"Losing My Panache, the Kiowa My Witness," an essay, by Holly Hunt

Holly Hunt, essayist and poet, is from the Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, The Kansas City Star and Arkansas Democrat newspapers, and other journals. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. She lives in Hot Springs with her genius cat and her husband who was raised by wolves and The Grateful Dead in California.

Losing My Panache, the Kiowa My Witness

Jams, my old boyfriend in his mid-thirties, musician top dog in charge, acoustic genius at large and fluid on keyboard and drums according to the seasoned ears in southwest Oklahoma, as tuxedoed in boundless energy going bald. He swept up a storm wherever he walked. If he was afoot, his speed was usually so that his thin, dark ponytail flew behind him, because the music biz doesn’t wait for slug worms.

It was mid-morning in July when Jams rushed into his studio apartment, the one with walls covered in cushy grey egg-cartons, better to insulate the vibes for his four-track recording gigs.

Every sound element was sharper on a four-track, and he was a most adaptable, multi-genre mixer between Tulsa and Wichita Falls. He pitched some sheet music toward the dark corner, and it landed on the sloshy waterbed in the nether regions where not much had changed since the day Kurt Cobain put on a pair of plaid flannel pjs and tied up for the last time.

Jams skipped over wires running to and from the old school Peavey amps. Amazingly, he never tripped. When he walked past the sweet Les Paul leaning on the edge of the blonde- veneered end table his mama had given him just so he’d have some furniture, I felt his cool like in a frosty bottle. He was still fizzy from last night's blow-out when a roomful of friends and neighbors witnessed his legendary style, as he sang and played “All Along the Watchtower,'' wailing in melodic tenor with tasteful vibrato. We hollered and clapped in standing-room-only encore.

Somebody said, in the kind of worshipful voice that sees Christmas angels, “Jams, you’re the greatest! Mellencamp got nothin on you, man!” Well, who wouldn’t eat that shit up? So, now he was hot to finally make the great music video.

Two-Hatchet, a Kiowa film guru and my favorite gay cameraman, had lazed around all morning close beside me, on a cloud of soggy mercy before the sun rose too high and forced us to turn on the window unit air conditioner. I had nicknamed it Hank because it whined and sang yodels all night long. I had turned off Hank to give him a rest, knowing we’d need him later. I didn’t want to burn him out too early like the real Hank. We slumped in a caved-in leatherette sofa.

The Kiowa remained unconvinced regarding consecutive images. He would just look at you crazy if you snapped your finger, like telling him to gitty-up and get in line. You could say it to his face all day long; he was not about to gitty-up or get in line.

Jams, always aiming toward pro, could not inspire us from that state of dilapidation we’d pleasantly sunk into, a split Naugahyde losing its batting, a mortally wounded sofa. He could not uplift us, not even with his nearly Missionary Baptist, religious cheerleading: "Come on, you’re just as great as me, in your own way! Let’s do this thing right now! It's going to be great!"

Two-Hatchet, fiddling with his vintage sixteen millimeter, didn’t look up. He barely flickered interest in getting some film rolling. Jams and I merely yipped through the problematic air like two wooden, ineffective coyotes in some poppy art gallery in Santa Fe. Our best loving days had hit their zenith two weeks earlier. Now we were just sharing leftovers from the fridge, satisfied to keep each other sexual company. Nobody had come right out and said that anybody was wrong for anybody. There is such a thing as excusable limbo. You can stay there for as long as you can imagine something might turn into the real thing.

We were abiding together, the three of us, in namby-pamby limbo land where you never know, and the goal is unclear, but every new day leaves a pile of flakes around you, because humans are flaky. And I had begun to suspect that Jams was more flaky than jelled, like when you paint over and over a house and it dries but it still comes off in brittle pieces because nobody has yet done the hard work of scraping off decades of old stuff down to the bare wood.

Two-Hatchet knew. He could discern how our colors were cheaply painted on, not even natural pigment. He sat very still, like a brown listening rock. Paint never stuck to him. His essence shunned Sherwin Williams. He could see us through the smudgy windows that separated each of us from one another. And he also saw himself that morning, always through an invisible reflective window while looking into any situation. Sometimes he was paralyzed for minutes at a time, just watching everything that was going on. He had knock- out peripheral vision that was sort of like an epileptic owl. Maybe he had night vision in the middle of the day. Sometimes I thought it made him dizzy.

I crossed my legs and circled my foot around and around, like I was sitting on a front porch built onto a single-wide trailer. If only for just for a moment, I was determined to look like white trash. I thought it might be useful. I said to Jams as he tuned his beautiful old Gibson, "Don't look at me, man. I ain't nothing but a lost cause. You know, like your high-school dates from Doe-Doe Park."

Doe-Doe Park was a derelict old amusement park in the middle of town with a giant swimming pool long drained back in the mid-sixties and now full of leaves and bark rot and the fall-out of seventy-eight tornadoes. The owner of the park had been a right-wing-nut bigot who wouldn't let any Comanche, Apache, Arapaho, Mexican, or military-brat kids of all colors swim in his pool. When the world known as Oklahoma and the southern states around it finally semi-adopted the Equal Rights Amendment, the old guy who owned Doe-Doe Park locked the gates and threw away the keys. His amusement park closed down and grew over with weeds and little shrubby cottonwoods as a strange place where No Child Gets Ahead. The metallic paint-chuffers and glue-sniffers liked it and crashed therein.

Two-Hatchet, with his cosmic streak of Kiowa Indian outer-space drifting outward, loved to make jerky films with shocking rip edits. He delighted in chopping up time into tiny Chiclet-size pieces. I knew what he was up to, having aced the trend of Deconstruction back when it became just another ism.

He was wearing his Thousand Miles from Nowhere face, right next to me in his unorthodox corner of existence. He knew my tacky Doe-Doe Park joke had missed its mark, because Jams would be the last to admit that he didn't completely charm every date in his high school years when he had all of his hair.

So, I sunk down a little bit deeper, emphasizing the jest by sticking my wad of gum on the sofa arm. I said, "I have done nothing of significance—and I got a feeling like it might stay that way.”

Jams stopped strumming the Gibson. He glared at me from across the room. He looked at me as if some big old diamondback rattlesnake had curled around my neck. Forfeit and failure? Not in his lexicon. The very idea was unacceptable to him. He said, “Fuck irony! It’s for losers; all it does is flatten the soufflé!” Flatten the souffle, another Jammism. Pretty close to a Velveetism, in that it referenced cheese, but not without culinary elevation.

He asked, “Anyhow, what do you mean by that?''

But the cinematic deconstructionist surprised us and came to life. The Indian let escape one delighted howl as he hugged his ribs and fell over sideways on the sofa, leaning on my shoulder.

He could dig a little failure to coalesce, at least the possibility of it. He knew what I meant and what I didn’t mean and could see me coming before I visually appeared, because he could think in circles. So, I played for an extra close-up when I said, as if coming to a dire realization, "Really, what do I know about anything! I'm just a failed actress!"

Okay, right there: my pseudo-confession. But the Kiowa knew, as well as I, that it was not a true confession. But the stranger thing was this; I was probably acting too convincingly, like in the Method style, the one they teach you in beginning college acting classes. Meaning that the person I was talking to, Jams, the confident, get-ahead guy, might, for some reason, believe me.

And that is exactly what happened.

I had a choice. I could, with patience and rationale, explain to Jams the jest that had just flown over his head. But I realized that my explanation might make Two-Hatchet laugh to the point of passing out. He needed a good amount of oxygen to stay alert. And anytime one attempts to explain a bit of false news to somebody who cannot think retrograde for any reason, one could be wasting her time. It could take too long, like a half an hour.

The fact that I spoke a falsehood that somebody could believe, about my inability to tell a lie or live a lie or play some serious make-believe, was just too pointy not to hit an invisible bullseye in the air between myself and Two-Hatchet. We got it, only us two. The other guy, who always believed in himself as one of the gifted and talented, all of a sudden was not in on the joke. We were laughing while he was just standing over there, backing up, disgusted with me, whom he suddenly saw as a failed actress who was stupid enough to admit it.

He snapped, unable to appreciate my tone and message: "Damn you lazy jackasses! Why am I hanging around you forlorners! You imbeciles! Why do I even allow you in my place! Hell, I am leaving—if you're gonna stay!" So, he flung his Levi jacket over his shoulder like some tycoon in a TV commercial heading off for a private Cessna. Yeah. It was about to land him on Pike's Peak where he would stand and take in a 360-degree viewpoint, and he was sure it was a panorama that we could not possibly comprehend. He swept the door open with a vengeance, wham bam thank ya mam. He'd up and walked out on his very own great music video, leaving us deadbeats behind.

I looked at the classic Les Paul electric leaning solidly against the blonde-veneered end table.

In that moment, Jams left us behind, in an apocalyptic manner of abandoning the damned losers on earth. He also left behind a nearly full package of filtered menthol longs.

The Kiowa yawned, stretched, and I thought he might meow. He asked in his soft, almost kitten voice, "What's wrong with him?"

Whatever it was, his question was rhetorical. He knew the simple answer so shiny and poignant like the maraschino cherry on top of a molded Jell-O salad. But it was a question to which I would not have known the answer, had I still been acting. Which I was not, having ended my enjoyable dumb trash act, only not soon enough to be a really skilled actress.

Jams jumped in his rambling truck and tore off slinging gravel. Away he roared, maybe toward Nashville, maybe toward Austin, gunning it, ever seeking that break and the company of music pros that would be inspired to put him in a great music video. He shook himself free from me and all my failures real or imagined, perceiving me to have clearly lost my panache, and Two-Hatchet, too, as we appeared to be holding onto the underbelly of satirical punkville like Black Plague fleas of the Dark Ages.

We just sat there, babysitting our pathetic selves, somehow mysteriously satisfied with the unpredicted loss of his brilliance. He left us, indeed, and we were forced to drink the last bottle of home-made sangria in the fridge. By afternoon, we had smoked the rest of his cigarettes before bidding adios, aware that we had paid a price for seeing eye-to-eye.