Sketches of Those We Have Known:

The Woman I Most Loved

The woman I most loved had the mind of a criminal. This is hard to prove but something that grew as an awareness, over time. And I must say it was the purest sort of love, completely innocent, with enough enriching complexity to provide vivid scenes both in fact and in imagination. And who is to say that even loving a woman with a criminal mind is any less a love? And I didn't say she was a criminal, only that her mind operated completely like a criminal who will diabolically reverse all sense to convince himself that he steals and kills with a high and grand purpose. That it is a noble thing to do as a matter of fact. It was this tortured reasoning that made her, my love, so simpatico to the criminal mind.

She kept goading me to do something bad, something to show that I didn't believe in their rules. She kept saying I wasn't a real man until I had broken those rules and made my own. "Then you are a free man and I can love you as deeply as you love me," she said. And then purring, "Do a rotten thing, a terrible deed that you risk your freedom."

Then she would make wild love with me. She was in complete control here and I went along for the ride. And after awhile I became extremely imbued with the next sweet session, the next ride I put to myself, so that the idea of keeping her became more and more a pleasant necessity. Surely the dark spot in her could be erased by love.

I do know for a fact that she had, for a time, peddled marijuana on the street while she had been an "artist." She dismissed the whole incident as childish but driven by the necessity to make money. "They force us to make money you know so we can't do our art." In truth, she was a poor artist but knew this and wanted simply to call herself whatever she wanted to call herself. She became a businesswoman and hired illegal immigrants to do odd jobs, paying them under the table so she wouldn't have to report it to the IRS. And she started to make good money in the business and was soon flying to Germany to take her goods to trade fairs and pick up business in Europe. When I met her the business had topped out, she was in a funk and I think she was trying to live through me. I got that feeling from time to time. Since I was younger than she, she saw me as a puppy of sorts. "Oh little puppy, you know nothing about life and I will teach you..." She would have been a wonderful grifter had she put her mind to it.

She was, no doubt, born to make trouble and had tatoos been fashionable when I knew her she would have had one like that; an outlaw tatoo with a wild demon streaking out of her soft arm.

She was always trying to get me drunk so I would do something outrageous, even in public places. It would have driven her to a frenzied delight had I gotten into a fight in a good, upscale restaurant and had tables crashing and food splattering all over the place. She would have loved it and declared her undying love for me at that point.

Needless to say I tried to stay absolutely sober around her. In fact, I was on my guard around her more than anyone else. One slip, I thought, and I'll be spending time in jail or the hospital. She reeks of danger. I think if she watched me die it would give her a great surge of adrenaline.

But I did love her in those ways that, in reflection, seem so powerful and strange.

I've often thought that we human beings belong in another form. We are always trying to shuck off the one we have, inside and out. And that's not even mentioning the mind which is a crazy temple of outrageous propositions. Mind, you trick me once too often! And it always has a pleasant retort, "dreams are not for nothing." So, I suppose I'm rationalizing the nature of loving a woman with a criminal mind.

Her heroes were criminals who had become their own law. And I think that points to the woman and her condition. She wanted to be her own law, her own domain or region and felt all of humanity was trespassing on her;

There were the voluminous bookshelves that had books on Al Capone, Rattlesnake Dick, Pretty Boy Floyd, Billy the Kid, Ma Barker, and other infamous criminals in American history. There were cultural monographs by professors at esteemed universities about the impact of these anti- heroes on the cultural history of America. "They play out the shadow of even the most respectable person," the experts agreed.

I had been to Alcatraz Island several times, to show people from out of town, apparently one of the attractions to the area I am from. The splendid boat ride was always burdened by the facts of the matter. The prison, the old, lonely birds, the isolation, the collection of evil that stewed on that island and still came through as an atmosphere, as an effect after all those years of neglect. She, too, not only had been to Alcatraz but had spent some clandestine days hidden away in the bowels of the prison, soaking up the ghosts of the place, while hiding from the park rangers. It was another one of her escapades that made me realize that she was too much for me to handle.

She knew of my ambitions and dismissed them with contempt. "You're hardly a man, how can you have these ambitions? Prove yourself that you can stand up like a man, take the bad like a man, and fight for yourself. You think everything can be learned in books." And she had total contempt for all the books in the world except the very few, those precious few books she kept around that detailed the exploits of her favorite criminals.

Yes, there were times when I feared her. There were times when I thought she was capable of gouging my eyes or something of this nature. She used to relate very violent dreams she had in which someone who had done her wrong was torn apart by her own hands. It didn't please her but she knew it was the very core of herself and did not repress it.

I had met her parents; good people no question about it. And they treated her as if she were a beautiful little angel. I didn't want to disillusion them but everytime they heaped praise on her I felt a bit sick. They did not know her truly so she was very good in keeping appearances. Well, I reasoned, that was an important trait. It showed that even she had a conscience and was not going to let down and disappoint her dear parents. Her younger brother knew. Her sister cared less about her and wanted her to roam endlessly as an outsider so she would appear so much brighter in the eyes of the parents.

Now, from this distance, I can say that it was pitiful she hadn't been born in another era. She belonged out in the wild west or in the wild steppes or the wild pampas; anywhere but late 20th century urban America. She needed to live in a sod house for two years and get all the evil and violence driven out her by the necessity to survive. But, the modern world had given her the leverage to become what she wanted. That is, the modern world had given her time and time became a treacherous ally as she went from one adventure to the next; from one book on a favorite criminal to another.

I don't think she killed anyone. I'm not at all positive but I believe if she had killed someone I would have known; she would have made a slip. After love making, for instance, she would be vulnerable and cry and if she had killed someone she would have spit it out at that time and not in her usual brag but as if I could forgive her to God on her behalf. So, I don't believe that happened but I can't be sure.

Here's what she did do however. She robbed banks. They were small, rural banks and not well protected but I know for a fact she did that because she showed me grainy black and white photographs of her in post office wanted pictures. She claimed she was an incarnation of Black Bart and would recite silly poems to the teller after the robbery. And the gun was usually a toy pistol, not a real one but then the clerk had no way of knowing. "Tis a poor wee lady down in her luck/ and she wants to give the rich bastards a great big f....." They called her the F'n Robber and I think the detectives and investigators actually admired her and wanted to meet her. Men are always excited by women who use good saxon cuss words.

Perhaps I should have stopped seeing her after I found this unfortunate fact out about her. But you see, I loved her. And love is a most powerful attraction, a most powerful elixir certainly. I rationalized it all as the misadventures of a misguided woman who was proud and headstrong and trying to bring justice to the world, however perverted it may be.

It was only after I had left her that I realized she was one of a kind. That, in fact, when historians looked at this period of time whe might get mentioned as a representative type. After all, of the people who lived in northern California in the 1870's who is remembered but the thieves, killers, coach robbers, and those who grainy photographs show them hung from a tree? It began to dawn on me that there was more to this woman than her mere flair for criminal activity. She was acting on behalf of history! She had figured out that history scorned the good and decent and loved the evil, hateful types who created action. "Any action is better than this awful office death you subscribe to...." She put it to me like that on several occassions.

I'm sure she has her views of how things really were. Even though she never mentioned the name Robin Hood, I think she had a bit of that spirit in her. After all, in all the time I knew her we were surrounded by people with more money, money that had been gotten through a variety of cheats, subterfuge, manipulation, and out and out thievery. She never made the ideological argument that property was theft or that the money contained in the establishment actually made people, superior to the establishment, suffer unholy things. In fact, she moved thorugh life as though there was a tacit understanding that someone, somewhere was recording her very activities and that, in the end, the future would understand her.

In some ways, she resembled a character I had read about from Roman history. An Etruscan general had captured a young woman and kept her as a prize. During the truce the woman escaped to Rome, swimming across the Tiber River as Etruscan soldiers shot arrows and objects at her. She made it, was taken back to her family. The Etruscan general was outraged and told the Romans that the truce was in jeapordy unless the woman was returned. He was hard about it until, a bit later, he seemed to soften and tell the Romans of his admiration for her pluck and courage. "If you return her to me I will release her to her family. She can pick out a dozen prisoners to take with her." So, she had become the catalyst for something extraordinary; the exchange of trust and value between people's who had been killing each other before. And true to his word, once the Etruscan general had the young woman he praised her to his troops, out in the open air, allowed her to take back with her a dozen prisoners, and then released her to a family representative.

I read that story and immediately thought of her, my love, who was full of this male hormone or gutsy, ballsy courage that did what she had to do to be free. Ah freedom, that was her silent, secret song of life.

She claimed that working a normal job was slavery at its worst. The criminal class had long understood this and so took to stealing and killing to get along. No matter how I rationalized with her she wouldn't hear of anything else. "Every great person killed those who stood in the way of their freedom," and then she would turn back to the TV. She never cooked and was lousy at the domestic arts. Life was a kind of intense adventure that no one knew the outcome of. "If they know what happens then they are simply slaves. Only the free can tolerate the not-knowing."

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