Oaxaca, yea, it was in Oaxaca that I met him. Semana Santa of '84 I think.

I lived the 80s overseas, four years in Mexico City. Taught school. One Semana Santa, Easter two weeks break , I decided to get out of the city. Normally I'd stay in Mexico City, because everyone else is gone and it's nice during Holy Week. But this time I decided to get gone. Havana sounded nice, but a friend knew of an artist's hang-out just outside of the city of Oaxaca. El Molino De San Gabriel, a sixteenth century mill converted into a sort-of arty resort. Run by a gal from Mendocino County, California, and her husband, a Zapoteca. Great folks. So I go.

Then in the zocalo, yea, it was in the zocalo that I saw the author of this memory.

I was having some drinks at this outdoor cafe. The zocalo, the town square, in Oaxaca is nothing like the zocalo in Mexico City. Mexico City's is enormous, like with a cathedral and presidential palace with Rivera murals and like that. Oaxaca's is like a small park. A very small park. Undistinguished except for a bum who was writing, writing, furiously writing in a spiral-bound school kid notebook. He had a duffel bag filled with similar notebooks. The bum wore a fatigue jacket, nasty pants and shirt, sandals with feet so dirty they were black. Black nasty hair with little dead bits of who knows what flora.

So I ask my waiter, who's the bum, el naco, the guy sitting under the tree writing? He tells me that the bum is a kind of rumor. Rumor that he gave-up a chair at a university in order to, rumor has it, write his magnum opus. About what? Quien sabe?

I watch him for another couple of drinks until I can't stand the curiosity anymore.

I take the long way around, try to exude inconspicuous. Finally, I lean against his tree but like facing away from him like, hey, I'm just leaning here lighting my pipe. He doesn't notice. So I look.

And it's all madness. Gibberish. Swirls and swirls and swirls and such. I look in the duffel bag. The title on one notebook is XXXXXXXXXX. An open notebook beside him reads "\\\\\\\\\\" and halfway down the page "//////////". Madness. It's all madness.

Why write? I spend my days listening to fantasies, dreams. It is so easy to imagine the dream of whomever I am with. I have always approached doing psychotherapy this way. I need to feel their experience, mull it over. Like a good wine that needs to be held in the mouth to get the nuance of flavor. In order to help others, I have to have a piece of them inside myself. Then I can dialogue within myself and with them. A process. I spend my working day in process. The process of knowing another so as to help them know themselves.

I enjoy being a therapist. I am pretty good at it. I am not as good a writer as a therapist. But the motivation is the same.

Like therapy, in writing there emerges a unique knowledge that comes from the type of dialogue that I have with myself, my co-author, my subject and my imagined reader.

I worked at a runaway shelter for about 7 years. Part of my job was to answer the hotline. The hotline was advertised in the community as a place to call if you were in crisis, suicidal, ready to run away from home, that sort of thing. We did get a lot of those kinds of calls. But we also got pranks. There was a debate among the staff about what to do with the sexual pranksters. They called up with a bogus story just to get aroused then masturbate on the phone while the staff most sincerely tried to help them with their problem. I was of the "hang-up on the creeps" school of thought on this matter. But others, more sensitive than myself no doubt, thought that we should see this as a person trying to reach out for help. The official agency policy was "talk them through."

I slept over at the agency on the weekends, and had the phone by the bed in case a crisis call would come in. This guy calls one night at 2 AM and wakes me from a dead sleep. I answer the phone and am listening to this guy talk, and I know he is a prank caller. In fact, I think that I have heard from him before. He wants to tell me some crazy story about some problem he has, but I know in my half-awake mind that he really just wants a living, breathing person on the other end of the line so that he can know that I am listening as he gets hard, masturbates and comes. I know this is happening and it makes me furious. I am conflicted though, because I am not sure that, if I wasn't more sensitive like the other staff at the agency, I might be able to help this guy with his problems. And I am sure he has many. But it is 2 AM and I cannot stay awake, so I slip into a half-dream just as this guy is describing how he now puts a thermometer in his butt, and, when his penis is erect, it makes the thermometer "stand at attention like a little soldier" -- his words. So I see the whole thing in my mind. I wonder how he knows what this looks like, unless he has a light on at 2 AM and a mirror handy. But this is what he is telling me. My guess is that he is imagining the whole thing and describing it for my benefit. It's better for him if someone experiences it too. I still see that little soldier 20 years later.

Why write together? Writing together has become part of our marriage. Most married people create children from their union. We never had any kids, so we create ideas.

One of us will get up in the morning and start thinking about something. Maybe about the movie we saw last night, or an episode of Star Trek, Homocide or what some columnist in the paper said. Then there is the pope. We're liberal Catholics. All we need is for the pope to come out with something like "There is no way I'll ever ordain women" and we are off. The other one shows up in the kitchen and the one says, "I've been thinking about something..."

We have each written pieces alone, but the writing we do together creates a special intimacy in our relationship. We differ about some things, compromise on others. We don't always agree about how often to have sex, or which movie to go to. Whether this war is wrong, or that certain circumstances justify military intervention.

But when we're working on an idea, we are unified by a common pursuit, a common dream, a union that can be exhilarating.

Or think of it this way. We share this dream--now you will too--where we fall off (we don't remember what) into a clear stream. Hearts race but we're calm. All we need is to breathe. "Breathe in, breathe in" our hearts beat. And here's what's weird. We do. We breathe the water and swim like catch thrown back where it belongs.

There is a oneness of voice that all lovers share. When observed from afar, it seems a bit comical--
Honey, did you ...
... Yea ...
... So then...
... Right.

Apparently, we do this in public. We team-teach at a local university, and occasionally we catch our students laughing as we half-sentence away on break. The point is that when we co-author, in a sense we finish the sentence. The act of love that has made us husband and wife is the same act of love that makes us turn to our students and include them in our conversation. Writing is no different.

So why do we co-author? In one way of looking at it, we're no different than anyone else. Perhaps we have a compulsion to write. Perhaps it's a love of the word. Perhaps we have a need to be heard. Whatever, as our students would say.