“Bajema’s prose combines the precision of pop-song lyrics with the surreal haziness of a fever-dream. . . . These lyrical stories treat a range of topics, from schoolboy football stardom and infatuation with a local beauty to Eddie’s encounters with his emotionally battered father, described as a ‘dog of war’ with a ‘soul in pieces.’ A raw and direct pathway into the mind of an independent youth ‘trapped in the culture of Southern California.’” — Publishers Weekly
“From the moment you meet the thirteen-year-old Burnett in a San Diego suburb, to the moment many years later when he awakens with a bad hangover from a life that used to welcome him, you’ll find yourself silently cheering his every small triumph over gravity. Bajema is an enviably powerful storyteller . . . a walking badass of a book.” — Rolling Stone
“Bajema touches all the bases of American life: the pervasiveness of violence, the pain of loss, the strange calculus of race, the bittersweet agonies of family attachments and, always, the signals and skirmishes between men and women.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Eddie constantly seeks a nobler perspective, only to find an illusion, a trick of the mind. . . . As the distinction between right and wrong continues to erode, [Bajema] unveils a very dark answer in the quest to illuminate the human spirit.” — LA Reader
“Bajema’s prose is surly and mesmerizing, snakes down your throat like a pickup’s exhaust. Fans of Sam Shepard will dig these desperate and beautiful tales.” — Joshua Mohr, author of Damascus
“Don Bajema is one of my favorite writers. His stories are tough, honest and sometimes brutal yet they’re also merciful, wise and transcendent. Reading Bajema’s work is like hearing an ancient, mysterious folk song played by a great rock and roll band in a dark bar somewhere in the Mojave Desert on a hot night. Don Bajema’s stories makes me want to go write songs and play guitar too loud.” — Dave Alvin, Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter
“Don is a great writer. His work is worth reading.” — Henry Rollins, singer-songwriter, publisher, author of Black Coffee Blues
“Don gives an articulate voice to the outsider. He captures the fragility of adolescence and the awkwardness; how the random collection of our childhood experiences shape us into the person we are reacting against, coming to terms with and always becoming.” — Dred Scott, jazz musician
“A smidgeon of Shepard, a bit of Boyle, a cry of Kerouac and maybe a taste of Morrison flavor these original stories of a California life.” — Robert Englund, actor
“Discovering Don Bajema’s literary genius before the rest of the world has caught on is akin to stepping into Gerde’s Folk City in ’61 and catching a young kid from Minnesota fixing his harmonica in place and launching into a song about ‘Hard Rain’ or finding yourself at London’s Marquee Club in ’63 when a group of scruffy hooligans are reverently and rebelliously inventing a groundbreaking, world splitting, stone rolling, blues rock ’n’ roll. Bajema’s writing ignites agonizing heartache, prophetic insight, immortal swagger, and a redemptive, triumphant love of life. You will beg him to keep on singing.” — Pete Sinjin, musician
Winged Shoes
and a Shield
collected stories
Don Bajema
City Lights Books • San Francisco
Copyright © 2012 by Don Bajema
All Rights Reserved.
Cover design: emdash
These stories were previously published in two collections, both published by 2.13.61 Press in 1996: Reach and Boy in the Air.
This book is also available as a print edition: 978-0-87286-588-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bajema, Don.
Winged shoes and a shield : collected stories / Don Bajema.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-87286-588-4
I. Title.
PS3552.A3944W56 2012
813'.54—dc23
2012025574
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133
www.citylights.com
For Ramona, Nick, Epifania and Luke
Also, John Fawks and Pete Sinjin, the best friends a boy
and man could ever have, “There is a house . . .”
ROCK-A-BILLIES
They were rough, wild-humored Texans. Their house rang with laughter and singing, steamed with heartfelt conflict, occasionally spattered with their blood. That house rocked with a lust for the next expression of love, the next fight, the next joke to sum it all up. Five kids raving under the roof of two Rebels. They left their pit bulls in Waco, moved out to San Diego and put a beagle named Chino in the back yard. But the blood lust and heart of those pit bulls seemed as much a part of them as the black Indian eyes of their mother, and the sloping shoulders and wry squint of their old man.
They had audacious courage, stubborn determination, and a fierce brotherhood, because they kept their dead alive. In fact they were on a first-name basis with death. He was like a visiting uncle who carried a straight razor and told glorious stories as he bounced each of us on his knee. He appeared in cars late at night, across the border in brothels, in the bottle, staring at us with blood-red eyes. His were stories sung to the slow low keys of the piano at night, or told with laughter in the kitchen by day.
When our thirst raged hotter than water could quench, they’d take me to the ancient well that keeps the souls of our past beneath its surface. When I took their dare and peered over the edge down onto that black pool, one of them would slap my back and holler, “See, there it is” — I’d see my own reflection. We each took our turn pulling to the surface another song, pouring out another story. We’d fill ourselves with the desire to accept the next dare by gulping the cold elixir of our unique American heritage, part romantic, part psychopathic.
Until this very day when my heart drops into a dry hollow pit, or during those times it beats with the universe, or even when I’m just catching my breath, I hear a slow rhythm of inhalation and exhalation, a whisper of inspiration from those down in that well. When I fail to live as the man I was born to be, I hear a chorus of low moans as they recall their own regrets, before their time here expired.
We can’t see our ghosts, but we can hear them. When their voices echo in our songs, in our blues, in our dreams, it’s our own voice we’re hearing. Because they were who we are, and what happened to them, happened to us.
Gettysburg. Still-Breathing Ghosts.
Promise them the love of God and country; then watch them become the sons of Satan, transformed by the alchemy of war, from boys crying for their mothers into their brothers’ butchers. Long after you are sick of the sound of the victor and the vanquished, long after your heart is broken observing their astonishing efforts to prolong a life no longer worth living, you’ll hear their last song. It’ll sound just like a rebel yell.
I’m one of those still-breathing ghosts. The last few battles, I remember pinning my father’s name under my gray jacket. I wanted to go home one way or the other. I did the same thing for a few boys new to the regiment who had not seen this kind of fighting before. Without ammunition, we’d have to run more boys at them than they could kill all at once, and get it down to hand-to-hand just as fast as possible. These new boys’ hands shook so badly I penned their names in for them. They said their fingers were too cold. I took it as a white lie. We’d get up in the morning and vomit, squat somewhere and empty our bowels, and