Media Years

MEDIA YEARS / Deborah Digges Then the tv evangelist out of West Covina came on at six a.m., not before he'd wound up his fifteen or so monkeys, each with its own little cymbal or drum, most of the mechanisms sprung, pitching the toys over as the camera faded in, as though the moral of the parable were entropy.— Maybe we'd been up all night listening to the musak station, each deadly familiar song wrapped, it seemed, in cotton, between bulletins of the smog alerts, or the pile-ups, or, once, the baby-lifts enroute from Saigon to L.A. Eclipsed in the mountain fires that year, above the airstrips, the sun rose like the end of the world, and all the animals were driven down into the valley. The residents set traps—balanced orange crates at one end on sticks and put a little food inside. All this for a photograph of something wild. And true, our neighbors caught the stunned red stare of a coyote fleeing their garage. There's one of me in rollers stalking peacocks too tired or terrified to fly that grew so desperate when I approached, stupidly offering water, seeds, we thought they'd break a wing against base housing's pink stucco walls. As for the woman who took the picture, she was my friend. She'd drive in from the desert, stay through the weekend, keep me company while my husband flew The Missouri Review · 225 what they called the system, outbound somewhere over the Pacific. Sometimes near dawn on Sundays, not wanting to go, or maybe more than ready, she'd fall into an imitation of her drunken father, spitting, waving her arms, her face changed so entirely, I had to look away. And once my grounded-pilot-pentecostal neighbor lured me in his back door for the laying on of hands. The prayer was, baptised in holy fire, Td get the gift of tongues, rocking to Johnny Cash among the tupperware and mushroom cannisters, when in walked Trina with drugstore sherry and chocolate éclairs. Who can say why just now Tm remembering her big childish body while I watch the residents of the retirement home next door walk out into the season's first snow? They wander startled, otherworldly, clinging to one another's arms. It's nearly midnight. She's dead a decade, driven, combing her hair, across a median outside Palm Springs, the radio— beyond the crash, beyond her breathing—blaring some doped-up seventies chorus thousands of voices on a freeway ten lanes wide just kept singing, like the oversoul, along to, on-ramp by on-ramp. In California there were mudslides and earthquakes. There was a wind named after a saint that swept the smog, each autumn, from the city of angels, and a woman who could recite in sequence every exit from Tijuana to Riverside. Call her my blossoming. Call them our media years. We wore bright dresses with the backs cut out the time we read 226 · The Missouri Review Deborah Digges for nothing in a high school gym the first poems we'd written, where the bees swarmed the hummingbird feeders in the eucalyptus and the air smelled of jet fuel and oranges and the Air Force planes landed or took off and someone in the groves turned the wicks down in the smudgepots, after which, for luck, we burned the poems. Deborah Digges The Missouri Review · 227 ...