Informant38

I went to Mexico, headed for the beach, I had a little Brazilian tenor guitar with me and a big green backpack. I was on a city bus down in Tijuana, on my way out to the big Flechas de Todas terminal east of town, where the long-distance buses to Mexico City were. There weren't any other gringos on the bus. I was riding along through Tijuana - I love that, being someplace unfamiliar and looking out the window of a bus or train, surrounded by locals. I was holding the guitar so it wouldn't get dinged in the commotion, my backpack down at my feet, when the bridge broke loose of the soundbox with a monumental ringing twang, all six strings sounding at once, loud. Everybody turned to stare. So I made a detour, eventually, to Paracho, a town where they're famous for making guitars and guitarrons and mandolinas and violins, and arranged to have it repaired.
Later, after some time at the beach, when I'd got back up to northern California a friend asked me if I'd had any epiphanies while I was down there.
Not really, a lot of weird stuff happened, going and coming, but everything was like that; and back then it had never occurred to me that I could have epiphanies, in my life the way it was.
About ten years before that I was working a few days at a recycling center, volunteering, just for something to do helping someone whose official job it was to load the bundles of newspapers and magazines and barrels of bottles and cans onto a big flatbed truck and take them to whatever center they were destined for.
One time I picked up a bundle of tabloid-style papers and realized it was 30 or 40 Rolling Stone magazines, from Volume 1 up to whenever. Artifacts. Probably worth something to somebody. The top one on the pile had Janis Joplin on the cover.
I saw the first RS when it came out, at a bookstore on Cannery Row in Monterey, in the old days before development when it was all abandoned canneries, and that bookstore and some odd little rooms to let and a Chinese grocery. The lady in the bookstore gave me one for free, she said "This is it, you should read this. Pay attention." She liked me. She was always telling me to read people like Rimbaud and Shelley, and I did what she told me.
Another time at the recycling center I picked up a New York Review of Books, and because we were both hard workers but not fearful about it, and because I was hungry for intellectual meat and potatoes I glanced through it. There was an article by Joseph Brodsky in it, kind of a poetic manifesto. By the second paragraph I was wide open, hypnotized, fully engaged, in a trance of assimilation. I've been lucky to be able to do that with books, when they unlock the door. Brodsky had that key.
Prose like stones from a river, smooth thoughts and unimpeded heart-felt giving. This wasn't a brain using a body to get what it wanted, it was a man, speaking to the world, and there was love in every aspect of the rhythm of it. It was as gratifying as good sex, I was knocked out, floored, excited. Inspired. I wanted to do that.
That was an epiphany. I realized a long time later that that's what that was - an epiphany.