Burke James Lee
A Private Cathedral
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James Lee Burke
A Private Cathedral
For James Joseph Hogan One of the good guys who has walked the walk with us for over thirty years
“Going down in Lou’sana, gonna git me a mojo hand.”
Chapter One
You know how it is when you’ve kicked around the globe too long and scorched your grits too many times with four fingers of Jack in a mug and a beer back, or with any other kind of flak juice that was handy. And if that wasn’t enough, maybe doubling down in the morning with a half-dozen tall glasses of crushed ice and cherries and sliced oranges and vodka to drive the snakes and the spiders back into the basement.
Wow, what a gas. Who thought we’d ever die?
But why get into all that jazz? I’ll tell you why. I’m talking about those moments when you strip your gears, whether you’re chemically loaded or not, and get lost inside the immensity of creation and see too deeply into our ephemerality and our penchant for greed and war and willingness to destroy the Big Blue Marble, and for a brief moment you scare yourself so badly you wonder why you didn’t park your porridge on the ceiling a long time ago.
That kind of moment came to me once when I was standing on a Texas dock in the sunset while the waves rolled below me and thudded as hard as lead against the pilings, an incandescent spray blowing as cool as refrigeration on my clothes and skin, a green-gold light as bright as an acetylene torch in the clouds, the amusement pier ringing with calliope music and the popping of shooting galleries. It was one of the moments when you hang between life and death and ache to hold on to the earth and eternity at the same time, regretting all those days and nights you pitched over the gunwales while you deconstructed your life.
I’m talking about the acknowledgment of mortality, and not the kind that slips up on you in a hospice or on a battlefield filled with the cawing of carrion birds or by way of a drunk driver bouncing over a curb into a playground. I’m talking about seeing the Seventh Seal at work and a string of medieval serfs and liege lords and virginal maidens wending their way across a hilltop to a valley dark as oil, their silhouettes blowing like pieces of carbon in the wind.
The people who have these moments of metaphysical clarity are what I call members of the Three Percent Club, because in my opinion that’s approximately the percentage of people who fry a couple of their lobes and are able to talk about it later. You can pay your dues in lots of ways: on a night trail sprinkled with Chinese toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105 duds; or stacking time on the hard road; or kneeling on a hard floor in a convent with a rosary twisted around your knuckles; or listening to voices in your head that are as loud as megaphones. The surroundings don’t matter. You’re in a black box for the duration, Jason. You literally sweat blood, bud. To say it’s a motherfucker doesn’t come close.
After you’re through with the long night of the soul, or after it’s through with you, you’re never the same. Earthly fears disappear like a great weight removed from a scale. You have no inclination to argue or hold grudges; reticence becomes a way of life; it’s hard to stay awake during an average conversation.
The downside is you’re on your own, the only occupant in a cathedral in which you can hear your heartbeat echoing off the walls.
What does all this have to do with Johnny Shondell? I’ll tell you. He was out of another era, even though he was more symbolic of it than part of it, an era we always want to resurrect, whether we admit it or not. Jesus talked about people who are made different in the womb. I’ll take that a step further. Maybe some people were never in the womb. They arrive inside a golden bubble and somehow become the icon for the rest of us. At least that’s how I thought of Johnny and Isolde. Call it a scam or a sham or the stupidity of the herd, who cares? The only reality you have is the one you believe in. I say eighty-six the rest of it.
Back in that other era,