The Secret History of My Foolish Heart

I asked for a horse the Christmas I was four and was not fooled by the black and white wooden facsimile on springy-thingies I got instead.  That was my first brush with heartbreak.  I did not know to consider the children who got squat, and to be grateful.

My next heartbreak was when one of my older brothers told me there was no Santa, this the night before Christmas when I was six.

We lived in Laos when I was eight and I made a deal with my dad to pay for half the price of a horse if I saved up the other half.  Fifty bucks was the going rate for riding horses in Laos, took me nearly a year to save the twenty-five.  Found a horse and paid for it, we were supposed to pick it up in a week once it was saddle broken.  That was a Sunday.  The Sunday I was to take possession I awoke to the sound of machine-gun fire and the rumble of tanks running up and down the road in front of our house.  There had been a coup.  The fighting would rage for another year.  I was not long for Laos and I never saw my horse again.

My first serious broken heart came to me in 1963 when they killed John Kennedy in Dallas.  I was eleven.  I remember it made my tough guy older brother cry.  That scared me worse than anything.  I’m not over that one yet.

Not counting periodic episodes involving puppy love, my next heartbreak was at 16 when I went to visit a much-admired older friend who used to play in our neighborhood touch football games.  He was only eighteen at the time and it was hard for me to see him so badly broken.  He was just returned home from Vietnam where he’d left the better part of his right leg.

He was walking point, he told me, on a trail through tall elephant grass.  He turned a corner to confront a man with an AK47 who got off the first shot.  The round hit him in the thigh knocking him down and blowing him off the trail.  

It didn’t hurt he said, it felt like a dull thud.  He found himself on his back staring in shock through the arching elephant grass at a merciless sky.

He told me how he ran his hand down his leg trying to determine how badly he was hurt and when his hand got to the wound…it fell in.

***

I met the love of my life when I was fifteen.  It was immature to be sure, but it was definitely looove.  We were together all through the late sixties and those were intense times.  We married in ’70.  I was eighteen, she was twenty-one.  

She was so perfect for me, there was mind-blowing chemistry between us, and she was an angel of the first degree.  In fact, she was as sweet as tupelo honey…

Just like honey baby…from the bee.

We were married seventeen months when I was busted for four felony drug charges.  Out on bail awaiting trial the tension tore us apart.  I could have stopped it but I didn’t.  I didn’t want her to pay for my sins, so I cut her loose.  It was the hardest thing and perhaps the best thing I ever did.  She went on to marry and raise three children.  I went on to prison.  She still writes me sometimes.

As a freedom-loving hippie, prison was hard on me.  I’m not saying it was any harder on me than it was on anyone else, but I seemed to mind it more.  Every day I woke up in prison was another heartbreak.  Two-thousand, three-hundred and twenty-one heartbreaks in a row.

I got out of prison in 1978 and I’ve had any number of heartbreaks since then. But none compare to the heartbreak I feel when I consider that we have allowed ourselves to become a corporate war-mongering police state and a nation of torturers, bullies and liars.

Lord what I would give for a heart of gold.

As this old desperado just gets older I find myself wanting to get down to the heart of the matter.