CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

In which I fail to notice a pattern emerging as I face the world on my own

 

Now that Prunesquallor and Batanwa Jim were off screwing around at college, I had to look elsewhere for primary companionship, but as fate would have it, I didn’t have to bother looking, because it wasn’t long before a new phenomenon rose up in my life when I would, for lack of knowing better, occasionally pick up the telephone simply because it was ringing, and it would be for me, and the soft voice mumbling into the other end would be my old buddy Judas, wanting to know if I could get the Toyota so we could go hang out with some people.  I could always get the Toyota because my parents never went anywhere at night, and lo and behold, a new chapter in my life began and let me tell you, brothers and sisters, it would wind up being one heck of a long and dusty road, and one which has no end.

For it was my acquaintance Judas, who wanted to be my best friend for some reason, who ended up helping me find food, shelter and work from time to time throughout the next several decades when I had no resources of my own, or was unwilling to tap into them; especially after I was 21 when my Mama and my Daddy cut me off financially.

All he was in 1975 was a guy who mumbled and twitched with boundless inexpressible energy and was real smart but mainly wanted to smoke pot and somehow get to California, who wanted to be my best friend.  Did he just use the idea of friendship to get the use of my Daddy’s car?  In the past 30 years, Judas has picked me out of a crowd again and again over the course of repetitious self-destructive bullshit on my part, and given me a place to sit and study my life from a permissive, but no-bullshit, framework, and by providing such a framework, he helped me rework parts of my inherited non-operational framework.  Judas has always been a few steps ahead of me, and usually willing to glance briefly over his shoulder to make sure I was getting along OK.

And  lucky me, I was not to be stuck with only one friend.  There was good old Jed Barney, our black buddy who could be anybody and get anything: proud to be bisexual, proud to be black—or he could snicker, Yassuh!  Yassuh! rise up my people! if necessary, depending on present company—ready to be white or to laugh behind the Brothers’ backs, proud to be from Boys’ Town.  Not too proud to lie, cheat, steal, and stab in the back.  He was whoever he needed to be to get him in the door, and that meant we almost always got high every night no matter how long it took for Jed Barney to make things happen.  And so there we were: me and the Toyota, Jed Barney and his fine connections—the sort of people who ended up chasing me in their car one night because they were having a collective hallucination that I was a narc, based on something Jed Barney said that they misconstrued, and on and on—and Judas put it all together and made it happen with his singular and undivided willingness to pay for everybody’s drugs, and most of all he made it happen by having a job and an apartment.  It was the job element of the good times that I failed to notice at the time; as an unemployed self-employed has-been attempting to dwell on or near the comforting edge of lunacy and confusion, allowed to fail under my own parents’ roof, with nothing going for me but a grandiose, hyper-ornate business card I designed myself (“The Zdaemon Piano Maintenance Company”), I was holding my breath with my fingers crossed, tentatively trying on something that appeared to be a potentially never-ending summer vacation based on the possibility that I might be insane, and therefore incapable of dealing with the expectations of society.

I soon failed to notice a pattern emerging: it never quite occurred to me that I was not really paying attention, not really trying to succeed at anything, although some indefinite sense of unreality hung over everything as I sacrificed whatever else I could have been doing in order to drive Jed Barney to his connections’ houses, apartments and trailers—some of which were found on sides of the tracks I never knew existed in Hazing, Kansas—it never quite occurred to me that Jed Barney was using me and my family’s Toyota, and Judas’s nightly need to score pot, to get into lots of people’s doors so he could lift articles from the apartments of the many strange people we went to see.  Although my own eyes would, for example, see him pick up an expensive pair of boots on his way out someone’s door, a wink and a smile from Jed Barney would let me know that everything was all right, there was nothing to worry about.  Well, I reasoned to myself, if everything is all right, then obviously he’s just borrowing those boots.  And with zero reaction from me, it became more and more the norm for Jed Barney to leave someone’s house with something that nobody knew he was borrowing.

My mounting suspicion that Jed Barney was not just a nice guy who liked to ride around in my car all night, badmouthing Judas when Judas was not there, was cut short when a miracle occurred.  I was loitering in my basement one afternoon wondering what kind of mischief I was likely to get dragged around in later on that evening, when the doorbell rang unexpectedly, and by Golly there was my old buddy McDoodle, from Albuquerque, in the flesh, all 86 pounds of him!  And his old buddy Phil Martin, and a chick!  A real live girl!  And no adults, just a car full of old buddies and a stowaway girl!  Now this is what life is all about!  I got so excited I picked that girl up in my arms—she couldn’t have been over 5’ 1”—and ran around all over the house howling like a stud sorcerer, finally dropping her on a bed somewhere to catch my breath.  My friends explained to her that I was as strange as I was horny, and she better watch out for me, and then they told me to get in the car, and come to the Grand Canyon with them.

Now I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was more my speed than begging for the old man’s car every night so I could drive some klepto dude around town on his quest for knickknacks to heist.  So McDoodle loaded us all up in his Daddy’s big white 8-cylinder sedan—the sort of car a retired army man could take to the Country Club to fit in with his boss’s accounting firm’s clients—and drove me to greater downtown Hazing, Kansas, where my Mama’s office was located, and where she worked as the Resource Lady for the district office of the Presbyterian Church.  This was the job she had used to put me through piano tuning school, and the job she had then kept because she had her eye on a future in which my Daddy was not necessarily involved.

My Mama happily forked over some money so I could get out of Jed Barney’s hair for a couple of weeks, and that was it.  As a 19-year old derelict lunatic I needed nothing but the few clothes and indispensable poetry collections and notes for novels that I could fit into whatever I shoved them into, and we were gone.  The bedroom slippers on my feet got me all the way through the eight-mile hike up to the marble quarry at Marble, Colorado, and eight more miles back down again; when we stopped for a required visit with McDoodle’s relatives in Colorado, the tattered slippers were on my feet as Phil Martin and I desperately tried to keep Jo Lynn quiet where she curled up hidden under her blanket when McDoodle’s Uncle started to walk toward the car; wrapped in duct tape, those slippers were still on my feet at 3:00 in the morning at a mud hole in the middle of the Utah forest called Durfey Creek, on a piece-of-shit shortcut that looked like a perfectly good road on the map; my bedroom slippers were all I had on my feet as we overheated and begged water the whole way across the Arizona desert, and back in Albuquerque, where McDoodle’s parents were gone on vacation in their other car, those slippers got me everywhere I needed to get to throughout the old neighborhoods and more, where I desperately tried to get as much attention as possible without actually being noticed.  But those awesome and mighty slippers did not get me into Jo Lynn’s cutoffs; she sat silently in the back seat with me the whole trip where I had ended up since I was rarely allowed to drive, and I got to spend many hours stroking Jo Lynn’s hair, her arm, her feet, anything that would allow me a glimmer of hope.  To sit next to this plump little sweaty animal made me ache.  It was a long trip and Jo was too cute for words.  I don’t know how she tolerated me.  I was a complete useless disaster the whole time.  Nothing  could make me stop staring at her crotch, looking down her shirt, making remarks to communicate my desires; and worst of all, I had the ”crazed madman” image to uphold the whole entire time.

It was not made easier by the circumstance that McDoodle was pissed at Jo Lynn for having had sex with him only three times, and then refused to have sex with him again.  Then at McDoodle’s big booze party after we got to Albuquerque, she got all sweet on George.  What a mess.  If I hadn’t discovered Harry Nilsson’s music on that trip, I don’t know what good it would have done to even go.

Except that it got me out of the clutches of Jed Barney, Kleptodude.  His mother worked for the Hazing Police Department, so he was never in trouble for long.  He could afford to stay in trouble; it never seemed to stick to him.

Back  in Hazing, everything had changed.  Judas had given up his apartment, and moved back in with his parents to save money for the move to California.  But apparently Jed Barney had broken into Judas’s apartment before he got all his stuff moved out, and stolen his stereo, including my $20 headphones.  I don’t know where I got $20 to buy headphones.  Maybe it was from that piano I tuned.  Well, stealing my $20 headphones was not a good idea, as Jed Barney found out later.  Not a good idea at all.  Assuming he did it.   Which is all any of us could do, since nobody saw him do it.

It wasn’t long before I heard, rattling about inside my empty shell, what was to become a familiar voice during the next few decades: Move away!  Get out of here!  This other place looks oh, so good . . . what would it feel like?  To be somewhere else!  I’m not a schoolboy anymore; I can go away anytime I want.

That voice was my constant companion for years.  It was a medium for euphoria.  To consider leaving for a new town brought a feeling of inspiration, enthusiasm, a spark of wanting something for a change, as opposed to settling for settling for.

As my Daddy used to say, If you stay in one place too long, you will stagnate.

A man in Albuquerque had a player piano rebuilding shop, and although he had turned me down for a job when I asked him before, I decided to move to Albuquerque, hoping he would hire me now that I had been through school.  I called McDoodle and told him about my plan.  He hopped in his muscle car, which he was so proud of, and zoomed back to Hazing to get me and my stuff.  I moved in with my sister Mo and her little family.

That was the true beginning of my search for the greener pasture at the expense of whoever would put up with me and do most of the work of keeping me alive.

The initial scenario of this initial plunge into the world of a non-schoolboy included pretty much constant companionship with Scorpio McDoodle, who drove me everywhere in the muscle car he was so proud of, and he hung out with me in the room Mo had cleared out for me in their two-bedroom apartment.  One day McDoodle got mad at his Daddy for flying into a rage and spanking him when he wouldn’t stop barking at the dog.  With all the extra space we had in our room, it was felt necessary that a good proportion of it be dedicated to growing baby marijuana plants which we would find a place to grow once they got bigger.  My brother-in-law encouraged us to find such a place immediately, since he had wisely traded in pot for Scientology, and while we were at it we found a whole apartment so we could vacate my brother-in-law’s bedroom altogether.  It was he who had been sleeping on the couch ever since I moved in with them, not I.

As we were moving our stuff out, my sister Mo stood with her husband Aaron in the dining room, the little kitchen table between them, her little daughter clutching her mother’s neck, Mo crying and explaining to her husband that she wasn’t ready for him to move out, which he had suddenly decided he needed to do sooner than later in order to accelerate his progress in Scientology.  He was my living idol at the time, since he was part of the family but not like the rest of us.  I noticed Mo’s ability to openly express her emotions in a matter-of-fact way, something the rest of the family has never shared, except of course myself.  The middle children are, after all, popularly considered to be the most burdened with giftedness.

And we were both the middle child.  She had once experienced a soul retrieval at the hands of a shaman posing as a law student, by the name of Lou Who.  Lou Who had taken her out on a date during the first few months of her freshman year of college for the express purpose of giving her some advice.  He had noticed her moping around campus looking as lonely and gloomy as possible, a trick she must have learned from my Daddy, so he took her out and explained to her how the world works: the smiling are smiled at.  Friendliness attracts friendship.  The kind of simple messages that we never extracted from the convolutions of our home environment.  Mo’s entire personality didn’t change; she just stopped displaying her worst case scenario as we in our family have learned to do in order to apologize in advance for potential failures, and has ever since radiated a sense of knowing who she is and what she wants and to hell with what anybody thinks she should want.  Soul retrieval?  More like, exorcism of the Fatherly Ethic: if in doubt, stare at the floor and pout, and act tough, but only tough enough to be ignorably annoying, not tough enough that anyone would want to beat you up for it.  Mo’s toughness is in shattering the family-derived image of herself and walking away with an intact core of selfhood.

So there she was crying and being comforted by her little daughter, Aaron trying to stay “clear” while she dumped her emotions on him, me and McDoodle tip-toeing past them with boxes of clothes and suitcases full of marijuana sprouts.  It briefly occurred to me that my presence in the home might be a contributing factor to whatever eruption was going on.  It had taken an in-law to say something to me about it.

Life in our new apartment revolved around getting me to work, finding used parts for McDoodle’s muscle car, and making the biggest, most grandiose, heaviest speaker boxes that McDoodle could imagine.  I cannot tell a lie: I was bored out of my mind.  I was not interested in cars.  Piano rebuilding was scarier and more joblike than I’d ever imagined.  I was out of pot, and had no connections in Albuquerque.  I did not want to sit around in my underwear listening to records in an empty apartment.  McDoodle and I never left each other’s side, except to sleep, when we were both home; it never occurred to us, no matter how bored we were with each other.

The melodrama of the bored ensued: we found out we had bedbugs in the apartment, there were threats of lawyers, McDoodle quit his job as a security guard because his 86 pounds didn’t hold enough heat to enable him to stand around in a parking lot at night, McDoodle’s mother tracked him down and begged him to move home, and on and on, and before long we were in a different apartment that I had to pay for because McDoodle was not speaking to his parents, who were heartbroken, and of course I, as the bad guy who the parents blamed for it all, had to pay his rent to keep him from moving back home.  But it wasn’t long before I realized I didn’t enjoy paying to be an extension of McDoodle’s life, and one night I stayed late at work and got drunk so I could use the phone after the others were gone and call McDoodle to tell him to come get his stuff out of the apartment.

It was on McDoodle’s second or third visit to my huge two bedroom apartment that I asked him to give me $32 for back rent and car parts.  He stomped out and slammed the door behind him, and I have never seen him again, or heard from him, or heard anything about him, except that Mo said she saw him on campus and he was back in architecture school, after his fling as my partner in crime had encouraged him to take time off from being goal-oriented.  But hanging around with me cured him of smoking pot, since I used to smoke it out of a dirty tobacco pipe, and if he is still alive, which he is not supposed to be—since he was prepared by his wise pediatricians to die at the age of 21—then I am sure he is either an architect or a retired architect.

McDoodle was the first of a series of handicapped people who came into my life to show me that a handicap is one man’s catalyst and another man’s excuse.  The only time I ever saw him slow down to watch life pass him by was when he was smoking pot with me.  He loved to go to parties where there were older people, so he could get all the attention by standing around the punch bowl telling dirty jokes.  That skinny little smart-ass loved to get drunk and shoot off his mouth.  Since he was intelligent and opinionated, like all Scorpios, he was entertaining when he began to lose control, and since he was so funny-looking, he could proposition all the dames and just get giggled at, and get his cheek pinched for it.

One day back when we were staying at Mo’s apartment, before we got bored with each other, McDoodle and I were hanging out over at Jo Lynn’s house.  Her hippie friends had some LSD, which I’d been wanting to try, though I was afraid to try it because of all the scare tactics they’d used on us in junior high and high school health class.  I bought two hits, because I was depressed and didn’t care if I ever came back from this journey, and because that’s how much money I had.  McDoodle was worried about me, and thought I should try it when I was in a better mood.  I didn’t give a fuck, and in effect I committed partial emotional suicide by swallowing those two pills at that particular time, knowing the extreme reaction I’d had when I first encountered the altered state of consciousness known as marijuana.  By partial emotional suicide, what I mean is that I killed some sick fuck inside me that was telling me to always play it safe and never take a chance in the name of curiosity.  That sick fuck had to go.  Swallow.  Two little purple microdot pills, down the hatch.  Kill that motherfucker that hates me and doesn’t want me to have any fun.  Kill.  Kill. Kill.

Before long I was bored again, since all we ever did was drive around in McDoodle’s muscle car that he was so proud of, and I was pretty sure those hippie friends of Jo Lynn’s had ripped me off.  A couple hours went past, it had just gotten dark, and McDoodle was pulling off into an empty little parking lot to turn around at the end of an obscure dead end.  I noticed a soft blue halo around the globe of a street light, and asked McDoodle if he saw it too.  He assured me that he did not, because it was not there.  I heard consternation in his voice.  It was funny.  I laughed.

That felt good.  I couldn’t believe how good that laugh felt, coming out; almost orgasmic, and in a way even better, because I found that in order to prolong the orgasm, all I had to do was keep rubbing the laugh box, that button in the brain that says Laugh Now.  We started back down the road the way we’d came, and passed a car accident.  That was the funniest goddam thing I ever saw, and I laughed about it till we passed a guy on a bicycle, or a neon sign, or whatever other excruciatingly silly, dopey thing the world had to show me.  I laughed non-stop at everything I saw for the next two hours solid; choking, gasping, out-of-control explosive howling and every other form of laughter, because something tortured in me had become undeniably and tangibly free after what seemed like millions of years of captivity, and brothers and sisters, it was my mission and my grateful praise to laugh out loud without stopping as long as I felt like it, and there was no voice in my head loud enough to make me stop.  You see, ladies and gentlemen, I was filled to the top and overflowing with the sudden irrepressible intuitive proof of my old suspicion that the human race had foisted a phony reality on itself and was spinning its wheels going nowhere trying to uphold not only an illusion, but a mind-blowingly ridiculous delusion, that we need to lie and cheat and steal and posture and present and play games and compete and hook each other with knickknacks and ticky-tacky, to keep society churning away the way it’s supposed to be.  I was so totally vindicated; now that I could see clearly what was really happening around me, with society’s filters stripped from my eyes, I could not keep myself from rolling around in the street beating my fists on the asphalt, clutching my sides, squirting water out of my eyes, I was so overcome with pure raw happiness of the most incredible unbelievable kind.

I defy any asshole in the universe to tell me that this experience was bad for me.

When I had finally calmed down enough to comply with his patient remark that it might be possible for me to stop laughing now, McDoodle stopped at a park so he could fall asleep in the driver’s seat and I could get out and wander around.  This was before all parks had lights at night, and signs that said Closed After Dark.  I wandered around the tree-littered lawns, in complete ecstatic awe of the unreadable, but complete, letters and words that were flowing from the sky through the air in front of me in every direction, all colors of unreadable but perfectly etched words.  But that would have been nothing if not for the psychological effect; the euphoria that came with the hallucinations was the part I really savored: the feeling that everything was OK, I could take a break, it doesn’t matter what happens, it’s all just a delusion, a mass hallucination.  I entered a tennis court and got lost walking around on it.  The feeling of not having to obsessively watch over my shoulder and from the corner of my eye at all times to catch whoever it is that’s spying on me, the feeling of not needing to explain myself to myself, felt so good I stayed lost on the tennis court as long as I could.

Then I walked across the grass to a tree that I could see in another configuration as a cone of dripping purple and green waxy light, and I could feel the tree getting into my mind.  It had an ancient soul, compared to mine.  I heard words in my head.

“We are not here to punish you.”

We are not here to punish you!  Never before or since has anyone said anything that better summed up a two-hour bout of uncontrolled laughter, because I have had no more such two-hour onslaughts of hilarity.  Since that time I have had many acid trips, but nothing will ever beat the first time.  I don’t need drugs any more anyway since I’m now a dream-traveler anyway, and hallucinations no longer impress me; I know that if I tried hard enough, I could conjure up any reality I want, and achieving sensory stimulation by means of hallucinogens is no longer a priority in the course of my average day.

I figure, I’m alive, my senses are all working, why do I have to waste all my energy proving it?

There is much to do.