The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [23]
Chapter 8
TRUST LIFE, SLEEP SOUNDLY
Madre Pia knows someone who knows someone. The long and short of it: She’s gotten us booked at a Presbyterian church in Sacramento. We’ve never actually performed at a church before. Will it feel any different?
We cut over to Interstate 5 from Newport, drive half the night listening to Paul Simon on the tape player. High passes and winding asphalt gray from Grants Pass and over the Shasta range.
Tony, Lupe, and Manny sleep in a huddle in the backseat.
I keep my eyes on the yellow lines. “Do you still think you were born to spit fire for The Death & Resurrection Show?” I ask Barbaro. It’s been a couple of years since that snowy winter night at Antioch.
He closes his eyes. When Paul Simon finishes singing about his one-trick pony, Barbaro nods. “This road show is my home.”
Home. I can remember times when I said the same thing. This small circus we built together—my fellow travelers—all the people who had marked me in one way or another, who had loved me and I had loved. For years I believed in nothing more than the art and reverie that emanated from the very center of each of us and leapt forth onto the makeshift stage every night in our wild cabaret—the grand confrontation between reality and fiction in which fiction always won out. When had things changed?
I have the sudden urge to reach over, touch Barbaro’s sun-kissed jaw line. His new buzz haircut makes him look like a featherless bird. I worry about his mouth—all that lamp oil, all those flames. “You never get tired of it?”
Barbaro laughs. “Of course I become tired. Home is a place you become tired of, but it is also a place that holds you. You can leave it if you like. Your family will miss you, but they will allow you to go without protest. They know, as you know, that you will return one day, and when you do, you will not be a stranger. This is the beauty of home.”
“But none of us could leave the show. Or, if we did, we’d be replaced. The story would close in around the space we left.”
Barbaro hums.
Here’s what I love about Barbaro: his complete faith in the elegance of his destiny. This humble show.
He says, “Life sings to me beautifully.”
I can’t imagine that kind of contentment. I fret and worry intermittently, am tormented and distracted by doubts I can’t even name. Wrong turns in life and so much time passing you might not be able to retrace your steps. I’m afraid of hurting people and afraid of not doing what I need to do for fear of hurting people. I wonder if I’ll ever have children, wonder if it’s even moral to bring children into this world of hunger and war—a world where those who want to leave a city under siege are told to go to a certain mosque and even those who go waving white flags are killed. I’m afraid my failure to get a college degree will one day catch up with me, a ghost on a desert highway. I worry that my wondering faith isn’t good enough, that there’ll be hell to pay at the end. I worry I’ll never have sex again. I imagine what my life would be like if I’d stayed with the labor rights activist in Minneapolis who professed his undying love after just a few nights. I grieve because when Tony and I sold everything at that yard sale back in Santa Cruz, I imagined this life on the road—without a real job and the hours spent in crushing traffic to and from—would ultimately save me from all these worries. Live free and ramble, that was the idea. I say, “You trust life, Barbaro.”
His eyes bright. “What reason has life given me not to trust it?”
That night in a second-floor Super 8 Motel suite in Red Bluff, California, I stare up at the dark ceiling. What reason has life given me not to trust it? I wonder if I’m some kind of incurable malcontent, forever ungrateful for all the beauty and good fortune life showers on me. In college,