CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

In which I am pursued in vain by still further career paths

 

I hurried back to the river the very next morning in Sunny’s car and found her frantically wandering along the road in the process of organizing a search party.  She was a little bemused to see me drive up in her car, and when I informed her that the ordeal I had prescribed for us had been canceled 26 days early due to lack of interest, she hollered Yippee and ran into the Ranger Station to call off the search for me, and we loaded up our stuff and went home to Sky Ranch.

The trip had woken Sunny from her psychotic slumber and it wasn’t long before she had found us a new engineer to advise us on what was coming to be known in casual conversation as “the air car project.”

I had put together an air car design that I felt was sure to go 200 miles between fill-ups.  Sunny’s friend from Reno, Ed Chubb, was much friendlier and more tactful than Mr. Spooky had been.  He listened carefully to what I had to say, taking notes on his engineer’s pad.  Finally when it was his turn to talk he complimented me on the thoroughness of what research I had been able to do and upon the worthiness of my intentions, then with great sorrow went on to inform me that there were a few sad facts about air that I had failed to take into account.

The first of these disappointments was that air actually does weigh something—so much, in fact, that the amount of air that I proposed to haul around in those ultra-light, ultra-strong, carbon filament-wound tanks—which I had found out about on that winter evening when all those planets lined up and everything was either supposed to slide into place or slide out of place—that much air would weigh over a ton.

While my mind jumped to thoughts of self-destruction and Darshan and Porsche Doer began to pull the “closed forever” sign down over the get-rich air car schemes they had in their minds, Ed Chubb went on to give me more extremely important basic information on compressed air in the form of Disappointment #2: compressed air changes in temperature at the same time that you use it, and this sort of thing has to be accounted for mathematically.  In a roundabout way, he was not only telling me that my idea wouldn’t work because of air’s weight; he was also telling me that my research on how compressed air works had only just begun. He said that even with his engineering experience, he’d have to do some serious studying before he could hope to suggest anything.  What he also was telling me, which neither of us realized, is that because air changes temperature anytime you do anything to it, it is a refrigerant, making it possible to use it as a heat-pumping to absorb free solar heat from the surrounding atmosphere to use as fuel.  However, I was not yet stupid enough to realize this.

So there you go.  Darshan and Porsche Doer were scared away from intense involvement with the air car project; Sunny was out of her room gleefully mixing with the household, which drove me straight up the wall, but she still insisted on paying my rent since she had lost ten pounds on our little outing; Porsche Doer and Grave Darn were walking the two miles from town to Sky Ranch every day to help harvest Judas’s huge garden next door at Ma and Pa Partridge’s; the Monte and Lynne thing was losing it to Monte’s drinking; Darshan and Jaia were more and more closeted together; and I was bored, lonely, discouraged and left out, not to mention broke with no options except to find a job and, relatedly, tired of smoking dope to get happy and of then being too happy to care about any form of responsibility and then too tired to be happy.

On one of my recent trips to Campbell Hot Springs I’d taken a hike to the top of the mountain overlooking campus and discovered on that hike what I called “The Uphill-Downhill Mirror Syndrome.”

Tired but exhilarated from a long hike, I’d realized as I was trying to get down the mountain without getting entangled in the brushy patches that made you turn around and go back, that when you indulge in going downhill because it’s easy, you’re often fooling yourself; sooner or later the act of going downhill will have to be made up for by an uphill climb, or if sloppily done an unfortunate downhill plunge could lead to a nightmarish forced uphill march.  As long as there is a need to stay alive as successfully as is conveniently possible, then effort comes first; or as a sleeping bag salesman once told me when showing me how to stuff a sleeping bag into its cloth storage sack: “Work hard early.”

This later gave way to the Frawmbickle/Frumbessle Paradox, in which the Frawmbickler chooses to try new things and gains energy from seemingly using it in a sort of momentum flywheel or energy investment called Gralthy.  The Frumbessler, on the other hand, chooses the easy way, the usual route, and loses energy by seemingly hoarding it by doing nothing that requires a real effort.  The lost energy is applied as a momentum brake called Gropely.  The Frawmbickler is energetic, relaxed and creative, while the Frumbessler is bored, inactive, indulgent and miserable.

So as November approached once again, I took a long look at the $5 per week that I was living on and the amount of pot I craved for no reason and the amount of time I had to rub my shirt, and I arrived at the conclusion that my sister Glenda and her family up in Portland might as well be the next victims in my eternally halfhearted quest for an easy job and free rent.

So off I went to live with Glenda and Carlitos and their beautiful brown children.

Last time I’d lived in Portland, the youngest had been only five and had liked me because of my warts, my mismatched socks, and because I constantly made funny noises.  This time, Glenda congratulated me for “getting my behavior under control.”  As if my Grandpa Zdaemon ever got his funny noises under control; he had died suddenly of an unexpected heart attack in the middle of teasing one of my cousins in his silly wordless way.

I was temporarily rabidly opposed to smoking marijuana, which is the level of emotion I needed to muster up in order to generate an actual Abstinence Event, so as an alternative to pot I disciplined myself to work on a new novel—Being Fooled—and to learn how to function coherently while my body was asleep.  When I got tired of writing late at night I would lay down on my back with my knees up so I wouldn’t go to sleep by accident, visualizing a simple X, two intersecting lines, making the lines as fine, dark, straight, and unwavering as possible.  Somehow I managed to hold to the exercise long enough to produce excellent results.  The X eventually became a shimmering, glittering jewel constantly changing its shape, all of this drugless hallucinating caused by holding the attention in one place by a prolonged act of will.  I watched motionless in awe as what had for weeks been a forced visualization now took on a life of its own.  The shining, multi-colored crystal sent rays of light shooting silently in all directions, like a star.  I was so overwhelmed by the success of my concentration exercises in inducing spontaneous waking hallucinations that I stopped doing the exercises.  I was not yet ready to retire; my retirement career was to be that of someone who explores the uncharted realms of awareness and teaches others to do the same.  Like Castaneda, I was choosing to stop relying on drugs to induce altered states, knowing that leaving the body consciously is possible for anyone who will consistently apply the effort.

I had a couple of out-of-body experiences during the phase when I was using the concentration exercise to go to sleep slowly.  In a dream I was standing on the street in downtown Santa Cruz, where I used to stand when I was trying to sell acid, when suddenly my dream body started vibrating, then it became rigid and tipped back at a 15º angle and glided backwards through time and space until it plopped into my “real” body where it lay in bed.  I continued to feel the powerful energy—like in a flying dream or the time I saw that guy’s aura—that had made all this happen, but I’d had enough and let it fade.

The other experience was when I woke in the middle of the night in the throes of the Almost-Out-of-Body Nonphysical Tremors.  Every book on astral projection speaks of the vibrations, and mine were a typical case.  It felt like an earthquake, just as real and ten times more violent, but it felt so much more real than an earthquake that I had to know that it was an event of the spirit, proving to me that the spirit is of an undying nonphysical substance that is more real than real.

I had read somewhere that when Carlos Castaneda first abandoned his family in Peru, he had taken a job in Los Angeles as a cab driver while he perfected his English.  This sounded like just the ticket, so I went over to Broadway Cab, where George Heaton the air car inventor had been working when I met him, and let them train me for three days so that I could be a cab driver like Carlos Castaneda.

My shift was to be from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., six days a week including weekends, and I would have to pay rent on a cab owned by one of the veteran drivers, and return the car to the lot at the end of my shift with a full tank of gas.  If I didn’t get enough fares, then I would have to pay the rent and fill the tank with my own money.

The man who trained me had informed me that it was not going to be easy to make money this way, but I did not believe him.  I avoided the scary parts of town and the airport where I was afraid I’d be unwelcomed by the drivers who knew the routine, and waited to be called over the radio by the dispatcher.  Except for a recurring fare who coincidentally went by the name of Maxwell, cab driving was the longest night of my life, and I fell asleep a couple times waiting in nice neighborhoods for the dispatcher to call me, finally having to pay $7.50 out of my pocket to make up the deficit when the shift ended.

That first night I was sent way out to the suburbs to pick up this cat Maxwell, where it turned out he was being ejected from a party for harassing a woman he considered to be his girlfriend.  He wasn’t too upset about it, and since I had come so far to get him, I let him bring his cute little doggie aboard, which was against the rules, and I let him smoke pot in the car, which was also against the rules, and I gave him the discount he harangued me for despite warnings that such leniency would ruin my chances of making a living.  These actions won me the infinite respect of my new best friend Maxwell, who requested a ride from me specifically twice more that night.

As with all my other fares, I took many wrong turns, but Maxwell didn’t thrash me verbally for this like others had; he just upped the discount he expected to get.  The time he had to tell me I was going the wrong way down a one way street.  I responded that I was only going one way, and he liked that so much that he had me take him to a lounge in the part of town I’d been trying to avoid all night—because that’s where all the night life was, and all the business—where he promised to introduce me to all the prostitutes and pushers he knew, who would gladly give me their business since I was the cheapest cab driver in town.  When we got to the lounge I waited for him to pay me and get out of the car, and when he ran toward the front door of the lounge to bring all his friends out to meet me, I hollered after him, Hey man, I’m from Kansas! and I skedaddled out of there before he could take me down his dark alley, vowing that this would be my last and only night as a cab driver, which it most decidedly was.

Back on the Almighty Job Hunt, I had finally decided to get with the program and start over from scratch as a dishwasher, although my Daddy urged me to reconsider. I was determined to start at the bottom of the totem pole, and if necessary, gradually work my way up to, perhaps, head dishwasher.  As long as I kept my goal this small, there existed some hope that I might prevail in its attainment.  Nothing scared me more than the fear of a serious encounter with Duty, except of course the most Feared Event of All: asking for a job.

The first of the two jobs I asked for was ten hours a week doing lunch dishes at the Loaves and Fishes old folks hangout, two hours a day, five days a week.  For this incredibly important position I was interviewed by the whole damn Board.  Two things of significance took place at this job.  1) After I found myself using Hypermanic Dishwashing a few times to passively-aggressively punish the volunteers who I imagined were passively-aggressively punishing me for their being unpaid volunteers, I realized that if a person wanted to or liked being pissed there would always be something to be pissed about.  I was able to tame my inner time bomb 85% using this knowledge.  2) I met a big red-haired biker who was an alcoholic pot-smoking woman-fucking party animal who everybody liked because he had such a relaxed and basically happy disposition.  He was the principal character in the Piano Moving Incident, which I will describe shortly.

The other job I asked for fell in my lap too.  It was there waiting for me and I was hired on the spot although there had been no opening advertised.

At Newfart Place I washed dishes five nights a week including weekends and supervised teenage busboys on drugs who were forced by restaurant policy to stay and help me till I was done.  This system was complicated by the natural tendency of teenage busboys on drugs to want to get home to bed so they could get up and get to school and take more speed.  Now that I think about it, never have I seen more evidence of white powder consumption than right there amongst the white suburbanite high school students being forced to hold down jobs besides going to school.  The busboys’ philosophy was that a step skipped is a minute conserved; but Maxwell the Lame wouldn’t get his big fat head out of his ass and look at the clock: When am I supposed to do my fuckin’ homework?  I even got one guy fired for refusing to scrub the rubber mats and fighting me on it every single night.  Later I saw him at his new job standing at an ice cream wagon in the middle of the mall, checking out all the chicks.  He seemed genuinely happy to see me and was friendly to me for the first time ever.

My Nicaraguan brother-in-law Carlitos had by now joined his family in Portland.  He’d stayed with the house in Managua as long as he had his government job, crawling through backyards at night to visit his neighbors, thus violating a curfew that was enforced with bullets, but with respect to the rumor that he or his father Carlos Sr. were on hit lists being circulated by the Sandanista rebels who had finally taken over Managua and the government, when he went to his government job and found out he had finally been fired by the new regime, that night he walked over the border leaving the house, the car, the dog, the goldfish, etc.

Carlitos ended up working for the State of Oregon as Director of the Department of Minor Worries.  His father had landed a job as assistant pastor of a church in Kansas; he’d been the headmaster of a college in Managua where my sister Glenda had worked as an English teacher.  Glenda was now working in the personnel department at the Bureau of Land Management and the kids were in grade school.

If the mood at the dinner table is any indication of the state of the marriage of Glenda and Carlitos, then it could be said that trouble was certainly a-brewing.  Glenda was sullen, self-righteous, anti-social and sulky; she’d been out of my life for fifteen years, so I was disappointed because I’d rewritten her part in the family as that of Glenda the Good Witch.  Carlitos had become stern and silent, the opposite of what I thought I knew of his true personality.  I still looked up to him from way back when he first came into our family like a strong, happy wind of spontaneity with a true case of the smarts, but now he was distant and Glenda was always mad at him about something, I didn’t know what, and the whole thing made me want to be mad at my own sister because I could feel her angry vibe being pushed into my body and reminding me of the prolonged demise of our parents’ mis-matrimony.  What I would do to solve the problem was this: I ate real fast and quiet, then got up noisily and stormed over to the sink and washed all the dishes as fast and loud as I could, and retired for the night to my separate apartment, which had once been a two-car garage.

I had my own furnished studio apartment with my own bathroom and kitchen, free rent, free food, and free utilities, and I never thanked Carlitos for supporting me while I did god knows what with my wages, and I never showed him the courtesy of using the stove and refrigerator in my apartment, which he was paying for and then giving away to me.  I wonder if the strained silence between those two had anything whatsoever to do with me.  One Sunday morning, after a night of loud arguing behind closed doors, Carlitos came to me out of the blue and told me that I was part of his family and that I was welcome in his home as long as I wanted to stay.  Then he turned and walked away before I could think of anything to say.

Could it be that Glenda made him say that?  The rule seems to be: people talk about me a lot more than they talk to me.  Unfortunately, this rule becomes more true the older I get, so the more I need to talk about my life, the less the objecting party knows about me when I am finally allowed to try to vent my frustrations, so everything is taken seriously out of context and I wish my family would just go away.

In the general absence of the sort of verbal sparring I’d gotten used to hearing from Rivendell’s city people and then the speeded-up busboys and cooks at Newfart Place, an evil presence had built up in Glenda’s house due to the non-use or mis-use of opportunities for people to safely vent the heat that builds up due to friction.  Something had to be done about it, so I tracked down Al Margin and scored some marijuana.

Al Margin and his new girlfriend and his brother, a wilderness guide who would take people white-water rafting and bring along a gallon of cheap wine for himself, were all living together.  Al Margin said he knew a chemist who wanted to make some fast money manufacturing heroin, and I pretty much changed the subject.  I never could quite get comfortable with Al Margin, though I kept trying, but he did me a great big favor by introducing me to his Scorpio friend Trucker, without whose influence I might still be washing dishes.  Well, all right, I am still washing dishes, or I was until just the other day.  Trucker gave me a usable framework for me to look at the dynamics of human behavior and motivation, other than the half-formed framework I was always trying to invent, to try and get it all to make sense.  I call this framework “Milton Erickson and NLP.”

Trucker was a little bearded guy of Jewish extraction, who had just finished his Ph.D. thesis on the Native American tongues of Oregon.  He was a career counselor and teacher at the community college, and we shared many interests including hypnosis, Celtic folklore and languages.  He introduced me to astrology, which became interesting to me for the first time when I found out how right they were about me, an Aries with Capricorn Rising, that is, I feel compelled to climb the ladder of success but attempt to do so only in fits and starts, and I try to do it alone, and often only in my dreams, thus never gain the serious momentum that society would be likely to mistake for success.  Trucker was also the first person to introduce me to the personal computer.  Actually my Daddy had tried to get me to play with his PC Jr. but the first time I sat down and looked at the screen, it broke instantly.

Although we knew each other for only a short time, the push that Trucker gave me in the direction of Milton Erickson and NLP had a lasting effect on my ability to go out in the world and understand what I was doing wrong and to let people think I was fairly normal so that they would treat me better than I felt.  NLP—Neuro-Linguistic Programming—was based in large part on the work of Milton Erickson, who founded the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis.  He was a psychiatrist whose ability to improve people’s lives quickly seemed magical, and whose ability to do so either with or without the overt use of hypnotic induction was so astounding that Ericksonian hypnotherapy has become a sub-field of psychology all unto itself.

I have paid several over-priced new age charlatans to pretend to hypnotize me, and several of my friends have tried to hypnotize me, but to get results, next time I must find a hypnotist who knows more about hypnosis than I do.  I can do and have done better hypnosis that anyone I’ve ever paid, not that I have the motivation to do anything with my knowledge.  A tape I made has so far never failed to put anybody who listened to it into a deep trance, complete with the amnesia of sleep, then taken them back out of it.

One night I had been over at Trucker’s when he hauled out this cassette tape he had of Milton Erickson hypnotizing some lady.  He turned on the tape and we sat down, and this old man’s voice started coming out of the tape machine.  I thought to myself after I heard a few confusingly mundane statements that I can’t remember, This is a real disappointment, this guy has no charisma at all.  And that’s the last I remember till 45 minutes later that old man’s voice coming over the tape machine was telling me to wake up.  I remembered absolutely nothing of those 45 minutes and I am still thrilled to have been deeply and effortlessly hypnotized by the greatest hypnotherapist who ever lived, without his even being there, and for that I am in debt to my friend Trucker for playing the tape for me, so that I would know it was worth the trouble to study Erickson’s work, and that the hypnotic trance is a real—not imagined—phenomenon.

Starting with The Structure of Magic and on from there, every one of the books on NLP are pragmatically informative and enticingly sensical.  My Voice Will Go With You is a collection of stories Milton Erickson used to tell the students and professionals who would come from all over the world to listen to him tell stories.  This old man in a wheelchair had helped all kinds of people with hypnosis, indirect suggestions, and many other strategies, such as prescribing the symptom.

I eventually quit Newfart Place after they worked me 19 days in a row, and I went to visit Judas in Grass Valley.  He was care-taking for Ed Bragg, a former bank robber who had started a non-profit corporation and gotten grants while in jail to teach meditation to prisoners.  Now he was president of Creative Erections, an odd jobs and carpentry company.  Judas had a big garden and a truck and lived in a little trailer on Ed’s land.  I had been thinking of muscling in on Judas’s scene, but his drastic change of personality—from hangout artist to feisty little workaholic with a truck—was annoying to me so I went back to Glenda and Carlitos’s house and instantly got my job back at Newfart Place, where I was apparently approved of despite my reputation as a feisty little cuss with a hose.

Once I was spraying down my plates on their way into the dishwashing machine and this one busboy made fun of me for trying to spray every little bit of ketchup off my plates, so I turned without warning and sprayed him point-blank in the face, then continued spraying my plates as he stormed away cursing and wiping his face.  Then here came the busboy and the assistant manager both walking up behind me together, about one second after I had jabbed my palm down onto a steak knife that this same busboy had left pointing upward in the bus tub he had brought me.  I exploded momentarily and showed the busboy what he had done; the busboy got ready to explode too, and the assistant manager said calmly, “He probably didn’t do it on purpose.”  I said, “I know,” and went back to spraying my plates.  What Ross the assistant manager said to me was NLP because it got results fast: not only did I not get assaulted by the whipped cream sniffer; I wasn’t even pissed at him anymore.  Ross had also made mention of the fact that since my return I had stopped making funny noises and whining when people tried to talk to me.  The relative lack of humor during my vacation with Judas had not encouraged me to act weird.

I did, however, have another out-of-body experience, when I got back to Judas’s trailer one hot afternoon and put my head on the table since it was spinning after a bout with a large joint and a long walk.  I passed out and momentarily found myself hovering on the ceiling.

Glenda was elated when I came back because she gad gotten an old piano for me to rebuild and refinish for her, and when I had left to supposedly go live with Judas, that move included abandoning her with an unrebuilt piano that didn’t work.  She informed me that she had been disgusted with me for abandoning the piano job I had accepted before she went out and bought the piano, and I meekly turned my free-rent apartment into a piano shop, happy to be out of Judas’s increasingly humorless way, functioning as an individual rather than a subordinate.

I used the money Glenda and Carlitos paid me to move into Krishna Bernie’s building.  Bernie Greene was a somewhat older Jewish hippie from New York City who managed the dilapidated little apartment building about a block from Greedwill in what was otherwise an industrial area, except for the bar that was within crawling distance of our apartment building.  Bernie had been an orphan and bounced from foster family to foster family till he gave up on the whole thing and set out on his own at a young age.  Before he moved to Portland he had traveled around the world making a living as a freelance photographer.  Now he had a mail-order business and sold used records from the ‘50s and ‘60s, as well as vintage posters, National Lampoons, and music magazines.  Every day he put on his beat-up red windbreaker and walked, like a tall stick with a lot of hair on top of it, from thrift shop to record store to thrift shop, looking for good buys on records and titles that were on his customers’ want lists.  He rummaged around dumpsters for the cardboard to mail his orders out in, and he showed me how he created his advertising art by pasting up photocopied images and cleaning up the final master with white-out and a black pen.

Krishna Bernie was extremely reclusive and sedentary, and had no furniture except old pillows.  He was bone thin and both friendly and unsociable.  His friends would come by to smoke pot and cigarettes with him, and watch TV.  He always worked in the day and smoked and watched TV at night.   It was not easy to get him to go to anyone’s house for a visit, but once we went to a Vietnamese restaurant together, and another time we took LSD and went for a long walk in the woods, and when we were walking home through town, we saw a tattooed man jogging with a dwarf.  Bernie was obsessed with hating Portland and wanted to sell his records off and move to India.  “Krishna Bernie” was a take-off on “Krishnamurti,” the philosopher who had as a young man been vaunted by Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists as the next Christ.  The young Krishnamurti had eventually rejected Blavatsky’s scam, and he came to believe in not believing in believing in things, and since his philosophy is so confusingly simple, Krishna Bernie used it as one of his reasons to live a very simple life with few props, subsisting on Medaglia d’Oro coffee, Benson & Hedges 100s, plain salad, raw Spanish peanuts and golden raisins.  He slept in a threadbare sleeping bag that he got out of the closet every night and spread on the threadbare rug without any kind of mattress.  He couldn’t afford to smoke much pot, but smoked as much as he could afford to.  When he couldn’t get it he sometimes would smoke parsley to console himself.  He was the kindest and calmest person I ever met, always laughing and saying Jewish words like meshuggener, which means a crazy or foolish person, and pretty much summarized the world as Bernie saw it.  He could fling the bull around for hours with his Jewish friend Ed, who was also from New York City.  Ed would come into the second story apartment with his bicycle and his big white dog.  Bernie and Ed could argue about some little thing for an hour-and-a-half without getting permanently pissed at each other.  There was something so accepting from Bernie, he always made me feel welcome and comfortable, and shared everything he had with me.

Like me, Jimmy Joe U-Haul stayed with Bernie from time to time when he was in town or without housing.  He had an off-and-on problem with heroin; he was one of only two people I know who’ve had a problem with heroin.  His main interest was helping people on the street by working with organizations such as a free soup kitchen run by a group of activist lesbians.  Although Jimmy Joe U-Haul was deeply embroiled in the street politics of downtown Portland’s Burnside district, and knew all of the street people and prostitutes personally, like me he somehow left his troubles at the door when he visited Bernie.  Something about Bernie’s presence, up to and possibly including the smell of cigarette smoke in the pillows, walls and rug, made me just want to hang out and visit.  I can’t stress enough how unusual this was for me, the world’s worst conversationalist and the greatest inner fidgeter posing as a calm and centered person who ever lived.  Since the TV was always on and we sat on pillows four feet away from it, leaning against the wall, there was no need to prove anything by trying to match Bernie’s ability as a New Yorker to express himself verbally.  Nobody ever really succeeded in complicating his life.

I rented a downstairs apartment from Bernie and set out to find an old piano to complicate my life with.  If I had looked around, something good, easy and probably free could have turned up, but still without my own transportation at the age of 27, and knowing that the longer I delayed the more of my money and motivation would dwindle, I chose to grab the first thing I could find, an old upright that looked like it had been dropped from a low-flying aircraft, and I even gave the man $250 for it.  Now that I bother to think about it, he probably had gotten paid before for that piano—to haul it away.  It didn’t matter to me because the $250 was provided by my customer, a friend of Carlitos’s, who would be paying me in installments as the work progressed.

Thus follows the Piano Moving Incident—not that there haven’t been Several, but it would take a book of its own to record those many terrifying moments when I have somehow managed to survive undamaged, in the course of carting around town the best quality type of piano I was ever capable of rebuilding without continual anxiety about my abilities: the big old upright.  Way too big, but I had spent my last $30 on big wheels and some lumber and leather and bolts to build my own little piano dolly so it would be fairly safe and easy to move the piano with two people to share the load.  The second person was the red-haired biker who held the rank of custodian over at the Loaves and Fishes old folks hangout where I had once worked.  He had the truck and the leadership ability; I had the piano and knew how to move big uprights without getting killed.

As it turned out, moving the piano into my kitchen from his truck required no knowledge of moving pianos; when he picked up his end of the piano I had to pick up my end, and when he started walking backwards with his end I had to keep going with mine or he would have pulled the piano out of my fingers and landed it on my toes; and I was sore afraid, lo those several moments, between the time he picked up his end and the time I risked all to pick up mine, that I would lose forever the ability to stand, sit and walk normally.  You see, I hadn’t built a special piano dolly just so we could leave it in the truck while I carried my end of a big piano from the truck to the house in my fingers.

After that we were supposed to go do some other kind of work that he had lined up and wanted my help with, but on the way to the other job he pulled into the parking lot of a beer joint where he liked to go, and hauled me in there and bought me more beer than I wanted over the course of the next eight extremely boring hours.  Finally we left and he took me over to hang out with a guy who’d been in the bar two separate times while we sat there all day and night, and let me assure you, I was not a happy partier and had not been one all that day, nor had I any reason to be.  This other guy didn’t like me and had made fun of me at the bar for drinking my beer so slow.  He was so much nicer now that I was a guest in his home at 2 a.m.; he even let his pitbull sit next to me, and he complimented me on my glasses several times.  Then he hauled out a big plastic bag full of the worst pot in history.  Over the course of the next few hours I was forced to sit and drink even more beers, until finally we left the sadistic man and my friend drove us over to his own house about 3 a.m.

On the way my biker buddy showed me a birthday card he’d gotten from his new girlfriend who lived with him.  In it was a photo of herself in one of those self-service photo booths, and she was lifting her shirt and grinning wickedly.  This was a prelude to my friend being the first to inform me that he was going to go screw that very same female in every hole she possessed, and he was sure I would be welcome to join them if I wanted.  I declined politely and begged for a spot on his couch, which I occupied, ecstatically alone, for the next few hours while he and his girlfriend had a whole orgy all to themselves in the next room, until finally I could hear them start to snore.

The very moment I saw light in the sky I jumped out of that couch and snuck out through the front door and skedaddled down the sidewalk in search of a street sign, a clock, and a bus stop, and before long I was once more a free man, heading for home and my new old piano: the Taskmaster.

As a matter of fact I had actually let Jimmy Joe U-Haul talk me into snorting some heroin just once, and only because I knew it was made by Al Margin’s chemist friend, so it was at least as pure as Al Margin’s friendship with his chemist.  We were up at Bernie’s one night watching TV.  Jimmie Joe U-Haul warned me that it would make me sick since it was my first time, so I wondered, Then why bother doing it a first time, as I snorted it into my face.  It made me sick pretty quick, then I kind of floated in a weird fantasy world for awhile before I eventually drifted off.  It was sort of interesting but very dark, reminiscent of “The Celebration of Pain,” a phrase I had coined when I was younger and quite concerned with exploring the more obscure niches in the dark, romantic side of self-pity.

When I had lived with Glenda and Carlitos the first time I worked at Newfart Place, I used to ride the bus the three miles to work but had to drag my limping sciatica-bound butt home one excruciating half-step at a time, thereby getting to experience nothing less than an understandably altered state of consciousness each time I missed the last bus, which was almost every night.  Now that I lived in a completely different part of town from the suburban mall where Newfart Place was located, it just so happened that the embarrassment of having to be hauled across town by my managers after late night shifts at the restaurant forced me to stop going to my job, so it became imperative that the Taskmaster be transformed quickly into something that the customer who had bought it sight-unseen would not regret pumping hundreds of dollars into.  It should have been thousands.  I underbid my usual obscenely low rates by 2/3 to get the job and to get the customer to pay for the work as it supposedly progressed.  For these pressing reasons, it was imperative that I deal expediently with the disaster in my kitchen that had once been a piano.  I had once left a partially-paid-for player piano job unfinished in Lawrence, Kansas, and I had once done the same thing to Bobbie Wilson in Hazing, Kansas, deserting the disassembled mess in my Mama’s garage for her to deal with.  Every fiber of my being still wanted to kick me when I thought of these ridiculous underbid torturefests I had put on for myself to endure, all to avoid asking some storekeeper on Main Street for a lousy job.  Because of the internal pressure to not embarrass myself again, and because my apartment manager was now my best friend Bernie and I really wanted to earn his approval by paying my rent, and because my current customer was a friend of my brother-in-law Carlitos who I worshipped, I recreated from scratch the General Daily Plan which I sum up as before: Work Hard Early.

Something in me so steadfastly refused to fail completely that I got up every day and asked myself, What do I have to get done on this piano project right now, whether or not I want to, before I can do something easier, which can come later on.  I dropped the need to like what I was doing, based on my Frawmbickle/Frumbessle and Related Concepts Scenario in which the Frumbessler’s whole neurotic act revolves around searching in vain for the Greener Pasture, or Lingobingo as I call it.  So whatever the part was that I dreaded most, I did that first.  My motto became, “If I do it now, I won’t have to do it later.”  That one truism saved my ass on that particular job.

The first task I could not put off was to build a piano tilter, so I could lay the piano on its back at a comfortable working height, instead of putting it on its back right on the floor, which would have me working on my knees as I had done many times before, in pursuit of the ultimate backache.  I scoured the industrial district, where our apartment house was located, for old pallets and discarded sheets of plywood which I somehow got home on my new piano dolly.  I spent my last $8 on bolts and enthusiastically built my own homemade piano tilter at the actual cost of $8 instead of the $160 plus shipping that the professional suppliers would have wanted.

I was elated when my piano tilter, which was the size of a hippopotamus, actually worked more or less safely to get the piano on its back a couple of feet or more up off the ground so I could conveniently take it to pieces and redo absolutely almost everything including the things I hadn’t charged for so the final product would be acceptable.  From start to finish, this Taskmaster Piano Rehabilitation Project was made possible by a sort of ingenious frugality brought on by true desperation and Bernie’s excellent example.  I bought a big fan at Greedwill’s as-is store for $1 so I could breathe in the same room I was working in, while refinishing my quaint little piece of recovering yard sculpture.  The fan had a missing blade but I figured what the heck, two out of three is OK for a guy like me, and took it home and plugged it in and it vibrated so much that it walked across the kitchen floor in 7.2 seconds.  I went back to the as-is store and bought a second fan the same size, this one with a bad motor, for another dollar.  I took the good blade off the bad motor and stuck it on to replace the bad blade that I took off the good motor and before you know it, I had that apartment so full of fumes from stripping the old varnish off the piano that I had to sleep at Bernie’s apartment where the fumes were merely annoying.  But my new homemade fan worked, and thanks to having it pointed at me at all times, I survived one more piano refinishing project in my own home.  Bernie kind of said something when it came time to pound 250 new tuning pegs into a block made of hard rock maple with a little sledgehammer, but I assured him it was only one or two days out of his life, and it would all be over soon.

It was eventually all over with and I had some money so I needed to go someplace, but it wasn’t enough to go someplace with, so I moved in with one of the managers from Newfart Place and her husband while I proceeded to refinish their piano in their house while they were away on vacation.  I ate their food and smoked their pot and slept on their couch and fixed up their piano real nice, but wondered, How long can this go on, and finally I was hit by my Saturn Return, meaning astrologically that my life had started over.  So I called Don Puff In Hazing, Kansas, owner of Puff’s Pianos and Organs, and asked him if he could send any work my way and of course he said, Sure! we’d be happy to share our customers with you!  I told him I’d be there in a month and he mentioned a couple times what a conservative town Hazing, Kansas was, and I told him I understood, and it was all settled.

So I used my remaining time in Portland to hang out with Bernie and got pissed at my sister Glenda for accusing me of enjoying my emotional problems.  A few months earlier I had hit her with the same kind of libertarian nonsense, and now she was pissed at me for sitting around pouting at family dinners each Sunday at my Daddy and Marleen’s house, but in truth we just both needed to have our Sundays back to do with what we wanted, and I took care of my share of that problem with a one-way bus ticket to Hazing, Kansas.

It just so happened that at this point in my life, almost age 28 and in my Saturn Return, I found it expedient and necessary to fall back in love with my old high school girlfriend Ann Z, who I had gone steady with for 10 months back when she was 16 and I was 17, when we were both in love with Jesus.  Now that we were both upslidden adults, I felt it was necessary to write her long letters trying to convince her that I was not the needy little milksop I had been as her so-called boyfriend back in high school.  Meanwhile, she failed to mention in her letters back to me that she already had a boyfriend—not that she’d ever want me back anyway—so the volume and tempo of my letters increased with each succeeding episode till the climax, the letter I mailed a few days before boarding the Greyhound so she wouldn’t have time to answer it, in which I disgorged my all-out and infinitely profound love and admiration for her, and with reckless abandon I informed her that I was heading that way at that very moment to sweep her off her feet.

Ann Z was the ultimate liberal and had been a straight A pep squad suburban daughter of a local republican businessman and of a mother who always smiled cheerfully.  She had failed at only one thing in her life, and that was in choosing a career: teaching little inner-city black kids in their own schools to be happy, smart, self-disciplined and German-Irish like her.  For a breather she had returned to Hazing, Kansas to work for her father’s business, eventually getting involved with the famous Land Institute, founded by the famed biologist Wes Jackson who intends to prove that we can breed and grow perennial food plants to eliminate the need to till the soil each year.

Ann Z’s first act when I arrived at her apartment was to inform me that she already had a boyfriend, although she was thinking of dumping him because he couldn’t spell and she couldn’t figure out how to tell him that.  I was unable to help her with that, though I did help her by going to the guest room and leaving her to socialize with her precious Land Institute buddies who all came over to use her shower, and by quietly using my hard-earned accumulation of dollars the very next day to rent my own apartment so she could carry on with her Capricornish scurry up the ladder, free of my clinging, dragging grasp.

As it turned out, after she graduated from the Land Institute, she cashed in some stocks and bonds and went off to Harvard Law School, where she started up her career as a folk singer, which is what she mostly does now.  After years of practicing non-profit law, then mediation, she is now married to another lawyer as well as helping him run their horse ranch.  So, she was right, not that she said it this way, but she never did have time for me anyway.

Now there is only one or two things I should have mentioned about that stint in Portland at Krishna Bernie’s building.

My Daddy did not like where I was living, because Bernie’s apartment smelled so badly of cigarettes and was so shabby and unfurnished that he was afraid to even look in it, much less enter it, so he must have assumed we were shooting heroin in there or something.  Well actually there was that one time I snorted some, not that Bernie did, and another time I was over at Al Margin’s house after another unforgettable piano move, when he forced me to smoke some of his chemist friend’s pure heroin product, and then took me home to my Taskmaster.

Let me tell you this just once, boys and girls, and then I will drop the subject forever: under the influence of heroin, I was in a perfect world that night where absolutely everything was cool, the beat-up old piano was cool, all was better than well, it was unspeakably perfect.  I had never found myself so ecstatically satisfied with everything in my whole happy little life.  I stayed up till 3 a.m. whipping out the worst parts of the piano job that I had so dreaded a few hours earlier.

But after that I stayed religiously away from Al Margin, knowing that access to the kind of happiness that heroin held in its evil clutches was not a viable option for me.  I have not since so much as seen any heroin, and let me add with particular emphasis that giving that stuff up was only just possible for the unsurpassable and highly intelligent Al Margin, and that he was never again the same, and that it is highly arguable that having once been habituated to consuming heroin actually ruined his life by taking away the spark and sharpness and leanness of appetite that had made him the athletic mind and precisely starving artist that he had once been proud to be.  Last I heard, he had been forced to disappear into the thickets of the Los Angeles jungle because of his confusion between fast living and worthy risk-taking.

My Daddy freaked out when I quit my job at Newfart Place for the second time, and he came over with a couple bags of groceries, which antagonized me to no end.  Couldn’t he tell I was taking care of myself as a self-employed person?  My whole house was full of piano parts; what kind of helpless little weakling did he think I was?  In a subsequent telephone argument with him he insisted that, “We have to do something about this anger.”  To which I responded, “You do something about your anger, and I’ll do something about mine,” and I hung up the phone.  After a few days I called my Daddy over to my apartment—which because of my then-current obsession with working and only working, resembled a disaster zone—and I cooked him lunch, clearing off a place for him on the little card table I used for a workbench, explaining, “I don’t have time to administrate my life, I only have time to live it.”

To the credit of my Daddy’s large intelligence and even larger generosity of spirit, he then proceeded to quietly tolerate my silly, prideful need to prove to myself that I could survive without his help, throughout the next several years of on-and-off abject poverty.