A COLLECTION OF CATASTROPHES
Stories for THE DUNLOPS! And Michael, Matthias and
Greebo
By
Uncle Paul
1) The Great Christmas Letter
2) A quick bear story and Flight of the Wiener Dog
3) Omar and the Pigs
4) The 4 Magnet Stories ( Magent and the ‘Tards , Underwear
man and the Madman of the Sauna, Gooby and the Angry
Vietnamese Mechanic, Magnet and the River)
5) Kinderhauptman
6) The Farting Dwarf
7) Mexicans, Pot and Parrots
8) The Stoned Age
9) New Zealand
10)
French Tropical islands and First Love
11)
Catwoman and the Pinball Machine
12)
From First Love
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DEAR Greebo, Michael and Matthias:
T’was an Ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three
“Unhand me now, thou graybeard lune,
Wherefore thou stoppest me?”
--Coleridge-I must say there are few folks who get such raucous delight out of a TRUE
tale as you three. This is a quality dear to my old and chewy heart and so, even
though you WEREN’T going to get Christmas presents (as you have, generally,
and over the course of your entire lives, been very bad) I changed my mind.
Here is a Collection of Catastrophes. It is far from complete as there are so
many jewels I need to sit down with and burnish until they are ready to be viewed
(and I am certain to be involved in more catastrophes between here and the grave).
Still, here’s a healthy sampling of human, and animal foible. Bears biting black
kids, wiener dogs in trailer parks, cats getting stoned, insane people from the east
coast, the famous Christmas letter, ghetto kids out on their first wilderness trip,
adventures in Mexico complete with insane Germans, border guards and parrots,
retards cleaning Uncle John’s house, the madness of Mormons—they’re all here
for your enjoyment.
If you don’t like a story go on to the next one. Many of them take place in
New Zealand.
Best, another Ancient Mariner of the Forster Clan, (Uncle Paul)
Christmas 2005, now delayed until 2006
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Introduction
And finally there’s stories.
When it comes to stories my friends and I are, by turns, pushers and addicts.
More than one obnoxious soul has been kept around solely for the sake of a good
tale. Sure, so-and-so is a selfish, self-centered pain in the ass, but so-and-so can
also be counted on to provide endless stories by wooing your girlfriends, breaking
up marriages and getting fired (repeatedly). Then there’s so-and-so number two
out there getting beaten up in hot springs or growing thousands of dollars worth of
dope only to have it burn it right before harvest in a large fire set by a lost and
panicked hiker.
My family passes on stories like heirlooms. The time my brother stole the
German chocolate and lied about it. My sister’s born-again Christian attempt to
convert our dying Jewish grandmother on her deathbed. My fervent attempt to get
my family into a well-known California group therapy cult. My younger sister’s
elaborate pet funerals, her intensely cultivated ability to drive waiters crazy with
onslaught of petty questions and requests.
Long ago a tale would get catapulted into my life from a love affair, a
conversation with my story-monger pals or an adventure, and I’d run off with it
like a squirrel with a nut. For weeks I’d Jacob-wrestle it down until it fit into some
kind manageable form. I carved and polished any story that dropped out of the sky
and into my lap like an artist at an ice festival.
Now it’s the sloppy, crashing randomness of the stories before I beat the shit
out of them that interests me. Maybe that’s not even right, maybe it’s moments
that have my heart. Moments, seconds, scenes, little five second dramas. Like the
time this French guy left his empty cart in this long, snaking Friday-after-work
check out line and then trotted around Vons getting his groceries in ones and twos
and dropping them in a growing treasure pile every time he passed by. He was
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immensely pleased with himself for not having to wait in a long line with the rest
of us stupid Americans. I reached up out of my beaten-down adult apathy and
droned in my thick California voice, “Hey, come on, pal, but you can’t do that,
you’ve got to wait in line just like everybody else.” It wasn’t witty or erudite, but
it was effective and he blushed red with indignation, and then told me, with that
European directness which is so delightful, that I could go fuck myself and he
could get his groceries any way he wanted. Unfortunately for him there were other
grim, tired and cranky Americans in line and some big guy threatened to kick his
ass.
So I’ve been thinking about the stories I’ve slaved over, fashioned,
collected, made love to—and thinking about the stories I haven’t. The ones that
are still roaming free and unfettered. Those are the ones I want to chase here. At
this juncture it seems like making peace with my story addiction is like making
peace with lust—not gonna happen anytime soon. And judging from my dad,
eighty-six and still looking at girls—not gonna happen anytime later either. Yeah, I
know, writing’s an ego trip, and Salinger would shoot me, but, as dearest Douglas,
certainly the high priest of the rueful-at-his-own-expense narrative, would say,
“You can’t help it, it’s your nature, you’re just made that way.”
THE CHRISTMAS LETTER 2004
Dear Sissy:
Well just off to the races here, all the usual family fun and games at Xmas.
We’ll begin with Grandma, who had a real bee in her bonnet about
controlling the present outflow, but of course she was, with good reason, worried
about Grandpa taking an hour to open each present. So before a single present was
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passed she made huge deal over her new “No Dawdling” rule. “Grandma’s house,
Grandma’s rules,” she snapped.
Of course it all flew out the window when Uncle John started passing out
presies and the kids went nuts. So the three nieces all got big boxes with their
names on them and low and behold Paisley, Kayla and Annie all got these lovely
homemade quilts Grandma had slaved over. There was much gushing and all was
well.
Then, a few minutes later, Grandma fixes a beady eye on Annie’s little red
and white quilt and announces that there’s been a mistake and really that quilt’s for
Susie. Well this is totally nuts because she showed me the quilt a week before and
told me it was for Annie and asked me if I thought Annie would like it. It’s also
nuts because Grandma would never give Susie a beautiful quilt because, as we all
know, the quilt will be used to wrap sick chickens, errant guinea pigs and pooing
babies.
So the whole Christmas shebang stops dead, and Uncle John and I are
passing Grandma mad (slang for crazy or strong in this particular case) looks to
mellow her out, so she’ll just back off and let Annie keep her quilt.
But Grandma and Jim are in on this one together and Grandma won’t be
derailed—and she takes Annie’s quilt away!
Well of course Annie looked like someone had hit her and Uncle John
immediately leapt in to make her feel better by giving her his 6.2 pounds of
chocolate, a golf club and two books on how to beat Las Vegas. Annie, bless her
heart, was very gracious, and did not burst into tears, she just had a wretched look:
What kind of family is this that gives you presents and then yanks them away a
few minutes later?
Annie’s graciousness, however, did not spread to her cousin. Paisley, who
previously had not given a flying @&^#@ about her own quilt from Grandma,
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suddenly wrapped herself up in it and would not shut up for the next hour about
how lucky she was to, “Get a quilt from Grandma and how much she loved it.”
Ah, dearest Sister, I can see you think I am done, that I have hit the highlight
of Christmas crassness at the Forster house! Ha! Grandma losing her marbles is
but one of many delightful moments.
The presies start flying fast and furious again and by the arranging of many
circumstances, Grandpa came up short. I had given him a present bag a few days
before, and he was supposed to go to Susie’s and get more presents the next day,
and Uncle John had given Grandma wads of cash to go buy him many presents,
and Grandma didn’t come through. Did she forget? Did she subconsciously feel
that Grandpa already had enough presents? Who knows?
Anyway, Grandpa started out the festivities in a very genial Grandpa spirits
as we’d all gone to watch him sing at the Unitarian Church (except Farwell and
Grandma who weren’t allowed because last year they behaved like two naughty
kids). He wasn’t too pleased about Grandma’s new “No Dawdling” rule, but still
his spirits were high.
However the presents flew fast and furious and he only got two. He opened
the first one under Grandma’s new rule and didn’t take his usual three hours,
BUT!!!! When he came to his second and LAST present of the evening he was not
about to open it without some fanfare. At this point the kids were ballistic with
chocolate and greed—accept for Annie, who was still stunned over Grandma’s
quilt snitching.
So Grandpa gets going on the snorting that means he wants some attention.
No luck. So he decides to try stronger measures and starts asking for quiet. No
luck. He tries again and again and,,, (Here you go, great Forster moment number
two) … Grandpa suddenly turns on poor Barbara and yells “Shut UP!” The
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second syllable a clear and musical fifth above the first. Try it, right now, you will
recognize the inflection of an extremely pissed off person.
The room goes quiet except for Kayla babbling to herself, and Barbara looks
like someone whapped her in the face with a big, wet fish. Sort of the adult
variation on the same look Annie had when Grandma snatched her present back.
Kayla’s, totally whacked out on chocolate, is still babbling happily to herself and
Grandpa turns to her and yells, “SHUT UP KAYLA!”
Yep, right there on Christmas Eve. Boy do the Forsters know how to keep
the true spirit of Christmas alive and well. Christmas With The Kranks got nothing
on us.
Well Grandpa got the attention he wanted, and after a good bit of snubbeling
and morting (snorting and mumbling Grandpa style) he took his usual fifteen
minutes to open a can of tennis balls—which we all, of course, ooohed and
aaaahhhed and applauded wildly.
Oh? Thinkest thou that I am done? Strap in, there’s more.
An hour later it was time to pack up. The kids were playing in the living
room, a nice gentle game in which Paisly continuously waved her quilt in Annie’s
face. The three siblings, John, Susie and I were out in the kitchen, getting along
quite famously over a hapless box of See’s chocolates that was saying its prayers
as it rapidly headed towards the Great Chocolate Box In The Sky.
Grandpa and Grandma came in, both rather rumpled and quite the worst for
wear. Grandpa observed us for a second and then turned to Grandma and
announced, “Well, there’s our kids. They didn’t amount to much did they?”
Ah, the fondness of parental love, there is nothing quite like it, and at
Christmas time it becomes even more tender and rich.
Wait, there’s a smidgeon more! Do you think we could escape the
obligatory visit to Lompoc?
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The next day the battle-weary family—minus Grandpa and Barbara who
could take no more—made it’s way to Susie’s genial and gentrified, cars-up-onblocks, howling dogs, drug-dealer neighborhood. Susie welcomed us and ordered
us to try the “buffet.” Her grasp of language is quite creative, quite euphemistic, as
“buffet” clearly stood for the mass of food the dog, kids, and guines pigs had been
crawling around in. Grandma turned pale, make a weird sort of clucking noise and
hurried out to the backyard.
No escape there either. The guinea pigs have no gone wild and roam at will,
the chickens are off parole, and the dog madly leaves huge, dirt-flying craters
every few feet in it’s endless quest for The Holy Gopher. Grandma, in her little
red Christmas blouse sat on a filthy yard chair and put on one of those smiles you
see plastered on corpses.
Paisly, who had run out to our car attached to her &%#*@ quilt, now
wrapped herself in the thing, sucked her thumb and refused to play with Annie
because, “It’s so nice to snuggle up in a quilt made by Grandma.”
Presies round two began out in Susie’s Wild Animal Park and all went well
until Susie asked Paisly to go and get something. Her darling child refused. This
went on for a minute or two until Susie lost patience and announced, “If you don’t
reform, you are being sent to Public School!”
Ah, exactly as I suspected, the institution I have worked in for the last
twenty years is a place for delinquents.
Paisly, who I had long thought would greet these words with shouts of joy,
shoved her thumb in her mouth and disappeared under Grandma’s quilt.
And there you have it, the highlights of another holiday season.
Bear Snippets
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Bear story number one: I'm up by the Muir Pass with Steven back about
1983 and we meet this furious little sunburned blond man with a huge pack.
This compact guy is one of those fifteen mile a day steamrollers, and the he’s
pissed, just pumping down the trail like a little engine. Right off the bat he sees
us and the first thing he starts out with is, "Goddamn motherfucking bears..."
It turns out this guy has been saving up for three years to do the Muir trail
and it was going to be the trip of his life and take all summer. He saves up all
his money, buys all the most expensive packer food and finally gets on the trail-and two nights out bears get all his food--all his food.
The guy is furious and he makes it all the way out to Mammoth on an
empty stomach. In Mammoth he stocks up again and goes back out to pick up
the trail outside of Red's Meadow--but now there's a twist--he's out for revenge.
Down in Mammoth he's picked up three pounds of Wasabi--hot Japanese horse
radish--and ten pounds of chocolate chip cookies and now every night he's
leaving out a sandwich—wasabi on the inside and cookies on the outside--sort
of a combination between an Oreo and a flame thrower.
"Goddamn motherfucking bears,” this guy explodes. Then he goes on
with, “Fuckers gobble down all kinds of shit. When they get my special treat
down they think it's freebie, and the next thing you know they're running all
over hell swattin' at their noses and snuffin' and sneezin'--fuckers, that'll teach
'em, now maybe they'll leave packers alone and go eat honey or whatever the
fuck they're supposed to eat."
He doesn’t say good-bye or anything. Just marches on past us to take
revenge on every bear between Yosemite and Mt. Whitney.
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Bear story number two: The bear that got up in a tree and pissed on Gooby
while he tried to chase it off.
Bear Story number three: The bear that bit the black kid in the ass because
he went to sleep with a Hersey bar in his back pocket.
FLIGHT OF THE WEINER DOG
Introduction
I’m a sucker for a good story, and a real sucker for a good animal story.
Now make it a good animal story where wild animals show domestic animals just
exactly who’s who on the food chain and I go absolutely weak in the knees. So
welcome to The Flight of the Wiener Dog, a collection of animal stories gleaned
from years of sitting around the campfire on backpacking trips river expeditions.
Flight of the Wiener Dog
One brilliant green, fat river-flowing spring the crew and I were up on the
Kern River camped by dilapidated splendor of the Kernville Trailer Park. We
were trading tales after a long day’s rafting when a few of the ragged-around-theedges trailer park denizens dragged their rusty beach chairs and cold beers down to
the sandy edge of the river to join our fire. In their sleeveless denim jackets and
bass fishing t-shirts they listened politely to a few of our favorite animal stories
and then promptly stole the Oscar by telling us the following gem.
Chester the wiener dog was the undisputed king of the Kernville Trailer
Park. When the local tom cats, easily twice his size, came by Chester went berserk
with machismo and off they scattered. When the local dogs trotted up to pee tails
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high and proud, they quickly yelped off with their furry flags lowered, and when
the mailman dared show his face a few sharp barks from Chester were enough to
reduce him to a bone-tossing ooze of friendliness. Years of undisputed reigning
over the trailer park filled Chester with pride and taught him that he was a dog
among dogs and a force to be reckoned with.
Sadly, none of this was true. Chester suffered from such deep delusions of
grandeur, that, had he been human would have quickly landed him in the local nut
house. The truth was that Chester was no prince among pooches and no canine
king of any sort. He was a spoiled and deluded wiener dog and his power came
not from himself but from his owner, the dreaded Doris.
Chester’s owner was a fiercely protective little old lady who kept the tiny
garden around her lime-green trailer in immaculate condition, her collection of
ceramic gnomes polished to a shine, and her dollies in fastidious rows like
obedient soldiers. The blue-haired Doris doted on her little dog and flew from the
trailer like lightning the second she sensed her little treasure was in trouble. It was
Doris and her broom that kept the local dogs, cats and mailmen in a state of terror.
She handled her broom like Bruce Lee and she was even deadlier with her hose.
So the dusty years went by, the sharp colors of the American flag that Doris
ran up a pole every morning faded to soft pastels, and Chester completely forgot
that he was just a punk. The farthest idea from his tiny mind was that he was just a
little wiener dog on the end of somebody else’s leash in a great big dangerous
world. Chester grew to consider himself the emperor of all he surveyed and he
began to bark ceaselessly to prove it.
Had any inhabitants of the trailer park been under seventy and in full
possession of their sense his insistent barking would have gotten him a quick
launch out into the middle of the nearby river. There, in the gentle green arms of
the Kern, Chester would have had the chance to experience several class four
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rapids, and a brutal class five if he lasted long enough. But sharp hearing was not
rule in the Kernville Trailer Park and Chester continued to bark away with
impunity year after year. His barking even became soothing to the octogenarians
around him, barely audible, as continuous as the gurgling of the river and the cries
of the jays.
And then one hot summer lawn-sprinkling day the unthinkable happened:
Chester’s eight years of continuous barking abruptly stopped. It was like a giant
pulling the plug on the sun, or one of the surrounding mountains getting up and
flying away. Life in the trailer park came to a screeching halt.
Bob and George looked up from their checkers, Myrtle stopped watering her
geraniums, Ed woke up from his nap and looked out his window, Beverly left the
stove and went to her door. Frank stopped tying trout flies under his awning, took
his glasses off and peered into the distance.
And there, in the center of the trailer park, body stock still, eyes huge, ears
down, tail buried deeply between his runty legs, was Chester.
Was there going to be an earthquake? Had there been a gas leak? Had
Doris died? Was a family of hungry wiener-dog eating Vietnamese moving in?
What could have inspired such an unheard of silence?
And then, one by one, the inhabitants of the Kerville Trailer Park saw the
hawk. The big hawk. The hawk starved to thin-ribbed desperation by a long, dry
summer. The hawk who had drifted down out of the blazing blue sky as softly as a
cloud and landed with unnoticed silence and stealth on the power line above
Doris’s trailer. The hawk who was now brooding over the frozen Chester with all
the power and purpose of the Grim Reaper.
Deep in the depths of his walnut-sized brain Chester recognized a force
greater than wiener dogs, a force of such dark and hungry malevolence that it
would be incited, not deterred, by pride-filled yipping. Years of old-lady enforced
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ego and arrogance flew abruptly out the window and Chester snapped his sharp
snout shut and prayed.
The world of the Kernville Trailer Park hung in a sun-pounded daze of
motionless silence.
And then, like a dark and feathered bomb, the hawk plunged off the power
line, grasped Chester in his talons and took to the sky. The silence was so deep
that the thick airy pounding of his huge wings could be heard as clearly as sudden
shout in a library.
Unfortunately for the famished hawk, Chester was on a leash firmly tied to
the screen door.
Inside the trailer Doris was startled out of her afternoon soap opera by
ferocious clanging and banging on the side of her trailer. She looked up to see her
screen door leaping back and forth like an epileptic Chinese acrobat. Thinking that
a sudden wind must have come up she got up and hurried over to close and latch
the door, and it was then that she noticed Chester’s leash was moving like a kite
string and pointing up instead of down. Wondering how in the world Chester
could have managed to get up on the roof and yelling at him not to panic, she
grabbed for the leash and looked up.
And almost had a heart attack.
Doris froze with terror and stood there like a kid holding a model airplane
while her wiener dog yelped in terror and flew around and around in circles above
her head. The hawk’s wings were beating with such fury that Doris’s little balding
thatch of blue-rinsed hair flattened under the downdraft.
Doris finally regained her voice and screeched and squawked but Chester
remained airborne. Then she grabbed for the broom she kept by the door and
began to swat at the hawk. The raptor was too high to reach so she dropped the
broom and grabbed the hose. A fat silver jet of pressurized water buried itself in
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the hawk’s feathers and the hawk began to take a liquid pounding by a furiously
protective old lady.
Realizing there are forces in the world greater than birds of prey, the
defeated hawk finally dropped Chester and flapped off into the blue.
Chester plummeted from the sky and hit the baked earth like a dropped
football. He bounced twice and then came to a stop and was soon found to be not
much the worse for wear. Doris had George, Ed and Bob knock up a protective
awning for him and in a matter of days his ceaseless bark was once again lulling
the inhabitants of the Kernville Trailer Park.
Omar and the Pigs
by
Paul Forster
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Introduction: Long ago I used to take little hoodlums out for summer
trail work expeditions. One year I had a whole group of under-privileged
ghetto kids to deal with.
Peg and I got up for another day of scorching trail work and found the
coolers knocked down, the stoves upturned, and the supplies rooted through.
"The kids are going to quit," I told Peg. "When they wake up and see this
they're going to quit and walk the twenty miles back to the ferry."
"This'll be the final straw," she agreed. "They already hate this place."
She was right.
The kids had hated the hot, gnawed interior of Catalina Island--where
they had been dumped to hack trail out of the chaparral--from day one.
They had been suckered in by the Nature Association's MTV-style
advertising campaign--a slick video package sponsored by a huge soft drink
company. The hip, loud, quick-cut, seamlessly sound-tracked video had
persuaded them to sign up for a summer of trail work with tempting images
of crystal lakes being dive-bombed by hard-bodied teens in bikinis and cutoffs. The world the kids had signed up for looked like a Coor's Lite
commercial--and had absolutely nothing to do with the wasteland they found
themselves sweating in.
"Dat video be bullshit," Patrick announced the second he saw his new
home, "I doan' see no waterfall, I doan' see no forest." All he did see were
tired hills long ago stomped into dust by herds of buffalo, goats, and, as we
found out, pigs.
Back in the thirties some Great White Hunter put the buffalo on the
island so he could fly his friends over to blast them at point blank range.
Now they were protected from hunters and raised like cattle to end up as
"Buffalo Burgers". They dotted the burning hills of the island like enormous
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carpet racks and listlessly chewed thorny weeds while the yellow sun beat
down like a hammer. The goats, released by a movie mogul who liked to
kill smaller things, were even worse: they bred like Mormons and ate
everything in sight. Of course the pigs attacked our camp--there was
nothing left to eat.
Peg and I looked on worriedly while the sleepy kids got up and slowly
gathered in a silent knot. The kids surveyed the damage with drooping jaws,
and then Omar, the tall Palestinian kid who was always angry, burst out,
"Who the fuck did this?"
"The wild pigs, Omar" Peggy told him. "Remember? The ranger said
this might happen?"
"No fucking pig's going to treat me like this!"
"Pigs? Ewwww! Yuck!" Cindy and Candy squealed. They hated dirt,
work, animals and my co-leader, Peggy, who didn't fall for their feminine
charms, made them swing a pick, gave them lectures on eco-systems, and
(privately) called them the Barbies. For my part I suspected they harbored
slutty streaks under their facades of giggling horror at having to pee
outdoors and burn their own toilet paper.
"Theees is an eensult," agreed Chico, a thick Mexican kid with big
tattooed biceps. "This is our hood, eh." Chico spoke more English than his
sister, Julissa, who had done everything possible to be Anglo including
bleaching her hair to a strange nuclear-blonde color and changing her name
to Jane. He explained the pig attack to her in gangster Spanish making it
sound as if we had been pillaged by a rival gang from South Central.
"Ve vill catch zis pig," Richard announced in his thick Romanian accent.
He was a good kid, harder-working than the others and determined to be
American, but despite his baseball cap and jeans there was always a faintly
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uneasy and dorky European stiffness to his actions, and the tiny speedo
bathing suit he wore around camp didn't help.
"I ain't catching no pig," Patrick, our Black kid declared, as if we had just
ordered him to scrub toilets and he was standing up for his rights with Rosa
Parks nodding approvingly over his shoulder. Patrick, like Omar, was
always angry (the two of them had gotten into a fistfight the first day of
camp and still weren't speaking to each other). Omar's anger was mercurial
and unfathomable while Patrick's was steady and certain: he was angry
because he was being discriminated against.
When anything went wrong in Patrick's world (like having to do dishes,
or carry water) he immediately announced, "It's because I's black!" Patrick
had an unshakable conviction that he was getting a dirty deal because of his
skin color and it made him hate everything. He had a particular vendetta
directed at my Rastafarian caps, Bob Marley t-shirts and blonde dreadlocks.
"Why you wear dem colors? Why you wear the red, gold, black and green?
Damn, you all whacked out. You white, doan' yo know? Why doan' you
wear White People things? Why don't you wear a can of Cheese Whiz on
yo' head and a Twinkie round yo' neck?"
The last two kids, little squirrel-sized Oscar and big bear-like Mario were
already planning pig traps. These two had missed the testosterone train of
teenage rebellion and were still boy scouts. Their greatest desire (aside from
avoiding Omar and Patrick) was to get lost so they could use their
compasses to find the North Star and build a fire with sticks.
We finally got the pig-ravaged camp back together and were ready to
tromp out to work when pint-sized Oscar trotted up to Peggy and seriously
informed her, "Somebody's got to guard the camp. I'll volunteer."
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Unfortunately Patrick heard him and immediately squealed, "No fuckin'
way, Brother! Anybody keepin' his ass in camp and not diggin' no dusty,
shit-ass trail, it be me! Not no white butt-kiss."
"Don't swear, Patrick," Peggy told him for the fiftieth time.
Patrick had sounded the alarm and now all the kids demanded a "Pig
Meeting".
Peggy insisted that the pigs were nocturnal, but knowledge was no match
for superstition and the kids wouldn't touch a shovel until we agreed to leave
a guard. When no one kid wanted to spend the long dusty hours alone we
had to pick pairs. After much argument Peggy and I finally managed to
leave the Barbies, who did squat for work anyway, and who were terrified
that the pigs would make a return daylight trip specifically to eat their
dwindling supply of raspberry lip-gloss.
I thought it was going to be another day of the kids scratching listlessly at
the dry dirt with their shovels but I was wrong. They were so involved in
planning revenge on the pigs that they forgot to sulk in their usual
disappointment and actually worked as they argued over how the pigs would
be trapped, and how they would be cooked and served once captured. Chico
and Jane knew several Mexican dishes featuring pork and the other kids
listened hungrily as Chico translated Jane's descriptions of chilis, onions, hot
oil and sizzling meat. Only Patrick resisted the orgy of fantasy pig-catching
and killing. "I doan’ want nothing to do with no whack-ass pig," he repeated
at regular intervals.
Back in camp Oscar and Mario began a pig pit while Omar and Chico
sharpened spears. Darkness fell, and another tasteless packaged dinner was
eaten. After dinner a new conference was held over the fact that the pig pit
was barely started and the camp had no defenses. "We'll stay up in
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watches," Mario declared importantly. "I'll take the first one, then Omar,
then Oscar, Richard, and Chico, and then Patrick."
"I ain't..." and Patrick was off again on how he wasn't going to "watch out
for no pig," and why was it that a white guy was giving orders again and a
black guy was getting the last watch? This started a huge adolescent senate
about Patrick's responsibilities, regardless of skin color, in the face of the pig
attacks. After many angry words, racial accusations and almost another
fistfight with Omar, Patrick slunk off to his tent.
The argument went to waste because Mario, the great tactician, fell
asleep and the pigs raided the camp again. When the sun rose on the
devastation the other kids were furious with Mario, the Barbies, who hadn't
even volunteered to take a watch, called him fat and lazy. While this was
going on Patrick discovered that the pigs had zeroed in on the Pop-tarts, the
one food we had that he actually liked.
"It's cause I's black. Damn pig knows it and has to eat my Pop-tarts."
Though there was obviously a herd of pigs at work, Patrick saw them as one
entity, one malevolent personality that was bent on creating his own
discomfort. "What the fuck I supposed to eat now?" he demanded. "Damn
Pig got my Pop-tarts."
It took Peggy and I an hour to get the kids to stop yelling at Mario and to
coax Patrick into eating a bowl of Lucky Charms, a feat he only agreed to
when we promised he could stay behind, guard the camp and work on the
pig pit. "Yo’ squealy ass goan' get it now, pig," he cursed under his breath
as the rest of us went off to work and he took his shovel to the hard earth to
dig a pig pit
"You know," Peggy said to me later, when we were out on the trail, "if
that ranger, that guy Ray for the Park Service knew that one of our crew was
19
back in camp digging a pig pit he'd be pissed. They may be pigs who steal
our food but they're still wildlife, and the Park's paid the Nature Association
some big bucks to get a crew out here to build a trail. The guy is basically
our boss and he does show up every few days with supplies."
"Yeah," I agreed, "that's true, but at least the kids aren't so negative, I
mean, they may be yelling at each other, but they're not going on and on
about how they hate this place. All they can think about is pigs. They even
worked yesterday and they're working today."
We both looked down the bright orange string-line marking out the new
trail and it was true: the kids were so angry and so busy planning their
revenge that they hacked away at the dusty earth.
"Maybe it's worth it," she shrugged, wiping her brow with a blue bandana
and looking around at the kids. "It's a relief not to have them complain
every two seconds, and if we actually get some work done around here we
might get Yellowstone in the fall."
"Sweet."
"It'd be a hell of a lot better than a kitchen job in some lodge, which is
what we're looking at right now, the way these kids have slacked off."
"Damn, I'd give anything to get Yellowstone, the fall crews get almost
double pay and that free emergency first aid training—"
"—and the fall crews get the best chance of making Crew Leader and
then going year round with benefits," she finished for me.
We looked wistful, like we always did after we had this conversation.
We'd been both been Environmental Studies majors back in college and we
thought we were in the door when we landed summer trail crew positions
with the Nature Association. We soon learned our employer had a huge
stable full of eager young grunts like us who would work for practically
20
nothing, and after two years of getting laid off in the fall we were both more
than eager to move up the ladder.
"Piss on the Nature Association. What are you doing tonight?" I asked.
"I'll check my day planner," she said with a laugh, and then she went
back to work. After weeks of dusty isolation we both wanted to jump each
other's bones, but we had partners off the island and so all we could do was
make jokes.
When we got back to camp, Omar looked at Patrick's efforts and actually
growled out a gruff word of approval, but the pig pit was still nothing that
even a handicapped pig in a wheelchair couldn't scramble out of with ease.
Oscar and Mario began designing some sort of net trap that fell from a tree
while the Barbies and Jane, oblivious to all Peggy's endless lectures about
sexist roles, made dinner and the rest of the boys gathered rocks for the
coming night's assault.
This time Mario managed to stay awake and rouse Richard for his watch,
and in the depths of the night the Romanian boy's stiff accent broke the
stillness. "Avake! Avake! The pigs haff come! Avake!" Flashlights
winked on around the camp and captured a herd of big hairy spotted pigs in
their beams.
There was a second of silence as they kids actually beheld their enemy,
and I felt a wavering of courage go through them at the size and teeth of
their adversaries. It was Omar, finally finding an object for his incessant
rage, that roused his peers to action. "You fucking pigs! Nobody wrecks
my camp! I'm gonna kill you!"
The pigs, Oreo crumbs dripping from their snouts, blinked in surprise at
Omar's outburst and then scattered as he charged them. Richard hit one with
a rock and a panicked pig-grunt bounced into the night.
21
"Kill!" Omar demanded. "Kill! Kill!"
Richard hit another one and the big-tusked beast, instead of fleeing,
turned and charged him. Yelping in terror Richard turned to run but tripped
over a tent line and went down. The pig rammed him and then slobbering
jaws closed on his ankle, but Omar leapt forward and delivered a vicious
spear jab that drove the pig off with a blood-curdling squeal. Then rocks
and spears were flying, girls were screaming, pigs were squealing and tents
were going down all over camp.
Finally the last pig crashed off through the brush and the kids straggled
back in out of the darkness. They were exultant. They stoked up the fire
and in the light of the dancing flames they relived the battle. Patrick had hit
a pig with a rock and was immensely pleased with himself. "I tol’ the
sum'bitch not to eat my Pop-tarts! I tol’ him. That rock teach his squealy
ass to listen to me! I got that mofo with a rock-tart!"
Each kid had a similar story, but Omar, having drawn blood with his
herioc rescue of Richard had been the bravest. He presided over the fire like
a fierce warrior king from Mesopotamia with his blooded spear as a scepter.
The kids were still telling tales when Peg and I crawled off to bed.
The next morning we woke up late and started breakfast. The kids, their
tents all flattened, had pulled their sleeping bags into the middle of the camp
and were all sound asleep like big birds in a sprawling nest. "Shall we get
'em up?" I asked.
"There kind of cute like that," she said. "At least they're finally getting
along. Let me get the camera."
We she took a few shots I pumped up the propane stove and made some
coffee. "I don't know about this," Peg said, watching the kids in their dusty
sleeping bags. "The Nature Association's paying for us to build trails and
22
teach kids about cooperation and ecology--I think we're getting off track
here. Maybe we should put a stop to this pig thing."
"They're sure cooperating on it," I said.
"Maybe we should nip it in the bud."
"Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute," I said, my lights going on. "Maybe
we ought to use it for a bribe."
"How?" she asked, blowing on her coffee.
"The kids build an awesome trail: they can chase pigs to their heart's
content."
The Nature Association's not going to go for that, neither is that Ray
guy."
"They don't have to know. Anyway, what do they care as long as their
trail gets done?"
"I don't know," Peg hedged.
"Look, at least the kids are starting to work together. Omar and Patrick
were even friends last night."
"Yeah, but they're working together to kill."
"So do lions."
Peg gave me a frustrated look. Nature arguments were big with her.
"Okay," she admitted grudgingly, "so they're echoing one side of nature, but
we're not here to kill, we're here to heal."
"How's this," I offered. "The kids get the trail built, give up one of their
days off to do a healing thing of your choice, and promise to write glowing
letters to the sponsors--all that, and they get to chase pigs. Come on, Peg,
they're never going to get one."
A careful look came into her brown eyes. "A lot of supervisors didn't
make Yellowstone last year because of those sponsor letters," she admitted.
23
"The kids will have to promise to make 'em glow, lots of references to
nature experiences and no pig talk."
"We're talking about bribery and blackmail," she said.
"Come on, I don't know where you were working last summer, but I was
trail crew leader for some historical monument place in Delaware, it was like
living in a city park."
"Shit," she said. "I know, I was in Missouri last summer."
"Come on, Peg, we've paid or dues, if we don't look good here we're..."
"But it's bribery," she cut me off.
"Okay, let's look at the other side: we don't let the kids chase pigs and
what do we have? A group of pissed-off teenagers scratching away at the
dirt and bitching, no trail done when we leave and whiny letters to the
sponsors. How's that going to look when we want to get hired for fall?"
She stood up, pulled off the red bandana she always wore, picked up a
brush and slowly untangled her shoulder-length brown hair. "What if they
do get a pig?" she asked, pulling reluctant hair strands out of the brush and
flicking them into the tiny morning breeze.
"They won't. They'll get tired of the whole thing."
"What if they don't get tired of it?"
"Come on, this bunch? Catch a pig? They can barely drive them off."
Peg looked at me and then at the sleeping kids. "Okay," she sighed.
"We're never going to get this trail done unless something changes, and I'd
die if I didn't make Yellowstone again."
When the kids woke up we offered them the deal. They jumped at it,
even Patrick, for the first time all summer he agreed to something without a
fight. The kids were so eager to get the trail done and begin serious pigcatching that they didn't say a word about the short rations for breakfast and
24
they tromped right off to work, saving Peggy and I the usual two hours of
urging to get them out of camp.
I thought their enthusiasm would wane but every night the pigs attacked
and every morning the kids were talking about revenge and fresh bacon. On
the next scheduled rest day all the kids voted to skip it and tromped off to
work ten hours straight.
The kids finished the trail in a week and didn't complain when Peg and I
went over every inch of it and put them back to work for two more days to
make sure it absolutely faultless.
The second Peg and I gave them the okay they attacked building the pig
traps with fury. Mario and Oscar built a net from twine and then worked on
rigging it to fall from a tree when the bait was touched. Chico spliced ropes
for a huge version of a rabbit snare, and the rest of the kids sharpened spears
and dug at the pig pit until it was six feet deep and eight feet square.
Peggy and I organized what little food we had left, planned the pack trip
we were taking the kids on at the end of the summer and fixed up the tents.
It wasn't much work and we spent a lot of time reading novels in the shade
and watching the changes in the kids.
Cindy and Candy got caught up in the group spirit and stopped with the
teased hair, make-up and bright matching outfits. They went for the
"Survivor" look and took to dirty shorts, bathing suit tops and ponytails.
They quit squeaking about dirt and broken nails and got clean out of a
meager plastic bucket like the rest of us. Patrick and Cindy had even
developed a courtship and were always together. She brought him water
while he shoveled out the pig pit and he let her listen to his CD player.
Richard and Jane had a courtship too, though they were both shy and
formal about it. They liked to sit together sharpening stakes and talking
25
slowly about their homes in Romania and Mexico. Chico, once he realized
Richard was a devout Catholic, chaperoned the budding relationship with an
older brother's watchful eye.
Omar presided over all the preparations with unofficial, but complete,
authority. The other kids didn't seem to mind, even Patrick, and in fact
reported their progress to him and sought his advice. When Omar wasn't
shoveling harder than God he took breaks to inspect the camp like a general
with a swagger stick.
Mario and Oscar endlessly reworked their net trap and constantly set it
off for Omar's approval. These little experiments were a highlight and the
kids would fight over who got to pull the bait and be the pig in the net. One
evening it was Patrick's turn and he thrashed around under the curtain of
ropes squealing, "I ate your Pop-tarts, Mofo! They was good! I ates 'em
all!"
"You die, pig!" Omar yelled back.
"You poke me with that little old stick of yours, didn't do nothing but
tickle me, but I got my eye on you A-rab Boy!"
"I ain't afraid of you!" Omar thundered, unable to contain himself.
"Fuck you! You's all too dumb to catch me! I's coming back and I's
going to eat everything!"
That drove the kids wild and they erupted into a yelling match with
Patrick, now the voice of their enemy. Even Richard, stiff and jerky like a
puppet, did an anger dance around the net and growled insults. The whole
scene was strangely and uncomfortably primeval, until the threats and boasts
finally toppled under their own weight and dissolved into laughter.
"I don't know," Peggy said, watching Patrick give up his impersonation
and crawl out from under the net. "I mean, it's like some kind of military
26
camp around here. What if Ray drops by? Or someone from the Nature
Association?"
"It's dead quiet out here and we're twelve miles down a four wheel drive
dirt track," I pointed out, "so we'll hear him hours before he gets here, and I
wouldn't mind if he did show up--if he brought some food."
"Dried stuff and canned stuff, that's all we've had for days," Peg sighed.
"The pigs got everything. I'd love some fresh vegetables."
"Vegetables, shit," Omar called out, his dark head surfacing out of the pig
pit like a seal out of an earthen ocean. "Fresh ham is what you're gonna to
get!"
"I'm a vegetarian, Omar," Peggy yelled back, but he just grinned and
ducked back out of sight, and dirt resumed flying over the lip of the pit.
As the traps approached completion Omar, showing an atavistic cunning
that I never would have given him credit for, ordered a little food to be left
out at night. He added to this strategy by commanding that the nightly pig
raids be chased off half-heartedly. "We're going to get these mofos overconfident," he told his troops. "We're going to get these dumb-ass pigs
thinking this camp is as safe as Disneyland."
"Then Whammo!" Fat Mario yelled like a big kid scoring a hit on a video
game. Something about Mario caught my eye and I looked at him closely: I
realized he was nowhere near as plump as he'd been three weeks ago. The
same went for the rest of the kids, the countless days of bad, dehydrated
food and brutal work had given them all a tougher look.
"Whammo and here comes the bacon!" the Barbie's squealed like they
were announcing a game show.
On the day the traps were completed all the kids collected a mass of
firewood and a huge spit was made ready. When darkness fell Omar called
27
his final strategy meeting. After his orders were repeated back to him three
times verbatim the boys stoked up the fire and sat around it sharpening their
spears and boasting about how brave they were going to be while the girls
kept talking about dripping, juicy roast pork.
I visited the fire to say a few encouraging words but the kids barely
looked at me and after feeling almost invisible for a few minutes I walked
away with a strange feeling. I found Peg outside her tent reading a Barbara
Kingsolver novel and plopped down in the dirt by her Tevas. "Think we
made the right choice?" I asked her.
She was reading with her headlamp and when she saw me wince in the
bright LED glare of the bulb, reached up to turn it off and then looked over
at the leaping flames. "Well, the trail's built..." she said uncertainly.
"Yeah, they did a great job, but..."
"But what?"
"I don't know, the kids are, they're like in a trance or something."
"I know what you mean," she nodded. "I mean, the idea of that group
healing anything or writing glowing essays about wildlife experiences
seems, I don't know..."
"Ludicrous?"
"Yeah, ludicrous."
"Just now when I was over at the fire I got the feeling that even if we
tried to, you know, tried to stop this thing, reassert some authority the kids
would just ignore us."
"You don't think they'll really get a pig do you?" she asked me.
"No way," I said, but I was beginning to wonder.
"That trap they made is pretty serious," she said.
"Maybe we should try to cool them out a little," I suggested.
28
"We can't," she said. "They kept their promise and we have to keep
ours."
"Maybe we should try to talk them out of it."
"Come on," she said, rolling her eyes at me. "You started all this bribery
stuff, it's your fault, and anyway, it doesn't matter, the Nature Association's
going to be reading about how we taught the kids to build pig traps if we
tried anything now."
Before we could argue anymore Omar solemnly pulled out a large bottle
that gleamed a flickering golden color in the firelight. Even from thirty feet
away I could see it was a fifth of Jack Daniel’s.
Peggy and I gaped in horror. In our training as trail crew leaders we'd
been told that anyone with alcohol was to be kicked out of the group
immediately. The kids knew this, but they didn't even bother to look in our
direction. Their eyes were on Omar. "One swallow each," he said.
"We should stop this," I whispered to Peggy, now fully aware of the
Faustian bargain we'd made.
"You stop it," she said angrily. "You started all this."
Omar quaffed at the bottle and then raised it fiercely, "Pig you die!"
Patrick grabbed it from him and shook it out towards the surrounding
night. "Because of you pig, I eats shit for days, I eats Cheerios an' powdered
milk! Tonight yo’ squealy ass going to pay!" He drank and passed the
bottle on.
Oscar and Mario drank clumsily and their faces turned red and streamed
with tears. Chico and Richard drank with quick macho head tosses,
imitating movie heroes heading for impossible battles. Jane drank timidly,
and then the Barbies validated my suspicions that they were seasoned Paris
Hilton party-girls by drinking deeply without batting an eye.
29
Omar capped the bottle, put it by the fire and then glared at his group.
"The rest," he said, "is only if we kill. Now, to your places!"
The kids picked up their spears and melted off into the night.
"Peg," I said. "It's gone too far. I'm scared to say a word."
"Damn it! It's your fault, you started all this."
"This is like N.R.A. summer camp," I tried to joke.
"Very funny," she shot back.
There was a long, cricket-chirping, fire-popping silence, and then she got
up, picked up the Jack Daniel’s, and brought it to me. "Go on," she said.
"What?"
"Go on. It's all out of our hands now anyway."
"Are you crazy? It's bad enough the kids are drinking."
"Look," she said. "It couldn't get any worse, even if we get good letters
and get Yellowstone we both know it's a lie--we didn't teach a damn thing
about conservation."
She was right so we moved up to the fire and drank slowly and
purposefully. We drank until Peggy's face was bright red and when she tried
to put another stick on the flames she missed and burst out laughing.
"This'ss crazy!" I said after we had put a considerable dent in the bottle.
My voice was now lazy and disobedient in my throat like it was trying to get
out around a pound of honey. "Thisss's crazy. We take a bunch 'a
unnerpriv'liged kids to learn 'bout nachure an' 'nstead were all waiting 'round
to kill pigss!"
"Hey!" Peggy hollared. "Hey ya’ pigs! I' wasssh' out if I were you!"
Crickets chirped and the stars shone. Omar and his soldiers remained
silent. Peggy thought this was funny. She took another swig and yelled,
30
"Pigss! You're goin' a' get it! Run, pigs, runn! Run to market! Wee, wee,
wee! All a' way!"
Not a whisper from the surrounding bushes. I collapsed besides Peggy in
drunken laughter. She finally got to her knees, peered out into the dark and
yelled, "Pa'rick! Pa'rick, you lit'le sshi'! I foun' a Pop-tar'! I foun' a Poptar'!"
We dissloved in glee and rolled around in the dirt clutching our sides.
Then I heard Patrick whispering fiercely from his bush, " That no joke!
They ain't acting! They all fucked-up! I knows they is!"
"They're just fucking with us," Omar whispered back.
"I' noh' fucking with you!" Peggy howled. "You lit'le murdererss! I
foun' a box a Pa-tars! I did! Sssee?? Sseee?" She crawled up on the
folding camp table, unsteadily got to her feet and began to wave around a
box of powdered milk. "SSSeee? Blue'brey! Sssee......" Then she lost her
balance, screamed and fell headlong in a clatter of dishes and food boxes. A
fine spray of powered milk floated around her like a miniature snowstorm.
Stunned silence. And then howls of laughter from bushes near and far.
"See!" Patrick's voice rose up triumphantly! She all fucked-up! Goddamn
counselor, trip-leader all fucked-up!"
Omar, leafage wrapped around his head, charcoal streaks on his face,
disgorged himself from the heart of a bush and came over to us. "It's okay
you're fucked-up," he said, brown eyes glittering under his foliage crown,
"but you got to be quiet, okay?"
"Yess ssirr," Peggy giggled from a nest of boxes and silverware.
Omar gave a quick grin, took a hit off the bottle, put it in his pants and
melted back into the night. Whispers shot from bush to bush followed by
snickers, then all was quiet again and the fire crackled in the stillness.
31
"Sshit," Peggy said. "How we gon' be quiet till all a' pigss come?"
I tried to help her up but she yanked my hand and I tumbled down into
her nest of boxes. She grinned at me and even through my drunkenness I
caught the unmistakably hot and wicked gleam in her eye. "We ffucked
ev'thing up," she slurred. "Why sssstop now?"
We didn't see the pigs arrive, but their greedy presence cut through our
thrashing and hot slobbering kisses. "Pigss," Peggy whispered. I rolled off
her and we cautiously peered over the boxes like spies. Dark shapes snuffed
at the edge of the firelight while whurtles and snorts of pig breath sounded
all around us as if we were on a boat surrounded by softly surfacing whales.
The tension in the camp was dark and delicious, and the pigs, well aware
of it, peered around with cunning eyes instead of abandoning themselves to
the treasure Peggy and I had scattered in our drunken lust.
Star light.
Soft crackling from the dying fire.
Peggy's hot breath in my ear.
Then the pigs lowered their heads and began to root around for food.
Cardboard tearing, teeth grinding, the soft clatter of a pig worrying a box.
More whortles and snorts. Then a loud crash of breaking sticks followed by
a surprised grunt and a heavy thud.
"Now!" Omar thundered, and the dark, silvery bushes shook to life and
vomited out their contents. Pigs squealed and grunted and looked for an
escape. Rocks crashed. Spears flew. Patrick's volcano of anger burst into
an eruption of cursing about Pop-tarts.
"Peeg!" Chico hollared above the din. "Peeg in my trap!" The scattered
shapes charging around the camp fell into a group and gathered at Chico's
trap where a bucking monster of a pig plunged and reared inside its noose.
32
"Kill!" Omar cried, leaping forward.
But Chico barred his way. "No," he said calmly. "Is my peeg. I must
kill him."
Omar nodded, lowered his spear, and stepped back.
Jane let out an urgent flood of Spanish, but Chico only nodded to her
with a dismissive snap of his head. Then he turned to the leaping, gnashing
pig, raised his spear, let out a hair-raising Aztec yell and darted forward
bringing the point down into the monster's shoulder. The pain gave the pig
the desperation it needed to break the noose and it tore forward and knocked
Chico underfoot. It would have eaten him alive if the other kids hadn't
rushed forward and driven it off.
Before the kids could notice that I was lurching around after them in my
underwear, another tornado of squealing touched down, this one from under
Oscar and Mario's oak tree. "We got one!" they yelled. "We got one!"
The group ran to their trap where a pig struggled in knots of mesh. "Kill
it, Omar! Kill it!" little Oscar yelled, pointing his huge flashlight beam into
the pigs yellow eyes and hopping madly from foot to foot.
Omar stepped forward and raised his spear, but then he stepped back and
said, "You and Mario make the kill--it's your pig."
"Us?" they swallowed.
Omar nodded, and then Richard, Patrick and Chico nodded with him.
Oscar and Mario looked at the gnashing, thrashing pig and then at their
thin spears. "Kill the pig!" the Barbies sang like cheerleaders. "Kill the pig!
Kill the pig!" The two boy scouts stepped forward and timidly poked at the
beast, which, even hampered by the net, attacked them. They scuttled back.
"Kill the pig!" the Barbies urged kicking their legs high. Again they stepped
forward, this time splitting up and coming from two sides. Mario poked the
33
enraged swine timidly and when it charged Oscar poked its blind side and it
had to turn back. The success of this maneuver made them brave and they
began to let out little war yells and to jab harder. The Barbies cheers
approached touchdown volume. Oscar and Mario began to jab more and
more viciously, and the pig, trying to turn in circles to protect itself, wound
the net into such a tight knot it could barely move. Then the blood-lust was
too much for Omar and the others and charged forward to finish off their
enemy.
When the body was still Omar commanded, "To the pit," and we
followed him to the pig pit where the flashlights revealed a furious boar
throwing himself against the dusty walls of his prison. "This one's mine,"
Omar said, and at the sound of his voice the red-eyed demon pig looked up,
Omar’s black eyes glittered down--and fury met fury. "I told you I would
come for you," Omar said, and he dropped into the pit with his knife.
The boar charged and got in several vicious slashes before Omar
managed to throw himself on its back. The boar bucked and grunted and
Omar, half on and half off, was dragged around the pit and slammed into the
walls. Then, hanging by one arm he got his knife hand free and plunged the
point into the pig's throat. He hit an artery and the pig let it's last enraged
squeals while it crashed around blindly. Its charges grew weaker and
weaker and finally it folded up in a corner and bleed to death.
Silence.
Stars.
Bloody Omar down in the pit and breathing heavily.
Then a big cheer roared out and he was hauled out of the pit and carried
to the fire, where the kids found Peggy passed out in nothing but her
underwear and let out another cheer.
34
The bloody, bitten kids stoked up the fire, efficiently gutted and spitted
the pigs, wrapped torn-up t-shirts over Omar and Chico's wounds and began
a Bacchanal. While the pig turned on the spit they painted patterns on each
other with blood, relived the battle and polished off the Jack Daniels that
Peggy and I had already put a serious dent in. When it was empty Chico
pulled out a bottle of Tequila, the Barbies appeared with matching hip flasks
of Southern Comfort and Patrick passed out some joints.
The delicious odor of cooking meat began to fill the air. The kids
grabbed buckets and boxes, turned them into drums and began to dance
around the roaring fire. Richard and Jane grabbed hunks of steaming meat
and fed each other. The Barbies took their tops off. Patrick and Cindy
started making out. Candy, bottle in hand, started kissing everyone. I woke
Peggy up with a shot of Tequila down her throat and we went back to what
we were doing before the pigs had showed up. Candy started doing more
than kissing and clothes flew everywhere. I passed out dimly aware that
Oscar was losing his virginity while his pal Mario did a howling dance
around the fire with a glistening pig leg in his hand.
When I woke up my head was splitting in ten different directions like a
dry log. The sun was high, and three Park Service employees in their crisp
tan and green uniforms were staring in disbelief at the ravaged pig carcasses
and naked, painted bodies lost amidst a sprawl of clothes, bottles, sleeping
bags, food boxes, propane stoves and flattened tents.
With a blazing halo of vengeful sunlight spread out around his bearded
head, Ray, our boss, came over to peer down at Peggy and I. Peggy,
disturbed by his shadow, cracked her eyes, saw him and, as consciousness
came back, groaned deeply. Ray didn't say anything, just walked back to the
35
tailgate of the truck where he crossed his arms and waited with the other two
Park Service guys.
Peggy and I got up, put our clothes on and woke the groaning kids. They
took in the situation with bleary eyes and then, without a word, slowly and
quietly packed up the camp. When they were done they went to sit in the
bed of the truck with their feet on their backpacks and rolled up sleeping
bags. Despite their greasy, streaked hungover faces I saw a look of quiet
satisfaction in their eyes.
When Ray had the camp empty and Peggy and I in the back of his truck
along with the kids he folded his arms and glared at us. "There goes
Yellowstone," I whispered to Peggy.
Ray's cold eyes bored in at me; then he turned on the whole group and
paused for dramatic effect. "We hired you young adults to make a
contribution to a nature preserve," he finally started. "We hired you to
protect an endangered eco-system and to learn to value it. Trapping and
killing innocent animals is inexcusable and—"
"Squealy-ass ate my Pop-tarts," Patrick cut him off tiredly. "I tol' him
not to but..." he trailed off with a fatalistic shrug and a certain moral dignity
in the set of his head.
"Whether the wild pigs ate your food or—"
But Oscar began to hum "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" and the other
kids joined in, and when Ray tried to talk over them their voices rose up
with such dogged cheerfulness that he had to give up his lecture and angrily
get in the cab to start the truck. "And on that farm he had a PIG!" the kids
sang.
"Not no more he don't!" Omar yelled.
36
INTRODUCTION to the Magnet Stories. Magnet was a force ten
hurricane on wheels banished from the East Coast and dropped in Utah. He
was my fellow heretic and partner in crime as I struggled to survive divorce,
bleak days of graduate school, endless snow and Mormons. The four stories
that feature Magnet truly are a Collection of Catastrophes.
Magnet and the Tards
I want to tell you about Magnet and the 'tards, but first, of course, you have
to know about Magnet. I'm not speaking with Magnet right now, by the way. He
ran off owing my brother seven hundred dollars and that's the last I've seen of him,
though vague rumors of Magnet-sightings do come my way. Things like, "I think I
saw Magnet with some chick at Soho, they were doing blow in the bathroom," or,
"I think I saw Magnet's name on that outstanding warrants list they publish in the
paper."
I met Magnet in, of all the cold and frozen hell-holes on earth, Logan Utah.
How did a Buddhist-Jewish-Unitarian end up in that sugar-white landscape? Well,
let me tell you, pal (as my father would call you, or maybe if you're lucky you'd get
Buddy or Mac), anyway, here's the skinny: the present era is no time for a white
boy to be getting into good graduate schools and so all my applications came back
marked with academic euphemisms for "Piss off".
Actually, if you really want to know (as Holden would ask you) if you really
want to know, I did have an acceptance from the University of Washington's
prestigious playwriting program almost in hand when the head of the department
37
called to tell me she was truly sorry but they "had a Native American apply at the
last second."
Yep. All my applications got slammed, but one. Utah likes Whitey, Utah
loves Whitey, Utah not only invited Whitey over they gave Whitey an eight
thousand dollar scholarship (turned down by a Chinese guy who no doubt got wise
at the last second).
So Whitey trotted off to Logan Utah to be humiliated by graduate school (a
long and arduous tale often told) and to be infuriated by Mormons (a hot and
spiteful tale that I've told before and will tell again at the drop of a hat) and to meet
Magnet (a tale being told at this very second).
Magnet had a real name and a real life and in my first couple of years of
grad school I vaguely knew him: a fellow heretic also banished to Utah because his
wife was getting her Masters in folklore, and Utah's big on folklore. Gag me with
a spoon. They can never hear enough about their "perilous westward treck" and
their "pioneer past". According to the Mormons, they were the only group to do
the Pioneer-Indian-Donner-Party thing. The fact that they only went from
Missouri to Utah and never even dealt with the next thousand miles of scorching
desert and freezing mountains that the rest of the Pioneers had to deal with seems
to have been washed out of their collective beehive memory by too much sugar.
Okay, Magnet. Magnet was a fellow heretic, a fellow member of the
"invisible people" as I thought of us, because, once it was established that we
weren't going down to the local ward to "watch a little video" it was like we didn't
exist. They looked past us, beyond us, talked as if we weren't in the room.
Anyway, Magnet's pretty little wife came back from a trip to Boston and
announced that she and Magnet were fini, done, terminal, dead, kaput; and lucky
Magnet, who was now neck-deep, credit-card deep, in his own Masters was stuck
in Logan while she took off to work on a historical farm in Iowa. If I remember
38
correctly she earned a Masters so that she could wear a gingham bonnet and lead
parties of German tourist around a "living farm." What joy: "This over here, ladies
and gentlemen, is a chicken. The pioneers had chickens." I suppose it was
preferable to staying married to Magnet, which must have been something like
being married to a cross between a meteor and Peewee Herman.
So Magnet, once docile and domestic and rarely seen, suddenly roared onto
lively singles scene of Logan like a bumper car let loose at a fair. And who was
there to join him? Who else had a pretty little wife shoot off to another state? Yes,
it's a long and gruesome tale and--you know the drill.
Magnet and I became peas in a pod: two divorced guys sticking out the last
few months of endlessly toilsome graduate degrees in the land of the mesmerized.
We got drunk (at the town's one bar, the infamous White Owl), and we yelled at
our vanished wives, and we plagued the weight room and the steam room of the
university. And the steam room was haunted by a couple of real winners:
Underwear Man and The Madman of the Sauna, who I am going to tell you about,
as soon as I'm done with Magnet and the 'tards. Anyway, back to this story: it was
a real fun six months, and all drenched under snow and ice and locked in a timewill-not-move zone of sub-freezing temperatures blowing down from Idaho.
Magnet was one angry guy (with me along we made two). He yelled out the
window of the car: "Fuck you, bitch! Fuck your chickens! Fuck you for luring me
to this place, this shit-hole, and then dumping my ass!" He yelled variations of this
in the weight room, and he yelled often-slurred variations in the bar--which is how
he got his name.
One long and smoky and sordid night--in an endless parade of deep-friedBuffalo-Wings-and-beer long and sordid nights-- Magnet stood up in the White
Owl and yelled out an emphatic, "Yes! I am a chick magnet!" And, of course,
there was not a woman within a hundred yards of our divorced-guy-sticky-with39
beer table and so the name stuck, and quickly shortened itself from the delicate
Chick Magnet to the more direct, Magnet.
Of course I had to have a name too, and as a woman had refused to go out
with me stating I was a "Rebound Guy" I became known as Rebound. We were
spoken of around town like a law firm or a TV buddy-cop show: Rebound and
Magnet. We were, if you really want to know, a mess. Ever see all kinds of stuff
go into a blender solid and come out liquid? That's what unexpected, unannounced
divorce will do to your harmless, innocent, unwary soul.
As angry divorced guys will, we did a lot of stupid crazy stuff. We went on
river trips, got in bar fights (the boozy threatening kind with much yelling and little
real violence), ruined parties, saw Pulp Fiction thirty times, picked up girls many,
many years our juniors, ate fast food and saw therapists. Like I said, it was a
whole lot of fun.
An end finally came to this hell and I got my degree and, after some
adventures, ended up with a job back in my sunny California town. Santa Barbara,
I love the place. Magnet, from the howling depths of Utah, loved it too and begged
in his raspy indignant voice for me to set him up: "Where the hell am I gonna go,
Rebound? Back to fucking Boston? Out to the chicken ranch in Iowa? Set me up,
Dude, if I'm gonna study for the Bar it may as well be there where the babes are."
I convinced my brother, rightfully suspicious of somebody from Boston by
way of Utah and named Magnet, to hold a room for him in Chez Bachelor: my
brother's beautiful house. A house that generations of single men and Tee-bone,
my brother's dog (a big dog that bites kids and anyone under five feet tall) had
lived in and reduced over the years to little more than a cave for watching football
and heating frozen dinners. Mark-the-stoner and part-time bicycle salesman, one
of the perpetual single men roommates migrated out, Magnet migrated in and the
swithceroo was pulled.
40
Magnet, immediately influenced by the cosmopolitan air of Santa Barbara,
insisted that we clean up Chez Bachelor and bathe the dog: "What babe's gonna
wanna come over to this pit? Come on, Rebound, show some elbow grease. We're
winners now, remember? Winners. We win, we get babes, we get jobs, that
divorce-guy, Utah-shit is over. I pass the Bar, I reel in a new Babe, life goes on.
Nancy's the one back in fucking Iowa looking at chickens."
"Well, okay..."
"And we got to get this fucking dog off the couch! This isn't a dog! He's a
bear! Who's a bear?" And at this point Magnet would nuzzle up to Tee-bone and
pat his enormous head and Tee-bone would thump his huge tail and then roll off
the couch to pick up a well-chewed pair of my brother's underwear in his jaws.
Magnet would keep chanting, "Who's a bear! Look at the bear!"" and try to get the
underwear and Tee-bone would growl with pleasure and do this puppy-prance
thing--remarkable for a hundred and fifty pound dog--and then gallop victoriously
out into the neighborhood with my brother's skid-marked chones held high with
pride. Many were the nights I came home from work to be greeted by the sight of
Tee-bone parading around the neighborhood with stinky underwear in his jaws
while the neighboring mothers quickly pulled their children inside.
For a month Magnet' house-cleaning zeal waxed strong, but soon it began to
wane, and when he took a waiting job and began to hang out with the "babes" it
virtually disappeared. And, thank you for your patience, this is where the ‘tards
come in.
Magent--who had a habit of parading around on our deck naked but for his
big, thick Elvis Costello glasses, and reading the paper by the hour--stumbled upon
an advertisement that caught his eye. The advertisement offered house-cleaning at
a very reasonable rate. What was the catch? The catch was that it was a van full
of retards who came to clean your house. No, this is not hard to swallow, this is
41
America and there are those entrepreneurial geniuses who will find that way to
make a buck that no one has ever thought of. "'Tard in the Yard," as it came to be
known, was just such a project.
The young Horatio Alger (a U.C.S.B. business major) who conceived Tard
in the Yard had all angles of his business well thought out: on one side he had the
well-meaning saints who ran the local retard residences thrilled that their charges
were "building skills" and getting driven off for an "interaction with the real
world" and on the other he had his customers glowing in their own holiness
because they were giving disadvantaged people a chance. Win/Win, you know the
drill.
So I know all this now because the whole business went bust because the
guy, of course, couldn't let a good thing be, got too ambitious and began driving
his 'tards with whips and threats, and, the local paper alleged, even fed them
amphetamines to get more work out of them. According to the paper he was also
porking them. A fact I can verify, as I am about to tell you.
Magnet, in a fit of magnanimousness (no pun intended), didn't tell me about
his decision to hire 'Tard in the Yard, in fact he had a little plan: the 'tards would
come while I was at work and I would return to a sparkling house, all courtesy of
my pal.
Well, as Gomer Pyle would say, "Surprise! Surprise!" I came home alright,
dead-tired after a long day of work and there was this big, beat-up van out front
with a crudely stenciled "Dave's Home and Yard Service" on the side. Before I
could digest just who Dave might be--someone who sold drugs to Magnet
perhaps?--Tee-bone, the dog that bites anyone under five feet came tearing around
a corner of the house chasing one of the shorter 'tards, one afflicted, I think, with
Down's Syndrome.
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Completely mystified, thinking that Dave's van might be a cover for a gang
of handicapped thieves and that Tee-bone had saved the day, I emerged from the
car. Tee-bone, good dog that he is, treed his 'tard and then came trotting up to me
with his tail wagging triumphantly; while from the canopy of the big Jacaranda tree
above us terrified groans and gurgles filled the air.
What the fuck was going on? Deciding it was wiser to look in the house
instead of go in the house, I approached the kitchen windows. I came face to face
with two drooling, round-faced mongoloids who were slapping squeegees all over
the glass, spraying each other with Windex and drying the floor with newspapers.
Tee-bone saw them as well, but as both of them were over five feet he remained
completely indifferent. Strangers in the house? So what? They're over five feet
tall, nothing to worry about. Tee-bone had one of those amusement park "You
must be this tall to go on this ride," things in his head, only his said: "You must be
under this height for me to want to crush your 'nads in my jaws."
On to the next window where I watched a deformed midget drag a vacuum
around our living room. Tee-bone's height meter went off and he went berserk,
immediately and repeatedly launching himself against the sliding glass doors like
an enormous, furry fly. Unable to hear his frenzied barking over the shriek of the
vacuum, the midget continued to drag the machine around in circles with the
dedication and patience of a donkey going around a stone mill.
On to the next window: here two strange-looking women flung Comet
cleanser around a bathroom like powdered sugar and flushed the toilet repeatedly.
On to the next: here someone was fucking someone else in my bed. Dave,
the Bill Gates of the house-cleaning world, was taking a well-earned break from
the taxing job of supervising his work force to pork some poor retarded girl (from
behind) in my bed.
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Okay, if you really want to know, I watched. I should have screamed in
outrage, been righteous, done something; but, truth be told, there is something
extremely fascinating about watching other people have sex, and in this case it was
even more so as the sexual act had an element of a carnival freak show mixed in,
and it was happening right in my bed.
I was only watching for a very short time, ten or fifteen minutes, when the
loud crash of breaking glass started all three of us and a terrified midget, dragging
a vacuum cleaner came tumbling into the sex den with Tee-bone, who had flung
himself through the sliding glass doors in his frenzy, right on his heels. Two naked
people, one retarded, and a midget, also retarded, clambered up on my bed holding
each other and throwing my pillows at Tee-bone.
Down feathers filled the air, other retards, attracted by the noise, came
pouring into the room. One of them, completely unaffected by the turmoil,
plugged the dragging vacuum cord into the wall socket and looked to master for
praise. Master yelled, "Turn that off you fucking idiot! Get the Goddamned dog
out of here!" Outside a crowd of curious neighbors had gathered under the
jacaranda tree to speculate on just exactly what was up there groaning and
gurgling. One of the more intrepid even had a birding guide.
Magnet arrived at that point, pulled Tee-bone off, and the 'tards were hustled
(by a half-dressed Dave) off to the van in short order, and the van shot out of the
neighborhood--with Tee-bone gleefully chasing it. And, would you believe it, we
were promptly billed--even though the house was, I know it's hard to conceive of
this, in worse condition than it had been before Magnet's jewel of a plan went in to
affect.
Magnet, with typical abrasiveness, announced, "I'm not paying those fuckwads! They didn't do shit! That fucker just let a bunch of 'tards run around the
house and now he wants me to pay for it? Fuck him!" The bills kept coming, with
44
growing late fees attached, and this incensed Magnet to the point where he
announced that his first case, when he passed the Bar (he'd failed it twice so far)
was going to be "Suing the ass of that motherfucker who used our house as a
Goddamn 'tard pimp-palace and playground."
But before Magnet could pass the Bar and begin litigation, Dave's business
went ass-over-tit. "Hey, Rebound, come here and check this out!" Magnet hollered
one Sunday morning. Out I went onto the deck, where Magnet, naked as usual,
showed me the article I told you about. Tee-bone, scratching at fleas and listening
in, thumped his tail fondly at the memory of one of his best days.
So that's the story of Magnet and the 'tards. Not long afterwards Magnet got
into a huge fight with one of our more conservative neighbors over his habit of
nudity out on the deck, and not long after that Magnet didn't pay rent and got into a
fight with my brother, and not long after that Magnet moved out in the middle of
the night leaving seven-hundred dollars in debts behind him.
I assume he's still in town; like I said, vague rumors still land in my ears: "I
heard Magnet passed the Bar on his fourth try." "I saw Magnet with some chick,
they were both shit-faced." But my favorite rumor is the one I heard from
someone who swore they saw Magnet driving around in a big van with something
about house-cleaning advertised on the sides.
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Underwear Man and the Mad Man of the Sauna
I weathered the darkest days of my divorce in Logan, Utah. In those gutwrenchingly rotten months I clung to my also-freshly-divorced pal, Magnet, and
the two of us spent a lot of time in the Utah State weight room and sauna. It was a
snow-drenched minus five outside and the only way to get a sweat up was indoors
playing basketball or lifting weights. In those black and angry days exercise was
therapy and I couldn't get enough of it. After another long and humiliating day of
graduate school I'd scuttle over to the gym to vent off the top few inches of my
constantly upwelling spring of rage.
As my visits to the gym became routine I learned the habits and personalities
that made up the place. The same loud group of jocks used the bench-press at fivefifteen, the same giggling girls used the leg machine at five-twenty, the nice guy
who remembered your locker combination was on duty Mondays and Wednesdays,
and the asshole who would fight you to the death over a towel paced the gym cage
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. A steady group of guys used the sauna regularly but
two were obsessive: Underwear Man and Mad Man.
Underwear Man was a plump Korean with a big, doughy frog-like face who
always wore his white cotton briefs, and always wore them pulled up far too high
around his jigling waist. Underwear Man and his underwear lived in the sauna. He
never said a word, never spoke, not to Anglos, not to other Asians. He was
absolutely solitary. He would emerge from the sauna to take a cold shower, comb
his hair in the bathroom mirror, examine his face, drink some water, and then back
in he would go. Sometimes he would camp out in front of his locker cutting his
toenails and shaking out athlete's foot powder on his toes. All of this was done in a
big white, wet pair of cotton briefs.
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The Mad Man of the sauna was Underwear Man's opposite. He spoke to
anybody, to everybody, even to nobody if need be. Amidst his garrulous
monologues, always centered on his diet and fitness habits, he performed every
almost every function known to man—and performed them in the sauna. He ate,
he drank, he flossed, brushed his teeth, he ran through his exercise routines, he
conversed, diatribed, debated, and, one fine day, masturbated.
Underwear man I pitied. Madman I was scared of.
In my own dark and lonely days at clannish Utah State I shared the bottom
of the social barrel with other exiles. I saw Asians and Blacks wander around the
university with stunned and baffled looks on their faces as yet one more bevy of
women skipped by them with huge bows in their hair. The place was a nightmare
if you were not into Brigham Young and lime jello; if you were not one of them.
If you were one of them it was heaven: mounds of sugary food in the
Campus Center, flocks of people your own age gushing about "Missions" and
"Wards" and "Quorums," endless taffy-pulls, baking contests and bobbing for
apples. And beyond the hard work and stress of college lay the certainty that some
uncle, out of the thousands that you had, would plug you into a job. Of course they
wanted you to work—they were going to tithe you.
So who wasn't happy? Well, to start with there was the ever-abrasive
Magnet, who'd been dumped and left to rot in Utah by his ex-wife. There was me.
Just as pissed off and divorced and enraged at my ex-wife.
Then there were all those poor Asians who didn't look exactly thrilled. One
or two got captured by them and became like pets, and they had it pretty good.
They were sort of led around and displayed and made much of like trophies: "See?
One of you joined? And see how happy little Phong-Sue is now? See how we all
love her? She just loves all her new friends and her classes at Institute." (Institute,
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I know this is hard to swallow, was a department of the Utah State and gave
college level credit for studying the Book of Mormon.)
Who else was pissed off? The black athletes who'd been recruited. These
guys were furious. Recruitment was what they'd busted ass for their entire lives,
and now here it was, and where was the play? Where was the beer? Where were
the wild parties? Where was the college-is-the-best-years-of-your-life-AnimalHouse party spirit?
This rage was eloquently summarized by a Daren, a black guy I knew from
Long Beach, who grabbed my arm in the Campus Center, glared around and spat
out, "What de fuck be with all de chicks in de mo'fucking bows and shit? Ward? I
doan wan' visit no ward! I wan' sum play! I can’ git no play!"
How did I, a white guy, get to know black guys? Because they, like every
other pissed off heretic with no place to go, haunted the gym and the weight room
to get their anger out. I played basketball with them, even though they referred to
me as "De li'l cracker" as in "I guards de li'l cracker" and "De white boy" as in
"White boy you ain' even goan touch de ball," and they slammed me into the floor
every chance they got. So what? After the floor-slamming my ex had delivered
what they offered was gentle in comparison. Besides, I was I the mood to be
slammed into the floor. I did some slamming of my own, though backed by my
ferocious hundred and fifty pounds all it did was make the black guys laugh:
"Cracker mad! Cracker mad! Look at 'em jump! Damn, white boy, chill!"
Still, misery makes strange bedfellows, and the black guys treated me well
off the court. Daren, knowing I was a fellow exile from California, took to me and
gave me free tickets to all his home games. Magnet and I spent several autumn
nights drinking Schnapps and watching him smash himself against other poor
black kids who'd had the good fortune to be recruited by schools were they had
toga parties instead of taffy pulls.
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All this leads to the fact that I had some pity for Underwear Man, who was
obviously one more lost and baffled visitor to the gracious hospitality of Utah, only
he'd cracked under the strain. God knows, he may have started attending the
school in nineteen-eighty, had a nervous breakdown, and been haunting the sauna
ever since.
The Madman I was scared of. One night two old geezers who took their
saunas in their Mormon undergarments (I wonder if Underwear Man was making
some kind of statement?) got pissy about all the toothpaste and shampoo Madman
was launching all over the sauna and one made the mistake of asking, "Why don't
you brush your teeth in the bathroom and shampoo your hair in the shower?"
"Why don't you mind your own fucking business?" was the prompt reply,
sending the two geezers scuttling out of the sauna like fat, pink, lightly-steamed
crabs (in strange Masonic undergarments). The two geezers went straight for the
nearest authority like kids on the playground running to teacher, and the nearest
authority happened to be the cranky locker room supervisor who handed out the
towels and locker combinations with all the joy of Shylock handing out his own
gold.
When Madman got out of the sauna and went to his locker this guy went
over to talk to him and the booming, "I CAN SHAMPOO MY FUCKING HAIR
IN THE FUCKING SAUNA IF I WANT TO!" that immediately resulted from this
altercation burst into the metal-clanking low-volume noise of the locker room like
a bomb going off. The cranky towel guy quickly retreated to the safety of his cage
and never bothered Madman again.
I was scared of Madman. He was built too, probably from the endless
exercise routines he did in the sauna. With his long red hair (endlessly
shampooed) and freckles he looked like a slightly-scaled-down Conan the
Barbarian. But live and let live; and hidden in the steam there seemed to be plenty
49
of room for divorced guys, disappointed athletes, Koreans and Mormons—months
dragged by without incident.
Then Madman decided to whack-off.
Maybe he saw it as the ultimate act of defiant protest against the constrictive
Mormon world around him.
The same two old geezers who had ratted on him for shampooing his hair
were in the sauna, and Daren, and another big black football linemen, and Magnet
and me—and, of course, Underwear Man. We were all minding our own business
when Madman stopped one of his muttering monologues, glowered around the
steamy room, grabbed Mr. Happy, and started beating the shit out of him.
Ever see that famous National Geographic picture of the thick-browed
Japanese snow monkey glowering out of the hot springs at the photographer while
the snow flurries around him? That's pretty much how Madman looked, except it
was steam not snow flurrying around him, but he did glower, at everybody, daring
anybody to say a word.
Well, nobody said a word. Even the abrasive Magnet, no stranger to
altercation, had learned that Madman was not to be fucked with and kept quiet.
Daren and the other football player were dumbfounded and the two old geezers
quivered, and when Madman pointed it at them and continued beating they
whimpered and scooted into a corner.
Then Underwear Man made two strange gulping growling noises and came
completely unglued. He let fly a burst of screaming in Korean, grabbed the
powerful cleaning hose that was kept coiled under the benches, turned it up full
blast and doused Madman. Bullets of cold water crashed everywhere and the rest
of us let out gasps of shock as needles of ice pierced our pulpy, freshly-steamed
skins. We frantically scrambled up onto the benches to get away from the pain.
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Madman let go of Mr. Happy, leapt for the hose and the two adversaries slammed
around the room bellowing out explosive grunts.
"Fuck dis! Fuck dis! Mo'tho'fuckers! I goan kick your ass!" Daren's friend
screamed as he got nailed by a jet of frigid water.
"Stop them! Stop them!" the old guys whimpered. "Help! Somebody!
Stop them!"
The cranked-up hose escaped and began to whip around the room on its own
like a furious snake. Underwear Man and Madman, no longer distracted by a
rubber object, set to beating the shit out of each other with real dedication.
Then the got trapped against a wall and filled up with pressure until it
quivered. Underwear Man's foot bumped it free and it lashed out viciously across
the room smacking Daren in the nuts. His scream was so loud that both Madman
and Underwear Man, locked like sumo wrestlers, stopped fighting and stood
blinking uncertainly through the steam. Daren's volcano of pent-up anger erupted
and he jumped down and began to beat the shit out of them screaming, "I hate you
fucking Mo'mons! Hate you! Hate you! Hate You!"
On hearing this, the two real Mormons let out squeaks of fear and made a
dash for the door. The other black guy, realizing Daren was hitting the wrong
guys, yelled, "It's dese Mo'Fos we want!" and grabbed them by the garments and
began to beat the shit out of his true enemy. Daren quit pummeling Madman and
Underwear Man and joined his friend, screaming, "Why couns' I gets Michigan?
Why couns' I get Georgia Tech? Why I get sen' to dis shit!"
"Get 'em!" Magnet yelled, like he was now at a game. "Get 'em! Kill the
righteous motherfuckers! I hate 'em too! Fuck 'em! Fuck their lime jello! Fuck
their bows!" Magnet, excited into pure frenzy, jumped off his bench and joined in,
hopping around behind his fogged-up Elvis Costello glasses and kicking whoever
rolled near him.
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The door flew open, a crowd of athletes and gym supervisors tumbled in,
pulled everybody apart, dragged everybody outside.
And it was over.
Just a bunch of pink and black sweating men, some in strange underwear,
panting and dripping and glaring around with wild eyes.
The guys who worked in the gym tried to find out what had happened and
the old geezers waited for everyone to rat on Madman, but no one did—because
Madman, no matter how fucking mad, was us and they were them. The old
geezers started pointing their fingers at Madman, but Underwear Man immediately
let loose a flood of Korean and pointed his finger at them. Madman shook his fist
in their faces, and the whole inquiry degenerated into chaos, all backed by Daren
and his friend both screaming, "Fuck dis shit! Fuck dis shit!"
A week later it was back to business as usual: Madman shampooed his hair
and talked to the walls, Underwear Man went in and out of the sauna in his white
briefs and Magnet and I sweated away and ranted through the steam about what
bitches our ex-wives were.
The only guys who never came back were the two old geezers.
52
Gooby and the Angry Vietnamese Mechanic
I've had several request for more Magnet stories. Sean, the Great Kazoo in
Taos, Don in Utah and Steven have all requested more Magnet. "It's because he's
so unreflective," Steven told me. "He's such a great character to read about
because he just acts without ever stopping to think."
That was Magnet.
Magnet. The man who once sliced a three iron so bad at Bear Lake Golf
Course in Utah that I got nailed and had a big red patch on the back of my neck for
three weeks. Magnet who got carried away by cocaine and dancing in Vicki-thewaitresses' tiny apartment and killed her boom box with a karate kick. Dear
Magnet. No one knows where he is, though Don said he blew through Utah
several months ago. Anyway, I have one more Magnet story, Magnet on the River
, or How Magnet Almost Got us Killed in Ray's Bar, but before I can tell you that
story I must tell you this one, for the two are intricately wound together.
So for this story cast your mind back to the golden era of Santa Barbara in
the mellow sun of the1970s and Gooby pottering around in his green and white
1963 split-screen Volkswagen van.
Back in those long-age days Gooby was beautiful and blue-eyed but he was
sailing on other people's boats and smoking other people's weed and listening to
other people's reggae. He was butt-poor making three bucks an hour behind the
counter at Headley's Health bar where he cranked out atomic bee pollen shakes and
wheat grass blenders.
Anyway, Brian Smith, (Curb as he will forever be known because when he
got stoned he couldn't park worth a damn), anyway Curb who was a beautiful
Montecito baby was working up the San Ysidro Ranch making major bucks
bussing tables and he finagled Gooby a job. Now this took some doing because
53
The Ranch was big money and hard to break into and every restaurant hustler in
town wanted to get their foot in the door, but like I said, Curb had some clout and
he got Gooby in.
It rolls around to Gooby's first day. He's in a frenzy of nail-nibbling and
shirt-pressing and he finally gets in his penguin suit and gets in his tin box and
starts rattling across town for his debut on the job, the first day of his two week
"probationary period". Nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof, as my mother would say.
Well, Gooby gets half-way across town and his ancient van starts coughing
and choking like a gasping fish. Gooby takes his nails out of his mouth long
enough to swear furiously, gets both hands on the wheel and nurses his dying box
into the nearest garage--where it dies with a last sooty gasp.
Ah, how fickle is fate! For whose garage should Gooby come limping into
on this most desperate of days? And what momentous decision had the owner of
this garage made just that morning?
Yes, you are about to meet Wang, the angry Vietnamese mechanic.
Wang the refugee, Wang the banner of the American dream, Wang the anitGatsby, Wang the success story, Wang the hater of Whitey. Wang the street rat
from Saigon who grew up begging for crumbs from G.I.s, Wang who started
hanging around Transport Group Three's army mechanics shop and fetching
wrenches for cokes, learning to change tires for a comic book and a dollar. By the
time he'd reached the age of twenty he could do a tune up on a jeep twice as fast as
the sergeant in charge and he was invaluable to the shop, but this only made the
G.I.s hate him more and call him Gook louder. In fact Wang wasn't even his name,
but no one could be bothered with his real name and eventually he heard "Wang"
shouted at him so many times he forgot it himself. "Wang, get the Goddamned
motherfucking wrench, you Goddamn gook!"
54
When Saigon fell Wang was fucked: the North Vietnamese would kill him
without a second thought for collaborating, and the Americans laughed in his face
and said, "Forget it, pal," when he mentioned that holy word, "Helicopter". Wang
had busted ass for the U.S. Army Transport Corps Group Three for ten years and
was rewarded with nothing but the loss of his real name, a smattering of English,
an ability to work on engines and a burning hatred of Americans.
He got out of Vietnam on a leaky boat where children died and women were
raped and made it to the Philippines and a burgeoning internment camp. Wang
rotted out weeks and months trying to plan a future, but in the end it was planned
for him: he could either go back to Vietnam or go to America. Some of the
Vietnamese boarding the transport ship were excited but Wang trudged up the
gangplank with hatred--the land that he despised had become his only refuge.
After arriving in America Wang's life was a nightmare of forms and
relocation centers. Finally he was inoculated to the gills and released. Totally at a
loss he attached himself to the fringes of a large group of his countrymen and
drifted into Isla Vista. There he fished off the pier until angry sports fishermen
drove him away with shouts and curses.
Destitute, Wang recycled bottles and ate dogs and cats, thus extracting his
first (literal) taste of revenge, but it was small revenge and his heart burned hot
within him as he slept in crowded rooms stinking of fresh octopus.
Wang finally did what he knew best. He dragged himself through the
morass of his nightmarish memories and began hanging around a repair shop
fetching wrenches for free and begging for a job. Old Heinrick at the VW shop
gave him one and no man ever worked harder. Wang gave his lifeblood to the
shop, worked eighteen hour days and actually slept on a cot in the back. He ate
canned fish and day old bread, never wore anything but his blue mechanics suit,
and slowly he accumulated enough money to buy Heinrick out.
55
Once the business was his, Wang put in another ten years of insanely hard
work. Not to save for a house or a child's education, but because every dollar he
received from an American was a drop of the blood of revenge, a pound of the
flesh of racial equality. Every check he got, every bill, credit card payment, every
quarter--it was all revenge to Wang. Whitey had ruined his life and scorned him
and now he could get his tormentor back by hitting him where it hurt--in the pocket
book. For ten years he lived like this, a victorious grin inflicting his eyes with a
malicious light every time an injured vehicle wobbled into his yard.
Had Wang still felt money was sufficient revenge, Gooby's limping entry
into his life may have been uneventful, painful to Gooby's finances but not his
pride. However, Wang, as the years passed, was not getting as big a bang for his
buck. As B.B. King sang, "The thrill is gone." Wang tried to get it back: he raised
his prices, gouged fat, white bass fisherman for catalytic converters, robbed blind
overly-manicured real estates agents in need of a tire--but the Goddamned
Americans just payed up and drove away, they didn't even seem to be aware they
were getting ripped off. They went blindly off to their next can of coke and Fourth
of July Barbecue.
Wang's bitterness grew deeper and more vitriolic. Three mechanics came to
work for him and all three quit--he was mean, bitter, impatient and smoldering
with an anger that, had it been focused into one beam, could have ignited rocks.
And so it was that on the cathartic morning of our story, Wang came to a
fateful decision and right afterwards Gooby's old green and white van came
gasping onto his premises. Gooby leapt out in his penguin suit, gingerly lifted the
engine latch and quickly ascertained that his carburetor was clogged. Gooby
dropped the latch, swore and cursed and nibbled his nails ferociously. He was in a
penguin suit and a desperate hurry and he didn't have time for this shit. Then he
noticed a shadow at his shoulder.
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"I check for probrum," Wang announced.
"You don't need to," Gooby told him. "I know what it is, it's the carburetor,
the wholes thing's all gummed up. Can you clean it for me?"
Wang stared at Gooby with absolute hatred. Here was everything he
despised: a clean-cut, good-looking American youth all gussied up to go off to
some wedding, smart enough to know what was wrong and too good to dirty his
own hands.
Wang stared up at Gooby with the cold and beady eyes of a turkey who has
escaped the Thanksgiving massacre and will never trust another human as long as
it lives.
"Can you fix it?" Gooby asked. "I'm in a hurry."
This infuriated Wang even more; these fucking Americans were always in a
hurry, always rushing off to do something important, like nibble iced shrimp
prepared by some poor and oppressed Mexican.
"Can you? Now?" The desperate Gooby asked. "I don't care how much it
costs."
That was it for Wang, he mistook Gooby's desperation for imperviousness
and his monumental anger finally congealed itself into his final blow at Americans.
Looking at Gooby with a vast and desperate hatred he announced: "You suck dick,
I clean your carburetor."
"What?" Gooby panted, almost purple with worry. "How much?"
"No money, money no good, I no want you money."
"What?"
"You no risten? What a you probrum?"
"Look, what are you talking about? I've got to get to work, it's my first day.
I'd do it myself but I'm in this monkey suit and I don't have time."
"I no monkey! I no monkey!"
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"No, no, no, that's not what I said, I'm in a monkey suit, see this? This is a
monkey suit."
"You no give me Engrish resson!"
"Look, sorry, I don't have time, I..."
"American never have time, always busy, busy, busy."
"Can you clean it or not?"
"You suck dick, I clean your carburetor."
Gooby's sun-drenched California world collapsed around his ears. Years of
getting stoned, listening to Reggae and talking about backpacking equipment had
not prepared him for this moment.
"Get out of here. This is a joke right?"
"No joke. You suck dick, I clean your carburetor."
"What?"
"I no make a joke!"
As Wang’s insane offer settled into his brain Gooby found his life balanced
on a razor. What to choose? Dignity? Or the coveted job at the Ranch?
Wang turned around and marched into his office where he watched Gooby
pacing around under the bright, flat California sun and nail-nibble out his agony.
This was real revenge. This was true humiliation over the oppressor. An
expression of great glee bloomed over his flat features as he watched Gooby's
torment.
Suddenly Gooby hurried in.
"Let me use your phone, I'm calling a cab."
Wang's ripped the phone jack out of the wall and turned back to his victim
with a placid smile. "Phone no work," he announced. The greasy Pepsi clock
above Wang's head clicked out another lost minute. Gooby looked up and down
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the street: nothing but weedy vacant lots and warehouses, no phone for miles. Cell
phones were years away from being invented.
The clock clicked again.
Gooby made it to The Ranch with one minute to spare, and a carburetor so
clean you could eat off it.
59
Magnet and the River
When the end finally came to the long, cold and frozen purgatory that was
life in Utah, I celebrated by taking one last trip down the Green River. It was late
June and the river was high. I talked Magnet into going with me and Tim also
trotted along.
The trip started inauspiciously, the usual collection of nature folks, ecopeople and foreign students gathering at the university's Outdoor Recreation Center
to load up the van with rafts and bright neoprene river gear--and then the nice long
sun-baked drive through Heber and the Uinta Mountains and out through the desert
to Vernal. We got in late to the put-in, and the river rat in me thrilled to hear the
whisper of the waters sliding by the tamarack roots as I fell asleep.
In the morning there was the smell of coffee and warming desert and river
mud and the electric crowing of twelve-volt pumps sputtering to life after having
their tails plugged into the cigarette lighters of vans and trucks. Everyone was on
best behavior and we packed up the boats in good cheer. Magnet--already wearing
the red speedo and big orange life jacket that would not come off for the next five
days-- tromped around in his Pee-wee Herman glasses and pitched in with a
ferocity that made up for his lack of knowledge. Tim, eyes bright and blue, curly
hair all in a wreathe, breathed out sighs of relief from having made it through
another year as a private school teacher and beamed at the prospect of a long, lazy
summer in front of him--and maybe nailing Bridgette, one of our guides, again.
This was his second tour down the river and he packed up with the ease of an old
hand while the newer folk stood back and watched in admiration.
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The ranger came down with his clipboard and Bridgett toured him around
our three boats and showed him the permits. In the middle of this ritual a burst of
nasal swearing rent the morning air and from the next party over a ringing eastcoast voice announced, "Let me make one thing perfectly clear to you," the word
'clear' taking on two syllables and rolling up at the end. "If we don't get the little
boats for everyone we don't go." We all stopped loading to watch an angry Long
Islander harangue his poor river guides about his right to have river "duckies" for
every member of his family. An absolutely assinine request as the bright colored
duckies are impossible to control, go around in circles on flat water and
immediately flip in a rapid. The ranger quickly signed us off to go over and see if
he could help smooth things out. The rest of the trip our crew burst out at random
moments with, "Let me make one thing perfectly cleee-uh to you," in thick Long
Island accents.
That great moment that all river rats love approached, the moment of
freedom, of cutting loose, of leaving civilization behind for five days of drifting,
sun-drenched peace. The new people clambered in and held on tightly and then we
shoved our boats off. We got out through the eddy fence, the current took the rafts
and slowly the busy, pump-sputtering put-in disappeared behind us. All us old
hands sighed with relief, knowing that we'd just checked out of the twentieth
century for a few days. The rafts passed some willow flats and then the sweet,
towering walls of the Utah canyons came up around us and we passed in silence
under their warm red arms and into the sacred world of the desert river trip.
A big green river gorged on the snowmelt of the high country, a hot summer
sun, German girls stripping down to their bikinis, the splash of the oars, the gurgle
of the current, a lonely raven's call, the waft of sun screen, the heavy flap of a big
blue-winged crane--it all cast it's enchanting spell on me and I settled against the
hot gray rubber of the raft and trailed a happy foot in the water.
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"This is fucking unreal!" Magnet crowed, and Tim and I grinned at each
other like fond parents to see the awe playing across his face. "This is fucking
unreal! I can't fucking believe this! Fuck people! Fuck every body! I'm gonna
drift down this river the rest of my life! Fuck Nancy! Fuck divorce! Fuck being a
lawyer! Fuck the Bar!"
Tim and I laughed, but one chick with sun glasses and a birding guide gave
an irritated look. After lunch she got on another raft.
By afternoon Magnet noticed the resonant quality of sound on the river and
the echoes from the high canyon walls and he began to beat on a bailing bucket.
Tim and I joined in and Bridgett laughed as she bent at the oars, the tops of her
breasts already getting nice and brown in the desert sun. Even across a hundred
yards of water and safe on a new raft I could see the chick with the birdie guide
looking pissed.
That night after dinner we had the mother of all drum jams. We were
camped against a towering monolithic wall of rock, a natural amphitheater, and as
the moon came up, fat and full and gorged with light, we pulled out every bucket,
sat in a circle and got primitive. The birdie chick made a big show of being tired
and slunk off to her tent but no one followed her. Even our foreign students, a
Korean couple and two German girls beat away with good spirits.
After the drum jam we traded stories and jokes and I got around to the story of
Gooby and the Angry Vietnamese Mechanic. Magnet was delighted, I have never
seen him happier. He insisted on hearing the story three times in a row and then, in
an ecstasy of creativity, he became all the characters and began to fill out the
scenario. Magnet moved Wang's garage out into the desert and then became four
black guys on their way to the Temptations reunion show when their carburetor
clogged and they limped into you know where:
"You suck dick!"
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"What de fuck? I ain suckin no dick! Tyrone! I gots a job for you!”
"I ain' suckin nothin'!"
"But we got to git to de show!"
"I ain' sckin' nothing! Damned Nip!"
"Not nip! Nip Japanese! I Vietnemese! Different fing! You suck dick!"
After the four black guys dug in their heels, refused to budge and forced
Wang into a Mexican stand-off Magnet became the New York couple whose
Lincoln Mercury hobbled into Wang's presence after a cross country tour:
"You suck dick!"
"I didn't fuckin' drive Tree tousand miles to floss my teeth wit' some Gook's
dick!"
The it was four stoners on their way to the surf trip of their life:
"What, dude? What? Suck what? Aw man, no way dude! Chill out on the
dick-suck thing, you Asians are always so wound. Smoke a bowl."
All of these characters ended up stranded in the desert outside Wang's
garage desperately trying to convince each other to be the one to do the dirty deed.
Magnet finished painting this magnificent scene in a burst of literary genius that
would have made Mark Twain jealous--the sudden arrival of a downed alien space
ship forced to earth by, of course, carburetor problems.
The Koreans didn't understand a fucking word of the whole tirade, the German
girls shook their heads at it--grappling with the concept of humor as their bluepainted and shivering ancestors had once grappled with the concept of the warm
and sunny Roman Empire on the other side of the Danude, and the rest of us rolled
around the fire till our sides ached.
As the revels finally rolled to an end Tim watched Bridgette hopefully, like a
dog waiting for a biscuit, but she crawled off to sleep alone. My own freshlydivorced eye had fallen on Kate Stevens: blond, pretty, outdoorsy, sincere, lovely
63
teeth, lovely smile, boyfriend--but who knows what magic happens on rivers? But
she crawled off to sleep alone as well and Tim, Magnet and I bedded down
together on a big tarp.
The next morning was cool, desert-scented and framed on the eastern
horizon with delicate ribs of salmon-pink clouds, but Magnet, oblivious to this
glorious scene, and the birdie chick sincerely meditating down by the river,
greeted the dawn with, "Wang! Pick up de fuckin' wrench, you Goddamn Gook!"
and then proceeded to put his life jacket on and tromp around cursing at Wang and
reiterating great lines from the previous night's orgy of imagination: "I didn't drive
tree tousand miles to floss my teet' wit' some gook's dick," rang out more than
once.
The birdie chick got up from her meditating rock and stormed off in disgust.
We had breakfast and then put in another glorious sun-drenched day on the
river: a few class two rapids bounced us along here and there, ravens cawed, Tim
and I went in circles in one of the duckies and then gave it up in disgust,
Bridgette's breasts grew browner, Magnet chirped and yelled.
That night the camp buzzed with the excitement of the bigger rapids
awaiting us, chanting in their low and threatening tone just a mile down the
canyon. The fire cracked up willow sparks and the Koreans smiled nervously--as
well they should have considering what happened to them. Then the guitars came
out and Kate Stevens sang lovely folk songs, Magnet, Tim and I put on a skit, the
German girls sang a German song, Mark, one of the other guides and the nicest
most all-American blushing boy in the world, juggled apples and Lloyd, a big, tall
Jeff Goldblum look-alike held forth on Middle Eastern politics.
The fat moon wobbled into the sky and bathed us all in silver and it watched
lazily as the night ended with the Tim's hopeful eyes pinned on Bridgette--again no
invitation and he got me and Magnet and the tarp. I went off for my pre-sleep pee
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and stumbled over the lovely Kate spread like a sylvan nymph, hands behind her
head, gazing at the stars, thinking, dreaming, wishing. River magic beckoned and I
sat on her tarp and stroked her moonlit hair as the river gurgled by, she looked at
me with tempted eyes and then whispered in a sigh, "I have a boyfriend, I just
can't."
I, too, got Magnet and the tarp.
The next day the disasters began. The disasters that make river trips so
memorable. The first was minor: Bridgette misjudged her line on a class three and
bottomed out on a rock that tore a hole on the bottom of the raft and smashed up
part of the frame. We got the raft out of the water, got the repair kit and then,
while we waited for the patch to dry, we discovered the joy of the suicide raft.
We'd been dragging a little four-person paddle raft behind the oar rigs and
now we carted it up to the head of the rapid, loaded it with five people and shot
down into the depths of a leaping house with white foaming walls and windows.
The tiny boat would have flipped in a heartbeat under the now towering waves but
we took on so much water our weight kept us down.
The suicide raft was a huge hit and Magnet insisted we go again. The birdie
chick, who had not helped with patching the raft, glowered with fury on the shore
when we rocketed past her solitary perch on a rock. Magnet, over-flowing with
goodwill, yelled and waved his paddle at her but she didn't move a muscle. "What
the fuck is with that babe?" He demanded after the ride. "What's her problem?"
You can guess where this is going.
Magnet would have ridden that one rapid all day, like a kid at an amusement park,
but the birdie chick complained to Bridgette and Mark that she had come for a
nature experience not a white water adventure camp and so Bridgette came over to
inform us that we'd have to stop.
65
"What the fuck is with her?" Magnet demanded, dropping the raft and
glowering at the source of his displeasure. "There's one of her and fifteen of us.
Fuck her."
Bridgette, already used to Magnet's outburst and no shrinking violet, would
not be swayed. In a stern and warning voice she said, much like one uses to
address a dog, she snapped, "Magnet," and she held his eye just like Max held the
eye of the monsters in Where The Wild Things Are. Magnet grumbled and cursed
but he was beaten and our expedition packed up and drifted down the river again.
From that point on when the roar of white water echoed up the canyon I
abandoned my post on Bridgette's oar rig to captain the suicide raft . At first only
Magnet and Tim wanted to come with me, but soon the newer people, seeing that
we survived rapid after rapid, began to ask for turns--and that is how I almost
killed two unsuspecting Koreans, a German and Tim.
But that was disaster number three and disaster number two was directly
ahead. It greeted me as I piloted my little crew around a corner, peered down from
the top of a rapid and saw Mark's raft upside down and pinned against a rock wall
with Mark clinging with rat-like desperation to the top and life jackets bobbing
down the river below him.
"River right! River right!"
We got the suicide raft into an eddy near the capsized raft and then spent the next
hour with throw ropes. But the current was too strong and we couldn't pull the
boat off. Finally Tim and I took a heart-tightening swim out to the raft and Mark
pulled us up. It was terrifying out there--the river roaring all around us, the raft
quivering like a wounded horse, the prospect of falling off and getting pinned
ourselves dancing in our brains. After a shouted conference we dug our legs in,
pushed against the rock wall and managed to spin one end of the raft out far
enough for the current to cartwheel us off the rock wall and down the river. The
66
three of us careened down the rest of the rapid clinging to the back of the wounded
raft like terrified primates clinging to a log. The white water finally subsided and
we spun into the stillness of a big eddy.
That little episode cost us some gear, another bent frame and a couple more
hours. It was getting late when we put in again and we made camp above the next
rapid, having had enough for one day.
Our adventures had now firmly bonded all of us, or almost all of us, and
camp was a rowdy affair of cracked beers and stories told and retold. Mark had let
Lloyd, who had begged him, take over the oars, and Lloyd, discoursing on political
theory, had promptly crashed into the rocks, flipped the boat over and gone
bobbing off down the river. He grinned sheepishly under Magnets tongue-lashing,
"Where'd you learn to row a boat, Lloyd? Huh? Jesus H. Christ! They let any
Goddamn Tom, Dick and Harry row a boat these days! Let me make one thing
perfectly clee-uh to you, Lloyd, you pull those kind of shenanigans again and I'm
sending you to Wang!"
And of course there immediately followed a long scenario of the guilty
Lloyd being sent off to Wang to get the raft fixed. "You boys are so chuvenile,"
the German girls told us, and shook their heads.
"Wang! Pick up de fuckin' wrench you Goddamn Gook!" Magnet replied,
strutting around the fire in his lifejacket and bug glasses and swigging at his beer.
The next day I led us into disaster number three. I loaded up the suicide raft
with Tim, the two Koreans and one of the German girls and we foraged ahead of
the oar rigs looking for rapids. Our river guide had shown no class fours for the
next seven miles and I felt absolutely confident that we couldn't get into any
serious trouble. With that I mind I went looking for it and steered the raft towards
every curl of white water I could find. Magnet followed behind me in one of the
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duckies with the guilty Lloyd riding shotgun and paddling obediently whenever
Magnet yelled at him.
I steered us through several holes and waves and then sighted a pillow far up
ahead and, feeling invulnerable, ordered the crew to dig in. It didn't occur to me
that the river was in flood and there were now new class four rapids where the map
showed only benign class twos. As we closed in on the pillow, the smooth glasslike upwelling of green water grew bigger and bigger, and suddenly it was
enormous and the roar of white water was coming from the other side. I frantically
ordered my crew river right but, except for Tim, none of them spoke English and
all they did was look back at me with terrified eyes. Realizing our only chance lay
in speed I ordered full throttle and straightened us out to take whatever was coming
on the nose.
We rose up onto a huge boulder, perched for one heart-stopping second, and
then shot straight down a ten-foot waterfall and into a roaring pool. I was
catapulted out of the back of the raft like a stone out of a slingshot. When I
thrashed to the surface I saw the raft spinning madly in circles with Tim paddling
ferociously while the Koreans and the German girl gripped the sides in mute
horror. The current pulled the raft back under the waterfall, deluged it under a
thundering torrent and then spun it out again, now barely floating. My duties as
captain called me back to my crew, but before I could swim a stroke the river quit
messing around, grabbed a hold of the raft and sent it up onto the next rock lip-where it quivered for a second of suspended stillness above another ten foot
waterfall. Then, in a bulge of great green muscle, the river backed up behind it and
gave a malignant shove and I watched my unfortunate crew launch out of sight like
petrified patrons at a force ten amusement park.
My worry for them turned quickly to worry for myself. They had shot of
down the river and I was going nowhere. I was in mad pot of roiling water, and I
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was going in circles. Then the river's hands grabbed at my legs and I went under,
my tevas were torn off, I spluttered up and went under again. My lifejacket fought
against the hungry suction of the water and river horror stories of "keepers" killing
boatmen shot through my brain--and then I was out gasping and choking and
bobbing backwards down the river.
Right at that moment the rubber ducky piloted by the intrepid Magnet
cheerfully shot up onto the first boulder, swung sideways and poured itself and it's
crew helter skelter into the raging cauldron I'd just escaped from. Magnet's Peewee Herman glasses disappeared under billows of white foam. The river ate
Lloyd.
Before I could see if it spat him out the current pulled me away and I took
the rest of the rapid in lawn chair position. Everywhere I looked--when I could
look--disaster. Head's bobbing, duckies swirling, life jackets, shoes, shirts,
paddles, all washing over waterfalls and under waves.
Bridgett and Mark, having watched both my boat and Magnet's get
dismembered, hung river right and made it through the rapid unscathed. Bridgett
fished me out shaking her head. "Damn biggest yard sale I've ever seen," she
whistled. A minute later Magnet came sputtering by and we pulled him out. Lloyd
came bobbing by next but before we could pull him aboard he scrambled up onto
the raft like a drowning cat. Then he sat at Bridgett's feet shaking and
remembering the feeling of the river pulling on his legs, the river wanting to take
him down to that cold green room. I was shaking too.
Magnet was undaunted.
"That was fucking righteous! That was awesome! Yes! Yes!!" He pumped
his fist, once up in the air, once with his elbow tucked into his side. "Yes!" Is that
the best you have river? Fuck you! I'll do it again!"
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"Why the hell'd you follow him?" Bridgett demanded, pointing at me.
"Didn't you see them eat shit? Christ, the river ate them!"
"I thought he knew what he was doing," Magnet crowed. "Jesus H. Christ,
Rebound! Where'd you learn to row a boat like that! That's it! You're fucking
through! I'm sending you to Wang! Wang! Pick up the fuckin' wrench!"
In the midst of disaster Magnet's unassailable enthusiasm actually made me
crack open a shaking smile, and then it got at Bridgett too and her lips split open.
After all the damage to gear and people she'd probably never be allowed to guide
again, and yet Magnet's fierce joy was irresistible and she gave up trying to stay
serious. "Oh, Jesus H. Christ, Magnet, you're a fucking lunatic, we've probably got
dead people floating off down the river. You could have been fucking killed."
"Fuck 'em! Fuck the river! I'll kick it's ass! I'm not afraid! We're not
afraid, huh Lloyd?! Fuck! I want to hear some Foghat right now!"
Lloyd, now quivering in the bottom of the boat, did not answer.
We continued pulling gear out of the river until we finally came upon a
heart-wrenching sight: Tim, the Koreans and the German girl all looking like
drowned rats, huddled in the battered suicide raft and perched in a precarious eddy
at the top of the next rapid.
I have never seen such a look on Tim's face, terror and hatred combined. He
glared at me from under the flat mop of his now defeated curls and if looks could
kill I'd be dead. It was a look of pure betrayal: I trusted you and you took us into
that? You tried to kill me!"
" Right! River right, Bridgett!" I screamed. "River right! We've got to get
someone on that boat!"
"I'll go! I'll go! Let me on the fuckin' boat! I'll go! Me and Lloyd!"
"They need help! Get over!"
"Fuck 'em! I'll go! I'll help! We'll show the fuckin' river who's boss!"
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"I can't get over," Bridgett grunted, straining at the oars. "I can't get over, I
can't make the eddy. I've got to get our line, all we need is to flip this thing too."
Tim watched in horror and disbelief as Bridgett gave up on him and his
battered crew and pulled us out to take a good line. My heart went out to Tim and
his terrified crew. I looked around for some way to do something, but there was
nothing to do, except feel like the Judas of river rats. Tim glared at me as the river
took a hold of the raft and we began to pull away.
"Fuck 'em! Fuck the river! Kick it's ass!" Magnet yelled at the miserable
crew. "I'd come but these weinies won't let me!" Then he turned around and--his
half-drowned companions already forgotten--let out an eager rebel yell as
Bridgette guided us into another class four.
We eddied out in the pool at the bottom and then watched as the suicide raft,
now little more than a submarine, came smashing through the white water. As
before, Tim paddled wildly while his crew held on and prayed. Too heavy to flip,
they made it through.
We threw a rope and gave them a tow to shore where Mark's raft was waiting and
finally the event was over. One of the Koreans had meet the river bottom and was
a little cut up and Lloyd was a quivering mess, but aside from that and some lost
gear we had come through remarkable unscathed.
I splashed over and found Tim, "Sorry." I said.
"You fucker," he said. His eyes were very blue.
We stood ankle deep in the big pool and felt the desert sunshine crashing
into our bones.
"That was fun," I said.
"Oh, yeah, right," he muttered, but finally safe, he began to breathe again.
"Most fun I've had in a while. Maybe next time we can do it blindfolded."
"You fucker. I thought I was gonna die."
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"Me too."
Magnet opened up one of the coolers and then triumphantly paraded a beer
up and down the beach, cursing at the river and demanding that we carry the boats
up and do it again. Tim watched him and shook his head.
"He's insane."
"Yeah, totally insane."
"Wang! Magnet yelled, when he spotted us. "Wang! Get your ass over
here! You want a comic book? You want a coke? Then clean this Goddamned
muffler!"
The Koreans, escaping death by a hair’s breath, looked on in absolute
bewilderment. How could this crazy American, who had just barely escaped
serious bodily harm, go trumpeting around the beach waving a beer with all the
crowing pride of a bower bird performing a strange courtship ritual?
Bridgett shook her head and began to laugh, and then we were all laughing-except the birdie chick.
We followed Magnet's example, got beers and fell into a storyfest, each
person telling the event from their perspective. I most enjoyed Mark's perplexed
account of watching the suicide raft head towards disaster instead of avoiding it--a
sight he'd never seen--and then his even greater perplexity at watching the ducky
paddle doggedly after us, even after we'd disappeared over the lip of a waterfall.
One of the Germans finally asked the silent birdie chick, whose name was
Barbara, what she thought. "I didn't come to splash around in rapids," she sniffed,
and then she stalked off with a sandwich and her binoculars.
"Magnet," Bridgett warned, catching his look and cutting off trouble before
it began.
"Alright, alright, alright," Magnet said, holding his hands up in mock
innocence, and of course spilling his beer. Then he stuffed some sandwich in his
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mouth and walked off kicking at the sand with his long skinny beetle legs and
mumbling, "I didn't come to ride rapids! Fuck that shit!"
We got through the rest of the day without disasters, and that night Kate
built a sweatlodge and we had a great moon-howling party. The river vibe was
smoking: Bridgett was flirting with Tim and Kate rubbed my back. Magnet
harassed the German girls who kept shaking their heads and repeating, "You are so
chuvenile! Such a boy!" Lloyd, no longer the only one who'd screwed up, got his
spirits back and began to prance around the fire in a gangly speedo dance.
The next morning, Tim, emboldened by Bridgette's growing affection,
announced he wanted to captain the suicide raft through the last class four, Coal
Creek Rapid. I bowed out and Mark, curious about the suicide raft experience,
joined Tim's crew while I took over his oar rig. Tim, much to his credit, promptly
steered the raft into the biggest hole and flipped it, sending Mark, Magnet and the
German girls on a long swim.
"You have learned well, my son," I told him, once we'd gotten everyone
back in the boats and the suicide raft hitched to Bridgette's oar rig.
"Well, you know," he mumbled in mock humility, "I've had a great teacher."
"Let's do it again!" Magnet demanded. "Tim! Dude! Where'd you learn to
row a fuckin' boat! You're worse than Rebound! You're going to see Wang! Get
ready!"
Tim looked sheepish, but pleased. He had, after one disaster, gotten right
back on the proverbial horse and led his crew into another. He had discovered that
English teacher was only a sideline and that he was, at heart, a river rat.
As Desolation Canyon opened up the rapids fell more gently and there were
long flat stretches of glistening, glittering river rippling in the sun. The day grew
hot, a fat, baking desert hot, and our little flotilla--two oar rigs, the suicide raft and
the ducky--drifted lazily down past willows and banks of tamarisk trees. The
73
sandy smell of summer desert filled the air. Lloyd went to sound asleep in the
gently spiraling suicide raft, his feet contentedly splayed up on the pontoons. Mark
fiddled lazily away on a harmonica.
And here, in the midst of flat water, came our next disaster. Someone
started a raft-to-raft water fight and we were all having a high old time until I
inadvertently sent a bucket of water right into the birdie chick's face and blasted
her ninety dollar sun glasses into the river.
She lost it.
All the days of her frustration with Magnet and the rapid riding and the
immaturity and the lack of serious conversations about Thoreau--all of this finally
exploded.
"You fucking immature asshole! You're buying me a new pair of
sunglasses! And if you don't I'm suing! I'm getting a lawyer and suing! You think
you can just do whatever you want! Well you can't! You had no right to do that!"
All the laughter died and a deathly silence descended.
"Hey," Bridgette said. "Take it easy, water fights are a part of life on the
river."
"I won't take it easy! He's buying me a new pair of sunglasses or I'm suing
him! He had no right to do that. He..."
"It was an accident," Bridgette soothed. "We were all doing..."
"It wasn't an accident! He had no right to throw water in my face! You're
buying me a new pair of sunglasses!"
"What the fuck is your problem!!" Magnet announced.
"MAGNET!" Bridgette warned.
"FUCK!" Magnet glowered, but Bridgette backed him down and he put both
hands across his mouth, and then turned his back on the whole scene and stared
rigidly off into the distance.
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Another deathly silence descended.
Barbara, the birdie chick, bobbing in the ducky--which as soon as the rapids were
over she'd claimed as "hers"--glowered at me from under a mop of dripping hair.
"Hey, it's just life on the river," Bridgette tried again.
"You're buying me a new pair of sunglasses," Barbara told me.
"Fucking dyke," Magnet whispered. "Goddamn birdie dyke."
"WHAT?!!" Barbara shouted.
"Here," I said, taking mine off. "You can have mine."
"No, you're buying me a new pair, as soon as we get into Green River."
"FUCK THAT SHIT!!" Magnet exploded. "TAKE THE GODDAMN
SUNGLASSES! THAT'S FAIR!!"
"Alright, alright, alright, alright," Bridgette jumped in. "Enough, enough,
enough."
"He's buying me a new pair of sunglasses! He had no right to..."
"Enough, enough, enough!"
The two big rafts, the little raft and the ducky--with the furoius Barbara in it-all drifted down the river. No one said a word. I caught Tim's eye and he gave me
a victorious snicker, pleased to see his pal get worked.
"You think it's funny?!?" Barbara demanded.
Tim dropped the smile and looked deadly serious.
That made me laugh, which drove Barbara wild with rage. She began to scream all
over again about lawyers and sunglasses. Bridgette dug the oars in and pulled us
away from the verbal torrent. Barbara was so mad her arms made a flurry of
paddle strokes, but the ducky, being a ducky, only spun around in circles--which of
course made Tim laugh.
"TIM!" Bridgette barked.
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Tim yipped like a dog that's just been kicked and then went to the back of
the raft to sulk.
Bridgette pulled away at the oars and distance diffused the situation.
"What the fuck was her problem?" Magnet demanded when we were out of
ear shot.
"Come on," Bridgette said. "We've all seen that coming, she's wound tighter
than a Swiss watch."
"She need to get laid or what!" Magnet summarized.
"Oh, yeah, right Magnet," Bridget sighed. "The guy's answer to everything."
"Aw, you fuckin' chicks, I don't know, how should I know? Am I a chick?"
"No, Magnet, you are not a chick. And don't call her a dyke again, you'll get
us all sued."
"Well she is, isn't she?" Magnet pointed out. "Fuckin' dykes--always hate
you just cause you're a man. That's what this is all about--it's not about birdies,
that's bullshit, it's about dykes, that chick's on a bad one 'cause no other dykes
came on the trip and no one's lickin' her carpet--that's what this is all about!"
"Yes, Magnet," Bridgette groaned. "Yes, absolutely, it has nothing to do
with you and Lloyd and Rebound and Tim flipping the boats every chance you got
and then running around all night retelling that stupid story."
"WANG!" Magnet howled in glee, as if he were welcoming a long lost
friend. "WANG! Pick up de fuckin' wrench! Get your Gook ass over here! You
want a comic book or not? Put that fucking cat down, that's a pet, you get it, pet,
we love those, we don't eat them."
Bridgette just shook her head and gave a lazy oar stroke.
We made the take-out by late afternoon and set to packing up the boats.
While we were deflating one of the rafts, Barbara, who had been fuming away
behind the van suddenly made a charge for me and started in with the lawyers and
76
the sunglasses. Magnet immediately leapt up off the pontoon he was deflating and
she quickly scuttled off.
We got the gear loaded and then rattled down the long dusty desert road into
Green River, Barbara glaring at me the whole time from the back of the van.
In Green River we dropped our mats in the big shady campground and lazed
away the last hours of long summer light, killing time before heading into town for
the mandatory visit to Ray's Bar. After an hour or two I slunk off to pee in some
bushes and suddenly Barbara, like a great white rushing a seal, was all over me:
"You think you can just do that! Now we all have to smell your piss! You
owe me a new pair of sunglasses and you're buying them now! NOW!!"
In the face of this apocalyptic fury I bowed my head and scuttled back
towards Magnet, Tim and Bridgette. Barbara was yelling into my covered ears
like a madwoman and I began to see visions of coming home to bunnies cooking
on the stove. She was so out of control that when I reached my friends I took to
the ground to avoid violence. I sat down and clammed up refusing to add fuel to
her fire.
"Take it easy," Bridgette kept saying. "Take it easy."
Barbara wouldn't stop with the lawyers and the sunglasses and everybody
having to smell my piss.
Magnet, I suddenly noticed, was whimpering like an eager dog at the end of
his chain. Clearly he was going through some terrible internal struggle. Suddenly
he shot up, stepped towards Barbara, and then, just as suddenly, told himself in a
stern, clear voice, "Magnet! No! Don't do it, you'll regret it!" After giving himself
this advice he abruptly sat down and took the same eyes-locked-on-the-grass
position I was in. I could feel his incredible struggle for self-control radiating
through his clenched body and into the earth underneath me.
"NOW!" Barbara screamed. "I want my sunglasses NOW!"
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"You can't do it," Magnet whimpered to himself. "You can't, you can't, you
can't. You can't go before a judge again!"
Barbara kept foaming away, flinging words and frothing like a rabid poodle.
And then Magnet shot up, grabbed his towel and mat and marched himself
away. "You can't go before a judge again," he scolded himself aloud. "You can't,
you can't, you can't." His back, pale from five days of lifejacket, was crimson with
anger; his legs were stiff and jerky with rage, but he did it--he exerted monumental
Magnet self-control and marched himself away.
With Magnet gone, Barbara redoubled her flaming attack. I kept my eyes on
the grass, visions of being stalked by a psychopath filling my head.
"I'm getting a lawyer and I'm suing you, and I'm suing the Outdoor Rec
center! I deserve..."
"Just cool it," Bridgette said, her voice losing the soothing tone and getting
firm. "Just cool it, that's life on the river."
"He had no right to throw water in my face! Those were ninety-dollar
sunglasses! I'm..."
"If you knew what you were doing you would have had 'em tied on,"
Bridgette said. "Nobody wears unattached glasses on the river. What? Would you
sue the river if you lost them in a rapid?"
"I didn't come for the stupid rapids! I'm getting a lawyer!"
"You ever here of croakies?"
"As soon as we get back!!"
Bridgette's chest and cheeks were flushing.
"I am! I'm getting a lawyer! I'm suing the Outdoor Rec Center! I'm..."
"Oh, get the fuck out of here!" Bridgette finally snapped, rising to her feet.
"Quit being such a fucking baby! That's life on the river! You lost your
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sunglasses, he offered you his, you didn't want 'em. Get out of here, I DON'T
WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD!"
Barbara stopped at if she'd hit a brick wall. Her mouth moved soundlessly.
Bridgette glared at her, nose to nose. Barbara turned and stomped off.
"Thanks," I said.
"Damn! She was getting on my nerves with all that whining."
Tim looked at Bridgette was open admiration.
With the coast clear, Magnet came back dragging his mat.
"Sorry,
dude, sorry Rebound, I had to go, I had to, I can't lose it, I can't go before a judge
again, I've already gone for a D.U.I. and then for that thing in the parking lot at
Smith's with that asshole I used to work for, I can't take a chance, they won't even
let me take the bar if I go before a judge again."
"You made a good call," Tim told him.
"I was gonna kill her! I'm so sick of that damned dike... I'll stop, I'll stop,
I'll stop."
"Jesus," Bridgette said. "I'm a patient person, but I can only take so much,
you know? What the fuck are we gonna do with her? I don't want to ride in the van
with her. I guess she could ride in the truck with Mark"
"Aw, Jesus, the poor bastard. He's such a nice guy he'd do it too."
We yammered a bit more about Barbara and then it was getting dark and we
let it go and wandered through the warm western streets and into Ray's.
Ray's: wooden walls, pitchers of beer, pictures of rafts blasting white water,
hungry river rats tearing up big burgers, pool balls clacking, country music
playing, the ghost of Ed Abbey hunched over a bar stool.
We got a table and immediately set about getting plowed. Big golden
pitchers of beer marched across our path like an obedient army and then went
down without a struggle like an ignorant and unarmed enemy. The German girls,
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hair down, a little lipstick on, looked beautiful. Every one looked beautiful.
Bridgette was a goddess. You should have seen Kate. We told the same stories
again and again, laughing louder each time. Mark glowed with a goofy, redchecked Boy Scout drunk. Lloyd wouldn't shut-up. The Koreans bloomed out of
their shyness and took on that brand of boisterous drunkenness I associate with
Japanese businessmen--the saki-slamming, challenge-everybody-to-a-drinkingcontest, slap-everybody-on-the-back kind. We all felt battered and proud and full
of sun and river.
Attracted by the revelry--and by our beautiful girls--a bunch of other river
rats joined us and we all traded stories. Within an hour one of them was grabbing
my hand, looking at me blearily and promising, "If you went in, I'd pull you out,
man, I'd pull you out or I'd go in after you, even in Big Drop One, man, even in
high water, even at sixty thousand C.F.S., I'd go in after you. The river makes us
brothers, man."
"You too, dude," I slurred.
Then he was grabbing Betta, the prettier of the German girls, and telling her
the same thing.
"Hey, hey, hey," Magnet warned, losing his good humor and growling
possessively over our women. "Hey, hey, hey, watch it there buddy."
"It's cool, brother, it's cool," the drunken river rat said, and he quit slurring
all over the not-unreceptive Betta and fell instead on Uma.
"Hey, hey, hey," Magnet bristled.
"Pool!" Bridgette announced, not so drunk she still couldn't see trouble and
try and avoid it. "Come on, les play pool!"
"Fuck yeah! I'll kick your ass!" The easily distracted Magnet bellowed.
We got up and lurched over to the pool table.
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Disaster number God knows what: a bunch of guys were playing pool
already and three of them were Vietnamese.
"WANG!" Magnet howled. "WANG!"
"MAGNET! NO!" Several of us interjected.
"What's the fucking problem! These guys gotta hear the story! You guys
wanna hear a great story?!"
The other guys, pool cues motionless, looked at us with already deepening
hostility.
"MAGNET! NO!" Bridgette urged in dismay. "PLEASE! Come on, let's go
get another pitcher."
"It's a great story!"
"No story, thanks," the most sober of the pool players said. Like Bridgette,
he had a nose for impending trouble
"Why not?" Magnet demanded, now taking umbrage that his story was being
rejected. "It's a fucking great story! It's about Vietnam! What? You don't wanna
hear a story about your own fucking country?"
The three Vietnamese guys went absolutely still, like someone had snapped
a photograph of them.
"We'll get him out of here," Tim promised, and he began to drag Magnet
away.
Garth Brooks wailed on the juke box. The Vietnamese guys were as still as
cobras, their eyes just as hooded.
"It's about a Vietnamese guy that makes people suck his dick! WANG!
PICK UP THE FUCKING WRENCH!"
"You better get out of here, pal," the sober guy warned.
"YOU SUCK DICK--I CLEAN YOUR CARBEURATOR!!"
That did it.
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Three, thank God they were somewhat drunk, Vietnamese guys, tried to kill
Magnet, while the rest of us tried to drag him away.
"FUCK YOU, WANG!! " Magnet yelled, trying to kill them in return, arms
flailing like windmills.
The bar tender and a huge truck driver came flying into the mayhem and
separated the two sides.
"We weren't doing shit!" The sober guy proclaimed. "We weren't doing shit
and this asshole here starts coming in with all this racist bullshit about
Vietnamese..."
"Okay, okay, okay, enough! You, pal," the bar tender pointed at Magnet.
"You're outta here, these guys were fine until you showed up, you're the problem,
you're outta here."
"Aw, no," Bridgette pleaded. "We'll be good, come on, we were on the
Green for five days, come on, we'll make him be good."
"You sure, lady?"
"WANG! PICK UP DE FUCKIN' WRENCH, YOU GODDAMNED
GOOK!"
We were outside before a dwarf could fart.
But we weren't outside alone: the truck driver and the other river rats who
liked Betta, Uma, Kate and Bridgette were with us. In no shape to walk, let alone
drive, the truck driver pulled us up into his big rig and we drove through Green
River howling and screaming and playing with his C.B.. When he was tired of the
party in his cab he stopped at the campground.
Drunk, but cognizant of the fact that we were about twenty feet up in the air,
most of us got out clumsily but carefully. But Bridgette, she just stepped out the
passenger door as if the ground was three inches from her toes, not far, far away,
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and like the coyote in the road runner cartoons, she hovered for a split surprised
second, and then hurtled to the ground.
Thank God she was drunk or she would have broken large bones.
When we'd finally gotten Bridgette back on her feet Magnet noticed that
Betta and the other river rats were already walking into the campground and his
sleeping jealousy, temporarily forgotten, raged back to life. "Oh no, buddy, no
way, pal, she's with us!" he warned, and he lurched after them.
Then another ugly drunken scene broke out with the river rats saying, "It's
cool, everything is cool, be cool," and Magnet saying, "No way, pal, she's with us,
you're not gonna take her off and rape her somewhere, no way, she's with us and
we're taking care of her," and the river rats saying, "Nobody's gonna rape anybody
and she can come with us if she wants, and the rest of us saying, "Shhhh! You'll
get the police out here, you'll get the police!"
Betta, out of the blue, curtailed the imminent descent into darker chaos by
announcing that she wanted to do yoga. We'd done yoga on the river trip (I'm a
yoga teacher) and now her Germanic computer of a brain had spat out the
information that it was time to do yoga again. Uma, too, wanted to do yoga.
So I was suddenly in charge and I herded my rag-tag drunken band away
from the campground and out onto this golf course for a yoga class.
And then the clothes came off.
Don't ask me how or why. I can't for the life of me remember the reasoning
behind it, but suddenly it was determined that we were all doing "Naked Yoga"
and the clothes went flying. And there, right it front of me, was beautiful Kate
Stevens naked as a nymph and all silver in the moonlight. The German girls and
Bridgette looked lovely too. Lloyd and Mark were naked, Tim was naked,
Magnet, except for his glasses was naked, I was naked, the other river rats were
naked.
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This wobbling crew looked at me expectantly, and even put their hands into
prayer position.
"Down dog," I announced, and those lovely girls took down dog, a pose
which is, too say the least, very flattering on the female body.
The night took a marked turn for the better: the first few poses were peaceful
and quiet, just a little giggling here and there, and I cruised around giving
adjustments, to the girls of course. The moon watched it all. Our old friend the
river gurgled not too far away.
Then Magnet saw some of the river rats eyeing the girls and he started to
rumble like a waking volcano. We managed to keep him quiet for a while, but it
was like trying to hold back a tidal wave.
"I saw you looking at her! You were looking right at her..."
"Magnet! Shhh! Come on Shhh!."
"Hey, dude, be cool, were all river brothers here, we're all getting along.
Magnet quieted down, only to erupt again a few minutes later.
This cycle went on for a few minutes
Finally one of the other river rats lost his cool, quit doing triangle pose and
got in Magnet's face. "What's you're problem?" he demanded.
And Magnet, of course, retorted with, "Do I have to draw you a fucking
map?!"
And we were off to the races.
The other guys claimed they just wanted to "be cool", and Magnet claimed
they wanted to rape our women, and it all went to hell. Tempers flared, voices
raised, pushing and shoving started.
Tim, desperately trying to salvage a good thing, pushed the other guys away,
got in Magnet's face and tried to reason him to down to some sort of sanity--and he
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was still there reasoning zealously long after everyone else but me had put their
clothes on and drifted away.
"I GIVE UP!!" Tim finally yelled, seeing his beloved Bridgette, now
clothed, disappearing into the darkness. "I GIVE UP! MAGNET! YOU"RE
INSANE!! ALRIGHT! THEY WANT TO RAPE UMA! GO SAVE HER! GO
ON! YOU"RE RIGHT!"
And Magnet, still naked, stumbled off to do exactly that.
"You tried," I told Tim.
"He's fucking insane!" the naked Tim replied throwing his arms up in
exasperation, and then he announced, "Oh fuck him," and threw his arms down in a
gesture dismissing the whole sorry mess, then he grabbed his clothes and ran after
Bridgette.
Alone and naked on the golf course just minutes ago decorated with naked
girls like Greek statuary, I heard Magnet's voice leaping regularly out of the
darkness, "WHERE ARE YOU ASSHOLE!! I'M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS!"
I sighed, put on my clothes, stumbled back to the campground, and
fortunately, stumbled right over Kate Stevens. "Shhhh!" she giggled. "Shhhh!"
She pulled me down, pulled me under her blanket, put her head on my chest
possessively--and promptly passed out.
A few minutes later load moaning broke out to my right and I watched the
patient and long-enduring Tim finally claim his prize. I passed out to the sounds of
sex, punctuated with the cries of the lost Magnet: now-nearer, now-farther, floating
in and out of my hearing like a radio with bad reception, "WHERE ARE YOU
ASSHOLES! I'M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS!"
Lloyd, who didn't get a wink of sleep, told me that Magnet haunted the
campground like some kind of lost, furious and naked nocturnal bird until dawn.
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When I clawed my way up to groaning consciousness the next morning
Magnet was passed out, white buns in the air, in front of Barbara's tent. Most of
our hung-over crew of revelers were already awake and aware of Magnet's delicate
placement and we all watched in delight as Barbara unzipped her tent and was
greeted by the sight of the nude Magnet snoozing across her doorstep like a loyal
dog.
She began to scream and Mark, sweetheart of all sweethearts, went over and
dragged the groggily cursing Magnet away.
Well, a few details and I'll sign off leaving you with a last image of Magnet.
Barbara went back in the truck with Mark, and Mark, wherever you are--bless you,
and you too Lloyd. The rest of us piled in the van and slept the whole way back to
Logan, head's on each other's shoulders, contented grins on our faces, summer
thunder rain-curtains tapping reassuringly against the windows. I never saw Kate
Stevens again, Tim never saw Bridgette again, and the river's still flowing.
And here's that last image: Magnet in his red speedo and orange life-jacket
kicking up and down the beach with his long skinny legs and swearing at the river,
"Come on, you bastard! Is that the best you got! Come on! I'll kick your ass!
Come on! Let's do it again!"
86
Kinderhauptmann
Like I told you before, Steven and I took an adventure to Mexico. It was
summer and hotter than hell and we rattled down there in my old brown
Toyota station wagon loaded with fins and boogie boards (which the
Mexicans promptly stole) and Coleman stoves and novels and no plan of any
kind whatsoever.
Baja was a scorched hell of burning deserts and old washing machines
tumbled into ravines like smashed spaceships, and there are only two good
things I remember about it: one was the night we slept in a cactus forest
under a full moon down some dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and the
other was this palapa on the beach down by Loretto where they served
ceviche and fish tacos and we sat in there all day drinking cold Pepsis and
then cold beers and reading novels. I liked that. It was so fucking hot that
going outside was paramount to insanity and we sat in there for two or three
days with our toes in the cool sand, dogs at our feet, the sound of waves in
our ears. I wish I could remember what great sprawling novel I read because
whatever it was it engrossed me.
After Baja we loaded the car up on a ferry and went across to fishstinking, boat-rotting Guaymas and then down the coast. The desert gave
way to greenery and tropical plants and Steven, a navy brat to his core and
raised on Guam among other places, went placidly nuts. He got this dopey
look on his face and floated around for hours in warm salty water and ate
every mango and papaya he could get.
Somewhere farther south we parked the car at a train station and boarded
a train going up into the Sierra Madras. The train stopped and started
capriciously, completely independent of whether there were actually people
87
to board or depart. The train stopped when the engineer was hungry. The
train made garbage stops over gorges: "Okay, everybody clean up around
you." The train would then perch high up on a trestle bridge so that
everybody on board could launch Coke bottles into the river--already
decorated with old cars and refrigerators.
Stopped or moving, the engine coughed out a steady black stream of
diesel exhaust that came in the open windows and turned us all black. Goats
and chickens ran around, babies screamed, some Mexican professor
cornered Steven and I and lectured us on the fact that we as Americans, were
fat and rich, and that his country was better than ours--richer in history,
culture and compassion, the whole bit.
Steven and I weren't exactly happy, but on the other hand, what the hell,
it was an adventure and we were seeing beautiful Jurassic canyons with
waterfalls tumbling down the sides, and the trees near the train proudly
sported every form of garbage imaginable, and kids were throwing shit from
the windows, and pissing out the open doors--and it was Mexico.
So Steven and I were relaxed, but there were other foreigners who
weren't. Germans. Ah yes, the Germans. Those lovers of time and order.
In our compartment there were, of course, the omnipresent German
travelers: two young men and two young ladies, with train schedules in their
hands and watches on their wrists, both of which they repeatedly looked at.
And the more clear it became that the train was not on a schedule that
resembled the one in their hands, the more uptight the Germans became.
They even approached Steven and I and asked in their stiff Colonel Clink
English if this was the train to Creel. That was the only explanation they
could fathom--that they had somehow gotten on the wrong train, but the
train itself was on schedule--as trains the world over are meant to be.
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Somewhere around midday the train stopped in the middle of nowhere
for no reason and everybody got out and wandered around and threw
garbage. That really got the Germans: there was no station, there were no
venders, there was nothing here but jungle resplendent with old diapers and
broken radios--why had we stopped?
Well the more fucked-up about the chaos the Germans got, the more
schedule-reading and watch-waving they did, the more delighted the
Mexicans became; sort of a slow, sleepy fox-like delight around the corners
of their eyes, little looks to each other, nods and winks. Obviously the sight
of distressed Germans was familiar to them and they liked it; like tossing
trash of the bridges it was part of the entertainment of the ride, one of the
benies as we crass Americans would say.
I was up taking a pee near the front of the train when a couple of kids
came dashing up to the engineer and his crew and blurted out, "Hay
Alemaines en el train!" My Spanish sucks but I got: "There's German's on
the train." The engineer and his buddies nodded with delight and promptly
sat down to smoke another pack of cigarettes.
From that point the train became even slower and more unpredictable,
and even, I kid you not, went backwards for a time. And believe me, when
the train went backwards the Germans really got uptight and the Mexicans
lowered their faces and nudged each other and smiled.
Twelve hours later the train finally got into Creel and Steven and I and
the Germans stumbled off dead tired and followed our Fodor's Guides
directions over cobbled streets to Maria's, a youth hostel full of international
travelers on the world trail. We checked in and then went off to find beds in
a large dorm-like room.
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Two Brits, (who along with the rest of their country have never forgiven
us for kicking their ass in the Revolutionary War and for bailing them out of
World War One and World War two) promptly sighted our grimy blackened
faces and red eyes and immediately chirped, "Oh, took the chicken train did
we?"
"There's another train?" we asked in our dull, flat, stupid American
voices.
"Oh yes, right, first class, the whole thing, costs five dollars more and
gets here in half the time, air conditioned, the whole bit."
"Great, thanks," we said.
They smiled and nodded and smugly went back to their rock music
magazines.
"Oh fuck you," I said. I'd had a long day. "If it weren't for us you'd all
be speaking German."
Well the Brits lit up with delight. There was nothing they wanted more
than another chance to win the war, only this time they were going to do it
verbal salvos.
But we liked the two Brits and they liked us and over the next couple of
days we hung around together and drank beers and went on excursions with
other travelers to the local hot springs and caves. Eventually we told the
story of the Germans on the train getting tormented by the Mexicans. The
Brits, of course, immediately one-upped us, "Oh that's nothing. Mexicans
have always 'ated the Krauts, always. You heard about the bloke they drove
nippers right? The German bloke they drove right out of 'is gourd? Flipped
'is bleedin' lid, he did, still in the nut 'ouse down in Jalisco."
So here's the story they told us.
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Kinderhauptmann, which literally translates to "Kiddy Captain," was a
second rate German Bozo the clown. First off, name a German comedy, go
on, I dare you. Name a funny German movie, a funny German book, a
funny German play. Can't do it, can you? So the very idea of a German
clown is preposterous.
And it was preposterous even to the Germans who didn't have much use
for Kinderhauptmann and after a few years his little T.V. show broadcast out
of Baden-Baden went bust. Kinderhauptmann looked around the world and
decided that Mexico was the one nation most sorely in need of his talents
and he contacted some low-rent Mexican T.V. station in Chihuahua--and
that station agreed to give him a show.
It may be they figured he'd never make it to Mexico, he'd never even
show up, and that's why they said yes. Then there's a second, more plausible
explanation: they were delighted with the idea of a German in a pseudomilitary clown suit trying to survive the Mexican rail system. Then, finally,
there's a third, and I think most likely, explanation: they literally did not
believe that there was such a thing as a German clown (like people who don't
believe in Santa Claus) and so they thought he was nut and they said, "Sure,
come on over, we'll give you a show," believing all the while they were
jollying along a helpless mad man who'd been dialing numbers at random
somewhere back on the other side of the Atlantic. "Make sure you wear
your uniform," they added. "It'll be good for publicity."
And so Kinderhauptmann, dressed up in his big black suit with white
gloves and big brass buttons and a big wig of flaming orange hair on his
head, showed up in Mexico City, and took the train for Chihuahua, and like
the Germans on our "Chicken Train" he soon became flustered. Only he did
more than look at his watch. He complained to the engineers and conductors
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with fervency. Had he been dressed like any other German (denim and
cowboy boots--they all try to look so American) the train crew probably
wouldn't have radioed ahead for help; they probably would have just stopped
the train or made it go backwards--standard fare in dealings with irritated
Germans--but the Kinderhauptmann outfit made them suspicious—was this
some kind of new terrorists? And so Kinderhauptmann was deposited off
the train for an interview with the federales in Jalisco.
The more he insisted that he'd come all the way from Germany to do a
children's T.V. show the harder the federales laughed, and when
Kinderhauptmann finally got a phone call through to the station that had
invited him they, of course, denied ever having even heard of him.
Eventually the federales got their fill of the joke and settled down to
collecting their prerequisite bribe, again standard fare in Mexico. The
indignant Kinderhauptmann, looking no doubt like some enormous tropical
fish, puffed and blew with indignity and refused to pay for a freedom that he
saw as rightfully his in the first place. Tired of tormenting the fat German
in the Captain Kangaroo suit and unable to extort him, the federales dumped
him off at the nut house in Jalisco.
The nut house in Jalisco happened to be right next door to the youth
hostel and so the passing migration of travelers, many of whom spoke
German, heard Kinderhauptmann's anguished pleas of sanity through the
windows. And he was anguished.
The orderlies, realizing he was German, wired the clock in his cell to go
forwards and backwards at random. They told him dinner would be served
promptly at six and then served it at eight. They said, "If you really are a
German clown, which we have never heard of and don't believe in, make us
laugh."
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On the nights when the guards had left him alone and Kinderhauptmann
heard the sound of German floating in through his windows from the youth
hostel he would leap up and rattle the bars and yell out his long and
mournful story: He really was called Kinderhauptmann and he really had
come to do children's television and the Mexican's had locked him up
because he wouldn't be bribed and wouldn't somebody please help him?
Of course all the Germans and Austrians and Swiss who understood him
felt their blood go cold. How horrible: this poor insane fellow European
who'd lost it, taken on the name "Kiddy Captain" and gotten locked up in
Jalisco. They thought he was nuts too.
Finally, one night, Kinderhauptmann rattled his bars and howled out his
mournful plea and a German from Baden-Baden who heard him actually
remembered having seen the show. The next day he went to the front door
and sought to get Kinderhauptman released. Thus began weeks of
negotiations and phone calls between Germany and Mexico. Finally the
mail, moving on Mexican time, brought a letter with pictures and articles in
it and the Mexicans gave up on their stubborn disbelief in German clowns,
decided that Kinderhauptmann was for real, and went to release him.
It was too late. Kinderhauptmann was perched in a corner of the room
watching the erratic clock spin around and chirping like a huge cuckoo bird
every time it struck the hour.
So, the smug Brits informed us, our Germans-in-Mexico story wasn't
shit, and Kinderhauptmann was still in the nut house in Jalisco chirping
away, and if we didn't believe it we could go down there and stay in the
youth hostel. They said he would chirp and drool all night but that if you
hollared out "Kinderhauptmann!" he would come to the window and rattle
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the bars and tell you his story in lucid German for a moment or two, until he
lost it again and went back to chirping.
Well, no need to tell you, both Steve and I thought the Brits were full of
shit. But we did listen to them about the other train, and they were right
about that, for five bucks more we got an air-conditioned express ride back
to the coast.
And wouldn't you know it, there were a bunch of German girls on the
train, the long-legged, big-shouldered Valkyrian kind, born to be champion
shot-putters and discuss throwers. So we talked about this youth hostel and
that youth hostel and eventually I asked one of them if she'd ever heard of a
German clown named Kinderhauptmann and sure enough her face lit up
with the memory, "I vatch zat show vhen I vas chust a girl."
THE FARTING DWARF
AND THE CLOWN WITH HERPES
My brother found out that I was going backpacking alone and he
suggested I go with this friend of his, Dean. I was twenty-three, bored and not
much up for another solo drive to the Sierras so long story short I find myself in
a truck with Dean the clown.
When Steven heard this story he assumed I meant clown in the
derogatory, not literary sense, and he was actually quite pleased when I
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explained that Dean was, in fact, literally, a clown. He had a clown suit and he
hired himself out to kiddie parties where he made a few bucks doing tricks and
making balloon animals.
So there I am driving up for five days in the Sierras with Dean the clown
who I don't know from Adam, and right off the bat things go wrong and we
blow the Mojave 395 turn-off and drive into Bakersfield. Eventually we turn
around, get back to the trailhead, crash out in the dirt and wake up for our first
day up Baxter Pass.
Four hours up, still below the pine trees and the streams, still surrounded
by Owen's Valley desert, Dean won't budge, won't go another inch. It turns out
that he's having a herpes outbreak and that takes all his strength. Long story
short I carry my pack up to water, come back down, get Dean's and carry his
too. Great, not only am I with a clown, but I get one that has herpes.
The next few days spiral down into an irritation fest because Dean's
bitchy and moody and he doesn't feel well, and on top of that this lonely solo
backpacker attaches himself to us and I have to deal with his endless stories
about his heart attack and his second chance at life and how, like the Ancient
Mariner, he's basically doomed to hike the John Muir Trail the rest of his life
and tell his story or kick the bucket.
But I do get something out of it, I get the story of the farting dwarf. One
night I get to asking Dean all about life as a clown and I find out he actually
went to clown school down in Florida and spent a couple of years on the road
with a small time circus before he branched out on his own. I learned,
according to Dean anyway, that most clowns are drunks, meaner than hell and
hate kids. Dean also said the clowns in the rinkey-dink circuses all have to
share a trailer with the dwarf and it's the lowest of the low. The animal guy gets
his own trailer, the fat lady gets her own trailer, the ring-master gets his own
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trailer, but the clowns all get packed like sardines in an ratty old Airstream with
a dwarf.
So Dean, four other clowns and a dwarf are all traipsing through
Kentucky and Tennessee hitting all the Pawtucket one-horse towns and
spending nights sweating in a tiny trailer, and if you know the misquitos down
there you know that opening up for ventilation is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and
it's just as hot outside anyway.
So one night the clowns and the dwarf light up the stoogies, get out the
cards and hit the Jack Daniels, but the ringmaster comes down and breaks up
the party by announcing the clowns can work it out any way they want but
someone has to do more kid duty-- that it, stay in the sawdust ring after the
show and bounce kids on his knee. The ringmaster leaves and a big fight
erupts. The clown's all hate kids and they hate their jobs and they don't want an
extra hour of bouncing brats on their knee, that don't get paid enough as it is
and blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of cursing and screaming and the upshot is
they agree to split it six ways and rotate on a schedule.
Now the dwarf hits the roof. What is this six ways shit? The ringmaster
said the clowns had to do kid duty, not the dwarf. No say the clowns, you're
part of our act, you've got to pull your share. No way, says the dwarf, how am I
supposed to bounce kids on my knee? They're bigger than I am.
The bottle's out, the nights hot and tempers flare. The dwarf won't give
in and the clown's are stuck with a five way rotation.
So the next day, hung-over and pissed off, they put a little extra charge of
gunpowder in the cannon that fires the dwarf into the net and the dwarf flies
over the net and lands in the lion cage, and barely scrambles out with his life.
Things go from bad to worse.
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The dwarf won't give in and do kid duty and the clowns make his life
hell: every time there's a dwarf-clown schtick the clowns get in an extra kick or
put a real dog turd in the big trunk the dwarf gets crammed into for the act.
So one night the dwarf shows up at dinner and instead of eating the usual
cafeteria wagon slop he reaches into a bag and pulls out five Kingsize cans of
baked beans and he sits down and glares at the clowns and starts shoveling
down the beans, very deliberately packing in each spoonful. The clowns don't
get it. So? You like beans so what?
But that night they get it.
Locked in their tiny Airstream trailer they get it.
Deep from the depths of dreamland the dwarf relaxes all his muscles and
begins releasing large and fragrant clouds of gas. First one, then two, then an
endless stream of thick reeking dwarf gas. It's so thick the clowns are afraid to
light a match for fear the trailer will explode.
The next day the clowns sue for mercy, the dwarf demands no kid duty
and the best bunk in the trailer and the clowns agree willingly, throwing a bottle
of Jack Daniels into the bargain.
So Dean tells me this story up at ten thousand feet and that's the only
good part of the whole damned trip.
Mexico, Pot, Parrots and Border Guards
After two or three weeks of adventures that included the notorious chicken
train, a hot springs deep in Mexico’s Copper Canyon, seedy hotels and furiously
hot days hiding in a Baja beach shack, we pulled into the American side of the
border in New Mexico. We still had that young, full-haired, pot-smoking look that
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border guards find so alluring and my old Toyota glittered with butterfly decals
that my mother had pasted on the back, and so we were immediately waved to the
side. We were told to step away from the car while this huge, blond lineman
disguised as a border patrol officer brought his rabid dog over. Though still in our
twenties Steve and I were long past our years of college dope smoking and the car
was completely clean.
Tell that the big black dog.
The dog took a few keen sniffs and then erupted in a firestorm of howling
and began tearing at the car with paws and teeth. “We got one! We got one!” The
huge lineman boomed out, like he’d just hooked a fish, and several other border
police bustled over at a fast trot and quickly dragged Steve and I across the blazing
highway and into the linoleum-floored waiting room. I can’t remember if we were
handcuffed, but I do remember the puzzled looks we gave each other: the car was
as clean as a whistle. There are only two explanations for the dog’s eruption.
Either the dog was faulty, or the dog was so damned good it smelt the long-ago
years of high school pot smoking that had permeated the upholstery.
Inside the crowded waiting room Steve and I sat on bright plastic chairs and
watched with a combination of fascination and horror as the border guards pulled
the car to pieces and tossed our camping gear around. We were surrounded by
several other suspected drug-runners, one being an elderly woman with a green
parrot in a cage.
After a few minutes, when no dope turned up, the big blond hulk with the
dog came over, through open the door and stepped in front of us. “We know
you’re carrying, he barked. “So just make it easy on yourselves and tell us where.”
Before either of us could answer his arm jerked to the right and he stumbled
after the bounding dog who had spotted the parrot. The dog, teeth bared, crashed
into the cage, viciously bowling the terrified shrieking parrot across the room.
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There followed a sharp battle between the dog and it’s owner, finally won by the
straining owner, and as he passed us dragging the berserk and choking dog
backwards he yelled, “We’re taking your gas tank off!”
The parrot, in a corner, cage now on it’s side, squawked frenetically.
Steve and I watched as the border flunkies in bright orange mechanic suits
hustled in the jacks, raised the car and dove underneath it. The dog, parrot
forgotten, was once again ferociously baying and pawing at the car. The gas tank
appeared out in the sunlight like a big rusty silver fish dragged from the dark seas
of the car’s netherworld, and was examined minutely.
Once more nothing was found and the huge border guard with the dog
marched into the hot waiting room. “Dog’s never wrong,” he growled at us.
“Now just make it easy and tell us where you’re hiding—”
The dog’s second launch at the parrot was so savage and complete that the
entire cage disappeared under a cover of heaving black fur. The cage, once again
bowled over and trapped in a corner, had nowhere to roll and the dog mounted it in
frantic squirms as if in the act of love, teeth lunging through the bars and stopping
inches from the petrified bird. The parrot’s first batch of shrieking was nothing
compared to round two and once more dog and owner engaged in battle. The
owner won again. “You two, go in there,” he barked at Steve and I and jerked his
head towards the interrogation room.
Steve and I dutifully entered a little linoleum cell with a table and a couple
of blue plastic chairs and the guard, panting, sweat popping out on his forehead,
followed us in, dragged the dog in and shut the door. “The dog’s never wrong,” he
bellowed. “So where is it?”
“We don’t have any—“
“Bullshit! The dog’s never wrong! Where are you hiding the—”
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The dog-who-was-never-wrong catapulted into the metal door and scratched
at it, paws whipping at the paint in a furious attempt to dig through and get at the
parrot.
“Sit!” the guard roared. “Sit!”
The dog bayed and crashed into the door again.
The parrot, terrified to the point of insanity, squawked like a berserk car
alarm. The old lady was trying to sooth the bird but her own sobs just added to
chaos.
“Sit! Withholding information is a cri— Sit! Goddamnit!”
The guard jerked viciously at the leash. The dog lunged back for the door so
hard his chair dragged across the linoleum like a miniature sled.
“Goddamnit! Sit! Now listen you two, this is your last chan—”
Right at that moment a second guard opened the door and the dog seized the
opportunity to push through and once again mount the parrot cage.
“Goddamnit! Get off that thing!”
The second guard tried to ignore the noise outside and played “Good Cop”
with Steve and I. “We know you’ve got a couple joints stashed somewhere,” he
said casually. “No big deal, probably just be a fine, makes a lot more sense to tell
us and be out of here in an hour, your other option is to wait until we find it and
then charge you, could take weeks.”
“We don’t have anything,” I told him.
A particularly loud volley of parrot-shrieks and guard curses came through
the door. Good Cop tried a few more times and then gave up on his reasonable
kind voice and slipped into an irritated dismissal. “You’re gonna have to wait till
your tanks back on,” he growled, waving us away. “Go on, get outta here.”
We hurried out past the terrified old lady now cradling the mangled parrot
cage in her lap. Out in the hot sun we watched the flunkies put the gas tank back
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on and then we threw our gear in pell-mell and hurriedly pulled out. In the rear
view mirror I saw the dog going baying at a Winnibago with Rotary Club bumper
stickers and a puzzled pair of old folks peering out the windshield.
THe StONeD aGe
I recently saw this movie, The Stoned Age, and it took me back to my own
senior year. Right back to the little blue bong that Two-Beer Jones bought me for
my seventeenth birthday. A bong that I faithfully hit off of every night before bed.
The thing was so gummed up with resign that I could scrape out the pipe and
produce enough black, gummy goo to get high whenever I was hard-up. God, I
was a stoner back then. Glenn and I would put hash on pins and stick them into
oranges and do some trick with a glass. Grant Dyruff and I smoked joints carefully
rolled inside dollar bills—I used to be quite good at that now that I think about it.
Gooby and I got stoned out of our brains and saw Blue Oyster Cult and when the
green laser hit the mirror ball I truly believed I was experiencing the pinnacle of
human culture. Moses could not have looked on the burning bush or the parting
sea with more awe. And my poor mother and her cat. Mom was always finding
the chips in the freezer, the ice cream in the cupboard, and even on one occasion,
the cat in the refrigerator. I just couldn’t remember a damned thing back then.
The movie brought back the nights I went out to I.V. and got so pathetically
wasted all I could do was crawl around and puke. Wasted is far too mild.
Obliterated is the correct word. I would get obliterated. In the morning I would
have these howling hangovers, death hangovers, head-in-the-toilet hangovers—and
even though I often passed out—I was sure I’d had a fine old time the night before
and being wretchedly ill was a price I was willing to pay. I remember one night
out there being so wasted on alcohol and Thai stick that I couldn’t walk. I crawled
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down the sidewalks smelling fog and eucalyptus and loosing my guts every few
feet.
Back in my own “Stoned Age” my banzai attack on my own brain cells
seemed to happen in a spontaneous whirl of confusing emotions, but from my
current vantage point I can see that my neural rape-and-pillage crusade made a
certain twisted sense. In my senior year I was insanely horny, and yet wildly
nervous around girls. I was also insanely romantic, awkward and lonely—and
determined not to show a single one of these emotions. I lived with a constant
sense that there was this magical, glittering teenage world that I was missing out
on. A dramatic, love-drenched world where others lived and loved like heroes
while I wandered around looking for the key. I was also bewilderingly uprooted
and new, finding myself a senior in a southern California high school after five
years in a strict all-boys school in New Zealand. The fudge on top of this messy
sundae was my turbulent subconscious anger at my divorcing parents. In the face
of this adolescent turmoil the only logical response to my seventeen-year-old brain
could spit out was to just get obliterated.
In New Zealand I had been quite a drinker but once I arrived in California
and discovered the copious amounts of wicked weed that were floating around I
added that to my self-destructive arsenal and fire-bombed my brain with THC.
Weekend after weekend I partied until I passed out. That was really the object:
Zero to Sixty in five seconds flat. I had no interest in cultivating a buzz, in
remaining in some kind of control. The whole point was to get crashingly wasted
in as little time as possible.
I was quite good at it.
At one party Rick Klien (who is now a Christian with seven kids) didn’t
want his qualude so I cheerfully took two, followed by gallons of some zillionproof punch. I passed out in the garden with knee-buckling suddenness as if I had
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been hit over the head with a hammer and woke up on a strange couch in a strange
neighborhood the next morning.
I spent night after night in my pal’s poster-decked rooms getting blasted and
then zoning out to Pink Floyd, Supertramp, Emersen, Lake and Palmer, Yes and
any other band that was a feast for stoned senses. I spent all of my hard-earned
Foster Freeze salary on bags of dope known, back then, as lids. I splurged on
sticky Thai sticks. I drooled over High Times magazine. I got stoned on the
beach, in the mountains, at work, in my room, anywhere, anytime.
It all, thank God, came to an end when I went off to college. The main
reason my stoner phase went belly-up was paranoia. At first getting high was all
laughs, philosophic thoughts and heightenedsenses—but a solid year of THC
drenching my system ended the party and the paranoia showed up. I’d get high
and immediately start dwelling on death. I’d be sure the car was going to crash or
the police were going to nail me. If those black mind-bombs didn’t go off I was
visited with the certainty that no one liked me, that everyone was watching me,
talking about me. Any kind of social situation became agony. Add girls to it and
the agony multiplied exponentially. Mix girls and weed-induced paranoia together
and I truly became a paralyzed basket case, no more active than a potted fern. So,
the long and short of all this is that by the time I went to college being a stoner
wasn’t fun anymore. What had once been an escape became the exact opposite
and I was confronted with every thought I didn’t want to think and every image I
didn’t want to see.
The second, but far smaller, reason my stoner years went into the grave was
my discovery of hallucinogens, on to bigger and better things as it were. I did have
a few bouts with marijuana after high school—the great pot pancake episode with
Steve and Doug, the horrendous rainy trip to the Doberman-guarded Bodega Bay
pot farm with Steve, Sean and Album—but college had taught me the meaning of
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“higher education” and pot quickly went from first chair to the back of the
orchestra. But before I leave my stoner years, so vividly brought back to me by
seeing The Stoned Age, I’ve got to write about a couple things. One just gets a
brief mention.
Two-beer Jones and I got so high at Foster Freeze one night that I couldn’t
for the life of remember what people were ordering. A lovely young Chicana
woman and her two kids came to the window and she ordered something like three
sundaes, two chocolate, one strawberry, one with nuts, one without whip cream.
Normally this order would have been a piece of cake, but I was so absolutely
blasted that every time I turned away from the window to make the sundaes my
mind went totally blank. So I had to keep turning around and asking her to repeat
her order. Two-beer, frizzy blond hair popping out gleefully from under his little
paper burger cap, was over behind the grill and he was laughing so hard he was
rolling on the floor. After the fourth time I turned back from the ice-cream
machine to get the poor Chicana to repeat the order she finally stamped her feet in
exasperation and snapped “You’re just too stoned.” She stormed away with her
kids bursting into disappointed tears at her heels.
When we finally stopped laughing and got off the floor Two-beer trotted out
all the whip-cream cans we’d been hoarding and we hit the nitrous oxide and
melted right back into the floor for another ten minutes supine with laughter. Twobeer, no lie (cause you’re not going to believe this) got so high one night that he
closed up the store, took a banana, emptied out the guts, filled it with hot fudge and
fulfilled his teenage lust with it back in the bathroom. The next day he swore it
was the best masturbation technique ever—the only drawback being the incredible
mess that was left when the passion between man and fruit had finally been
consummated.
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The other adventure I have to capture was the time Grant, No-House, Greg
Logan, Jamie Clement and I all ate pot brownies and went into the mountains at
midnight.
Back in my “Stoned Age” I would have smoked pot upside down if someone
had told me it would have produced a different high. Eating pot was bound to
happen and one night we baked up this huge batch of instant brownies absolutely
green with bud and then gobbled several of them down. Nothing happened, or at
least happened fast enough, so we ate the rest. Not a good choice.
Bored and restless, amped out on sugar, climbing the walls, someone noticed
the full moon outside the window and suggested that we hike up to the Cold
Springs waterfall and see it in the moonlight. With no idea that the sugary masses
in our stomachs were about to go off like bombs, and no idea that the moon does
this thing called setting, we piled into a car and shot up into the mountains howling
along to Jimi Hendrix.
At first our plan worked out like a dream: a fat moon flooded the canyon
with light and the creek water ran silver over the sandstone boulders and sparkled
joyfully where the trail crossed the stream. The air was heavy with the scent of
sage and cooling earth and my young head was flooded with Tolkinesque fantasies
of elven maidens stepping of from behind the whispering oak trees. The brownies
hadn’t exploded yet and it seemed like marching off into the enchanted woods
before us was the most reasonable thing in the world.
An hour later the moon was setting and the brownies were rising and we
crashed along in the dark constantly losing each other and the trail. No-House took
a wrong step on the side of a steep hill and rolled off into the shadows at the
bottom where he disappeared completely. Jamie was somewhere far ahead, Grant
was far behind and Greg was madly screaming at them to come back and help
House, who was setting off no small clamor of his own from his nest of shadows.
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Everyone was shouting up and down the canyon but out of sight of each other and
as the moon disappeared completely the confusion only got worse. I was bringing
up the rear and tried to follow Grant and but I missed the weak trail altogether and
was soon absolutely and completely lost. I shouted for Grant, and then I shouted
for everyone and anyone, but there was already too much confusion. Grant yelled
my name a few times but his voice grew fainter and fainter.
Stoned and panicked I crashed through trees, crackled through thick piles of
leaves and shouted away, but soon Grant’s faint voice was completely gone and
there was no escaping it: I was completely lost, and completely separated from the
others. Once this sunk in I stopped thrashing around was able to stand still. My
baked brain somehow realized that the only way to get out of the canyon and back
to the car was to find the stream and follow it out. Set on this course of action I
gave one more hopeful yell and then felt my way downwards. The closer I came to
the creek the thicker the darkness became, and when I finally heard water and
stepped under the thick canopy of trees that grew along the banks the darkness was
complete. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. The moon was long gone
and the starlight was far too faint to make its way through the tangled branches.
And here’s where an odd thing happened: I was stoned out of my brain,
completely lost and unprepared, in total darkness—and suddenly I wasn’t afraid.
Fear just vanished. The summer night was warm and thick and black and the
boulders along the creek were warm and sandy under my hands. In complete calm,
like it was a game I had been dying to play, I began to feel my way down the creek
bed.
Sound and touch became everything: the coyotes, the crickets, the burbling
water seeping through my running shoes. The night was wrapped around me and I
just slipped into it, became part of it. I patiently felt my way down the creek bed,
no hurry or concern, no occasional shouts to see if I could locate my friends: just
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my hands and my ears and this warm, sheltering blackness. I never stood; just
crawled, slithered, sidled, slid on my rear and slowly inch-wormed my way
onwards. Had I not been stoned out of my gourd I would have been terrified of
putting my blind hands on snakes and spiders, or spraining an ankle, or even of
going the wrong way, maybe even down the wrong creek. But I was blissfully,
blazingly stoned, and I just made my slow and patient way over the rocks and
through the soft water and didn’t think a thing about it. Just did it. Actually
enjoyed it. Imagined I was some kind of night-creature out for a stroll.
When I finally saw dim light ahead and came out on the road my friends
were all there, but they hardly said a word. They were all high as kites and my
soaked emergence from the shadows of the creek seemed no more remarkable to
them then their own reunion and return down the dark trail. We stayed for a while
longer, sitting on the hood of the car and then getting up to slip our fingers in the
silky water of the creek, and then decided to go watch the sunrise on the beach.
So there’s a couple stories from the “Stoned Age” when I thought nothing of
getting high and spending an afternoon in front of a stereo getting off on Peter
Frampton’s guitar solos and quarts of chocolate ice-cream. Speaking of that: I
used to get so high I would put the ice-cream back in the cupboard and the chips
back in the refrigerator. I always had the munchies and was always foraging
around the kitchen at midnight and forgetting to put things back in the right place.
My poor mother was always mystified by my errors. As my older siblings were
not stoners she had no experience of pot and put my endless mistakes down to
twisted teenage hormones. She never tired of patiently explaining to me which
food items went where and was endlessly amazed when yet again; she found the
milk in the cupboard, the ice-cream in the refrigerator and the chips in the freezer.
New Zealand
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More on Youth, which just seems to keep calling me with unwritten tales
and moments.
Clifford Crawford showed up new half way through our Fifth Form year.
My class had been together since Third Form and Clifford, through no fault of his
own, found himself outside an invisible box of shared memories and cultish
school-boy mannerisms. In one of my finest hours, I looked up from my desk in
History class and realized he must have hated being new. I remembered all the
times I’d been the new kid and promptly found him after class and showered him
with friendship.
From that day on I thrust him into my group of friends and dragged him off
to eat lunch with me. He was a nice kid, gangly, into soccer, and a little bit of a
straight arrow, and our friendship never found the juicy ground of some common
lust, desire, shame or humor. But he gradually hit it off with Bobby Orr, another
nice kid with freckles and conspicuously short hair (in an era when any selfrespecting rebel made sure to have at least a bit of an unruly mop to fly). Once
Clifford hit it off with Bobby I was off duty and, my good deed done, I quite easily
slipped back to my rough and scrumble pals without a bad word or negative
thought. I pause here for the reflection that in some ways the young seem far more
fluid and gracious negotiating the revolving doors of human relationships than
their elders.
Some months later I was surprised by an invitation to go sailing with
Clifford and Bobby overnight. And here’s youth again: I was deathly seasick the
entire two weeks I rode the ancient soon-to-be-scrapped P&O liner Orsova when
my family emigrated to New Zealand, and yet I accepted without a second thought.
They picked me up in a rattly old teenager car stuffed with blue sailing bags
and we drove down to the harbor, boarded Bobby’s dad’s boat and sailed off into
the blue. They both seemed quite adept and there wasn’t much for me to do but
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watch them haul on the ropes and enjoy the trip, occasionally holding the tiller
when they both needed to work the sails.
And the thing I remember the most, the thing I wanted to write about, was
my absolute trust. It was winter, cold and windy, and the dark fell early, and yet I
was completely calm. My captains were sixteen or seventeen years old and yet I
wasn’t one bit worried that we would land in some kind of trouble, or that I would
at some point become wretchedly seasick.
After dropping anchor, we had warmed beans and bread under the stars and
then they gave me some bedding and showed me where I was sleeping, right under
the rudder, and they crawled off to sleep in the bow. I was now the stranger, the
kid outside the box, and they chattered away as they made their beds and settled in
to sleep, and yet it didn’t bother me at all. I crawled under my blankets, under the
stars, in the back of this boat that had sailed to God knows where, and I was
peaceful.
No aching teenage angst, no parade of fears and worries, just the slap of the
water against the hull. I peed over the back and looked at a million stars, and then
crawled back in the blankets, thought about girls and glory, and drifted off into
long and carefree sleep. Back so long ago when my trust in the universe was deep
and soft and strong.
Ben Hanley
I see here that I can’t really leave youth, New Zealand or even The Stoned
Age behind without a salute to Ben Hanley, the glam-rock, soccer-loving rebel
who started it all. Ben was famous at Auckland Grammar, even in his first year.
Famous for fighting, driving teachers crazy and even going out with girls. I first
saw him between classes, the two of us passing each other like wary dogs in the
dark basement hall, my own blond freak flag flying. I thought he might leap on me
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or challenge me in some way and I kept my face hard, we gave each other careful,
manly nods and passed on our separate ways. And I think that might have been it
for Ben Hanley and I had not fate intervened.
I just wasn’t cool enough or wild enough for him to take an interest in me,
and for me he was too cool and wild. But then two things happened. One was that
I was placed in his class and suddenly we were together seven periods a day, and
suddenly found ourselves united against the common enemies of boredom and
petty authority. I was nowhere near as rebellious as Ben, but I could certainly
throw a spit wad or pass a silly note or make a funny crack in the hope of derailing
a teacher. Still, I wasn’t on par with Ben, and while he became friendly with me in
class I never saw him at lunch or after school.
But then I accidentally found the key to Ben’s door. I got into a fight.
I am not a fighter, and this very fact had caused me much misery as I moved
from school to school. By the time I entered Third Form at Auckland Grammar I
had decided, very clearly and logically, that the misery caused by refusing to fight
just wasn’t worth it. In that odd way that the young can sometimes guide
themselves when any kind of adult help is just completely absent, I had simply
decided that when challenged again, as was bound to happen, I would have to
fight. I even had a very clear plan. When the inevitable confrontation came, I
would count to three and then swing.
Sure enough the black day came. I was out on the athletic field and a fourth
form boy began to taunt my friends and I. He wasn’t a bad kid, not a real bully,
but for some reason, maybe peer pressure, he felt he had to taunt the new kids. He
showed off a half-joking karate kick to his pals by aiming it at my face. It was
slow and it didn’t seem to really hurt me, I felt no pain, but when I touched my
hand to my mouth and looked at my fingers they were bloody. No real surprise as
I had sharp braces and the smallest blow could start me bleeding.
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When I looked down at my red fingers a hush fell and the casual atmosphere
of rowdy boys fell into an immediate tense silence. I knew my moment had come.
I was neither angry, nor particularly frightened, just absolutely clear that I must put
my count-to-three plan into action.
We stood facing each other silently, a hungry circle gathering around us.
The older boy could have easily avoided a fight by apologizing, but he had to save
face and couldn’t lower himself to handing an apology to a mere third form kid in
front of his friends. I counted to three, exactly as I had practiced a million times in
my head, and then swung wildly. It was a crazy wild blow, but it went home and
his eyes flew open with shock. Then he jumped in swinging and we both let fly a
flurry of awkward punches that hit nothing but air. Older boys, who seemed like
giants, waded efficiently through the circle around, pulled us apart, sneered at us
and pushed us on our separate ways, and that was that.
I felt ashamed and silly for throwing wild punches and for being pulled apart
and sent on my way like a six-year old by the older students, and my own friends
did not seem to make too much of the matter. I certainly felt like no manly hero.
But a small kid named Lee, who worshipped Ben, had been there, and he’d had a
front row seat. In his version of the tale my first wild blow had gone home with
much more success than I had realized and my opponent was bleeding profusely
long after our encounter and even “must have had a tooth knocked out.”
The next day Ben marched right up to me, long hair flying behind him, and
demanded a full account of my battle. He was rightfully suspicious of my being
portrayed as some kind of wild fighter and he had to hear the story from my own
lips. I didn’t build the story up in anyway, and maybe that very act is what won
Ben over, but all said and done, once Ben had grilled me to his satisfaction, I was
invited to his house.
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And that’s really where the stoned age began for me. Ben had his own room
separate from the house replete with records, incense and candles and girlie
pictures. His parents, who never seemed to be home, were artists and nude
portraits decorated all the walls. Ben marched me straight in front of the stereo,
said, “You gotta hear this,” and played me Pink Floyd’s Meddle. I was only
thirteen, I’d never bought a record in my life, my passions were sports and skin
diving, and suddenly I had a friend who sat me down in front of the stereo and
went into raptures over Goat’s Head Soup. I was slow to get the power of the
music, but I was quick to sense that there was a whole new wild world waiting for
me.
After the music Ben put on Monty Python and took me into the off-kilter
palace of British comedy. Within an hour he had a microphone out and we were
recording our own silly, schoolboy versions of comic skits. Ben and I soon
became inseparable and all our weekends were spent together. I’d watch his
ferocious soccer games and then we’d go to his house and immerse ourselves in
toasted crumpets, rock music and silly projects. As I mentioned before, his parents
were rarely around, and one night we found their Whole Earth Catalogue.
We went straight to the drug section where we read that nutmeg had
hallucinogenic properties. “I think we’ve got some of that,” Ben crowed
triumphantly in his broad New Zealand accent and he plunged into the cabinet.
Within minutes we were swilling down nutmeg in some kind of horrible tea and
then we put on some music and sat back to have our first drug experience. Nothing
seemed to happen and after endless queries of, “Do you feel anything?” we gave
up on attaining our first high and went to bed.
In the middle of the night I woke up with wildly churning bowels. I tried to
make it into the main house where the bathroom was but the nutmeg had unleashed
and evil snake in my bowels and I was forced to drop a huge turd on Ben’s front
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walk. With little green lights flashing in my head I staggered back to bed. Hours
later I woke to the sound of Ben’s father furiously cursing. I slipped on my pants
and stepped out to observe Ben watching his father howling about the neighbor’s
dog and trying to get a giant shit off his slippers.
“Bloody neighbor’s,” Ben told me. “Their bloody huge mutt came over in
the middle of the night and just dropped a huge one right on the front walk. Poor
Da’, he went out for the paper and stepped right in it.”
I quickly scurried back into Ben’s room and hid back under the covers.
French Tropical Islands and First Love
I was thinking about New Caledonia. The French island in the Pacific. I
spent two weeks there when I was fourteen. I fell in love there, sharp, aching
fourteen-year-old love. I had my first experience of the mystery there. The
unexplainable, the undercurrents, the premonitions, God, I don’t even know what
to call it.
In New Zealand I took up basketball. I had played, rugby for a year but it
was too vicious for me and I didn’t have the heart to continue getting plowed into
muddy fields by huge Tongans, Samoans and ferocious Maoris. Cricket made no
sense to me and at that point in time soccer was as completely foreign to an
American as marmite and cucumber sandwiches, so I went for basketball. I had
played countless games of “Horse” as a kid and my brother had played on the
varsity team of the high school I entered so it made sense that I follow in his
footsteps. In an act of younger brother worship I insisted on wearing his number,
and as it was number 13 no one seemed to care. I pretty much sucked at
basketball, I was just too timid, but I loved it with a youthful fury and practiced for
hours fired by an endless determination laced with game-winning fantasies. The
junior team I was on was good and won eighteen straight games before we lost the
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city championship. I can’t take much credit as I didn’t do more than make a
couple of steals and one or two shots a game, but I was happy to bask in reflected
glory and determined to keep practicing.
When I was fourteen and at the very height of my determination, our coach
announced that if we could raise the money he would take an A team and a B team
to New Caledonia for two weeks. The other boys and I collected bottles and
mowed lawns until we were blue in the face and the trip was set for our May
Holiday.
New Zealand was very, very English back then, a common joke being that it
was more English than England. Marmite and potato chip sandwiches, meat pies,
endless cups of thick black tea. Very, very Harry Potter, (if you are a fan). I was
in “Red House” in my first school just as Harry was in Gryffindor, and I was
tortured by one or two snide and drawling teachers that hated long-haired
Americans just as Harry was tortured by Snape. Anyway, once the trip was close
we were given special travelling uniforms with ties, strict admonitions of behavior
as we were representing our school and our country, and several courses in French
manners as the island was, at that point, a French colony.
The first thing I remember is a bay surrounded by thick green grass that ran
in waves before a warm, thick tropical wind. Our coach was in a good mood and
to humor me, something he rarely did, he made a joke about my best mate,
Campbell Karaka, a Maori being busy digging up some clams for grub while the
rest of the boys chased each other on the beach. Even back then I knew that this
usually stiff and reserved man was doing me a kindness, taking a moment to reach
into my world, a world where I was always teasing Campbell about unearthing
rocks to look for things to eat.
My next memory is of the foundry. There were huge deposits of nickel on
the island and our guides took us to the metal smelting works. Vast and huge,
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torrid and blazing, a gigantic dark hell-world under a corrugated roof where toiling
islanders were outlined by the blazing red glow of molten metal. It was like a
sudden visit to the demonic hold of an ancient slave ship. The place scared the shit
out of me and did more to encourage me with my books and studies than many a
lecture.
Then there were the games, at night, the whole hot lazy city of Noumea
gathering to drink and watch in the big park down town, insects around the lights,
French floating on the thick air, frizzy-haired island girls in sarongs. I loved the
glow of the lights around the outdoor court and the mad dances of the crazed
insects and huge night moths. My team, the B team, got its ass kicked every night,
but our A team held their own and reeled in glory. I got my own tiny glory by
being voted captain of the B team, a small honor, but an honor none the less. We
were a pack of fuckwits really, the B team, but we were good-natured fuckwits
with a sense of humor and the A team players didn’t shun our company.
Sometimes, now that I ponder it, I think they actually envied our ability to lose
with grace and humor.
There was a striking fellow on the A team, a rake, a leader, a player, a loner,
in America he would have been a cowboy and a quarterback. His name was Matt
Hawkins, and not only was he handsome, but he could play the guitar. We would
take long bus rides to play outlying towns and he would sing Beatles songs, and for
some reason we all went nuts for Ob La Di Ob La Da, maybe it was being on a
tropical island. We roared that song out day after day and I can’t hear it now
without being instantly cast back to the back of a hot, rusty yellow bus, windows
open, wind blowing, young faces around me raised in song, dirt roads, cane fields
and roadside fruit stands.
Then there was the living arrangements. We were a boy’s school, but we
were billeted with students at a co-ed school, beyond exciting for boys trapped
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ceaselessly in all-male company. On the day of the billeting the French kids
gathered at the front of their school gym and their names were read out along with
ours. I bravely tried to hide my monstrous braces and hoped like hell my name
would be called along with one of the pretty French girls, but it was not to be. I
drew Yvonne. Yvonne the Modster, Yvonne the Austin Powers of New Caledonia
with his motorcycle, square glasses and thick seventies hair. Yvonne who didn’t
speak a word of English, Yvonne the easy-shrugging, friendly, not-real-bright class
clown. But damn he was a sweet guy. He threw me on the back of his 100cc
Yamaha motorcycle, sans helmet, he didn’t wear one either, and off we roared to
his house. I was fucking terrified and leaned the wrong way on turns, to which he
responded with a thick bleating of “Non, non, non.” After that happened two or
three times I began to lean into the turns and was quickly rewarded with “Qui, qui,
qui, bon, bon.” I actually got pretty good at it and we were soon roaring around
the island at death defying speeds. Yvonne, once the speedometer had climbed
past 100 kilometers an hour, would scream and point at it proudly, and I’d leaning
over his shoulder to nod appreciatively. How do parents have teenagers? How do
teenagers survive?
The first night with Yvonne’s family I tried to hold back as the dinner
courses kept coming but it was hopeless and I was gorged full long before the main
course came. I ate manfully, remembering all the manners we’d been taught and
how we had been hammered with the idea that we must appreciate the pleasures of
the French table to be good guests. When I finally crawled off to bed I was as sick
as a dog and I spent most of the night holding my stomach in the garden and trying
not to puke as the family, windows, wide open to the hot night, were right above
me.
The next day we had lunch at the school and I was flabbergasted to see big
pitchers of wine on the cafeteria table. We had been warned that wine was served
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with meals and we were not to get drunk, but I was a teenager and of course I
plowed in. When the bell rang I woozily followed Yvonne to class, sat in the back,
and was so distracting that the teacher threw down her chalk, pointed at me and
commanded, “Vous! Sortie, sortie, maintainent!” I can still hear her voice and see
the enraged glint in her eyes, and the translation was easy, even in my limited
French. “You! Out! Out! Now!”
Of course I was just sowing karmic seeds because I have been a high school
teacher for something like fifteen years now and I can’t count the times some little
asshole has tormented me until I have uttered the exact same command, word for
word.
We had a game in a distant village and were billeted there for the night. The
French kids in Noumea all came out in a convoy of scooters and rust-ragged
Citroens and stayed too. It was the only game that my B team, now named the
Turkey Team, ever won the whole trip. Victory on a ragged concrete court in the
middle of a cheering village of islanders in sarongs was beyond sweet. Afterwards
there was a party in the mayor’s house, the open-air bottom story spilling out into
the night garden. Long tables were laid out with white table clothes and the mayor
gave a speech, then our coaches gave little speeches too, in their stiff French.
While this speech-making was going on I noticed there was a bottle of Johnnie
Walker red label in front of me. I poured a big glass full and drank it off like
water. Before the end of the last speech I was ripped, absolutely ripped. I jumped
up and broke into the coach’s speech with loud cheers and was immediately pulled
down and silenced by my shocked teammates, who were, with good reason,
petrified for my sake. Fortunately the coaches left soon after and I was free to
stagger around knocking things over. Thank God for youth, in an adult world my
outrageous drunkenness would have been pathetic, but at fourteen it made all the
teenagers from both countries laugh until they cried. I tumbled around like a rag
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doll, throwing my arms around every one and cursing in my terribly mangled but
enthusiastic French.
Over the next hour I knocked over tables and fell into bushes while Matt
Hawkins sang like a nightingale and enraptured the most beautiful of the French
girls. A dark haired, dark-eyed beauty who for some reason took special pity on
my atomic drunkenness and insisted on getting me home in her jeep before driving
off with her handsome prize to the starlit beach down the dirt road. I happened to
be billeted with Steve Brown, the best player on our A team and as hopeless with
French as Yvonne was with English. Steve was a good sort, a kiwi through and
through, no ego, and he’d taken a vast liking to me as I had become his own
personal translator since we had come to this new town and he couldn’t say or
understand a fucking word on his own. Steve dragged me into the jeep and sat in
the back with me while Matt, more like a prince than a mortal, climbed in front
with his beauty. Jeeps, girls, drunkenness, the star player at my side, I truly
thought I had arrived at the pinnacle of human achievement.
Until I started puking.
Which wasn’t long. Steve heard it coming and threw my head out the back
of the jeep and I puked the whole way home. It wasn’t that bad though, it made all
my companions laugh.
When we came to the house where Steve and I were billeted it was late and
everyone insisted I be quiet, but of course every time they put their fingers to their
lips and went “Shhhhh!” I let out an enormous burp and then all three of them
would be on the ground laughing while I, freed from supporting arms, lurched off
into the nearest tree and then collapsed and crawled. I couldn’t walk so Steve and
Matt put my arms around their shoulders and tried to sneak me through the dark
halls of the sleeping house. I made five or six steps and then burped the ferocious
and reverberating belch of the truly drunk. My bearers collapsed laughing and I
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fell into the wall making the whole house shake. We had two or thee more such
incidents until they finally got me into the bedroom and dropped me like a sack of
bricks. I passed out immediately.
It seemed like only seconds later I awoke with the ravaging, burning king of
all hangovers. On my knees I made it to the toilet and renewed my new passion
for regurgitating. Steve, awoken by the horrific noises, whispered fiercely for me
to shut up, but that was impossible. I hung my head when our hosts called us out
to breakfast, but they laughed when they saw me and immediately made drinking
and puking motions. Clearly no harm was done.
But harm was done an hour later at practice outdoors under a white hot
tropical sun. I staggered and dragged, lost the ball, tripped, tongue lolling, eyes
crossed, clinging to the poles when it seemed I would puke yet again. “Get out
there and work,” my coach yelled, “if you can drink you can practice.”
Ah, what years, when a truly magnificent drunk can raise your stock in the
eyes of your peers. Once I survived practice I was lauded all day long like a
conquering hero. Matt Hawkins and Steve Brown insisted on sitting by me on the
bus back to Noumea, and continually laughed as they recounted trying to drive me
home and sneak me into the house. I grinned sheepishly, delighted to be a fourteen
year old sitting with seventeen year olds, which was as good as sitting among the
gods. Matt made sure I held his guitar when he wasn’t playing it, and maybe that’s
where the seed was planted. Not long after the honor of holding Matt’s guitar
thrilled my palms I began to painstakingly peer through “Learn Guitar” books and
plink away at an old guitar my father had, and I actually did learn to play, I’ve
been at it almost thirty years now.
Back in Noumea I fell in love with Jaqueline. I don’t know how or why she
picked me. She was gorgeous, fifteen, billeting Peter Thompson, our big Maori
forward on the A team. She was a goddess far beyond my silver-mouthed reach
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and I had done nothing but look at her shyly for days and days. Then there was
another party with small twinkling lights, a little room open to the air on two sides,
wicker chairs, ping pong out on the lawn, a volleyball net, crickets, nights birds,
those crazy tropical night flowers thickening the air, and a pool table. We got into
a doubles game against Matt Hawkins and his French beauty. I was sure I was
dreaming because it seemed that Jaqueline was smiling at me and brushing up
against me far more than she needed to when she took the pool que. We had been
there more than a week and she had barely looked at me, and suddenly she
wouldn’t leave my side.
I couldn’t fathom why. I was finally speaking some sort of French, maybe
that was it; I was someone she could actually talk to. Or maybe it was the attention
that my heroes Matt and Steve now showered on me. Maybe she saw past the
braces, which I was sure gleamed so brilliantly they outshone my thick blonde
curls and any other attributes I possessed. Maybe it was love, the mysterious thing
called love, or just hormones, or the enchantment of tropical islands.
Whatever the reason, one second she barely knew I was alive and I
considered her a queen far above me, and the next second we were gazing in each
other’s eyes. Puppy love, teenage love, got us both in its soft teeth and shook
away. We were inseparable. I couldn’t stop looking at her. I felt like my heart
was on fire around her. I thought about missing my plane.
Jackie, she told me to call her, but I loved the French Jaqueline.
She spoke bad English and I spoke bad French, and we both said things we
never would have dared say in our own languages, and spent hours giggling as we
mangled each other’s native tongues.
My final memory is of driving to the airport. I was in the back with
Jaqueline and John Mortenson and his French girl were in the front. It was a gray
day soft with a sprinkle of warm rain. The tape deck was playing Bowie, early
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Bowie, even before Honky Dorie, a bunch of odd, sweet little songs, and suddenly
one was about Uncle Arthur closing his shop, and I just lost it, for the first time
ever in my teenage life. I was drenched and flooded with sweetness and sorrow,
and I loved Jackie so much, and I loved all my teammates so much. I just lost it,
big time, I could not stop crying, even though there were other people there, even
though it was the first time I had cried in three or four years, even though I
wouldn’t cry again for another seven years. I just could not stop crying.
But the boy in front, he didn’t laugh at me, he too began to cry, and then the
girls began to cry. All us poor fucking young people with no idea what was in
store for us, just bawling away. When we stepped out of the car someone snapped
a Polaroid and I still have it, I look bewildered, I have a handkerchief in my hands,
my eyes are swollen, my hair is huge, and Jackie is holding my chin.
Then the good-byes began and the other boys cried too. I remember the
absolute bafflement on the faces of the two coaches as they watched their players
disintegrate, big, tough boys, athletes, notoriously cheerful Kiwis all pooling up
into soggy messes of clutched handkerchiefs. There was a final point at the gate
where we went down an aisle and the French kids couldn’t follow, but the wall on
one side was glass and they could walk abreast of us for fifty feet. All along that
glass the boys from my school had dropped their little green team bags and
stopped, and with tear-stricken faces they touched hands, palm to palm, with the
French kids. Separated by a quarter inch of glass. Even the ever-cool Matt
Hawkins was tear-drenched as his dark-haired beauty traced his fingers with her
own.
The coaches were dumbstruck. I saw them look at each other and shake
their heads. I gazed and gazed into Jackie’s brown eye, gazed until I thought my
heart would shatter.
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“Come on, boys, all right, all right, come on, we’re going to miss the flight,”
the coaches finally broke in, and they herded us away from the glass like reluctant
prison guards clearing the visitor section.
On the plane we were dead quiet. No arm punches, no bawling teenage
jokes and boasts. I suddenly felt incredibly sick and threw up in my airsickness
bag even before we’d rolled out of the gate. And then Matt Hawkins rescued us.
He began to sing, Desmond has a trolley in the market place, Molly is a singer in
the band… and slowly we all came in until the entire plane turning to watch.
When we came to, Ob La Di Ob La Da life goes on our voices rose thick and
strong. We sensed that we had lost something, but we also sensed that only the
rich have something to lose—and we were rich in island days, tropical nights,
teammates, new friends and young love.
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Four reasons for what you hold in your hands.
I mark my decades with the ritual of writing. Everybody’s Here helped me
negotiate turning forty. This tome, Everybody’s Dancing, is to bear me through
the I’m-in-shock-I-can’t-believe-it process of turning fifty. When I get to eighty
I’ll be writing Everybody’s Dead.
Next, words are my photographs. At reunions and birthdays John Goubeaux
trots out his collection of slides and my friends and family are beyond pleased that
we have someone in our lives that actually bothers to collects and document the
past, and then pours it into the cup of nostalgia for all to drink. Writing is my
contribution to the memory wing of my tribe’s museum.
Then there’s the elation and devastation of bookstores. As a reader I love
bookstores with nothing short of gluttony. As I reader I lose myself in them like
the proverbial kid in a candy store. I come out dizzy and satiated hours after I’ve
gone in and gorged on books. But as a writer… As a writer they fill me with
dread and jealousy. Why am I wallpapering my room with rejection notices? Why
am I not on the shelves? And if I were on the shelves would I be dusty and
forgotten within a week, like ninety-odd percent of the other writers who are on the
shelves? As a writer bookstores pass me the bitter distasteful dregs of futility.
Bookstores depress me in a Holden Caulfield depression that ponders the endless
lonely hours toiling over soul-shredding work only to have it end in the obscurity
of one unopened tome among many. Little paper graves waiting for the kind hand
of an excavation that never comes.
To combat this shameful slide into envious darkness and mortalitysoaked angst I think of my writings as letters. I have always loved letters and the
advent of e-mail hasn’t dimmed that love. This collection of words is nothing
more than a rather large letter to all whom share this journey of life with me,
known and unknown—and that thought helps keep the demons at bay.
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Catwoman and The Pinball Machine.
To celebrate turning fifty, I went backpacking in the Sespe wilderness with
Gooby, Crazy Michael and Olin. Olin used to lead groups of high school kids of
trips back there and as we sat our old bones in the Sespe hot springs he pointed
towards a flat grassy spot in the middle of the rocky valley. “These two kids,” he
said with a fond shake of his head. “They came on this one trip and all they did
was bone. They had an old red K-Mart sleeping bag and they put it right over
there, right out in plain view. The whole time we were here they just boned. They
never left that thing, not even for meals, right out in plain view.” The rest of us
looked over, and I could see the cheap red sleeping bag going up and down out
among the grass and cactus while the other kids looked over and then looked away.
“Weren’t you supposed to do something?” Gooby asked. “You were the trip
leader and in charge, wouldn’t you get in trouble?”
A slow and guilty grin formed behind the graying whiskers of Olin’s
backcountry face. “I pretended not to see,” he shrugged. “What the hell, let ‘em
bone.” The he looked back over at the spot and laughed. “Shameless, they were
just shameless. If you walked by they’d wave and then just go back to boning, and
his butt was just like an inchworm up and down, up and down, reeee, reeee!” Olin
showed us with his hand and laughed some more, and then wrinkled his nose.
“Can you imagine the smell inside that thing? All day long out in the hot sun
boning away? Dude! That thing must have reeked!”
“Was she hot?” I asked.
“But they packed it out?” Crazy Michael wanted to know.
“Yeah, they tried to leave it, but I made ‘em pack it out. Damn kids, right
over there, all day long, reeee, reeee!”
“She wasn’t hot?”
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“She wasn’t ugly but…. Right over there, reee, reee, all day long.”
We laughed, and looked over at the fabled spot, and then even farther back
at our own landscapes of lust.
My first step onto t hat holy trail happened when I was eight and the original
Batman TV show was on the grainy black and white TV my brother had in our
room. I was jumping around, punching the air, half watching, and also playing
with my army men and spreading out my baseball cards. I could hear my little
sister crying in her room and my mom calling out to her that she’d be there in a
minute. Our house throbbed with the steady heartbeat of a comfortable Brady
Bunch 1960s security—but the fence was about to be breached.
Catwoman.
My baseball cards fell from my fingers.
My little sister’s squalls receded in the distance.
Batman’s strength and logic were useless, he fell for her feminine traps and
Catwoman won. She knocked Batman out with some kind of trick gas or dart, and
when he came to he was tied up and she was purring and playing with her prey
while Batman wiggled and squirmed.
My little guts flipped upside down like a small silver fish had suddenly come
awake down there and was darting around. Something was going on between
Catwoman and Batman. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t have a clue, but I
wanted it. I wanted to be tied up and purred over. I wanted to be Catwoman’s
little mouse. That tight black outfit, that silky voice, the threat of punishment, the
promise of reward. I wanted it. I would have given my whole baseball card
collection for it, and mu comic book collection.
I leaned forward, fixated.
And then the screen froze.
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Same bat time, same bat channel, I’d have to come back tomorrow. I was
left with an open mouth, Batman heading towards the whirring blade of a logsplitter and Catwoman’s laugh echoing of the beams of the empty lumber mill.
The next day I kept my hands neatly folded while the teacher talked and did
my work fastidiously to make sure I wouldn’t get a detention. No after school
baseball game or orange tree raid could sidetrack me; I raced home from school
with atomic speed and was back in front of the TV at four on the dot. The second
Catwoman reappeared, the little silver fish woke up and started darting around
again. I was leaned so far forward my nose was inches from the screen.
And then fucking Robin showed up and ruined everything. I didn’t have
anything against Batman, but I wanted him tied up forever, I wanted Catwoman
running her claws down his panting sides forever. Batman free and handing
Catwoman over to the police was a huge let down. There was something that was
supposed to happen that didn’t happen.
The next day in school I was off good behavior and got in trouble for
daydreaming. But my usual daydreams of homeruns, rainbow trout and beating up
bullies were long gone. I had slipped away from long division and compound
words to be tied up in an empty warehouse with Catwoman purring over me as she
decided what would please her more: pain or pleasure?
The next time I met the eyes that made the silver fish dart in my guts they
were staring at me from the back of a pinball machine. My parents took us over to
Germany to live on a military base in 1970. We stayed in the officer’s quarters
without a kitchen and every night my mom gave me a dollar and sent me out to eat
at one of the little feels-like-home burger places that dotted the base. One of them
had a pinball machine with some kind of Devil’s Kitchen theme. Above the
flippers and the bumpers was a waitress just bursting out of her frilly white apron.
I couldn’t stop staring at her, and she turned over a shoulder to stare back it me. It
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was an alluring stare, a challenging stare; a stare that promised to take up exactly
where Catwoman left off: to both punish and reward. Her eyes were steel blue; her
breasts were like the tips of rockets. I didn’t know what the punishment was, I
didn’t know what the reward was, and down in those mysterious waters the trapped
silver fish dashed about like mad.
When we returned to the states, I found that my best friend Howard Harwin
had stocked his secret fort with his father’s Playboys. We spent long summer
hours in there looking at every picture, reading every word. I didn’t understand it,
but I wanted it. Howard did too. Howard would kiss the pictures, touch them,
hold them close. The same mystery that had a hold of me was clearly rattling
Howard’s cage. One hot afternoon his fat little sister found our fort and actually
got in and saw what we were doing before we could get our glazed eyes off Miss
March. Howard yelled, “Get out, Piglet!” which sent her off in tears, but the
damage was done. She had seen the magazines and she returned later with her
mother and that was the end of the fort and long afternoons rolling around in a nest
of Playboys.
The Great Grim got Howard. He was forty-three and had a sweet wife and
two boys, and the Grim got him. Brain cancer. My younger sister looked at me at
the funeral and said, “When Howard died your childhood died,” and she was right.
He was there for every step: fishing, baseball, bikes and Playboy. Howard was by
my side through it all—and then the fucking Grim got him. His sister yelled at me
at the funeral, she was till mad that we used to call her Piglet and wouldn’t let her
come in the fort.
She wasn’t fat anymore either. She looked good. And of course I wanted to
bone her.
So it’s all fucking hopeless. You’ve got death on one side and sex on the
either and they’re both stalking you, and you just hope the right one gets you.
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Because when the Great Grim gets you it’s game over, it’s I don’t know what else,
but it’s clearly game over. And when sex gets you, and grabs you and shakes you
and throws you at some other person like a killer whale tossing a seal, it’s cosmic
chaos, a free for all, punishment and reward, it’s the Eagles singing, This could be
heaven or this could be hell.
It’s everything that pinball siren promised so long ago.
The Eight Angels of Teenage Death
Here are the eight times I almost died. The eight times the Great Grim could
have easily snagged my young life while I rocketed around in a haze of hurt,
hormones, lust and tender romance. One: The hose. Two: Boogey boarding in
huge surf with Pinhead Hartmann. Three: The yabos in New Zealand driving
Vaughn and I at 120 down a country road. Four: Ynonne’s 120 miles and hour
motorcycle. Five: Hitchhiking from Washington back home after Max dropped me
off and all the psychos and perverts that picked me up. Six: The drunken Maoris
that I pissed off. Seven: The hoodlums that decided to pat me on the cheek instead
of kill me. And eight, and the closest I ever came: The serial killer that coldly and
casually appraised me one twilight by the San Lorenzo river, but decided not to
cross the river after me but find easier prey instead. He killed two girls camped
farther up the river later that night.
From Tropical Islands and First Love
I guess it’s better to say I had my first experience of the mystery as a
teenager—I’d had a few as a child.
One was the ending of my childhood in the summer of my eleventh year.
The gate out of childhood opened that spring in Norway. We were staying at my
Aunt’s home in Drammen, a rustic, timbered lodge in the forest. I went out to play
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and built a village out of pine cones, absorbed for hours in who lived where and
why. Then I stood back, became the invading army and bombed it with rocks—
thus fulfilling the role of creator and destroyer as I did in most of my solitary
childhood games. When the battle was over the forest quiet returned and I stood
looking down at my wrecked village. Then a very calm and resonant thought
came, “I will never play like this again.” There was no morality to it, no teenage
voice criticizing the child in me; it was just plain, unemotional commentary, as if I
were watching a documentary film of my life. I walked away without sadness, but
understanding that I would never again be able to completely lose myself in the
world of childhood imagination.
The gate out of childhood closed firmly behind me later that summer back in
California. In movies and novels there is often a cataclysmic event that ends a
childhood, but no such thing happened to me. I was absorbed in fishing, tree forts,
Little League and baseball cards. Then one day it was like I caught the flu. I
became aware that something out of the ordinary was going on, and I spent some
strange days not feeling like myself. I didn’t mope around the house or avoid the
neighbor’s yard where we played sandlot games, but I felt somehow removed from
everything—pulled into an inner world. When those three or four days ended I
knew that a whole ocean of life existed beyond my neighborhood and family. I
understood that the world was not only bigger than my neighborhood, it was also
far more complex. This larger world was a far greater force than my parents and
definitely out of their hands. They almost seemed to shrink before my eyes.
These odd days calcified into an unarticulated but keenly felt knowledge that
I was a very small separate unit in a very big universe and that I going to have to
make my own way. When those metamorphic days were over I knew there was so
much more to attain than my next baseball card or rainbow trout. I didn’t know
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what was to be attained, or how, but I did know that the satisfactions of the past
were gone.
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