Nebraska Maids
It does not matter much whom we live with in this world,
but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
Willa Cather (Nebraskan), “A Gold Slipper”
Like my father and brother before me, I was born in Southern California and journeyed to rural Nebraska to find a bride. There is something primeval and mammalian about being born and raised in one part of the world, then traveling to some strange and exotic land to fall in love and find a mate. Indeed, many classic fairy tales tell of a wandering prince who wins his dream princess in a foreign land.
Obviously, I’m not a prince, and Nebraska isn’t exactly strange or exotic; but for a seven-year-old boy (rudely uprooted from his home in sunny Southern California), the “Cornhusker State” in 1956 was a grotesque nightmare. I felt like a shell-shocked war refugee—cruelly banished from my beachfront homeland and exiled to a dusty, chigger-infested wilderness populated by coarse barbarians who didn’t trim the fat off their ham sandwiches, considered Jell-O with a dollop of mayonnaise to be “salad,” and for some strange reason called lunch “dinner.”
I languished for a full decade in small-town Nebraska, fantasizing that I’d be rescued by a flying saucer and plotting my escape back to the hip and trendy land of my birth. At night I dreamed I smelled the beach; I actually tasted the salt of the ocean on my dream tongue. Throughout my decade of Nebraska exile, California grew in my imagination into a mythical Ithaca. But unlike the hero Odysseus, I had no queen waiting for me on the golden shores of my lost kingdom. For that illusive treasure I would need to grow up and find a Nebraska woman.
Perhaps it is because Nebraska breeds a very special woman—the kind of woman who stoically endures some of the most brutal winters on earth for months on end when bitter arctic winds blast down from Canada and sweep through the Dakotas foiled by nothing higher than prairie grass; the kind of woman who, when the mercury tops a humid 110 degrees, will wash her hair in the kitchen sink and blithely brush it dry on the back porch; the kind of woman who, without blinking an eye, will lance a boil, stanch a bleeding wound, or gut a fish; the kind of woman who will, with firm and loving hands, tenderly end the life of a suffering dog or cat.
Despite all the cruelties and hardships this land inflicts upon them, these remarkable women love Nebraska. If destiny conspires to pluck them up and carry them off to faraway places, their hearts remain rooted in the thick, black loam of the prairie. They pine for that terrible and beautiful place like lovesick maidens who never recover from an adolescent romance. The change of seasons pulls their hearts back to the awesome land that wooed them so roughly. Like the majestic sandhill cranes, their souls migrate year after year back to the cruel and fragrant Eden of the Platte River Valley—a world the Pawnees called the “happy hunting grounds.”
DuQuette men must be a lot like Nebraska, for it takes a Nebraska woman to love us, to endure us, to inexplicably draw strength from our brash insensitivity and other unmanly DuQuette virtues a lesser woman might mistake for self-absorbed stupidity.
In 1966, my Nebraska odyssey ended. I returned to California immediately after high school graduation and began classes at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. College life in Southern California in 1966–67 was a very rich and colorful experience, little of which had anything to do with academics. The popularity of mind-expanding drugs and the social and political upheavals of the day (triggered by the Civil Rights movement and the war in Vietnam) were far more interesting to me than my English and drama classes. I was profoundly affected by my experiences with LSD and soon began to seriously turn my attention to the study and practice of Eastern mysticism, especially Hindu philosophy and yoga.
My brother, Marc, was my mystical fellow traveler on most of these psychedelic journeys. He would often volunteer to be my sane and sober babysitter and “guide” while I “tripped.” I, on alternate occasions, would do the same for him. The experiences were spiritual journeys we took very seriously, and the deeper we plunged into the depths of our own psyches, the more we knew that self-realization was the most important thing a human being can achieve during his or her time on earth.
One afternoon, the day before a full moon, we decided to drive out to the desert and take a massive dose of LSD together. We watched the full moon set in the west and the sun rise in the east. We vowed we would not return from the desert “until we were holy men.” I wrote about this event at greater length in an earlier autobiography,1 so I won’t bore you with the details here. I will, instead, jump to the quiet moments a few hours after that eternal day in the desert.
We managed to drive safely back to Costa Mesa late in the afternoon. We were still quite high but confident enough in our ability to “maintain” in public to visit our favorite tavern. It was there, sitting on the most comfortable barstool in the universe, my acid-soaked brain still soaring through the rarefied clouds of Technicolor consciousness, that I realized I would be incapable of safely controlling the awesome and terrible nuclear fusion of consciousness that was taking place in my cranium. I started to see the big picture. If I were to continue my incarnational adventure, I would need something, someone, to ground me, to anchor me, to hold my feet to the ground before I exploded spectacularly (but prematurely) on the launch pad of life.
I needed a Nebraska woman.
I had dated Constance on and off during our junior and senior years of high school in Nebraska, and when I returned to California we kept in touch by old-fashioned letters. We were friends. She liked my progressive politics. I liked her hair. We’d certainly never discussed marriage. But now I could not imagine a future without her. More accurately, I saw quite clearly that there wasn’t a future without her. Perched high upon the oracular tripod of my psychedelic barstool, I saw the future set in stone, as fixed and immutable as the past.
I called her from the payphone near the pinball machine and proposed marriage. To this day I really can’t tell you why I asked, and to this day she doesn’t know why she said yes. But, like a traditional Hindu couple whose parents sealed the marriage contract when they were babies, we dutifully surrendered to our destinies then and there.
We’ve been married for forty-seven years. Neither one of us can tell you exactly why.
Do we love each other? Yes, of course we love each other. Are we happy? Well … sometimes yes, sometimes no. But at least we’ve grown wise enough to realize that ultimately one person can never make another person happy, and even if we could, love is bigger than happiness. Each individual in this world, whether married or single, is responsible for his or her own condition of happiness or unhappiness.
What does all this have to do with homemade magick? My answer is simple. The edifice of my life—my home, my work, my magick—is built upon a foundation that is the love, the support, the opposition, the criticism, the irritation, the wisdom, and the ruthless condemnation of this Nebraska maid. Constance is a supernatural force of nature—an awesome and terrible magical being, a goddess, a devil, an angel, a harpy, a demon. She is also the archetypal wife, mother, and grandmother, but greater than all these things she is her own unique universe. She is, in every relevant sense of the term, a living saint.2
Take it from me: it’s not easy being the mortal husband of a saint. Any envy you might feel for me and my extraordinarily good matrimonial fortune must be tempered by an outpouring of pity, for even though I am blessed with many unique and admirable qualities, I am not a saint. It’s important that you remain mindful of this cruel irony as I attempt to relate a few of our family adventures in the pages of this book.
Constance and I took no vows to each other during our homemade wedding ceremony of so long ago. We promised each other nothing. Nonetheless, for over forty-seven years, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, this Nebraska maid has been and remains the home in my homemade magick.