CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

In which my manhood is put to the test

 

My good friend and benefactor Judas had created a huge garden out of the flat part of our 33-acre rental which we weren’t paying for out on Freedom Boulevard where we lived with Foot, Von Loon, Ellen and Peter and 20 others.  Judas’s garden was way bigger than he could possibly take care of himself, so John Stoats and I and Jimmy Twotone and anybody else who wanted to would periodically help him with the watering and the weeding.  He believed that the whole garden needed to be totally drenched—saturated—every single day, so he was frantically kept busy trying to reason with people who didn’t seem to understand that if they were willing to eat the fruit, they should be able to make time to water the vine. 

It reminds me of the buzzword he had used repeatedly way back when he first called me in Albuquerque and told me about Rivendell: Exchange.  Everything is an exchange.  I had spent many long minutes trying to put some flesh on that one.  Judas tends to make sparse comments.  Remember he was a Scorpio and the oldest of many siblings.  It boiled down to: everybody had to have something to do, or as Judas liked to put it, everybody had to create a business.  I created Elfin Foods and Germley Garbage, and Judas was secretly instructed to go with me on my food-buying trips, more or less whether I needed it or not, but I pretended I didn’t know this was going on because I liked his company anyway.  He was never sullen.  Irascible, yes, but he didn’t know how to sulk morosely or how to not say what was on his mind.

Judas and Maureen and Debo and others were heavy into Rebirthing, the breathing technique that was supposed to be the cure for Primal Therapy, and I let them try it on me a couple times.  When Judas did it to me, it just made me want pizza.  This could have been my “poverty consciousness;” I have always felt that an urgent need for pizza had always lurked just below the threshold of my consciousness, waiting to spring forth full-blown at the slightest provocation; and I had identified the cause of this nagging threat as Poverty.  It was the knowledge that, at any given time on any day of any month, if I were to go into a restaurant and order a pizza, it would be all over for me financially; I could even wind up in jail.  It was this knowing that left an inner part of me whimpering for pizza all the time.

Maureen’s session with me was more interesting, because as a founder of Rivendell and another Scorpio she scared the hell out of me in general, so I didn’t try to go off on a self-indulgent tangent with her like I had with Judas.  I liked the way all that connected breathing made my hands and feet and face curl up involuntarily, tingling and semi-paralyzed in a pleasant way, and I especially liked the buzzing in my body that was caused by the increased supply of oxygen to my brain and blood.  I thought about trying to get high that way, by breathing continuously all the time, but it was hard to do it without someone there to make me.  It didn’t bring up any repressed memories for me, but Judas says it made him re-experience his birth; as with Yoga, sex, running, working, and everything else he did, he practiced Rebirthing full tilt with his typical excess of energy and over-focused mind.  It’s hard to argue against breathing continuously.  Just because nobody does it doesn’t mean it’s all that bad.  Breathing audibly and visibly just isn’t considered appropriate in a society of sedentary neurotics who need very little oxygen in order to watch TV and drive cars around.

A few days before the seance where I had turned my longing away from LSD at the request of the disembodied Dr. Duran, I had spent the night lounging around with Judas and Debbie Szcxhtain.  I had passed some acid out to my companions and we just hung out and talked and laughed through the whole entire night.

I told Debbie Szcxhtain about a New Idea I had—yes, my darling readers, this is the exact moment you’ve been waiting for all your life—I told her about a go-kart I wanted to build for Stanley the eight-year-old, using an air motor like the motor in player pianos that uses bellows to turn a crankshaft.  Debbie Szcxhtain said, “Go for it, Luther!” and that got me to thinking.  That was the conception of the air car revolution in my mind.  I count the birth of the air car project as a few months later when I started researching my idea: October 31, 1979.

Before that, my only original thought on the subject of alternative cars was the possibility of running a car on sound waves somehow, and then there was the time Prunesquallor had sketched on a napkin at Pizza Hut, a picture of his idea for running a car on the relative wind that the car’s motion generates, using wind powered turbines along the edges of the car to turn this wind into power.  I had never heard of anybody running a car on compressed air, and actually since bellows motors use suction or moving air rather than compressed air out of a tank, I didn’t start thinking about compressed air until October 31, 1980, when my first breakthrough was set up for me by a considerate friend at work who was married to an air car inventor.

Anyhow, I am setting the stage to eventually go into the account of the air car project, but I can’t do that without first mentioning where the crucial boost of encouragement came from: Debbie Szcxhtain.

The fact that I was tripping on acid at the moment of conception has nothing to do with anything.

One day I was at the weekly OIC meeting at the expensive Rivendell headquarters in a professional office building where we couldn’t afford to rent an office, and it turned out that the main item on the agenda was that Peter the Printer and his wife and little girl wanted to join the Rivendell family.  Up to now they had been Rivendell’s employees, since we had saddled ourselves with a print shop and had to have someone to run it.  Peter the Printer and Tony Hill had become good friends, and like all Tony Hill’s friends, Peter the Printer had instant prestige in our organization because of this relationship.  Not that he lacked confidence anyway.  And besides that he was 6’-4” tall and his red hair was nearly three feet long.  He had the practical knowledge of several technical skills, and enough glibness to keep up with Tony Hill.  So Rivendell wanted him, but OIC had to argue about whether we could afford to take on another house before going ahead and doing it.

Peter’s wife, Leanne, tall and thin, with long golden brown hair, and their five-year-old daughter Taisha, stood next to him as he told us what a pain in the ass it was to have anything whatsoever to do with the printing business, but he didn’t mind doing it for us, because he liked our trip and wanted to be part of it.  Leanne was openly skeptical, and I mistook her for a rigid paragon of stern-ness at first because she didn’t crack a smile at this particular meeting, where she expressed concern that her little family, which meant everything to her, would get sucked up into the general flow of the larger Rivendell Family, and that she would end up without any family at all.  She finally decided to give us a try, but there was plenty of tension between Leanne and Tony and some of the other bigwig Rivvies, right from the start.

One night we were all at a big party at one of our houses, and I was standing out on a big second story deck sort of late in the evening when here came Leanne, and she looked happy; in fact, she turned out to be a giggler and a chatterbox, notwithstanding her obvious intelligence and sincere maternal devotion.  I didn’t notice her weaving on her feet because she was dancing and weaving on purpose; unbeknownst to me, she had just made an extremely large decision, and it made her giddy.  She was also drunk.

Leanne flittered up to me and told me, as she looked me in the eyes, that she liked me very much.

“Good deal,” I said, or something equally irrelevant.

She was in a real state, happy happy happy, and I was just bored and wanted to go home, and here was this new lady telling me she liked me.  So what?  It’s nice to know.  I was polite to her but I actually didn’t know what she was talking about.  She weaved back across the big deck after making me promise to come in and see her next time I came by to pick up her garbage, then she got in her chartreuse pickup truck and weaved home, experiencing only one conversation with a police officer before she got home.  She told me about it the next day when Judas and I came over to pick up her garbage.  When we left, she invited us to come back later in the evening when we got off work, and I promised that we would.  I figured she must be lonely, since her husband and her daughter were off at a camp or something called “Campbell Hot Springs” where Maureen had taken a bunch of Rivvies for a Rebirthing retreat.

Judas didn’t want to go back that evening, so I went back by myself.

I don’t remember what she talked about exactly, and I still wasn’t sure what was going on when she asked me if I wanted to take a shower with her, until she added that she felt a little self-conscious asking me to take a shower with her, and wasn’t that silly, she said, considering what she was about to do to me.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Leanne announced that she was preparing to seduce me, and I was not entirely shocked by this; but I had to be grateful to her for stating her intention to seduce me so openly, for by so doing she left me out of the decision-making process altogether; that way I could experience the complete absence of a feeling of responsibility in the situation.  After we had sex I asked her what she was going to tell Peter, and she told me she was going to tell Peter good-bye.  I asked her what I was supposed to do in regards to the selfsame Peter, and she advised me to keep a continuous and consistent distance between myself and him.

In spite of the stress that I was undeniably undergoing, I guarantee you, this whole thing was much easier for me than for anyone else involved.

I had recently moved into a little trailer that was parked on the grounds of the Freedom House, and so it came to pass that the perfect arrangement quickly became obvious: Leanne and Taisha moved in with me almost instantaneously, and Peter carried on his work with Rivendell as a single man.  Leanne helped me with Elfin Foods and it wasn’t long before we’d created our own little family within Rivendell, but somewhat separate from it.

One day when Leanne was off on business and I was left to hang out with Taisha, for some reason Taisha was in a deep purple funk and didn’t want to talk about it.  She was trudging around outside staring at the ground and kicking pebbles.  This was very strange behavior for any four-year-old, and especially for this one, who was normally a jolly and jabbering bundle of animated intelligence.  She wouldn’t talk to me so I left her alone, and when I’d gotten her dinner made, I told her she could join me for food if she wanted to, but she didn’t have to; she could come in whenever she was ready.  I went in and started eating.

The women at the table insisted that I should go out there and haul her into the house and force her to feel better, but I maintained that I could not make her any happier than to give her the freedom to feel whatever she needed to feel, and sure enough, about five minutes after those women gave up on me and filed my whole case in their Stupid Man basket, here came Taisha, announcing that she was ready to eat while she climbed up on my lap and started jabbering like nothing had ever happened.  After that I gained some relief from my reputation as one who professed to know all about child-rearing but without having any discernible experience: the spinster aunt syndrome.  Although I had no experience as a parent, I did have plenty of experience as a child; more than most people.

Another time I gave Taisha a chicken leg to eat, although she and her Mama were vegetarians.  She not only ate it up, she carried it around with her for an hour sucking on the bones.

Taisha had a hard time with wetting her bed, and one night when Leanne had to get up in the middle of the night to change her sheets, I re-experienced what it felt like to wake up in a wet bed every morning when I was a little boy, and I became overcome with emotion and hollered and wailed about that for a while, hoping that I was having a proper primal therapy experience and thereby ejecting some sort of emotional backlog that was hanging me up by being locked up inside me.

Another time I had a dream that Judas lived with a commune somewhere in the woods, and I was horrified to learn that he had been drowned in a flood.  I woke up wailing, and squeezed as much primal therapy out of that as I could.

Leanne got even with my by waking up in a completely panicked state in the middle of the night one night, commanding me to jump on top of her.  I did what she said, and she gradually calmed down, finally explaining to me that something had been trying to suck her spirit out through her toes, and she could only get it stopped by making me lay on top of her.  She said she had been dreaming, just before this, that multitudes of people were cheering and applauding her, because she had just been elected the first female president of the United States.  That’s when the soul sucking started.  By the way, she didn’t take any drugs at all.

Other than that, our relationship was fairly normal until Tony Hill started his shit.

I was at the men’s group meeting one night when the phone rang and it was Leanne calling me to tell me to come home and comfort her, because a wandering visitor who was traveling with a personal friend of hers had just been caught red-handed, by Leanne personally, trying to get Taisha to touch his penis.  I got off the phone and told everybody what had happened, and I was going to leave immediately, but Tony started badmouthing Leanne like she was the worst thing that ever happened to Rivendell and he wished she would just pack up her things and go away.  I was shocked at his timing, not to mention what he was saying.  The Great Socialist was totally off the wall, and I assume he was caving in to the pressure of having created a money-gobbling monster out of what was supposed to have been a pinko sharing experiment, and I figured he needed a scapegoat.  I ran home and told Leanne what he’d said about her, and we began making our plans to depart Rivendell for greener pastures.

It was common knowledge amongst myself and I don’t know who else that Rivendell was on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own collective bad judgment and bad luck.  For once, Judas agreed with me, and as Leanne and I drove off in her pickup with all our stuff, Judas, Foot, and Oshean Freewave Germley were all getting in a van that was headed for Campbell Hot Springs, and not planning to return.

We moved into the spare bedroom of a friend of Rivendell who was an on-call pilot for a major airline.  We knew him because he used to get drunk at Donovan’s Restaurant on his days off and we would have to drive him home and carry him into his house and put him to bed.  He let Leanne and Taisha and I live in his house while we schemed and argued about what we should be doing with ourselves.

One day while we were at the welfare office so Leanne could get some money happening, I was sitting in the waiting room while Leanne was talking to her case worker, and in walked my buddy Ellen, straight from Rivendell.  We got into quite a discussion about what my role should be in the providing of cash for the upbringing of my step-daughter, and the support of her Mama.  I thought I didn’t have to run out and find a job, because I had too much pain and fear in my mind all the time and I really shouldn’t be expected to take care of myself any more than absolutely necessary.  Ellen tried to tell me that it was absolutely my business to help support my step-daughter, and she claimed that I was guilty of thinking of myself as a special case and expecting special treatment.  I said I thought I really was a special case, and she amazed me by holding steadfastly to her assertion that I was not special and that I should be willing to work for a living, since I was obviously physically and intellectually capable.

I believe that this was the first time that someone was able to put this message across to me both forcefully and from what was obviously a loving and more practical than judgmental perspective.  I have never felt more tempted to listen to that oft-heard argument than I was by Ellen’s way of presenting it.

That doesn’t mean she was right.

It was after a long, dragged-out, screaming, crying, down-on-her-knees begging for my attention episode over whether or not I should go have a cigarette that I told Leanne that I was a weight around her neck, and I was going to go away and work and prove to myself that I could be a responsible breadwinner.  I told her I would come back in a year, when I was different, and she could have me if she cared to wait, but I was too uncertain of my ability to take care of a family and I didn’t want to experiment on her and Taisha, so I got my backpack and went to the highway and hitchhiked to my Mama’s house in Hazing, Kansas.

Leanne was one of the most wonderful, affectionate, exciting, intense, interesting, and interested women that I have had the privilege of knowing up close.  I miss her every day.

Rivendell didn’t last another year.  One of the counselors went to visit one of the placements who had gotten himself thrown in jail, and the counselor had a little lump of hashish with her, which they found when they searched her purse.  That was pretty much the last straw for Rivendell.  They went bankrupt with a million dollar debt, and two serious liability suits against them, leaving each member of OIC with $10,000 to pay off to creditors after all the settlements were made.

My last word on Rivendell: those people saved my life.

I quickly came up with the idea of going to Lawrence, Kansas to work in the pipe organ factory there.  When I got to the factory I walked into the office and announced that I wanted a job, and the receptionist looked at me and my scraggly beard with pitying eyes, for Lawrence, Kansas was a little town with a big university and odd jobs were not to be had in a pipe organ factory anyway.  As she was trying to console me by jotting down my name and phone number, I happened to mention that I was a piano tuner, and her face lit up, and she ran into the personnel manager’s office.  He came out and hauled me into his office and hired me on the spot without even sniffing my armpits first, and told me to be back on Monday morning for my first day of work.  I was thrilled to death to be working full-time making $4.04 an hour plus overtime.  I felt I was well on my way to proving myself to Leanne.

My supervisor was a big noisy Texan—of which there is no shortage anywhere in the world—and a slob, and a seasoned organ man, not to mention a musician, as was nearly everybody at the factory.  He ran the Assembly Room, a huge three-story-tall room where we put together what the rest of the factory had built from scratch.  We soldered up all the circuitry, and built the frame that held everything together.  We found all the bugs and fixed them, then took it all apart, packed it in the semi, then drove or flew to some little church in some little town and took it back out of the truck and tried to put it back together again.  Each organ was custom-built to fit a specific room in a church or concert hall, and the engineers, who had personally measured the room before designing the organ, made the organ theoretically fit like a glove.   What that meant to us installers was that we had to redesign some things because, for example, not having room behind a corner post made something impossible to do once there were walls around the organ, or the room had shrunk an eighth of an inch since it was last measured and the whole beastly multi-story, room-sized mega-contraption just plain didn’t fit in the room it was made for.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I hated this job.  There were wonderful things about it, like working in a 100-year-old building, and I learned a lot, but I had to think, make decisions, and take actions that changed the physical universe, and my actions affected a whole building full of people.  Well, not really, but I couldn’t help thinking that people were constantly looking at me, sizing me up, getting ready to pounce on me because of what I didn’t know.  There was a balcony where the second floor people looked down on us in the assembly room.  The owner, who had inherited the company, would stand up there and watch us, and if he ever saw anybody put their hands in their pockets, that worker would hear about it from the big noisy Texan.  There was no place to hide and always plenty of work to do; usually too much.  The only thing I liked about overtime was the paycheck, but I was amazed how little I could do with the money, which seemed like a lot when I got it but then evaporated in front of my eyes.  I felt that for the infinite amount of effort I was delivering I should be getting—well, to tell you the truth, I just wanted my freedom back.  I was a nervous wreck being out in the world full time, constantly aware of being watched, whether it was true or not, because I hated being in this place where I was surrounded by people who knew and cared more than I did.  The initial challenge that my supervisor greeted me with the first time we met—So you want to be an organ man!—taunted me throughout the assignment, because I didn’t.

It was at this time in my life—the first sign of resigning myself to the Fact of Work—that I developed a stabbing pain in the ass, and I will never forget the first time I felt it: I was stepping up about 20 inches to a platform at the factory and a sharp, vaguely familiar but unrecognizable pain stabbed me somewhere in the butt cheek.  I limped a little that day, then it went away.

It may have something to do with the refrigerator injury (see below), or it could be stress alone; I started feeling the pain regularly, in one leg for a year, then in the other leg for a year, then in alternating legs, and eventually I got away from obsessively keeping track of its meanderings, but I never went to a doctor and still haven’t.  I eventually came to call it sciatica and for a time I blamed it on stress, though now I blame it on kidney malfunction prompted by cigarette smoking.   Sciatica has been my friend off and on for so long that I actually get a jolt of reunified recognition when it comes back after a long absence.  We are such old friends, my pain in the ass and I, for how else would I have become so comfortable and companionable with a physical pain, except to have one as a familiar?

There have been times, especially during the early years with sciatica, when it literally took me 20 minutes to crawl across my bedroom floor to turn off the alarm clock, and I’m not talking about being groggy or lazy, I’m talking about real pain, with me writhing around—as slowly as it is possible to writhe—trying to discover mini-movements towards the other side of the room that didn’t cause a sharp stabbing pain somewhere in one of my legs or butt cheek areas.  You can’t tell by looking at me, but I have endured pain.  Sometimes when I try to step up, or balance on one foot, I am convinced that my left leg mobility has deteriorated permanently.  Like a little boy, I am proud of my limp.  So indulge me, because for the life I have lived, I need all the excuses I can get.

It just so happened that Joybroth and Shade Further both were living in Lawrence at this time, attending the university and working.  Shade  Further was out of touch since she hadn’t been speaking to me for some undisclosed reason.  Joybroth was married to Ocepi Germley, and he worked at a university job  where he had met Kenny, a warehouse supervisor for the university, who rented me the bedroom in his apartment when I first moved to Lawrence.  Kenny let me pay by the week and didn’t rip me off for deposits and all that crap.  It was just a nasty little basement apartment anyway, full of those little brown roaches that thrive in old greasy apartments.

Kenny’s bed was in the living room with the foot of the bed pointing toward the front door so that if anyone tried to break in while he was asleep, he would be awake with his gun carefully aimed at them before they could get in.  Whenever I got home, he’d have to let me in, because I couldn’t have a key.  He always came to the door with a loaded revolver.  He was retired from the roofing business, and apparently his warehouse job and basement apartment were some sort of a hideout; he was expecting visitors and some kind of confrontation, but he didn’t know how long it would take for them to find him.  Kenny was a nice guy, but he was of the obese persuasion, and on top of that he was narcoleptic.  That means he had to keep talking to stay awake.  Whenever I’d get home he’d always be there, in bed, asleep in front of the TV.  He gets his gun, lets me in, failing to accidentally shoot me one more time, and as I stand there unwillingly glued to a spot on his floor, stymied in what was to be a mad dash for my room, he demonstrates his keen knack for using a pair of ears—mine—as a part of his fiendish plot to keep himself awake by listening to the sound of his own voice.  It was like taking a National Enquirer pill, and then finding out, too late to do anything about it, how long the effects last.

I could not relax in my room.  I had not come to this town, which is the Berkeley of Kansas, to have to hide in my room so I wouldn’t have to listen to a lonely narcoleptic bachelor with no real interests trying to keep himself awake by making conversation with me.  It brought up terrible feelings in me that I could never fall into a casual conversation and flow with it; I would stand to the side, a twitchy spectator, and take tentative lunges in the general direction of conversation, but with Kenny I didn’t need to try too hard because he didn’t need my help holding conversation with me.  If I talked too long he would just go to sleep anyway.

Once while I was standing there being a listening post he noticed me bending backwards to pop my back and complimented me on being relaxed enough to do that.  This got me all fired up and I worked overtime to pop my joints more and more, always looking for new ones I could do.

It reminds me of the first time Leanne took me to her bedroom closet to show me the shirts she had made for her husband, Peter the Printer, out of material she had woven herself on her own loom.  She was jabbering excitedly about her conquest of the material world when I couldn’t help but notice her absentmindedly reach up with a pinkie, whisk a little booger out of a nostril and flick it on the floor without even slowing down in her description of her weaving art.

I was elated.  This person, who I looked up to immensely because of all her energy, enthusiasm, and accomplishments, had just picked her nose without even thinking about it.  Since I had a constant tape loop in my head ordering me to keep my finger out of my nose, I had to think about it all the time, to stop myself from doing it too much, which I would do if I wasn’t careful because the voice telling me not to do it just had the effect of reminding me to do it.  (Refer to CIA Classified Bulletin #xyz123 entitled, ”The Power of Reverse Psychology in the Reinforcement of Compulsive Habits, Especially With Regard to the Drug War as a Subliminal Marketing Technique for CIA-Sanctioned Cocaine Inundation of the Western World During the Proposed Reign of Ronald Reagan as Trainer for Director Bush and His Heirs.)  But some circuit got crossed in my role model data banks and I became compelled to pick my nose incessantly for a year-and-a-half, till it was scab-on-scab, and even till scabs refused to form, till finally I found the inner strength to force myself to keep my teeny tiny little fingers out of my teeny tiny little nose, without exception, for at least a week, and that was that.  It was almost as hard as giving up cigarettes, which I do several times a month, just for the exercise.

I mention this only so that if I should be forced to run for president to get what I want out of life, I will not be destroyed by people dredging up the worst things they can find out about me; I have already told on myself worse than they could hope to.

My second excuse for a place to live in Lawrence was a basement apartment in one of the big old wooden houses that slumlords like to split up into student apartments.  When I inquired about the place, I was warned that it had not been cleaned yet, but I looked at it anyway.  The last tenant had been a young man with little zest for organization.  All his unwanted possessions littered the floor, and dirty socks and underwear comprised the main component of the mixture.  Apparently this was someone who only needed a place to sleep and change his underwear; I didn’t blame him for not wanting to be there any longer than absolutely necessary, because it was the creepiest of all basement apartments, with nary a window, not even a chink in the concrete to inform the tenant what planet he was living on.  Nevertheless, I had been offered some kind of wonderful consideration if I would do the cleaning myself, like, You can move in today, Sucker, if you do my job for me, Idiot.  And you know me, I can’t turn down a good deal, so I moved on in with my kitty cat, Storm Warning, who was the brother of Like a Hurricane, Shade  Further’s cat.  Storm Warning ran away and eventually found his brother after he was adopted by someone on that side of town.  The two cats would enter Shade  Further’s house together through the cat door, and Storm Warning, who had become fully grown before he had re-appeared, would come right over to me and jump up on my lap.  He wouldn’t let anyone else touch him, since he was just visiting; he was drawn to me alone, which proved his identity to my satisfaction.

I was told that a refrigerator would be delivered to my new apartment promptly, and after I reminded the landlady of her promise, she promptly brought over the nastiest piece-of-shit refrigerator you ever saw.  I am not exaggerating, it was literally full of maggots and cockroaches, I shit you not.  So I ran over to Kenny’s house and brought him back with me, and we moved the refrigerator outside, but I was so righteously pissed-off that I stupidly rushed the refrigerator eviction by pushing the beast along with my leg, and thereby ended up with a pulled muscle in my groin, and Kenny had to take me to the emergency room so I could be told I had a pulled muscle in my groin.  On the way back from there we stopped so he could buy me an ice cream cone, and there in the flesh was Shade  Further, who I would often run into in this way, ending long spells of not hearing from her.  Thus ended the latest spell of not hearing from her, and her presence in Lawrence was a welcome spot of warmth in my life.

I called up my landlady and repeated my prior success with the bedbug incident back in Albuquerque by once again refusing to be drawn into an argument, and only repeating one simple statement: You are going to give me my deposit back so I can pay my emergency room bill, or I am going to sue you for putting that refrigerator in my apartment.  It worked: she gave me my deposit back.  The $60 helped me get out of that apartment right away, which was sort of an underlying theme in the negotiations between the landlady and myself.

Joybroth lived in an apartment building where one of the other tenants, Old Yeller, had befriended him.  Old Yeller, Joybroth and I put our funds together and rented a beautiful old two-story wooden house for $350 a month from a nice young couple who had just bought it and weren’t ready to live in it yet.  It had never been rented before, so for once I got to live somewhere in Lawrence, Kansas without having to constantly watch my back for fear of being jumped by a mob of hungry cockroaches.  Across from our porch was an old brick church with parking places lining the street marked “CHURCH PARKING ONLY ON SUNDAY,”  so I named the house Only On Sunday.  The kitchen was big enough to play Ping-Pong in, but Old Yeller liked to cook, so the kitchen was the place to hang out and listen to Old Yeller talk about himself.  It was worth it, because the food was good and he always smoked us under the table after dinner, then we would watch HBO and smoke his pot till he passed out in his chair drinking beer.

Old Yeller was another of those people I fit into the prototype for which I used Donovan West as the icon.  These types deliver a monologue to you—but not about anything having to do with you, only about their life, their opinions, their particular way of doing certain things, whatever, as long as it’s about them, and it’s all stated in grandiose tones that lodge themselves in the center of the listener’s attention.  Unfortunately, Old Yeller was hurting his brain with alcohol, and as the months went by, his experience of having had to kill an old man in Vietnam and his anger toward his mother were getting stirred up in his fogginess, and he would start screaming horrible things sometimes when he was alone in his room.  A guy I knew at the pipe organ factory had known him years earlier, and this guy was intensely saddened by what had become of Old Yeller’s spark after several years of sitting in a chair every night and drinking himself to sleep.  Old Yeller was very intelligent, but he was becoming confused, belligerent, prone to tantrums and paranoia.  His stepfather was a successful inventor, a Canadian.  Old Yeller was a short little guy of Scandinavian extraction with a pot belly and curly blond hair and beard.  He looked like one of the dwarfish folk out of The Hobbit.  I was fascinated by men who could talk incessantly, whether they had something to say or not.

Now that I was working for a living I had to find a new way of getting the intensity out of life that I craved since some of my earlier ambitions such as bookbinding and studying Welsh mythology and praising Jesus  and screaming primally and losing my mind and lynching nuthouse authorities had faded in importance.  I have always needed an underlying theme to my days, something to be intensely involved with, something to push me into leaving my safe place from time to time, because my safe place, as valuable as it is to me, quickly fosters nearly lethal boredom.  Lately I had been looking for an activity that would help me feel like I was doing something about the suicidal and nest-fouling stupidity of the human race.  Having other people’s concerns monopolize 40 or more hours of my week made me truly desperate to find some form of doubly-intense diversion during my evenings off so that I would not mull over the details of my job when I wasn’t there, which would have had the effect of keeping me at work all night.  I became obsessed with the idea that I could not stand back and watch the humans destroy my Planet out of greed, stupidity, laziness, ignorance, and negligence.  I could not stand back and watch the meanest and most power hungry people tell us what to eat, what to wear, what to drive, or what to think about reality.  I felt I could never get used to the status quo, which I called the Suicide Dance or the Suction Highway or the Collective Average, and I felt driven to butt up against its voice—the Hoveltongue—to lash out with a message, to deflate the monopolies and bury the polluters and defeat the warmongers by means of one unifying Better Idea so all-encompassing as to wipe out many bad ideas with its gradual society-wide adoption.  I was frustrated because there was a whole world of perfectly good causes to choose among, and because I didn’t know how to decide what I should do, and because I no longer had unlimited time in a day, so I had to pick my project carefully, because I only had time for one, and it would also have to fulfill a great variety of my personal interests in order to keep me involved enough to carry through.  I knew I must lose myself in it or not bother, so I chose something I thought was extremely relevant to the interests of everyone in general, and I required a test, research to prove to myself that the Task I had decided to take on was the one thing that really needed to be done, above all other things, in order to save the humans and the home they threatened to ruin.

I decided that it would be my goal, or my personal Task, to eliminate the internal combustion automobile engine from the face of the Earth.

Now I admit, I was already biased in favor of this being the thing that most needed to be done, because it just so happened that I already wanted to build a car that ran on air, but I needed a good reason to do it.  And I recognized my bias, so to ensure myself that the replacement of fossil fuels with a benign energy source was the biggest blow in the head I could possibly deliver to the evil, controlling side of the Establishment, and that I wasn’t just suckering myself in the direction I wanted to go as I was so wont to do, I did some research.  I found that half of the energy use in the USA was represented by petroleum consumption, and half of that petroleum use was accounted for by passenger cars burning fuel.  That makes cars the number one energy consumer.  And it makes auto and oil interests the greatest monopolies that ever got us down on our knees and whipped us since the invention of the corporate so-called entity.  I decided that replacing the gas car would be the single greatest contribution I could make to the well-being of the Earth, to the potential economic health of the masses, to the establishment of sustainable technology, and to the freeing of the human race from the Evil Landlord Syndrome, and I was not willing to settle for a lesser goal, because I was easily bored and really needed to keep my mind off my job in my spare time so I could keep the silly job long enough to prove I wasn’t some sort of mentally crippled burnout, thereby coming to deserve Leanne’s love.

So that’s why I decided to save the world: to escape the conviction that I was a useless schmuck.

Then I was worried that there might be a better alternative auto than a car that runs on air, and I didn’t want to dig into a cause that was bogus, so I devised a list of criteria and judged the various alternatives on a scale of 1 to 5 for each criteria of advantageousness, and when I was done with this study the air car got the best score by far.

That meant I was ready to take on literally the greatest task of re-education that I could think of; not that I put it in messianic terms myself, but someone clued me in later that I had set out to save the world.

At first I wanted to make a large wooden bellows motor, with bellows six feet tall acting as pistons to drive the car.  A big blower like the one that supplied the massive amounts of air required to make the pipe organ wail would move air through the air motor to make the bellows each collapse in turn, which would turn a crankshaft, which would make the car go.  And the source of energy to run the blower?

My star-struck students, I must admit that at the time I was not aware of the existence of the Laws of Physics, or the Laws of Thermodynamics in particular, and it is with great embarrassment that I expose myself as a former “believer” in perpetual motion.  Really only a believer by default; I was just ignorant of the fact that a person sitting on a bicycle seat pedaling a blower is not going to move enough air to make a car go; I was—because of ignorance—a seeker of the impossible, but my intentions were good and my general aim, to run a car on air, was sound.  I couldn’t make heads or tails of the charts on the power consumption of blowers, but I was seeing the word horsepower a lot, and in an attempt to define the term so I could use it, I learned about a lot of useful concepts such as force, work, power, efficiency, etc.  It was a few years before air car inventor Terry Miller straightened me out about perpetual motion—you can’t create or re-use energy—but in the meantime I had a calculator and an awesome university library and a little desk in my room where I would sit till too late at night, randomly stabbing at this growing urge I had to prove that the most wonderful possible thing could be true, changing the whole world for everybody.  Who wouldn’t want that for a hobby?

I used my grocery money to buy some plywood, a saw, and an electric drill, and tried to build the blower.  I turned Old Yeller’s dining room into a wood shop for a weekend, and when I finished my beautiful masterpiece that was going to save the world instantly, it was a piece of shit and didn’t put out enough air to blow a gnat off your nose.  But that was OK, because it meant I could put my tools away and get serious about learning something, and it was a long time before I tried to build something again, for I am a serious research freak, and any project that involved going to the library and looking for really obscure information could get me deeply lost in a very pleasurable experience.

I will state outright and forthwith that at this very point in my life, I could have been a few months and a few thousand dollars away from my own real air car if I had been the sort of person to take his excitement to people who could help him do something with it.  But it has never been my thing in life to ask for things, which is why I took up working in favor of hitchhiking, because with working you only have to ask for a job every so often, but with hitchhiking and bumming off friends and relatives, I had been constantly asking for something.  Similarly, I never could make it as a self-employed piano tuner because I wasn’t out in the community telling everybody I wanted to tune their pianos, I was home playing my guitar and I had never had either a phone or a car since leaving my parents’ house.  And therefore, as was my habit with my hobbies, I made a mistress of my intense interest in this air car project, and she was my personal problem to figure out.

In Lawrence that year I just happened to have a few casual friends.  I hung out with a guy named Roger from the pipe organ factory who met me for lunch at the infamous Red Lion lunch spot to look over my first-ever set of drawings showing what kind of air car I wanted to build.

The Red Lion was a little storefront cafe from another dimension.  It was a little off main street, downtown on a semi-deserted block, surrounded by parking lots.  There was no sign, no advertising, no phone number.  The big window in front overlooking the sidewalk was always covered by a heavy red velvet curtain, and on the dusty windowsill sat a little beat-up red ceramic lion.  It looked like someone had set it there for a second on their way to the thrift store and never remembered to go back and get it.

Roger coached me the whole way, because apparently there were unwritten rules by which the Red Lion functioned.  It was only open Monday through Friday, and only for lunch.  Roger said he had never seen a woman eating there.  The woman that worked there seemed perfectly normal.  The owner, Bill, a red-haired gentleman in his fifties, had diamonds in his teeth, and was probably perfectly normal too.  His food was mundane and a little salty, but eating in his cafe was a once in a lifetime experience.  Once inside, you would sit down and mind your own business, and you could converse quietly with the person at your table.  There was only so much room, and that was it.  No lines outside.  A sign on the inside of the wooden front door said, “Don’t tell your friends.  Remember, it’s your seat!”

When Bill was ready to serve, he would start rubbing two big knives together, and everybody—mostly young men in plaid shirts and jeans—would calmly stand up and get in line around the array of steam tables.  If you were new, you didn’t dare ask for anything special, or you’d be thrown out.  You’d get up to him and he asked, without looking up, “What’ll it be, darling?”  The last guy had been asked, “What’ll it be, dear?”  You respond, I’ll have the special, Bill.  That’s all you say.  Anything else is walking on thin ice.  He hands you a very ordinary cafeteria style mish-mash of food group representatives of his choosing, and you definitely do not forget to say, Thanks, Bill, as you take your tray and quickly get out of the way, and it’s Thank you, darling, Thank you  dear, till everyone has been served.

If Bill knows Steve and likes him, he might ask, You real hungry today, Steve? and Steve would say he sure was, and Bill would fix him up with an extra helping of something.  The woman who worked there whizzed by everybody’s table and got everybody’s soda orders, and got everybody’s money.  Then with everyone served, Bill and the woman stood around talking with some of their favorite customers while everybody else quietly ate their food and kept the conversation to a minimum.  With the meal finished, you stood up and left, each of us turning around on our way out the front door, waving and calling out, “Thanks, Bill!”  and Bill would respond, in turn, first, Thank you, Darling! and then, Thank you, Dear!

I don’t know any more about Bill than that, except that he was having some health problems and he had to take care of someone else who was sick, and the cafe closed shortly after I was privileged to attend lunch there.

Roger thought my drawings were cute and fascinating, and they inspired him to go home and built some little bellows-powered marijuana pipes, but that’s as interested as I could get him to be.  I thought if I could get access to the wood shop at the pipe organ factory, we could put together some hellacious bellows motors and an awesome wooden frame.  I just kept on thinking, because I was not going to be the one to ask the owner of the factory for special dispensation.

One day I was determined to buy the parts to build an air car, and I only had $75, so I had to hurry up and spend it.  I happened to run into my brother Dirk, and he walked to the dime store with me and accompanied me as I negotiated a purchase of two identical crappy new junk bicycles half-assembled with a few parts lost.  I intended to tie the two together somehow to make a four-wheeled car, but fortunately that was the last penny I spent on that particular project.  My research at this time became stymied by not knowing how to sift usable information out of engineering books, and by the fact that I had not yet considered using compressed air.  I just wanted to use low pressure suction with big motors to make up for the lack of energy density in the fuel medium.  With the little bit of information I had about physics, like the formula for horsepower, I spent many long hours, way past beddy-bye time, dinking around with my calculator, pretending and wishing and hoping, but going in circles with no clue what I should be doing, but I stayed with it based on my faith in the idea.  I actually thought I was the first person who had ever thought of running cars on air.

I knew deep inside that the simplest, cleanest, safest, cheapest, least environmentally impactful alternative is the one that should be used.  It seemed obvious to me that a car that takes in air, adds nothing to it, uses its pressure and/or motion, and exhausts it chemically unchanged, is the best alternative—if it works.  For a year I kept at my ponderous, circular, speculatory, wish-based search for usable information, having nary a clue what it was that I needed to learn about in order to solve the problems.   I knew, based on experience, that air had the ability to convey mean, tough, positive power: serious, continuous, even torque.  I had seen the power of the little wooden bellows motors used in player pianos, and you could not pay me to stick my finger in the works of one running at top speed.  An engine is an engine.  The simplest is the best.  Can it be more obvious?  A gas engine is already an air engine.  It already takes in air and compresses it and expands it and exhausts it, all the same things an air car would have to do.  So why put gasoline in it?  Except that we’re being told to.  That’s not a good enough reason.  If you take about a thousand stupid little parts out of a gas engine and several big nasty ones too, and change a few things and add a few things, it is possible to make an air car using the engine you already have.  But I’m not supposed to talk shop here.  The point is, a gas engine is an air engine with a temperature.  A sick joke.  A true Rube Goldberg device.

Joybroth was worried about me because I was staying up all night playing with my calculator, but since I was stoned on Old Yeller’s pot I couldn’t see wasting a free high by going to sleep on it.  I eventually started to wear down, got the flu, and when I came out of that, it was nearly Spring, I had been building pipe organs for  four-and-a-half months, I had no money to build an air car with, and I got pissed at Leanne.  I decided she had just used me to get out of her marriage or something.  I decided she had stolen me away from Rivendell.  I don’t remember what all I decided.  I got so pissed I decided to kill myself.  I had seen a jimson weed plant growing by an alley and had taken some seeds home.  I wrote some sort of farewell note to Leanne and swallowed three seeds in a ritual that I don’t remember, but that had some sort of dark, I Am The Greatest Victim Ever sort of theme.  I expected to hallucinate out of control for a brief time, then run around oblivious to my surroundings, knocking furniture over, then run down the road and jump in front of a car, or just die writhing in convulsions from the poisonous medium that the hallucinogen comes in.  Since I neither died nor hallucinated nor writhed nor obtained so much as a headache for my trouble, I became a new man, and fell head over heels in love with Leanne again for the first time, and started writing her letters telling her that I was headed her way right now, and she better be ready to be swept off her feet by a seasoned working man ready to take on the obligations of a family.

I gave two weeks notice at the pipe organ factory, on the day that I was told that the new general manager wanted to promote me to assistant foreman of the road crew and give me a raise.  I politely explained to my boss, the big Texan, that I was in love with a woman in California, neglecting to mention my other reasons for leaving—it was Spring and I hated building pipe organs—and he patted me on the head and expressed his desire to kick my ass for deserting him, and that was that.

I gave all three of my bicycles to my brother Dirk, or sold them to him for a good price, and got my stuff together and headed for California to find Leanne.