trashy smelly old Milwaukee now, and things are different. I can’t smoke pot any more, unless I want to feel sad and heavy. I need a massage so bad I ping when I walk. I lost that string of beads long ago. I have put gallons and gallons of gas in my car, and that’s always been all there was to it. You pump the gas, you pay, sometimes with your TYME[^1] card in lieu of real money, and you go on and do something else. But just lately, my car[^2] has taken the next little step on its way to becoming an honorary junker. A car that’s *been there.* A real *piece of shit,* if you know what I mean. And it *has* been there — out West to another hot springs, in fact, back, out again, back, down South, up North, and finally all around and around and around this honking screeching town in search of — something — and it’s really starting to show the wear. And now, today, I realized, yes, she’s using oil. Today was sunny, almost Colorado sunny, and I pumped my gas, leaning back against the trunk and looking at the inside of my head. Then I thought, what the hell, and checked the oil and it was about a quart low. So I replaced the nozzle, let the hood down lightly, and sauntered into the quick shop wearing boots and jeans and a flannel shirt, picked out a quart of oil, plunked it down on the counter and said, this and pump #7. I chatted with the lady, felt very sunny, walked back outside and raised the hood, and poured that son of a bitch in there. It oozed out, murky/clear, slow/fast, slurping a little over the rim of the hole where I knew it would smoke and that was okay. I replaced the cap, tried to find something to do with the beautiful little bit of grime on my fingers, and let the hood slam back down with a definitive <small>THWANG</small>! And I drove away and turned on the radio, scanning for this one love-you-forever song, this ultra-pop, little-too-sweet, superficial, utterly soul-wrenching song that I really love. I couldn’t find it of course. It only comes on when I’m not expecting it, or have already missed half of it. As I pulled out of the gas station parking lot, I thought, you know, there is a secret joy in having a car that burns oil. And a little green light went on inside of me somewhere. <br> [^1]: <small>Remember those? :)</small> [^2]: <small>It was a red Toyota Tercel — ’88 maybe? ’84? Don’t remember.</small>