Yesterday afternoon i spent about 6 hours with a 70+ year-old gentleman named Lord Christ in a gas station parking lot in Seligman, AZ along historic Route 66.
That is his birth-given legal name.
I asked him if he’s lived up to that name.
He got into it with the catholic nuns at school so often he had to be put into public school to survive.
The stories he told reminded me of Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue.”
He can’t stand organized religion.
Christ was his father’s Prussian surname. He is the firstborn son of the firstborn son 12+ generations deep.
He was born in 1940.
He sells tie-died t-shirts, flowy dresses, batiked tapestries, and crystals on the side of the road out of a pop-up shop under an EZ-up tent all around the states.
For years he was a driver in the music industry. He once almost left Jim Morrison on the side of the road in the desert and refused to drive the tour bus even one foot further unless Jim was escorted to the back of the bus. He said Jim was a kind, soft-spoken, incredibly sweet man – when he was sober. Once Jim started drinking, Lord claimed Jim drank until he hit the floor and became incredibly nasty.
He once was picked up by Janis Joplin at a coffee shop in Venice in his early 20s before she became famous. They were sometimes lovers and fierce friends until she died..
He left the music industry with finality and disdain the day she died.
He’s done all kinds of things with paperwork, records, illicit substances & trucking to fly under the radar his whole life…
He wistfully gave me the inside scoop on old-school biker parties and the things men and women got up to at these “adult events” back in the day that have since been outlawed in contemporary times. “You would not believe what was allowed to happen on stage!” (Sexist, cis-hetero norms apply.)
He invited me to smoke some herb in his massive RV and dropped some pretty big tears (which he tried to hide) after telling me about his partner of the last 17 years who has had massive physical and mental degeneration…
He just dropped her off across the country with her family two months ago because he “can no longer take care of her.”
He does not get along with her family.
She is not yet in institutional care. He cried openly when he spoke about it being “only a matter of time…”
Twice he casually rolled a cigarette with a pretty fancy hand-cranked self-rolling metal contraption.
He smokes. A lot.
The is at the threshold of a massive life transition. He does not imagine another woman would jive with his lifestyle.
He is trying to lose weight so agreed to have a cup of tea with me and reluctantly agreed to allow me to prepare him “a very light meal.”
I cooked him a spicy vegetarian meal in the parking lot (out of the back of my car) with udon noodles, fresh carrots, zucchini, and tempeh in a coconut, ginger, and parsley sauce…
He was visibly surprised by the flavor and said multiple times, “Wow! Now this is pretty good!”
He’s concerned about the hate in the country.
He is antithetical to government.
He talked about Trump.
He voted for him twice.
He never voted in his life before that.
He believes Trump won the last election.
He doesn’t understand why folk call Trump a liar.
He believes a wall should be built to “stop the criminals” at the border.
I reminded him he was a “criminal” in the same ways himself.
He heard me out and reluctantly agreed then differentiated by talking about the “rapists and child molesters entering the country.”
I told him I am a crisis counselor and advocate for victims/ survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence. I told him i literally answer the phone when someone reaches out for help; i meet folk at the hospital for post-assault forensic medical exams and am there when folk file reports with the police… I told him overwhelmingly the folk who assault and rape are known by the victim/survivor. They are their neighbors, “friends”, co-workers, employers, and family members and they are by a far majority US Citizens, not brown folk illegally migrating into the country. I mentioned that this was one of many of Trump’s lies.
He talked about enslaved Europeans who entered the country. i talked to him about the difference between being a debt slave or indentured servitude with the ability to work yourself free (and if white and male ultimately be given free land and the ability to use that free land gift to create intergenerational wealth) and the inherited intergenerational horror of chattel slavery that enslaved Black people have endured in this country.
He conceded the difference.
He also felt folk need to “move on.”
He talked about the prejudice and anti-white sentiment of specific Chinese t-shirt vendors he knows.
We talked about power and the difference between a specific person holding prejudice against white folk and institutionalized power in partnership with racialized prejudice that determines who is hired and fired, who gets a housing loan, who gets access to historical wealth to pay for university admittance…
He listened and nodded his head.
He is troubled by the race-based hatred in the county and does not believe it will ever end.
He told stories of traveling all over the country and the feeling he gets in his bones in places where the land is still “uneasy.”
He said Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the site of the Tulsa Massacre was one of those places. When I mentioned “Black Wall Street” he replied, “I believe it was called Greenwood and most Americans don’t even know that history.” The grief in his voice was apparent.
He’s worried about what is being taught in schools and that if our youngest generation can not read cursive they won’t be able to read the constitution. Multiple times he referred to interpretive history placards across the country as “hysterical markers.”
I asked him if he would share with me something he wished the country knew or something he would like me to know.
He thought a while then told me I had a spark of magic that caught his attention from across the parking lot. He was caught off guard by the open exchange between us. (I had told him at some point that I profoundly disagreed with some of his beliefs. He responded with warm hope that “I see that, AND we are having a caring discussion about it.”) He felt enlivened by the energy and tentatively invited me to spend the night with him.
I told him i was happy to share this meal with him and would be hitting the road. I also told him good things are coming his way and i was just the emissary of unknown future possibilities in this big life transition, hugged him, and left.
ps.
I might’ve accidentally had a Marilyn Monroe situation with the wind and my skirt as I was climbing in and out of my car and accessing the roof rack bin…
(Minus the decorum of undergarments.)
Twice.
(Apparently, I do not leave much for the imagination…)
Maybe this further inspired the invitation?!?!
🤦🏽♀️😂😬🤣
I headed back down Route 66, landed in Flagstaff, Arizona, and met a young creature named Andrew who decided to move into his jeep and began overlanding during the last year as he was pursuing his degree in physics online due to COVID…
pps.
you know you might have an extreme tea fixation when you travel to 3 different tea houses, 2 herb stores and the tea section of 2 grocery stores alongside stopping at 5 different spots looking for a larger inverter to power your mobile tea kettle…
all within three days… 🤣
♥️☕️🤷🏽♀️♥️
