CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

In which I learn the value of giving up and going away

 

Once we got to Forward Falls, our first stop was at a health food store where Judas bought us each a cheese sandwich with organic tomatoes and alfalfa sprouts, and let me assure you, I had never tasted anything better.  This was my first experience with hippie food, and I would never forget it: the best cheese I’d ever tasted on the best bread I’d ever tasted, and the first alfalfa sprouts ever.  As my last civilized meal, it was unforgettable.

On our way through to the other end of town, we stopped at a grocery store and spent the rest of Judas’s money.  I taunted him for buying cigarettes at a time like this, but he ignored me.  We stuffed the groceries into our backpacks and walked through the little town, until we got to the bridge across the river, into which I was going to deposit Judas’s last two cents, but he wouldn’t let me.  We walked past houses, farms and fields till we found a gated dirt road leading up into the mountains, which we walked up for a short time, but not knowing if we were on public or private land, we soon headed into the forest at a random spot so no one would have cause to suspect our presence or come looking for us.

Since Judas was a record-setting cross-country runner, it was nothing for him to walk straight up a mountain through scrub oak thickets at top speed; he nagged me to walk faster and I harped at him for going so fast in the hot sun straight up the side of a mountain.  The argument was forgotten, however, when we reached the top of a ridge castellated with huge boulders, where we boulder-hopped along the top of the ridge till we found a deer trail leading down into a little aspen-forested valley with a tiny little creeklet running through it, which we had no reason not to call home.

Far from the intricacies of civilized living, I found it easy and natural to feel as free as a bird.  An ostrich, perhaps.  Besides having plenty of granola to eat, and a little creeklet to drink out of, I was having a spontaneous attack of good-natured madness, and I kept saying stupid-funny things in rhyme, in a deep booming voice that made Judas laugh.  At long last, the demands of the human race were behind me and I was never going to have to take their crap again.  Judas immediately ripped open the two dozen packages of vegetable seed he’d just bought, and scattered the seeds around through the trees.  I informed him that his garden would not grow, but he was not impressed.  Unlike him, I had been forced to grow gardens as a child, but in the last few days I’d learned that Judas only responded to questions and concerns that he felt were not completely ridiculous, and obviously I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Judas decided to call our new home “Rivendell,” after the capital city of the Elves in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.  He immediately started collecting long poles to build the home we had planned before we got there.  We started building our wickiup right away, first creating a teepee-like cone of long poles, then piling sod around the outside of the structure to form an insulating, wind-proof wall.  The toy shovel we’d brought was hardly up to the task, and we never did get enough sod collected to finish the job, but the wickiup served very nicely as shelter for the anthill we had built it on.

It couldn’t have been more than a week or ten days before we were flat out of food, with no carrots or radishes poking their noses up through the forest loam for us to harvest.  We quickly discovered wild onions and dandelion leaves, and shortly after that we discovered farts that smelled like home cooking.  And let me assure you, brothers and sisters, home cooking was never far from my mind at this point.  In retrospect I wonder if Judas, who was not normally as stupid or impractical as I, knew what was going on the whole time and was just waiting for me to figure it out; poor little me, however, had not a clue other than mounting depression and a completely new concept of what it is to be truly bored, that this paradise was not going to be my home for long.

The next event in the history of Rivendell was that our little creeklet showed unmistakable signs of intending to dry up for the year, and with each hot day, the prognosis worsened.  Judas informed me that he was moving on to California; nature had decided for him that he was not going to die of hunger, thirst, and boredom now, just because I seemed inclined to do so, despite his aggressive campaign to sell me on coming along with him.  I cannot imagine how, but with almost no food or water, I somehow found the idea of going on to California scarier than staying where I was.  And so it was that I walked Judas up the deer trail to the top of the ridge the very next morning, prepared to say good-bye forever.  He tried to badger me once more into coming along, but I was steadfastly determined to die in this place, and—

—but wait.  It’s all coming back to me.  Here’s what really happened in those two weeks.  I was a wreck the whole time.  Completely disillusioned with what was going on, I came to the conclusion that it was only the presence of another human being that was keeping me from realizing complete independence of spirit, and complete freedom from the sick human joke.  Everything Judas said and did annoyed me, and he took it in his usual quiet resigned way—like someone who had just got done living with five or ten younger siblings.  When the creek started drying up, it was I who drew Judas’s attention to it; I saw it as my opportunity to scare him away so I could be alone at last.  Tricky me.  I never chose him as a friend anyway, that was his big idea.

So here we were, up on top of the ridge, me trying to say good-bye, Judas trying to talk me into coming along.  He was sane enough to fear being alone.  I wasn’t aware that I was afraid.  Finally when he could see that I was not going with him, he asked if he could have one of my two harmonicas, neither of which I had ever done anything with.  I said no, and sent him on his way, and I still feel guilty for not giving him one.

For the next two or three days I lounged around trying to convince myself that I was only there to write that book—the one I had to write before I could die.  I tried a few versions of page one, but with no incoming energy, there was to be no output.  I experienced worse than true boredom; but as usual, my madman act was less than interesting with me as its only audience.  It all boiled down to one thing: I was gonna have to go home, because chickenshit that I was, I had not taken the opportunity to go on the road with my friend, and there was no way on god’s green earth that I was gonna do anything real scary without someone around to make me.  Standing on the edge of the precipice of total aloneness that I had worked so hard to find, I could only turn around and walk away.  It was not in me to jump off.  The great spectacle of my utter emotional suicide would have to wait for another day; I was too depressed and weak from hunger to go to the trouble of starving myself to death. 

This is a typical case of laziness saving my life, as it so routinely has.

Returning to Hazing was fairly uneventful till I was nearly there, at which point I got a ride with some dudes who were actually going to Hazing, so I got too relaxed about where we were, and wound up walking eight miles to town from the farmhouse out Hazing way where those guys actually let me out.  They sure were sorry, too.  I walked for hours, never knowing where I was or which dirt lane I should be trudging down, and not doing anything to find out.  It turned out to be one of those religious experiences, like a vision quest or something, where massive effort and self-sacrifice create a unique vision of some kind; and come to think of it, I probably needed another four or five hours away from my Daddy anyway, considering what was about to happen: I was returning to the ramshackle machine that had created me, destroyed me, and thrown me away as all used up: the remains of my nuclear family.  I was back to my Daddy’s fold, to be coddled and pampered and worried over like the returned prodigal.

My next book will be the tale of what I could have had for a life if I had gone to California with Judas instead of returning to my Mama and my Daddy.

I walked through my Mama and Daddy’s front door late that night, and sure as shit, I knew it, there he was, asleep in a chair in the living room, like a dog waiting for its master to come home.

The dog woke up as I entered the room, and jumped up, wagging its tail.  It ran over and licked my face, and tried to jump in my lap.  When I could get it calmed down, I sent it off to sleep in its bed, and took a long shower before collapsing in my own bed in the executive suite in the basement.

It turned out my parents were finally getting divorced, because my Daddy was being transferred to Portland, Oregon, and my Mama refused to move away with him one more time.  I was invited to accompany him to Portland on an all-expenses-paid vacation for life.  This must have been the vision at the end of the quest.  A new life, mine for the trouble I had gone to by forcing an experience on myself.  A myopic vision for a half-hearted quest.

I can hear my Daddy’s soft whistling.  He wasn’t good at whistling and never tried to be.  He mostly did it when he was upset or nervous.  He only knew a few songs and knew them wrong, whistling them the same watery way every time or singing the same verse over the same way his whole entire life and doing it wrong.  One of the oft-repeated melodies was “The Sound of Love is a Sad Sound.”  That was the only line he knew, so it’s the only line I know.

On a brighter note, I was elated that my parents had decided to get divorced.  All a couple can hope to accomplish after being unhappy together for years with no chance for improvement is to kill time and create drama by sticking pins in each other’s vulnerable places.  Sadomasochistic torture scenes around the dinner table become the only thing in life you can count on, because it’s the only time that the ones you love are all gathered together as a family.

My Mama and Daddy had been afraid that the news of their divorce would flatten me; on the other hand, it actually inspired me.  I suddenly realized how many people had ripped me off during my life with my complete cooperation, and the growing list in my mind was making it hard to sleep, so I made a few contacts with people I needed to confront, and best of all, I got even with that duplicitous psychopath Jed Barney, who had pretended to be my best friend and then made off with Judas’s stereo and my headphones.  At least that’s what I was told he had done.

Those headphones had cost me $20, and I could think of no more satisfying way to get even with a con man that to con him back, so I cooked up a plan and called Jed Barney on the telephone.

He sounded skeptical at first, but I assured him that I considered the rumors about him stealing Judas’s stereo to be obviously nothing more than small-town gossip spread by unsophisticated ignoramuses, and invited him over to play pool in my basement like we used to do.  While he loosened up over a game of pool, I happened to mention that a friend of mine up in the north part of town, between Safeway and the community theater, had bought more Columbian Gold marijuana than he could afford to keep or even sell at a proper markup; as a matter of fact, he was so desperate for money that he was forced to sell it at an extreme loss, which meant that, while supplies lasted, we had the chance to score a serious stash for an unbelievable price, which I quoted him; all I needed was an additional $20 to make it happen.  When I quoted the price, his eyes got wide and he started drooling; when I said all I needed was another $20, he grabbed his wallet before I could finish my sentence.

I informed Jed Barney that we would be forced to walk all the way to north Hazing to make the score, but he had no objection.  On the way up he kept making comments about how naive and gullible Judas was, and I snorted right along with him, and then turned him over and buttered the other side by speaking with contempt of anyone who would drag a man’s name into the mud with malicious gossip just because he is black, or just because he has a criminal record, or grew up in Boys’ Town with a bunch of thieves and boy psychopaths.

When we finally reached Safeway, I informed Jed Barney that my connection lived behind the store, on the next street over, but that he lived with his mother and his grandmother, and it would be ever-so conspicuous if both of us dropped in on him, and Jed took the bait with absolute precision by not only volunteering to go in Safeway and wander around innocently while I carried out the transaction, but even handing me his US Army Surplus gas mask bag, which he always carried around as a shoulder bag, to carry the weed in.  The bag had been his trademark for some time.  As soon as he was in the door, I took off running and ran three blocks to the community theater where my brother Dirk was working, building sets.  I raced down to the stage and told him I needed the car and didn’t have time to explain—he had driven the family’s second car to work—and he reached in his pocket and handed me the keys.  I jumped in the car and drove like a bat out of hell to the gas station way out on the interstate where Prunesquallor was working.  He screamed with laughter when I told him what I had just done, and took off work early so we could drive around and smoke Jed’s pot.  It turned out he didn’t have any, so we threw his marijuana pipe out in a wheat field and went to get some pizza and beer with the twenty dollars I had scammed.  Prunesquallor informed me it would be a good idea to spend the money quickly, since it wouldn’t look good if I should get searched and turned up having any money on me—a highly unlikely thing for me to have on me.

When I returned home, I informed my Mama that if Jed Barney should happen to call or come by, it was of utmost importance that she beg ignorance of my whereabouts, for the sake of my safety.  She informed me right back that she would not lie for me.  So I went to my Daddy and made the same request of him, and he promised to comply.  My Mama and Daddy considered Jed a bad egg, because I had been whining about how he had ripped off Judas’s stereo, and they had looked surprised to see him show up at the front door that afternoon.

The next morning I was lounging around in bed when I heard the doorbell ring, and my insides froze up.  I pretended to be unreachably asleep when my Mama hollered down the stairs that Jed Barney was here to see me, so she came back in a few minutes and informed me that she was not going to allow me to lay in bed ignoring her request to go outside and talk to Jed, who was hopping mad about something, and she didn’t think it was fair of me to force her to deal with it for me when she didn’t even know what was going on.  So I put my boots on—in those days I thought boots would make me invincible, since I had broken a toe once playing karate with Batanwa Jim in bare feet—and trudged up the stairs to meet my doom.

Jed Barney was standing on the front porch conspicuously clutching his hard hat, claiming that in the shoulder bag I had stolen from him, he had left his wallet, and now he needed his wallet back so he could go to work.  Of course there had been no wallet or driver’s license in the bag, just a pot pipe and a few scraps of paper which I threw away.  My Mama stood a few feet behind me the whole time as I repeated one simple fact: “I don’t have anything of yours.”  This was somewhat true: the $20 was gone, the pot pipe was gone, and the bag was now mine.  Eventually Jed got irritated and punched me in the nose, and I stood in shock holding my broken glasses for a few seconds as he shook and trembled, then when I realized my Mama was standing behind me with her hand over her mouth, paralyzed, it became my duty to keep my Mama from having to witness any more violence against my person, so I pushed Jed Barney off the porch and locked the door so he couldn’t get back in.  I complained bitterly to my Mama about my broken tooth and broken glasses; now my perfect set of unflawed teeth, of which I was quite proud, was no longer perfect, and I let her know by a series of grunts and squeaks and half-verbalized I-told-you-so’s that she had better get a grip on where her loyalties lay if she didn’t want to see my choppers in a pile of rubble at her feet next time some random asshole off the street decided I needed to be demolished.

I called the police and informed them that Jed Barney had just assaulted me, which did about as much good as calling the President to inform him that his lawn was green, since Jed’s Mama was some sort of head secretary down at the police department, but they sent someone over anyway and I continued to hold to my assertion that I had nothing of Jed’s.  The officer consoled Jed that I had probably disposed of the items I had stolen from him, and gave up trying to bully the truth out of me, turning to huddle with the poor boy, who was obviously close to him since Jed had been arrested so many times for petty theft by now that they felt like old friends.

I carried the gas mask bag around with me for months, and when I eventually showed up with it at Judas’s house in California, he said, Oh, you brought back my bag.  It turns out Jed had borrowed it from Judas one day and never returned it.

On an even brighter note, it was not more than a few days before my Daddy and I had to be leaving for Portland, so he didn’t have time to give me any shit about this incident, and besides, it would be a while before he would give me any more shit anyway.  I think when I left him in his stew pot like I did, he got in touch with the fact that he didn’t know how to be my Daddy, and thought maybe he better just be satisfied with what he had created for himself and take companionship wherever he could get it, instead of telling people how to live.  The first few months I was with him in Portland, I was in a completely altered state of consciousness because the rickety old family scene was gone; my Daddy was treating me like a mentally disabled sister instead of an unruly teenage son, which was a vast improvement in our relationship.  All I had to do was go shopping and go to movies and go to the library and go to bookstores and take my Daddy to the airport all the time, leaving me ecstatically alone with a house, car, electric typewriter, and cash to spend.

I spent many afternoons downtown looking for someone on the street to sell me a joint.  I was too careful, so I had no success whatsoever.  It was all so frustrating.  I got bored and decided to hitchhike around for the fun of it for a couple weeks.  My Daddy gave me $100 and told me to be careful.  By the time I got to Forward Falls, I was depressed, partly because I was not eating.  I wanted to save the $100 for LSD, take it all at once, and go crazy so I would be put away and taken care of.  I’d seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at least half a dozen times.  I walked to the other end of town, crossed the river, and hiked up to Rivendell, ignoring the signs of an oncoming storm.

Let me tell you about the Forward Falls area.  It is hot and dry in the summer.  About 85º.  Carrying a backpack in the sun on asphalt, it is hot.

But at night, when it’s raining really hard and you have no tent, no tarp, just a plastic garbage bag which you try to crawl into for the first few hours until you give up and lay there with a river of icy water pouring through your clothes, down your neck, through your armpits, and down your back till it runs off your sorry ass into the muddy forest loam that drains it off and away from you, in times like that, it’s not summer anywhere, it’s not warm anywhere, it’s just plain 8000 feet up in the sky and you’re laying there screaming, not for help, not in panic, but because you know you have five hours to go before dawn.

Boy did I feel stupid.  Remember the wickiup?  It was still standing, exactly as we’d left it, and there was a huge piece of black plastic in there that we had left when we abandoned Rivendell.  When I first went in there to make a bed, I heard some sort of little field mouse or something rustling around under the plastic, and I bolted out of there like nobody’s business.  Instead of sleeping in the wickiup or under the plastic or both, I slept in my sleeping bag directly in the pouring rain.  But a whole family of mice stayed dry.

Then I hitchhiked to Albuquerque where I visited my sister Mo and my Daddy, who just happened to be working there that week, since he was in charge of stuff that was happening in thirteen different states, and then I headed over to LA to check out the Primal Institute, but it was closed.  After a nightmare of trying to get out of LA by thumb, I finally got to San Francisco, where I made my way to the Haight Ashbury district, hoping it would be just the place to find some acid.

I wandered around for awhile looking for a neon sign to point me the way to the LSD, but rather than ask directions from any of the hippies, street people, and oddballs that wandered the sidewalks with me, I gave up and headed back to Portland.

And darned if things hadn’t changed in my brief absence.  My Daddy had a new girlfriend named Marleen, who was nice, and would occasionally come over to cook for us, but in addition, it seemed my Daddy was no longer content to pay my way in life, and he suggested that I do some more work on the player piano, since it was not working very well anymore, and he thought he would just make that suggestion, as an alternative to me going out and getting a job.

Now with the pressure on, it became extra important that I begin growing marijuana to generate an income, so I waited till my Daddy was out of town, and took the $80 I had left from my hitchhiking trip—which I had intended to spend in Haight Ashbury—and bought an eight-foot-long, high intensity fluorescent light fixture and some bulbs, and brought them home and hid them under my bed.  I started a few seeds in paper cups on my windowsill, then sat down to wait for the plants to make me rich.

I soon discovered that marijuana sprouting is a lonely occupation, so I wrote to Batanwa Jim and told him to get out to Portland with whatever funding he could muster up, and rent us an apartment where we would both get rich growing and selling pot.  He wrote back and said he was in college now and had just saved enough money to buy a car, and was saving more money now, and he was sorry to disappoint me, but he didn’t want to stop what he was doing right at the moment.  He suggested that I come back to Kansas and go to school with him.

A few days later, I got a call from Batanwa Jim, who had just been dumped by a girl or disowned by his dad or some other kind of bad day stuff, and he was ready to quit school and move out to Portland, but when he got there, he was gonna try and talk me into joining the Navy with him, because it was easy torture and free education, and it only took a few years, then it would be over.

That didn’t sound like enough reasons to join the Navy, but I had confidence that I could manipulate Batanwa Jim in whatever direction I desired once he actually showed up, which he did, to my grateful amazement; as I have always said, if you don’t know how to make friends, don’t move every three months.  You know what I mean?  Anyway, here comes Batanwa Jim in one of those little cars they made back in the ‘70s that weren’t supposed to work anymore after the warranty ran out, and it sure was good to see a friendly face, someone I didn’t have to hide from.

Did I mention that I have always thought people were spying on me?  Everywhere I go, someone is boring holes in my back with staring, probing eyes; but at home, it’s prowlers.  When I was a child I lay in bed listening for the prowler while waiting for sleep to come.

When I think of Batanwa Jim, I feel eyes all over me.  Taking that poor innocent sapling out of his parent grove for basically stupid, if not vaguely fraudulent reasons, made me feel partially responsible for what went on in his life from that point forward.  Not that I started the ball rolling for him in any particular direction; I just gave it a bigger push than I really meant to, into waters I’d barely tested myself.  Even I was distressed at what became of Batanwa Jim.  But it really wasn’t my fault.  He was socially inadequate, immature and reactionary.  That’s why we got along.