Another Upstart: Jose Salamander Priest

I often feel that each time I write is frustrated by my mere hope for a fully developed story. Many times in my notebooks or in my daydreams, the beginnings of things are laid in place, causing a sort of series of many possible futures. The idea of futures being cut off, closed up and decided somehow bothers me, so naturally, I write beginnings often. Here is another...

It was the end of an era, the park bench where Jose Salamander Priest fell asleep after just convincing himself of his own ephemerality. What does that mean? Soon, he wouldn't have to care to live. Previously, the girl sitting on the rock beside him had forgotten the last name on her list of lovers because she, too, experienced a kind of ephemerality, the forgetting that the sight of Jose Salamander Priest incurred. Without a left eye, his face looked smashed by the boulder she sat on, smashed by a heavy weight that must have blundered upon him, with force, distinct force, scarred and left for young girls like her to look at, to gaze, to wonder. Who was that boy, the one who left for New York City? Who was that boy, the one who made her forever weep? In that instant, at the public park, with the people entering and exiting the restrooms in a uniform procedure, a veil had been lifted. No longer would the constant obsession over a boy, a memory, color her city.

The face of Jose Salamander Priest had been torn by weather, torn by accident, torn by fate. He sat with black grease lining the seems of his camouflage Army-Surplus pants. He rehearsed the lines he would say to his former boss when asking for another hit-man job, the last he hoped to complete before planning his own assassination. His assassination would give momentum to a new generation of hit-men who Priest believed, had the capacity to take down his rival gang-leader, Jorge Moreno. His logic was unprecedented. He would cut his long braid and mail it to the cemetery where he planned to be buried, in Muleje on the Baja Peninsula. And the clouds lined his eyes with hopes for a grand exit, the sort of exit that calls upon others to rise up and stand by their own fate as though it were a pleasantry, which it never is. But this grand exit would never come to pass, as the girl sitting on the rock would see. She watched his left-eye spasm and his hand drop, trailing fingers over the grass, after a rather slow and uneventful heart-attack. To her, it had merely appeared as though he had fallen to sleep, perhaps with some drug-related spasm to induce the sleep. Unperplexed, or rather, annoyed at the over-abundance of homeless people in the area, Dolores Park in San Francisco, she stood up and walked down the hill towards the tennis courts where bright yellow balls flew to and fro. Henceforth and Sidewinding. She needed to use the restroom and she dare not try the Dolores Park restroom because of the line. The line never seemed to disappear. Instead, she opted to hold it and to walk all of the way home, to Sixteenth street and Valencia, four blocks away.

The light in her eyes contradicted the future. There was no hope. Priest raised his head and watched her descending on the grass. He fell in love. How does a ghost fall in love? Sarah had a walk that swayed. It moved along, aimed at a horizontal axis that sent Priest floating into a reverie, because it reflected the same footsteps of his grandmother, walking out to through the palms to the river in Muleje. Priest had no body to consider anymore. He left his body on the bench and followed her, stopping in the shadow of the lamp-post, then hiding underneath a parked car, before sliding across the cracks in the street to follow just beneath Sarah's feet. That's where he decided to stay, in the empty place where her former longing had disappeared, the place where that distant love had departed from her memory. Now, instead, there was a blind spot, filled and protected by the ghost of Priest.

I thought maybe I could mention something about my choice of names, i.e. Jose Salamander Priest. This is a set of unconnected words fused together by childish caprice. My very own caprice. It hearkens back to the time when I named my teddy bear Buster Yellowy Buzbee Bear as a child. Names need to flow over the tongue. I like names that I would want to say aloud, or announce on a loud speaker.