THE STAIRCASE TO HELL OR HEAVEN

44th entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on August 31:
__12 Caligula (Gaius Caesar), 3rd Roman emperor (37-41 AD) what a charming pervert he was,but he was wise to name his steed Incitatus a consul, at least the horse had more sense than politicians do

1811 Theophile Gautier Tarbas France, writer/poet (Albertus) , enough to inspire anyone

1834 Amilcare Ponchielli Paderno Italy, composer (I Lituani, La Gioconda) poor chap, just remembered by his heavenly Dance of the Hours

1870 Maria Montessori Italy, educator (spontaneous response) ,the hings she had to tolerate for being a single mom

1928 James Coburn Laurel Nebraska, actor (Our Man Flint, Magnificent Seven,The Iron Cross)one hell of an actor!

Deaths which occurred on August 31:
1057 Leofric husband of Lady Godiva, dies, but not because he saw her riding naked
1964 Rocky Marciano former heavyweight champ, dies in a plane crash,what a loss
On this day...
1535 Pope Paul II deposed & excommunicated King Henry VIII,who would proceed to create the Anglican church in order to marry his already pregnant Anne Boleyn

STARS

The white page, completely in blank, is the greatest challenge for us the writers,dearest reader. After a period of absence, several days, I am back at your desk,with the pen in my hand. I t has been so hard staying away from you,from writing to you. Some things never wear off. I continue starry-eyed after I try to evict you from my thoughts,and not even those magical four stars formed with gold from our Siuna La Luz mine have the effect that a single word from you does. I look at them in their fine velvet case and I don ´t recognize myself in them. I think of the miners who left their lungs,punctured with tuberculosis, in order to wrench this gold from the entrails of the ground,and feel the slow blush of shame rush to my yet unwrinkled cheeks. They deserve these stars more than I do.
Sometimes, when we get something that life gives us,we wonder what we did to deserve it. Getting you into my life was the greatest reward I have ever had,but I still don´t know why I got this prize in this life. I haven´t won any battle beyond learning to walk again when all doctors reached a consensus that I would never step on my soles again.
Erica Jong, one of my favorite authors, said in a poem she hadn´t won a holy war nor invented anything useful to be rewarded with the YOU of her poem in this life. I face the same situation. I know every time someone gets pinged with an award, a medal or distinction, the person to whom it least belongs is to him or her. How many deaths, how many tears, how many pounds of guilt are behind that award or rank you get?
How many steps until I got there? How many ghosts in my closet? I run down the extension of my body.Did it begin with my head, with the topknot I wore imitating Marie of the Aristocats?
I wore green hair for only 5 hours. It was back in 1984, shortly after I had gotten shot in Jalapa while climbing into the helicopter. When I had gotten back to Managua,bathed in my own blood, I had realized I was beginning a bout of depression. I don´t know why we Jews are so prone to depression. It is nobody´s fault that we have gotten into so much trouble along time´s long snake body. Slowly, my wounded knee mended,and to this day I have a barely perceptible scar. But I must have been quite off colour in order to get myself into a beauty parlour and bought myself the greenest hair money could buy. It fills me with curiosity and astonishment because I hate beauty parlours, have always regarded them as huts full of mirrors and gossip, where the lotions and smells are the incense of that useless temple of vanity where the shape of the hairdo matters more than the ideas in the head beneath all that coiffed hair. I hate being touched by the hairstylists,so artificially mellifluous calling you lovey when they don´t even know your name. So I had my long hair tinted lime green. It cost me 20 dollars,and I headed back to the bunker with my still wet hair under a cap. My boss wasn´t at the office when I returned from the beauty shop. When he came in 5 hours later the shit literally hit the fan. He was striding into his enormous bureau when a tendril of my barely moist green hair escaped from my tight cap. He stopped with one leg in the air. He turned around and audibly gasped. Next he roared at me. He refused to have his translatress with green hair like an alien. Where he got the idea that aliens had that color of hair still fathoms me. He almost had a stroke, then fished around in his wallet with his poor wretched hands and threw a 100 dollar bill at me,demanding that I get my tiger-striped hair back again. He was livid with rage and he frightened me. His driver took me back to the place where I had gotten my green hair. The doyenne there was appalled. I have never had hair all the same color, it has been naturally streaked. It was going to be hard to restore my original color, said the owner of the beauty shop, but she would try hard to do it. The combination of the acrid odor from the strong chemicals of the tint and my anger worked together,and while the hairdresser worked on my scalded scalp, tears of rage streaked silently down my face. Once back in the office, my scalp stung and I was in the foulest mood possible. By then my boss´ fury had appeased, and when I went into his office to give him two more translations, he gave me a warm smile. I was so angry I just saluted and got out before I would have the shame of having him see me cry again.
Now I wonder, if I had refused to change my hair color, would things have been the same? Was I spineless? Had no pride, no stubbornness? Once in a while I miss that glorious sense of liberty that came with the green hair I only had for 5 hours. It was a lesson in what I would have to sacrifice on the long stairway into a red heaven or a blue-green hell. Or both.
My wrists,now always bejeweled,were once bare. So proudly bare, Until I made the mistake to drive a truck when I couldn´t even ride a motorbike, and catapulted my truck into a pit and I had to put my wrists on the steering wheel so it wouldn´t barge into my thorax. That was shortly after I lost Rubendarío Ramírez, the military service recruit with green eyes with whom I was destined to have twins but who died a few hours after I met him already wounded and doomed. I was in a state of walking limbo, still dumbfounded at how sarcastic kismet could be. I had the nerve to watch the surgical procedure by which a blond Soviet doctor mended my wrists in a cold,almost bloodless stainless steel surgical tray. I had bone loss in the right wrist, where I now wear my extravagant glass, lapislazuli and French rose beaded bracelets. So much pain and loss beneath all that glamour. One step up Or into hell. That missing shard of bone sometimes pulls at the scarf I wear around my neck and over the heart nobody knows I have,calls me in the middle of the night to say I´m here, walks over the rest of my skeleton as a ghost. I never saw what was removed from my wrist. I shouldn´t ask.I can still write and type. Let´s day it got metamorphosed into the gold medal that my boss´wrecked, hurtful scrunched hands misplaced on me that sunny morning,when instead of pinning the gold medal on my shirt he went right through the skin of my left breast and secured the distinction there while I bled silently without screaming in the midst of excruciating pain. When I removed the bloody clothing, along with the medal, I was left with a sense of free-floating emotionalism for a week, but I told myself to shut up because it was premenstrual tension. I still have the two tiny dots where the pin of the medal went through. Like playing domino, one step up,go and collect. But what did I collect then? Am not I still reaping the rewards or the penalties?
Looking at a full body x ray of myself, you could say I must get more stars than 4. That is why I wish I would have met Mexican artist Frida Kahlo,who is the only person I know of who had a more broken column than mine. The missions to La Penca left me with shrapnels fit to be the back buttons of a sexy black dress og the death we all carry in our stomach, an irrational fear towards moonflowers and a broken vertebra almost getting to my voluminous ass. It left me crying over Rubendarío Ramírez´s premature death although I never confessed it to anyone up until now that I do confide in you. True, I had already washed out the honour of lady war correspondents, sorely mangled when one of us got pregnant during a mission by one top officer with blond hair who thought love was a Battlefield even before Pat Benatar had the idea to give one of her songs that title. Honor, oh code of Bushido translated into local Spanish! I had washed it with my own blood and sweat. But the problem is that those precious substances cannot be bought at the corner shop where you can buy an ice-cold Cocacola. One ring down into hell, would say my friend Dante. Or up into that heaven that may exist only for Boticelli but not for atheists. Sorry, messed up again. Pinged with another star.
Where did I go wrong?
Or why did I go right? Was spreading my own brain as a thick layer of butter on the toast of so many students the answer? Or the fact that I never got airsick when airborne?
Did shooting with a tank without forgetting to wear the ear protectors help? Was it how magnetic I looked in the all-white suit fit for a corvette captain? Like a fly wallowing in a cup of milk? I look at myself in the mirror,and see the beginning of wrinkles that the cavalier camera still doesn´t pick up. Then again, I stare at the velvet box with the four gold stars.They never shine as much as the stars in my eyes when I pick up a pen or slide the keyboard in order to write to you, for you and you through me.