CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

In which I campaign aggressively to squander as much freedom as I can muster

 

It was finally the long-awaited year 1984, and I dove headlong into an all-out effort to prove that I was a normal, capable and responsible adult, perhaps so that Big Brother wouldn’t be able to find me and feed my brain to the rats.  My first act in this regard was to not even whimper when Ann Z turned out to not feel led to join me in my fight for freedom from my own personality, at least not as my girlfriend.  I had to admit to myself that she’d taken enough such crap from me when she was 16 and I was 17, due to my inexhaustible drive during those heartsick days to mope uncontrollably whenever she didn’t spontaneously feel driven to have any physical contact with me whatsoever, which was almost all the time, especially if anyone was looking.  I mean, in high school when I walked her to class, I couldn’t kiss her; we had to shake hands.  As one might imagine, this was not my idea.  So in December of 1983 I kept my mouth shut and got an apartment the second day I was in town, and because Don Puff had stressed that Hazing, Kansas was a conservative town, I cut off my beard, put on my best thrift store slacks, and walked over to Puff’s Pianos and Organs with my toolbox in hand, ready to work more hours every day than I liked to, and prepared to accept the bad with the good, convinced that my lack of self-discipline and narcissistic fascination with my own thoughts and feelings had made me a marginal person: a man without a home, career or family to mark him as a man; a weakling because little investment had brought little return.

But I had also figured out that each of us is an infinitely existing soul—assuming that souls don’t get old and die—and that never during the infinity just mentioned, never will everything be just absolutely perfect in every single possible way, because the way things work, in order to exist as an individual you have to exist separately from the whole entire rest of the universe, making you tend to always have this shadow over your emotional life, a feeling that there is something missing, which I call Narxing.  The warrior must accept this gnawing sensation and quit feeding it whatever it wants whenever it wants it, by putting a stop to the incessant quest for a greener pasture that doesn’t exist.  This challenge to discipline the routine-loving self is commonly known as the Frawmbickle.

Don Puff was his usual cheery self, sort of a “we can do that for you” kind of guy.  He helped me so much I still can’t believe he was human.  Because it was two weeks to christmas, his other piano tuner was swamped, so I walked right into a steady piano tuning and repair business—complete with customers.  I set new goals for my new level of intended success, tried to learn how to tune better, kept good records and forced myself to call each of my customers every few months so they wouldn’t forget my name and call someone else.

Because I was vehemently uninterested in smoking pot, I found it was possible to wake up most mornings with similar goals to the ones I had the night before, which made it easy and natural for an Aries with Capricorn Rising to at least hope to gain some momentum; if nothing else, I was at least spinning my wheels with zealous enthusiasm.

Don Puff immediately had a big old upright piano hauled over to my apartment.  Don Puff’s son Lawrence, who had recently been brought into the business, was about my age.  Ann Z had warned me about him.  Lawrence Puff was about 6’ 2” and had a lot of curly dark brown hair.  His grin was as perpetual as the mists of time, and the bulging empty stare that accompanied the omnipresent ivories sort of made you want to go away before this guy should try to follow you home.  Like his Daddy, he was as sweet as apple pie.  He loved to entertain the customers in the piano store with tales of his past use of psychedelic drugs and his subsequent institutionalization leading up to his eventual return to society as truly rehabilitated.

Only once did I see Lawrence Puff go negative, and that was when I got a bad customer, a woman about my age appropriately named Snetta Haggerbyrd who had sent only partial payment for my work, and purposely sent it in care of the piano store instead of directly to me, complaining that I had written, “No charge for the character assassination” on my bill to the church that she had called me to tune for.

Complete with perpetual grin, Lawrence Puff chewed me out in the middle of the piano showroom—”Sometimes ya just gotta eat crow!”—with customers just a few feet away who had been thinking about spending thousands of dollars on a new piano.  Don Puff stood outside his office door with his hand over his open mouth, paralyzed.  I went into hypermania, darting about snatching up tools and jamming them into my toolbox, but I was still in a Castanedian phase of trying to be crafty enough to get what I wanted out of life, so I kept my mouth shut and left as fast as I could, so that Lawrence and Lawrence alone would be present to bear the brunt of Don Puff’s compelling need to have a little talk with somebody.  The only thing I said on my way out was, I’m gonna go get the rest of my money.

Once I was sitting at the pastor’s knee in his office—the evil woman was choir director at his church—I realized and so informed the young reverend that I didn’t care if he paid me or not, but I was certainly going to take this opportunity to blow off some steam by telling on that anorexic dyke bitch for purposely getting me in trouble.  The reverend hastened to assure me that Snetta Haggerbyrd was not representing his church in any capacity that should give her the right to talk to me in the way she had—with this little smirk on her bony, pinched face that indicated a level of sadistic pleasure far beyond that required of a choir director: Is this note in tune?  Huh?  Is this in tune?  You call this a piano tuning!?—and I’m sorry I just called her an anorexic dyke bitch, because I had no reason to believe that she was anorexic or gay, and it wouldn’t bother me if she was.  I steered clear of all such adjectives in my chat with the reverend, and stuck to the point: this person supposedly representing Jesus Christ Almighty in the community has taken it upon herself to aggress on my reputation instead of requesting a new or at least tunable piano from the church, as she should have done.  Then I quickly returned to Puff’s to tell Don Puff what I’d said to clear everything up, and I collected immediate and profuse apologies from Lawrence Puff, who looked like a whipped puppy when I walked in.

This was only the second complaint I’d ever gotten on a piano tuning, despite my secret lack of confidence in my ability and my secret desire to invent a piano that would never go out of tune.

Such a piano has recently been invented.  The automatic tuning mechanism is operated by  compressed air.

But in the meantime, I was straight as an arrow and full of vim and vigor, hot on the trail of the big ladder that goes up into the sky.  It can be found right next to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so it’s a cinch: find one and you’ve found the other.

My Mama had gotten married to a guy named Sampson Merlin who she had met at a singles event.  They had a lot of fun going dancing and going to auctions and living together with his kids about 45 minutes from Hazing, Kansas, out in the country where he was an operator of large Earth-moving machinery in soil conservation work, a field related to what my Daddy had worked in as a bureaucrat.  So my Mama got to raise a couple more teenagers, yippee, and I got to hang out with her new family, yippee, but other than that we got along just fine and she was always available and we could talk about anything.

She didn’t tell me until later, but Sampson Merlin was a big drinker and it was my Mama’s new cross to bear to be married to a drunk.  Then one day he was weaving down the road when he smacked right into a parked car.  The happy little coincidence that it happened to be the sheriff car embarrassed him so badly that he never drank again.  He just read western novels and went to sleep early.

One night I had a dream in which I was laying on a cot in a teeny little room like the ones upstairs in the lodge at Campbell Hot Springs, and I was reading a book that in the dream was a brand new Castaneda book.  It had a red, orange and yellow cover, and it was called Meetings of Possible Ways.  I set the book down on the floor beside the cot and relaxed into a focused, wordless state.  By squinting my eyes I could turn a sunbeam that was streaming in through the open door into a complex star-burst of multi-colored rays of light shooting everywhere, refracted by my eyelashes.

A few weeks later, Castaneda published a new book, and its cover was red, orange and yellow.

Like Job in the Old Testament, I had a thing for the King of Clubs.  Once upon a time I had correctly guessed that a card would be the King of Clubs when it was turned over, so one night I decided to try it again.  I shuffled the deck real good and cut it, but didn’t look at the top card yet.  I went out into the windy Kansas autumn air and walked with a one-pointed intensity for about a mile, keeping my mind perfectly blank and using the intensity of my walking to focus the desire to keep my mind blank.  When I returned to the apartment, I walked right up to the deck and turned over the top card, and it was most decidedly the King of Clubs.

Joybroth was around a lot, which gave me someone to criticize incessantly, but he did the same to me, so we deserved each other.  The greasy prick kept bugging me to smoke pot with him till I finally got bored one day and gave in, and the self-improvement campaign sort of slowed down after that.  No more recording a dozen dreams each night, no more making hypnosis tapes, no more concentration exercises.  That eventually pissed me off, so out in the trash went Joybroth for the time being, but he’ll be back for more abuse before long.

Sober again, I happened to be tuning a piano for a doctor’s wife one day and saw in her family photo a girl I’d lusted after in high school.  Upon inquiring, I was informed that she was a single mother of three living in a trailer on welfare, and upon further inquiry I was able to get her phone number.

This girl of Scottish descent had black hair, blue eyes, pale skin, and freckles covering every square inch of her visible flesh; she was the most exotically beautiful woman I could possibly imagine.  After several long phone conversations, with her teasing me along and me trying to impress her, she let me come over and make pizza for her and her kids.

This poor episode is in sore need of a happy ending, but rather than wander the long way to a disappointing finish, let me just summarize by saying that she was not single enough, available enough, or interested enough for me to be able to relax and be myself, and I had no idea who I even was at that particular moment anyway, so naturally I became so exhaustively and exhaustingly infatuated with her that I repeatedly made a fool out of myself trying to force us to have something in common, and pretending that I wanted to help her raise her children.  It’s hell when the most beautiful woman in the whole world won’t tell you to go away and won’t tell you to stay, until you finally fall apart and reveal all your insecurities for nothing; six weeks and three hard-bought kisses into the courtship, it was over like a random slap in the face.

By now I’d wasted so much energy on the most beautiful woman who ever lived, and gotten so far away from my interest in shamanism and dreaming, that it seemed pointless to avoid marijuana any longer; I yam what I yam, pass the pipe, brother.

My friend Boss was to be found living alone in his three bedroom house in the suburbs with a perfect lawn, fenced yard, clothesline, garage, mortgage, empty bacheloresque refrigerator, the whole bit.  He had been able to purchase his first home due to the fact that he was making vast piles of money working as an on-call engineer for the railroad.  This means he was getting something like $20-30 per hour or more to entertain his friends and people like me in his basement while waiting for the phone to ring.  Like his astrological twin Judas, this Scorpio was what you might call a republican pothead.  Boss and Judas have a cynical twist—tending toward ruthless and sadistic—to their so-called sense of humor, they prefer the company of their inferiors, and they seem to function normally after smoking large quantities of marijuana.

It became my habit to take great pains to be done with my work early, even if it meant not doing it, so I could go see Boss around 3:00 p.m. most days, whereupon we would watch videos, play croquet or whiffle-ball baseball, smoke too much pot; the sort of things you’d expect to do with a banker’s son in a small town out on the prairie.  But since he was a Scorpio, he couldn’t tolerate being beaten at his own game: croquet.  Once I got him to switch to the English rules it was my game too; not so mean, not as easy to destroy somebody’s chances to survive with one lucky shot, and not as likely to get you killed for winning.  But Scorpios won’t be beaten at their own game.  If I got a really good shot, I mean unbelievable good, then he was sure I had cheated, but he didn’t say so; he just started seething.  I have this glitch where if someone is wrongly irate with me, I can’t miss a shot, so off I would go, hitting amazingly incredible long shots from all the way across the yard, three or four of them in a row, each infallible shot coming straight from my glitch: it somehow perfects me to be falsely accused.  Anyhow, three or four impossible shots in one turn and the other guy is in trouble, but when I would get on a streak like that, Boss knew he had caused it by literally forcing me to feel superior to him, and that also was unacceptable to him, because Scorpios are never inferior to anybody.  So when I was about two and a half hoops into a game-winning four-hoop streak, Boss—who happened to be the pitcher on his baseball team—would already be throwing his wooden ball straight up into the stratosphere, and I do mean way up there, as he strode across the yard like an offended Napoleon and stormed in the little back door of his immaculate garage, where he proceeded to repeatedly throw his wooden mallet so hard against the concrete floor that it was literally in little tiny splinters by the time I stopped playing, there being no one around to watch me win.

Boss was a Cubs fan, and that year the Cubs were scheduled to win the World Series.  I sat through all those games with him, like I’d sat through half the season with him before that, and in the final play of the last and deciding game, the referee made a bad call that blew the Series for the Cubs, and it was my fault.  I had jinxed it or something, I don’t know how and I wasn’t going to ask, but Boss wouldn’t speak to me for two weeks.

Then another time I actually went voluntarily potless for two weeks to get away from Boss because he told me to give up on the air car project.  It still took a serious self-righteous tizzy-laser to get me off a major marijuana binge.  I mean, all my energy had to be going in one direction.  Ambivalence and abstinence do not mix, and self-righteous anger dissolves ambivalence.

Eventually Boss got tired of me coming over every single day—and he probably got that way a few months before I began to suspect it—and that would be the afternoon about 3:00 p.m. when I stood on his porch pounding on his door and wouldn’t leave because he had hollered, “Go away!” all the way from the basement party room where I knew he was sucking down bong hits with his friends.  I sort of had road rage about it.  I figured if he was gonna let me hang out and smoke his pot, and make him entertain me and be polite to me every single day for several months, then doesn’t that put me in the club for good?  Finally his other friends—his real ones—came upstairs and allowed me in very gingerly and I just acted stupid, like, Didn’t you guys hear me knocking, blah, blah, and I just came over to get high but I can’t stay.  Nobody was too talkative, but it was fairly obvious as I considered helping myself to a bong hit or two that Boss was hiding in the next room and I’d better leave real fast.  What tipped me off to the immediateness of his close proximity, besides the fact that everybody was standing there fidgeting, was that when I bent down to load the bong with Boss’s pot that was sitting there, everybody in the room nearly had a heart attack, and  Tommy, the guy standing closest to the bong, loaded it for me with his own stash—post haste.

After that I was finally so embarrassed about my behavior that I found it easy and natural to stay away for awhile.  The weird part about hanging out like a beggar on somebody’s front porch hoping they’ll get you high, and then acting like a schmuck so they’ll think you don’t know any better, is that it backfires, and what you thought was a clever scam to waste a few hours with someone you don’t like who doesn’t like you just so they’ll get you high to make you leave, is really a crass and self-effacing way to act, and an insult to the host who is blackmailed into being polite and sharing party favors to avoid the arguably far worse unpleasantness of a confrontation.  I mean, act like an asshole; get treated like an asshole.  It’s simple arithmetic.

Now it came to pass that in order to supposedly save money I fell into the age-old trap of going out and renting a house with someone I thought I could tolerate if I had to.  The only bad thing I can remember Joybroth doing was to follow me around when I got home from work, telling me all about his day.  Even if I tried to lose him by walking from room to room, he’d either follow me or just holler from the other room, a habit that my Mama had taught me to detest, to consider almost infinitely irritating, and I didn’t want to be Joybroth’s Mama any more than my Mama had wanted to be the mother of a psychotic fuck-up, and probably a whole lot less.  But all in all I’d have to say that I must have a sadistic streak that Joybroth for some reason incited; and as we all know, the sadist is really just a masochist playing king for a day.

Meanwhile, Don Puff had talked me into taking an old grand piano home from his warehouse to completely rebuild and refinish, and its presence in my garage was like a mosquito buzzing around my face until I finally buckled down and began knocking off Step Ones, one at a time.

At this point in my life I was still very opinionated and closed to suggestion, and felt compelled to control my environment, so once again I put Joybroth on the far back burner with the heat on high, and went out and got a place of my own.  The apartment manager where I’d been living with Joybroth tried to keep my half of the deposit after he had told me earlier that he planned to return it, so I sat in the chair next to his desk in his big office full of secretaries, and I kept repeating in a loud voice, You can’t change your mind, and he kept saying, Oh yes I can.  But he knew I had him whipped, because he worked for a business school that owned the neighborhood where we lived and he knew I would make him ever so sorry if he failed to keep his word with me.  I have always credited my success in this instance with not trying to make points by way of a list of grievances, and instead just being a broken record repeating one and only one undeniable fact.

While I was living with Joybroth, my Mama came by and took me to Taco Tico and informed me that her husband Sampson Merlin had booted her out because she had, while vacationing in Colorado by herself, gone to visit her old flame from high school, her soldier boy who she had failed to wait for, Sam.

Apparently Sam had tracked her down after all these years and had been writing her letters and invited her to call him up if she was ever in town.  Now Sampson Merlin was all bent out of shape, apparently forever, and with a roomful of western novels and the booze problem licked and his kids all done with school and nearly out of the house, what did he need a smarty-pants woman around for anyway, so my Mama told me that Sam was hiring her a moving van to come out the very next day and bring her to his house in Colorado.  We finished our tacos and said good-bye and she went off to meet with a friend and see a play at the local community theater, and I went home and tried to go to bed early, but after looking at the ceiling for about half an hour, I jumped out of bed and into my car—the first car I’d owned in my so-called adult life—and drove to the community theater where I left a note on the windshield of my Mama’s car instructing her to call me before leaving for Sampson Merlin’s house.

When the phone rang, I informed my Mama that I would rather take her to Colorado in a U-Haul myself than to leave her in the cruel and high-priced clutches of the evil moving van man, and by Golly that’s what I did.  Joybroth, as my official piano mover, helped load the U-Haul and then me and my Mama drove 450 miles till I was staying awake only by virtue of the fact that people would certainly die if I fell asleep, and before you know it, 18 years have gone by and my Mama and Sam, reunited after a 37-year separation, are still happily-ever-aftering in their own modest globetrotting Camelot.

Now that I had money, a car, free time and a big fat head trying to tell me I could do anything, I went ahead and called air car inventor Terry Miller, after first interviewing the head of the Mechanical Engineering Department at a local technical institute, and being told that I was set upon a course of inquiry that would teach me more about mechanical engineering than I ever wanted to know.  I told Terry Miller I was real interested in studying his air car up close.  He said he would be happy to see me show up, so I drove on down to Crestline, Kansas where he lived at 1918 Bank Building.

His home turned out to be a real bank building built in 1918.  There wasn’t a need for addresses in Crestline, Kansas since there were only two buildings; Terry Miller was living in one and using the other to build his one-piece Styrofoam buildings in.  He’d set his “Air Car One” aside after showing it from coast to coast including in Times Square, and getting on the front page of dozens of small town newspapers and in People Magazine.  People love air cars.

But that year Terry Miller was deeply committed to his Styrofoam building project as well as trying to make a living on the side, making and selling camper shells.  He had warned me on the phone that I would not only be forced to stand around for ten hours in order to get one full hour of his attention, but also that the air car was partly taken apart and therefore would not be running when I got there.  None of that bothered me, so I jumped in my car and went to see Terry Miller, the first real air car advocate since General Herman Haupt CE back in the 1890s, and as an air car advocate—and Terry Miller himself invented the term, which is now a monument to its inventor—he is considered the founding father of the modern air car movement because he fully disclosed his air car building plans to the public, and as such he is the first air car inventor in at least 70 years to have done so, and maybe the first ever.

So I got there and Terry Miller was with his wife and a little old guy who was taking pictures.  There was a real nice looking pickup truck parked in his Styrofoam building—which was arch-shaped like a Quonset hut—and as soon as I showed up he sent me and his wife over to the highway in front of the bank building to wave down a bass boat should one attempt to drive by, to take part in the photo session.  We waited and waited, but a bass boat never did go by.  When the photo session was over we all went inside and Terry Miller’s wife made us bologna and mustard sandwiches on Wonder Bread, and Terry said, Shoulda had a V-8, and tossed me a can of vegetable juice, and after we devoured our lunch Terry gave me his full attention for six hours and answered all my questions and let me spend an hour just looking at his air car all by myself.  After that, he was down on his hands and knees fiddling with a troublesome VCR connection so he could show me the video on his then-dismantled windmill-powered compressed air station, and I started getting all apologetic since he’d done so much for me already, and he turned his head slightly toward me over his left shoulder and said, Son, I want to do this for you.

I had correctly quoted his air car book so much in the questions I asked that he ended up commenting that he thought I had a mind like a steel trap.  I was undoubtedly the happiest air car advocate in the whole wide world on that particular day, and as I left Crestline and drove north toward Lawrence, Kansas and the University of Kansas Main Library, if I could put how I felt that evening into a pill, then that is the pill I would always want to take: the feeling you get after you have defied fear to give yourself a truly exceptional time.

And there in the card catalog room at the library was Paco, who always showed up at key moments.  He said he was now a high school English teacher in Kansas City, and working on his law degree.  Regarding his teaching assignment, he commented that it was not whether or not his students came to class stoned; it was how stoned they were when they came to class.  I was just on my way out, and showed him the stack of photocopies that I clutched excitedly in my hot little hand.

That stack of photocopies, which now fills several filing cabinets, was the birth of the Pneumatic Options Research Library.  It was the advent of a trend that never really stopped: the air car news just keeps getting better and better.

I had just rediscovered for the first time, in the bottom basement level of what was now my very favorite library in the whole world, an awesome collection of old compressed air textbooks, all 50 to 80 years old.  I’d seen them once before but ignored them because of their age.  Now it turned out that not only did I not invent the first air car—and nor did George Heaton nor Terry Miller—it was an old idea from way back: compressed air locomotives had been available commercially for at least 50 years, until the second world war.  For the second time in a single blissful day, I had been to the top of Air Car Mountain, and let me assure you, my little cherubs, that the air car project has never been the same since that day.

On top of that, I got a fat envelope in the mail one day from a man I’d written to in Florida, a researcher like myself whose name I’d gotten from Terry Miller.  In the envelope was the next amazing installment of information on real-life air cars, this time in the form of newspaper and magazine articles about inventors, many of whom—like George Heaton—claimed to be able to refill their air tanks continuously while driving through the ever-present atmosphere of Planet Earth.  Although I’d come to mistrust such claims based on Terry Miller’s and others’ urging, the collector in me was on fire and I began my serious research years, amassing amazing and incredible confirmation that compressed air really is god’s gift to man, if there ever was one.  Some things that the engineering establishment has come to believe to be a disadvantage of compressed air—because of our modern compulsion to cut daisies down with chain saws—is actually one of air’s chief advantages, being misconstrued and kicked to the side without due consideration.

Unfortunately I was also going quite mad at home because the young couple in the apartment above mine was determined to kill each other in hand-to-hand combat someday, but for now they were content to merely scream at each other every night for hours on end, and I was forced to take Ann Z’s advice and rent the empty room over at her classmates’ house.

These young college graduates posing as hippies were all interns with Ann Z at the Land Institute where the famed Wes Jackson toils feverishly night and day, year after year, to learn how to breed perennial food plants so that farming can someday be done without destroying the soil.  The Land Institute was out on the prairie and sported every alternative gadget from windmills to composting toilets.  Ann Z got me invited to speak on air cars and answer questions, but for the most part I was convinced that most of the interns were snooty little transient college grads in a clique with each other and with a few local hippies and health food freaks, and I always felt tolerated rather than welcome in their presence, despite my qualifications as a snooty little transient health food freak.  The only intern I really liked was the one that the others didn’t like because she was quiet, moody and inaccessible.  However, she failed to ask me out, which as we shall soon see, was a great misfortune for me.

Along with renting a bedroom from the hippies, I re-rented once again the famed Garp Waddidge to use as a piano shop.  I had two cars now, both of which I had purchased from Lawrence Puff with the financial assistance of his Daddy.  A shy Quaker woman named Becky who was a part-time employee of the Land Institute had come to me wanting to learn how to rebuild pianos, so I was able to get Don Puff’s grand piano task accomplished without having to do the last three-quarters of the work myself, and all I had to give Becky for her work was a car that I didn’t want, which she probably wished she hadn’t ended up with, but opportunist that I was, I let her do all that work while I just paid the rent on Garp Waddidge and came by to give her instructions and to check my answering machine and to pick up tools that I needed in my important work out in the community.  I thought she might have the hots for me but I figured if she couldn’t leave a little albino tyrant like her child-beating Quaker husband, then she was too masochistic even for me, so I looked away and missed yet another opportunity with a truly frustrated woman who could have used a strong, caring provider like myself to teach her how to live.

Of course the one roommate I got along with at the interns’ house was the one I got pissed at for no reason, forcing me to move out secretly while no one was home, in order to bypass a confrontation over the $2 he failed to repay me and the box of my raisins he opened and ate all of, every single raisin, and then thought it was cute.  When Ann Z called me to find out what was going on, I wouldn’t tell her, explaining that I was afraid she would think I was being petty.

And sure she might, because I had just got done firing Becky for not showing up to work for two weeks, after she had supposedly, according to her, told me she was taking a week off for Christmas and then took another week off with the flu.  But it sort of made a real boss out of me to fire somebody, and I was getting tired of the piano business anyway; having to pay rent on a piano shop was stupid, but I was living in it anyway since I’d deserted the interns in their happy little hippie house, so what the heck.  Ann Z scolded me because after I fired Becky, Becky went out and got a job at Tony’s Frozen Pizza Factory where she promptly met a guy she liked and abandoned her evil child-beating husband and their two unfortunate children.  And to top it off, hiring Becky and moving in with the interns had both been Ann Z’s recommendations, so she was somewhat mortified with me which served only to push me deeper into a depressed mood, because nobody seemed to appreciate what an independent and successful businessman must sacrifice in order to make it, and then all these pretty boy college grad interns getting paid their stipends to study with a master in their field just assumed that I was born a republican or something and made a show of our lack of rapport, continuously cueing me that I was not in their little clique of highly disciplined warriors for the Earth.

Ann Z told me to take a vacation, so I finished up the grand piano all by myself and got paid for it, even though Lawrence Puff in the process of moving it on one of his Happy Days managed to magnificently scar the lid that Becky had so carefully varnished and polished.  Before I gave the piano back, however, I had a tiny gathering of friends over to Garp Waddidge, to say good-bye to the piano and Garp Waddidge both.  Ann Z and my new friends Colt and Mary came over, and I had gone specially to the library just to photocopy the sheet music for “Play Misty for Me,” since Ann Z and I used to like to listen to Ray Stevens sing it when she was 16 and I was 17.  I placed the sheet music face down on the floor just inside the front door of my piano shop, and nobody knew it was there but me, but whaddaya know, first thing Ann Z does when she comes in, she walks right on over to the grand piano, sits down and launches right into a rousing rendition of, you guessed it, the aforementioned request that I never had to make.

I took my money from the grand piano job and rented a real house with wood floors and paneling and a garage and a huge yard full of narcissus, and went on vacation to see Judas out in Grass Valley, and was discouraged to find that he had lost even more of the casual attitude of his youth, and had taken to giving orders so crassly that I purposely disobeyed him once and ended up getting his landlord’s van stuck in someone’s driveway.  Once again a short visit with Judas kept me from making plans to move in with him, and re-enthused my drive to live my own life, so I returned to Hazing, Kansas to put all my energy into establishing some sort of New Age Education commune with my new friends Colt and Mary, and Joybroth who had discovered them.

Back when I was still barely at Garp Waddidge, Joybroth had burst in the door one day, brimming over with—well, you know.  Joybroth had called a phone number on a flyer I had given him, and he thereby got to meet somebody named Colt from Berkeley, California, and then he had run halfway across town to tell me about it.

As it turned out, a fat and indolent pair of multi-level marketeers posing as cosmetics dummies and fast food repositories had adopted Colt, a 40-year-old psychologist with a purchased Ph.D., and Mary, a 60-year-old elf from Oklahoma, and there seemed to be the intention of establishing a communal effort of some kind until I showed up, at which point things started leaning toward, Well why don’t you, Colt and Mary, go have your little new age commune over at Luther’s house, since you all get along so well.  So Dick and Dottie got their house back and Colt and Mary moved in with me.  Colt moved into the special room I’d used only for ceremonial purposes; I was still not smoking pot and therefore remembering lots of fantastic dreams.  The special room could only be entered by walking a certain way, and nothing mundane could ever take place in that room.  It was in the special room that a Ouija board had informed me and Joybroth that the secret of the self-fueling air car would be discovered by me in 1988.  Now Colt was living in this room with all his pretentious new age image and glitz, and humble Mary was living sparely in my spare bedroom, and all was well except that now I had to watch an arrogant double Gemini lounge around my house in his gold chains and lizard-skin boots, collecting multi-level marketing checks for the subliminal programming tapes he never turned off, and dominating my free time with chit-chat about Colt this and Colt that.  Mary only stayed a month because she couldn’t handle being around Colt any longer without losing her elfin poise, and one morning I left him a note that detailed all the things I didn’t like about him.  I was prepared to stay in my room all day to avoid a confrontation, but I only had to wait a few hours, and he was gone with all his stuff, suddenly living with Joybroth whom I had been avoiding since we temporarily hated each other at that particular time.

Shortly after Joybroth realized his mistake and motivated Colt to find himself a girlfriend to move in with, I was tuning a little spinet piano on the show floor at Puff’s Pianos and Organs, and in walks my ex-roommate Colt with his new psychologist girlfriend, and he comes up behind me and starts rubbing my shoulders while I’m trying to work.  This went on for long minutes, me not saying anything for fear that anything I might say could be taken as an introduction to some sort of interpersonal sharing event.  Finally, Don Puff in his infinite wisdom came over and silently picked up one end of the piano I was tuning, and I knew what to do.  I got up and picked up the other end of the piano, and we took the whole operation into another room and shut me in.  I never saw Colt again, although he did play the pianos in the showroom for two hours before he finally left.

So I had my perfect bachelor life back again, and what else was there to do with that but to screw it up looking for a woman.

For some reason I kept seeing Lily and Danny around town.  They were from the Rabid Flock Jesus Freak days, and Lily’s little sister Trudy had been in love with me when we were in high school, but I was a senior and she was a freshman at the other high school, and she was also a little taller than me, so nothing ever happened because I was too stupid to give her a try, although I did go so far as to make out with her once, and another night I kept trying to stick my hand in her shirt when she, I and Batanwa Jim were upsliddenly occupying the deserted Rabid Flock with all the lights out and no one the wiser.

So I said to myself, if I see Trudy’s big sister Lily out and about one more time, I’m gonna get Trudy’s phone number.  Lily had already told me that Trudy was a single mom with a five-year-old daughter named Rhiannon, so I figured that was surely a sign, because the original “Rhiannon” was a sorceress of old Welsh folklore.  So naturally there’s Lily again, a third time in quick succession.  Obviously bidden by Fate to do so, I got the number and called Trudy.

The phone call was long and cozy and so was the next one, so I figured, OK, I’ll marry her, because I usually have to go through this process when meeting a woman, of deciding whether or not I would be able to spend the rest of my life with that woman, and if not, then don’t take her out and don’t have sex with her.  Of course all you have to do to override the system is to lie to yourself about whether or not you want to spend your life with that person.

And so it was that I proceeded to make plans to take Trudy and Rhiannon on a date.  Every omen was bad from the beginning.  The morning of the night of the date, I left my car’s headlights on and killed my battery, and had to call Trudy when it was time for our date and get her to drive.  When I first saw her through my window, walking up to the house, my heart sank.  I quickly realized that she was no longer 15 years old.  What had I committed myself to?  I can’t marry her!  She wears makeup!  Lots of it!  Her hair was in a permanent that made her look 15 years older than she was, and she did the ugliest thing an overweight person can do, in my opinion, which is to wear tight pants.  My mind was reeling: how do I get out of this?  My other mind was slamming the door shut: No escape!  You already asked her out.  It would break her heart if you didn’t continue to play the game out to the bitter end.

So she drove Rhiannon and me to the Mexican Restaurant in her primer-gray ‘65 Mustang which she’d been push-starting for months since the starter was broken.  At the restaurant, her incredibly precocious and energetic brown-haired daughter got to know everybody in the restaurant within minutes.  Trudy and I told each other our life stories.  It was not easy to keep Rhiannon in her chair long enough for her to eat, since she now had so many friends to visit, but finally we were all done eating and Trudy said to Rhiannon, “Don’t spill your soda,” and went like this with her hand, and smacked her own soda glass so hard that it flew all the way across the table and landed square in my lap.

So there we were later on, me in my wet sticky trousers, sitting in a movie theater after having dropped Rhiannon off at the home of her obese slobby Aunt and Grandma, both of whom—like Lily and the other sister who was married to a highway patrolman—talked in goofy little childish baby talk, and the movie was about an immature brontosaurus.  The title screamed at me from the movie screen: BABY, in 15-foot-tall bright yellow block letters, and I couldn’t help but feel that I was going against the grain here to keep a girl-woman from feeling jilted.

After the movie I asked Trudy if she had any pot, since I was getting ready to ruin my life anyway and I figured I might as well get stupid while I commenced to acting that way, so we stopped at the liquor store for some Tanqueray and tonic and headed on over to her house to smoke pot and drink gin.

Trudy had warned me that her house was a mess, and when I said I didn’t mind, she said, No, I mean a real mess.  It would be true if I were to state that upon entering her cardboard shack, which her sister’s Jesus Freak father-in-law had talked her into mortgaging her soul for, I walked into an absolute treasure trove of cookie bags, candy wrappers, piles of sugar on the rug under the couch, dirty clothes, cat shit, I mean this place had never been vacuumed, because there was no place for the vacuum cleaner to roll.  It was so horrible that I got good and stoned so as to try and make it seem more interesting than nightmarish.  I used Trudy’s guitar to perform a few pieces of Lost Wave Music for her, and she literally gave me a blank, mute stare at the end of each song, having found nothing interesting or noteworthy about my music.

At this point I realized I was just here to get laid and by Golly, that is what I intended to do, so I took her into her waterbed, which smelled like pee, and proceeded to have sex with her off and on all night, because that’s how long it took for me to get to where a guy is trying to get to when he has sex.  Trudy was in Fairyland, and even said so about 6:00 in the morning.  We had been taking turns going to sleep; first she’d drop off and I’d watch her sleep, then I’d drop off and she’d watch me sleep.  Finally we both fell asleep at the same time, and a few minutes later when I opened my eyes, hers opened too and she said, “I feel like I’m in Fairyland,” and then her eyes rolled back in her head and she gagged and kind of screeched, sucking in air while making this awful, shrill, inhuman sound, and her toes pointed and her body went rigid and her back arched and she went into a grand mal seizure, choking and gagging and drooling and jerking on the bed there beside me.

I had heard something once upon a time about sticking your wallet in someone’s mouth when they’re having convulsions, because it keeps them from biting their tongue, but I didn’t want her to bite my money so I just went ahead and stuck my hand in her mouth and by Golly, she pretty nearly bit it clean off.  I was able to retrieve most of it just in the nick of time, and turned her on her side so she wouldn’t swallow her tongue, and waited for the electrical storm in her brain to subside.

She had obviously pissed all over herself, and was completely unaware of her surroundings or even who she was.  I had to wait over an hour for her to become coherent enough that I could pretend she knew what I was talking about, and after a little bit of that confusion, maybe 45 minutes, she suddenly became completely lucid and understood exactly what was going on.  At this moment she made that horrid noise again and went back into convulsions.  This routine repeated itself throughout the day.  In those terrifying and lonely hours, after one convulsion ended and another began, I was tempted to leave this poor stranger where she was, call an ambulance anonymously, and run for dear life.  But there was a Pickled Pall of Fate hanging over these proceedings, a clammy-with-self-indulgence sense of loss-due-to-sacrifice that I used to console myself with as I envisioned myself raising Rhiannon alone and taking her to see her mother in the nursing home on alternate Sundays.  I could see myself growing old, a white-haired piano tuner: I could see my prematurely aging wife’s hairdo.  It was right there.  She already had it on.  The feeling went all the way through me, and I liked that; I have gone to great lengths many times to light up the deeper pools of emotion within my empty shell, but the one that takes the cake goes like this: a dude takes this chick to bed against his own better judgment, because he knows she has a real bad crush on him, and she gets real sick before morning and he blames himself because of the intensity of the situation, but really he just feels guilty for knowingly setting her up for disappointment just so he can get his thing wet.  He decides to stay with her, at least till she gets over her sickness, as if he had somehow caused the sickness.  He is happy because his melancholy is overwhelming; the intensity of the emotion is reward enough, and he can only hope the reward will be enough to get him through a life of marriage to a woman he pities but does not appreciate.

Sometime during all this, Rhiannon woke up and went outside to play.  On her way out the door she peeked into the bedroom, and I quizzed her tactfully:  Did you know your mother was sick?  Uh-huh.  You know she’ll be better soon, don’t you?  Uh-huh.  I assumed that Trudy had failed to mention an epileptic condition to me that her daughter was accustomed to.  Hours later, Rhiannon came in the house to ask me if I was hungry, which I was, so she took me by the hand and hauled me into the kitchen where she climbed up on a chair and got everything she needed to make us each a cheese sandwich.  Taking care of herself was apparently her daily routine; Trudy worked the graveyard shift at Tony’s Frozen Pizza Factory and somehow survived on about five hours of sleep.  Rhiannon survived because of her doting Grandma and three baby-talking aunts.

After the fourth seizure I called Aunt Fawnie, a retired nurse—Trudy was the youngest of the four sisters—and explained with great trepidation that I had spent the night with her little sister Trudy, and to get right to the point . . . she is an epileptic . . . isn’t she?

A long silence, then . . . No . . .

Oh shit.

I called an ambulance while Grandma and Aunt Fawnie rushed over to meet them at the scene of the whatever it was.

With the smelly, trash-filled bedroom full of medics, police officers, and worried relatives, I tried to explain that Trudy had been having seizures all day, and that she needed to go to the hospital.  I showed a police officer the little white tablets of speed on the dresser, hoping I was helping Trudy’s cause by doing so, rather that hurting it.  To complicate matters, Trudy denied groggily that anything was wrong, and of course she refused to get out of bed and into the stretcher.  I asserted that she wouldn’t be able to walk if she tried, because I knew from a long day of experience in these matters that if she did try to move, she would wince, cry out in pain, and fall back on the bed.  Nothing would convince the ambulance driver, who informed me that he could not force someone to go to the hospital against their will unless they could be shown to be incompetent.  I could read in every face in the room that I was suspected of trying to cover up a drug orgy, and I was afraid I would be arrested and Trudy would be left to “sleep it off.”

Finally I realized that I had only one option, and that was to demonstrate that Trudy was incompetent.  I peered into my vault of innermost resources and found a last-ditch idea.  I knelt at her side where she sprawled across the waterbed, her paralysis of mind and body apparent only to me, and said, “Trudy?”

“Hmmm?” she raised her eyebrows and looked at me.  I knew that she couldn’t move anything but her neck.

“Can you tell me what we were just talking about?” I inquired gently.

She rolled her eyes to the side and thought for a moment, then looked me in the eye and said, “Something about a picnic?”

The medics and police officers looked at each other and nodded, everybody patted me on the back, and they hauled her out of her bed and into the stretcher and off to the hospital.  Her muscles were so sore and stiff that she whimpered in pain all the way from the bed to the stretcher.

Skepticism still plagued the meager thought processes of the powers-that-were, and as a result they stuck Trudy in a room off out of the way somewhere—to sleep it off, I presume—until a passing nurse happened to look in and caught her in the middle of yet another grand mal seizure.  Finally they found it in their best interests to move her into a room next to the nurses’ station and called in the only neurologist in town, who scheduled her for supposedly every test in the book.  After a week in the hospital, the seizures had stopped, her mental faculties returned, the tests including the one for epilepsy all came back negative, the only neurologist in town prescribed Dilantin for her anyway, just for the fun of it, and he sent her home, cured of nothing.

Now at this point, Judy’s only physical complaint, except for the lack of junk food in her system, was the Dilantin, because it made her feel nauseous, groggy and weak.  Dilantin is given to epileptics to control their seizures.  I went to the library and looked in the Physicians’ Desk Reference Manual under Dilantin, and you know me, I gave all my attention to the huge section on side effects, most of which Trudy was complaining of.  What caught my eye most of all was a statement that Dilantin must never be prescribed for seizures caused by hypoglycemia.  Trudy insisted that they had not tested her for hypoglycemia, and I believed her; I had recently attended a lecture on the topic, and the speakers had stressed that regular doctors fail to test for this condition because there’s no way they can profit by finding it; the only way to cure the condition is by changes in diet and lifestyle, and the only neurologist in town hadn’t shown the slightest interest in Trudy’s diet or lifestyle.

Over the next few weeks we treaded the long and winding course to get a doctor to let her take the six-hour glucose tolerance test for hypoglycemia, also known as low blood sugar—sort of the opposite of diabetes—and after a month of fasting from sugar, candy, soda, chocolate, and fast food, sure enough, the six-hour glucose test still came back with positive results: Trudy was on the opposite extreme of the blood sugar spectrum from a diabetic.  She weaned herself off the foul Dilantin, let me talk her into quitting her night job at Tony’s Frozen Pizza Factory where her job was to get in a space suit and hose down walls and machinery with extremely toxic chemicals, and that was that.

Except that in the meantime, I had brought over my Rainbow vacuum cleaner, cleaned her whole house from top to bottom, taught Rhiannon how to clean her room, and moved in.

What more was there but to ask Trudy to marry me?

I typed up the invitations on my most prized possession, the old manual typewriter my Mama had given me, and made a bunch of photocopies, and sent the unadorned and most humble excuses for wedding invitations out to everybody I knew.  We talked Brother Loren Hautberg, the former assistant leader of the Rabid Flock, who had gone to reverend school and started his own Jesus Freak church, into heading up the ceremony, despite his hesitancy at leading a couple of thoroughly upslidden non-christians into the sacred state of lifelong commitment.  He bore his task with his usual toothsome grin.

My old friend Paco, the one who had inspired me to reject religion as the preferred path to misery, and who was now a tax attorney in Chicago, shocked me by showing up for the ceremony, which was conducted on a windy Spring afternoon in the gazebo at the park.  As best man, Joybroth helped me pin balloons up all around the gazebo, Ann Z played the music on her electric piano, and Rhiannon tossed flowers in the aisle.  The wind popped two balloons during the ceremony, prompting the ever-cheerful Brother Hautberg to stop during his speech to quip, “Two down, one to go!” and everybody giggled nervously and before I knew it, I was a legally married man.  My new mother-in-law informed me that I hadn’t just married her daughter, I had married the whole damn family, my Mama and Daddy informed me that I had always been the apple of their eyes, and Aunt Fawnie barbecued a whole mess of chicken parts.  I gave Paco my air car spiel, which he received with his usual skeptical little smile, everybody left, and Trudy, Joybroth and I stayed behind in the park to play croquet.  There was no honeymoon because Trudy wasn’t working so we couldn’t afford to go anywhere, and she was afraid to leave the city limits of Hazing, Kansas anyway.  That night my Daddy bought everybody pizza at the Scheme, and then my sister Mo, her second husband, my nieces and my Mama and Daddy all got on airplanes and went home.

That accomplished, Trudy and I went out and found a better house to buy, as it was obvious that the cardboard shack we were living in was unsuitable for a successful self-respecting couple of potheads to live their life in.  I talked Trudy into taking Rhiannon out of the Jesus Freak school that Lily and Danny were paying for so Rhiannon would stop telling us we were going to hell.  She was pissed at me for making her leave her friends and vanilla wafers behind at the christian school, but I warned her that her fear of making new friends in the public school would gradually go away all by itself, which it did in about a day and a half.  Pretty soon she wouldn’t let me walk her to school, because it was interfering with her social life.

It was undoubtedly our mutual and expensive hankering for bong abuse that started the trouble, not to mention my “secret” cigarette-smoking habit which escalated from nothing to everything whenever we had any kind of disagreement, as well as my lack of interest in sex.  After we amassed enough debts in the pursuit of entertainment to pressurize my teeny-tiny motivational structure to the point of imminent collapse, I announced that I had never intended for my wife to stay at home and spend my money, although Trudy had actually helped out considerably with the piano business by handling all the phone work, refinishing, and most of the moral support.  She responded that she had no intention of ever going camping with me or moving away from Hazing, Kansas with me, and stuck out her lower lip and went out and got a job at a fast food restaurant.  While having her own income helped her attitude considerably, nothing could help my attitude, and Rhiannon scolded me ruthlessly when I yanked the TV cable out of the wall in the midst of one of the tantrums I indulged in because Trudy was hooked on watching football and wouldn’t turn it off to listen to me whine.

Meanwhile, Terry Miller called me up from Crestline, Kansas to invite me to join him for a weekend at the 1985 Energy Exposition in Wichita, where I ecstatically gave free rides on Air Car One to everyone who wanted one, for two of the happiest days of my life.  The keynote speaker at the Expo was Dr. Amory Lovins, the famous author and consultant who is known world-wide for his work in energy conservation.  When Dr. Lovins arrived at his hotel from the airport, Terry and I jumped on the air car and headed out into the streets of downtown Wichita to go get him and haul him over to the Expo.  Terry drove like the reckless iconoclast that he was, explaining that there are no laws to govern air cars.  Dr. Lovins listened to my spiel and made some interesting suggestions, got in the passenger seat of Terry’s two-seat air car, and I watched them drive away, following on foot.

Near the end of the first day, Terry was riding around the Exposition Center showing off Air Car One throughout the crowd when something went wrong with one of the rear wheel-to-axle connections and the steering went out of control.  Air Car One slid harmlessly into the stage at two miles per hour and we spent the rest of the afternoon with the air car up on jack stands, staring at it with exasperation, trying to figure out a quick fix for the expediently designed and cheaply built axle mechanism.  Simply put, the free wheel had seized up and, lacking a rear differential, the car could not be steered with both rear wheels fixed to the axle.  Nothing witty popped into our exhausted brains, so we hung it up for the night and went to Terry’s hotel room where he and his wife slept in one bed and his step-son and I slept in the other.  Terry teased me for sleeping so close to the edge of the bed.

Terry was the last to climb into bed, and I noticed that he was literally snoring—I’m not making this up—before his head hit the pillow.  You might call him the opposite of a stressed-out person.  I was more worried about getting the air car running again than he was.  In the morning, I was laying in bed pretending to be asleep and listening to Terry snore, when he snorted loudly a couple of times, sat up in bed and announced, “I’ve got it!  The problem is the solution!”  And he was right: all we had to do was unbolt the fixed wheel so it would spin freely on the axle, and let the frozen wheel stay fixed to the axle.  With one wheel fixed and one freewheeling, the air car was repaired and drivable in less than five minutes.

Next to our booth at the Expo was a shiny little electric car which sat nearly idle through the whole show while people were lined up continuously at our booth to ride in Terry Miller’s three-wheel workbench-on-wheels.  People love air cars.  Although Terry was fairly bored with the air car by 1985, he did exhibit one fit of mania that weekend that I will never forget.  I was driving the car in big circles at the prescribed four miles per hour while Terry was off getting himself some popcorn, and when he got back with a huge sack of popcorn filled to the brim, he walked toward me and sent me hand signals indicating that I was to jump off without stopping the car.  I did so, and he jumped aboard and stood up in the car—which had no body to force him to sit down—and steered with one hand while he started whooping and hollering and spilling popcorn all over the place.  He pretended to be a drunk hijacker, yelling loudly in an exaggeration of his Oklahoma drawl, What kind of air car is this?  You call this an air car?!  A real air car!!!  I’m driving a real air car!

This went on for some time until a crowd had formed, Terry’s wife was ready to crawl under the table, and the supervisors of the event had gathered in a whispering circle and were shooting cold stares at the big man speeding around in warped circles, swaying like a drunk and hollering at the top of his lungs.

The last ride I gave was to a blind man who wanted a complete description of every sound he heard and everything that was going on in the air engine.  I drove him around twice as long as I was supposed to, and when he got out of the car I turned off the air so he could run his hands over every part of the air engine.  He intended to memorize the design so he could go home and build an air car of his own.  That ride was the fulfillment of all my desires; when the man walked away with a beatific glow on his face, I walked over to Terry where he slumped in his chair at the booth, and shook his hand, explaining that I needed to go home to my wife.  Whatever trips your trigger, he shrugged, Aren’t you glad you didn’t bring her along?

I smiled and said good-bye, not really sure I wanted to go home.

To be brutally honest, I wouldn’t have left then except that I had been bumming cigarettes from Terry’s stepson all weekend but in my excitement I had forgotten to bring my toothbrush, deodorant, and a clean shirt.

The glow of this latest peak experience in my career as an air car advocate soon degenerated into an overwhelming sullenness over the amount of high-priced piano jobs I was doing just to pay the debts of myself and my incompatible life partner.  Now that my martyr’s fantasy of spending my life in Hazing, Kansas catering to the interests of an overgrown adolescent other than myself had been revealed in the light of what that kind of life was really going to be like, the deepening gloom I slogged through day after day began to seem like an inexcusable self-punishment based on the stupid precept that I could not say no after I had already said yes.  Still I was unable to abandon in reality what I had already abandoned in spirit, but meanwhile my mood had swung so low that my customers were giving me looks like, Don’t come back, sucker, and, Get away from my piano, scumbag.  Don Puff’s younger son Demerald was just out of college with a brand-new Business Administration diploma that he was busy jerking off to as the new managing ego of the piano store that Don Puff had inherited from his own father, and Demerald’s contempt for my casual attitude and image and my rough-hewn tuning abilities were ever so transparent.  After nearly two years in this episode of my pretend career as a piano tuner, a little voice was telling me to sell my business while it still had any value.  So I contacted the placement office at my alma mater in Sioux City and they found me a brand-new piano tuning graduate who wanted a jump-start in the business, and I turned everything over to him with Don Puff’s assurance that he would be treated as grandly as I had been treated when I had moved back to town.  With a monthly check coming in from the new tuner, I happily procured a job at the new pizza delivery store that had opened up, and Trudy and I began competing to see who would be the first to make manager at our respective fast-food jobs.

Since Hominid Pizza had just opened its doors and needed lots of help to get them through their grand opening, they hired everybody who walked in the door.  I know this because when I wandered through the door in my new thrift store jumpsuit—which Boss said looked like a prisoner’s uniform—and a long beard, I was snatched up instantly by the general manager, a fast-living Eskimo boy who had lost his first two Hominid Pizza stores because he was too popular.  Once the beard was removed to reveal my baby-faced and timidly nonverbal true nature, it became obvious to my cocaine-sniffing manager and his big-breasted, foul-mouthed, 4’-11” drill-sergeant assistant manager that the quickest way to get rid of me would be to recruit me as a so-called Manager-in-Training and let me dig my own grave with my naive compulsion to follow all the written corporate rules to the letter while expecting the same from everybody else, but to resist as irrelevant and ridiculous the much more important unwritten rules, to wit:
1) delivery drivers are expected to break every traffic law in existence to get the pizza to the customer in time, 2) spend all your time sitting on the manager’s lap in his office appreciating his witty and dynamic personality, while the socially stupid and obstinately obedient worker ants stay in the kitchen to keep the pizzas going through the oven, 3) work for free, off the clock, to uphold the corporately dictated man-hour-to-production ratio and thus earn points for your district manager, and 4) party with the boss, and I do mean Thou Shalt Snort Cocaine And Have A Good Time.

Sparing my loyal readers any further details, I soon found myself not showing up to my shift because so many Managers-in-Training had been hired to compete with each other that the meanest, laziest, and prettiest Managers-in-Training found it obscenely easy to verbally abuse me into a quivering mass of overworked nice-guy froth.  Why go to work just to have it re-proven to myself and everybody else that I am far too sensitive and naive to work as a team leader in the fast-paced Real World?

Now that I was unemployed and living off a monthly $325 check from the eager-beaver who had bought my tuning business, I considered it high time that I build my first scientific test model in an ill-advised attempt to find a hole in the laws of physics to plug the concept of the seemingly impossible self-fueling air car into.  I turned to marijuana and player pianos for inspiration, and feverishly built a bellows device to prove that every engineer since the dawn of creation had managed to overlook a little-known property of levers that I hoped would explain why the self-fueling air car acts like a perpetual motion machine, that is, a device that finds extra energy somewhere to create its own fuel.  I hauled an acquaintance I’d met at the pizza job over to my house in hopes of blowing his closed little mind with my ingenuity, and also to see if he could help me figure out why my device failed so utterly and precisely to do what I’d expected it to.  He chuckled and patted me on the head and suggested I hit the books.  Naturally, this little-known property of levers had been overlooked by those in the know because of the undeniably relevant fact that it was a fallacy based on my own ignorance.  Once I forced myself to ask myself why my invention failed with such mathematical precision, I had to admit that I was a hopeless abuser of wishful thinking, and scrapped the feeble fantasy to concentrate more fully on what was really bothering me, besides the fact that I could barely pay my bills.

It was my so-called marriage.

To complicate things, my new step-daughter had fallen for me, because I had improved her life considerably by gradually righting some of her mother’s lop-sided habits and abdications of responsibility: I had brought Rhiannon fully into our home, wresting control away from her Grandma and her aunts and getting Trudy off the night shift; I had removed the white sugar from the house and provided a flawed but better diet by doing most of the cooking myself; I had given her a feeling of self-respect by taking her out of her high-chair and teaching her how to clean her room.  Without it being suggested to her, she started introducing me to her friends as her Daddy, which choked me up.

I bought Rhiannon a bicycle and gave her broken-down tricycle to the thrift store, despite Trudy’s recurrent protestations that she had enthusiastically ridden her own tricycle till her legs were so long that she had to sit on the back axle instead of the seat in order to pedal it.  One day, after Rhiannon had learned to ride the bike but before she was willing to use the brakes, I was running along behind her while she pedaled like the devil down a gravel alleyway next to our house.  She had gotten ahead of me, literally leaving me in the dust as I huffed and puffed in a hopeless attempt to catch her so I would be there when she needed me.  Then I saw a sandy pothole right in front of her, and knew with my entire being that she was going to wipe out at top speed, and in spite of redoubling my efforts to catch up to her, she hit the sand trap and flopped over on her side.  My mind shrieked at me for being so stupidly confident of her as to let her out of my grasp with nothing in control but her unbridled enthusiasm, and I raced up to the scene of the accident ready to call an ambulance and then commit hara-kiri.  But to my astonishment and complete surprise, the sobbing little six-year-old warrior, with tears squirting out of her face to beat the band, was already picking herself up out of the dirt and re-mounting her bike by the time I got to her, and before I could grab her and feel for broken ribs, she was already back up and rolling away from me, still sobbing.  I stood there trying to catch my breath, amazed at the imperviousness of true fun and wondering where I could get some.

And then there was my ever-loving spouse.  I wouldn’t stop smoking cigarettes because she couldn’t make me.  I was unemployed and she wasn’t.  Joybroth helped out by renting our basement bedroom, and for a change I found myself coming to his defense because Trudy was meaner to him than I’d ever hoped to be.  I couldn’t have sex with her because I felt so guilty for marrying her, and although she seldom complained about our sexlessness except when we were at my friend Tommy’s house mooching bong hits, something in me was winding up to a decision I didn’t want to make.  The word Daddy, pointed at me by Rhiannon’s big brown eyes so suddenly full of trust, hurt me like nothing ever had, because of what I was afraid I would have to do to get the black beast off my shoulders.

Joybroth had helped me pay off a flotation tank that I’d had on layaway, and in case you don’t know what a flotation tank is, it’s an isolation booth containing a shallow bath comprised of half water and half salt, on which you stretch out and relax.  You bob effortlessly on the water, unable to sink because of the salt; it’s completely dark; your ears go below the water so you hear nothing; and the water is heated to skin temperature so that you feel neither warm nor cold.  This device was designed by philosopher, dolphin-lover and scientist John Lilly MD to be the ultimate sensory deprivation unit, for the purpose of exploring the nature of consciousness.  I intended to use it to induce altered states and drugless visions, but because I turned out to be such a featherweight when I found myself about to free-fall into dreamtime, every single time I was on the verge of turning off this reality and melting into a new one, I reliably mistook the sensation I was experiencing for the dire need to fall asleep, and was thereby driven to remove myself from the tank so I could go to bed.  By the time the saltwater was showered off, I realized I was actually wide awake, fooled once again by the insidious human need to cling in mortal terror to the mental state to which I was accustomed.  As a result of all this tomfoolery, I nearly abandoned the tank, but one afternoon when I was home alone I got in the tank for an unusual reason: I was at the end of my rope, ready to give up on everything, and needed a place to escape my normal thought processes, which tormented me without mercy, so I could try to think clearly about the obvious need to make a decision.  In fact I promised myself that I would not get out of the tank until the decision was made.

Once in the unobstructed darkness, my mind kept landing on something my friend Tommy had said.  We barely knew each other, and his chief function had been to save me from my dependence on Boss.  I had visited him recently in the depths of despair.  He had puttered restlessly while I tried to explain my feelings of obligation and my equally miasmic feelings of uselessness and just plain wrongness.  He paced around the room holding his baby daughter while I needlessly told him of my emotional attachment to Rhiannon.  Finally he interrupted me, and looked me in the eyes for the first time that night, and said what he had been wanting to say:

“Goontner,” he said—Boss and his friends had their own name for me—”you can’t marry someone out of pity.”

That’s all he said, and that’s all he had to say.

I climbed out of the tank, showered off, and headed upstairs to pack.