By Kelly Mahan Jaramillo, Dec 25th 2010
*I am very nervous writing this. I am worried there is some secret ‘writer’s code’ that I am breaking by sharing my experience with a book that needs an important part of the story told to make it understood. Well, I will keep it posted unless someone tells me otherwise.*
On we go. Remember, I have warned you about spoilers! Plus, I recommend reading Part One, below, otherwise this post ain’t gonna make a lick of sense.
May, 2006. As I lay on the couch in our rented house in the horrible West Valley in Los Angeles, my head swaddled in giant bandages, fifty-seven stitches running diagonally from the right side of my forehead, down through my eye to my chin, and half of my right ear sewn back on, all that manages to break through the floating sea of painkiller purgatory is, “What are we going to do now? What are we going to do?”
My husband Tomas and I had been struggling to make ends meet, our most dismal time in Los Angeles was just having to live in the flat, hot smog of the Valley, far away from our few friends, rents ridiculously high, jobs drying up, and now me, incapacitated on the couch.
I picked up “Not By Accident” again during my recuperation, reading it paragraph by paragraph, in between the twilight doze of painkillers. There is one line, God touches us with a feather to get our attention. Then, if we don’t listen, he starts throwing bricks.
Samantha Dunn, in her accident, nearly loses her life, and comes perilously close to being an amputee. As I read, I am thinking about her “Brick” and this, my own “Brick” – what is it telling me?
My dear friend Bob Madigan asks me, “Why the hell are you two staying in Los Angeles?”
I yell at him, “Do you think we want to be here anymore? We are over it, we want out, but we are fucking trapped here!”
Dunn’s accident profoundly changes her life, as does mine.
It takes two years, but I finally receive my settlement from the angry, speeding, yelling-on-cell-phone asshole who ran a red light and slammed my car so hard the muffler was found two blocks down the street. My fantasies of laying in wait and beating his face to a pulp in the dead of night are replaced with the reality we can blow this shit hole Right. Now.
We pack up and leave Los Angeles for good, choosing to live in Pittsburgh. Tomas had grown up an hour and a half north of Pittsburgh, and his whole family was still there. My father had died six years before and Tomas had been with me every step of the way, from receiving the news to the years of grief which still stab me to this day.
He realized his own parents were getting along in years, and we wanted to be close to them. I wanted to give him the rock solid, unwavering support when it was his turn to go through losing a parent that he had given me.
What, you must be asking, at this point, happened last night? Get on with it.
Okay, here we are.
A month ago, I pulled “Not By Accident” from my bookshelf yet again, two and a half years living in Pittsburgh, happier than I ever though I could ever be in this life. I wanted to visit my old friends Samantha and Harley, read it from a new perspective.
I wanted more, and finally, finally I ordered “Faith In Carlos Gomez – A memoir of Salsa, Sex and Salvation”. I was itching to dive into Dunn’s own Part Two, where we pick up seven years after her accident.
She is walking just fine, although she is a self described klutz with a titanium rod in her calf, but for all the wrong reasons she decides she wants to learn how to Salsa dance.
Written in her wonderfully unique voice, this book is very different from “Not By Accident”. She can move again, and the pace of her life is not the pace of her life when bedridden. We open up in familiar territory, she is abandoning work to go ride Harley. Excellent, we are off and running.
This is fun, a beautifully crafted romp through the Los Angeles Salsa scene, a scene I was involved with when I was in my mid twenties, working at my best friend’s restaurant and nightclub “Miami Spice”.
Unlike Dunn, in her late thirties with a tricky leg and even more tricky self-esteem, I was not brave enough to try the Salsa lessons at “Miami Spice”, even with two good legs and (at the time) a decade younger than she. I am in awe of her all over again. I cannot put the book down, and I start subjecting Tomas to endless talk about Samantha and Harley, Samantha and Harley. He is a patient man.
Her routine in life starts changing as she immerses herself in the Salsa nightlife – she gets up every morning late, rides Harley, then it is all about dance, dance, dance. She was not supposed to have ever been able to walk again, much less dance. This woman is a goddess, completely unaware of it.
So, here we are, Christmas Eve., 2010 for me, 2003 for Dunn. I am closing in on the end of the book. Dunn has been sweating it inside and out, learning how to dance Salsa for almost a year. Her mother is out to visit for Christmas. Dunn describes the night of the 23rd, having gone to a Salsa club, where she dances as her mother watches, their complicated relationship inching a step closer to each other.
I smile, ahh happy ending, happy ending.
The next morning her phone rings. It is the stable, Harley doesn’t feel well.
No, I think.
Mind you, over the years I have assumed that Harley has passed on. In my world, he died a peaceful, old man death. Quiet, tranquil, painless.
I am about to be badly hurt, I know this. I put the book down and press the bridge of my nose.
“NO!” I say aloud, causing our white cat Vinnie to look up from where he is on the bed next to me, his little fox face saying, “What? I was sleeping, I didn’t do anything.”
Even though I have not continued reading, I feel my version of Harley’s passing slipping away. It does not matter if I stop reading this very moment, reality is rumbling up the street. I pick up the book.
Dunn and her mother are speeding down Pacific Coast Highway, Dunn’s cell phone wont stop ringing, it starts pouring rain just as she is pulling into the stable no no no no no no please god no
“….but the fact is that the goddamn rain really does fall precisely at this moment, and in the very next instant I really do see my beautiful horse – - the being who has been my companion, my secret keeper, my guru showing me the way to a better life, and, most of all my love, my absolute love – -I see him collapse in the wet earth.”
I am wrecked, sobbing, every loss seems to culminate on this page. I hear Tomas coming up the stairs talking to the cats, and I am unable to stop. If anything I am almost wailing.
I cry and cry, while he comforts me. I am like a child, insisting through tears and snot that Harley was not supposed to die in the rain and mud, a catheter filled with painkillers jammed into his neck, some fucking unknown neurological issue suddenly deciding to kill him, she rode him yesterday, he was fine, this cannot have happened to her on Christmas Eve. seven years ago, and it cannot be happening to me on Christmas Eve., seven years later.
We wake up this morning, man, I had a bad dream last night.
Over coffee, my hands are shaking slightly, and tears are randomly dripping, as they are doing now.
I can only go back to the “feather and brick” line from “Not By Accident”, and look at the last 24 hours as a feather, a light touch from somewhere, a reminder to hold those I love both dear and fearlessly, don’t shrink away from life as it can be gone faster than blowing out a candle, and just do my best to make peace with the curve balls, no matter how cruel they may seem.
It will turn out to be one of the greatest Christmas gifts I have ever received, I am certain.
Thank you, Samantha Dunn and Harley.
Yep, from your number one fan.
