CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

In which I sacrifice my life to win back my Sol

 

After Rhiannon caught me trying to sneak out the back door with my backpack I decided I would have to face the music and actually tell Trudy I was leaving her.  When the time arrived in a few days to say good-bye properly, I told Rhiannon I was sorry we couldn’t have our little family, and collected a stiff little hug from her as she ran off to school. I got Trudy to sign a Separation of Financial Affairs Agreement, and packed my Datsun station wagon and headed for Grass Valley to live with Judas where he now resided at the home of Porsche Doer and Grave Darn, at what had once been Ma and Pa Partridge’s place.

It seems that in my absence, Ma Partridge had taken sick and asked Porsche Doer and Grave Darn, who had been renting Sky Ranch after Darshan and Jaia moved into their El Camino, to live with her and Pa Partridge and help out with the things they could no longer do.  Porsche Doer had just given birth to twin daughters and since Ma and Pa Partridge had no children, shortly after his wife died, Pa Partridge sold his two acres to Porsche Doer for one silver dollar.  By the time I arrived, Pa Partridge had taken leave of the Planet and Porsche Doer now owned her own home, free and clear.  She and Grave had taken over a produce market which they proceeded to run into the ground, and now Porsche Doer ran her own produce stand out of her home, much to the dismay of the county officials who failed to sympathize with the interests of non-yuppies.  Porsche patriotically thumbed her nose at the county and continued to operate People’s Produce any way she wanted, and Grave Darn slunk around getting his surly two-cents in and raising his daughters while Porsche Doer ran around playing patriot games and keeping a few Federal Reserve Notes—also known as “greenies”—flowing in because of her knack for picking out a good crate of oranges.

Judas was happy to see me, since he needed help remodeling Porsche Doer’s bathroom after the floor had completely caved in.  We slept in a little screened-in hut that had been the home of pregnant Porsche Doer, Grave Darn, and Porsche’s teenage punkster daughter from a previous marriage, while the Partridges said their last long good-byes.  Judas rebirthed me to try and help me exorcise the horrendous guilt I felt for abandoning Rhiannon.

The day I got to Grass Valley it started to rain, and that January of 1986 it continued to storm non-stop for several weeks, blowing the roof off Pa Partridge’s barn and raising the creeks and rivers to flood level.  Judas was working for a local acupuncturist, Rendall Stuckey, who had learned his trade, as well as Japanese carpentry, in Japan.  He had been born and raised in the ghetto, and it was his ambition in life to be as far from poverty-stricken as possible, so he charged as much for his acupuncture services as any MD, and ran his office with a professional image (see Winning by Intimidation, by Robert Ringer) that gained him a loyal following amongst the more well-to-do New Agers and retired meditators in the area.  The beautiful home he had built on the Ridge no longer impressed him, so he and his wife, who was from a wealthy Japanese family, had purchased an entire mountaintop and were paying Judas and others to turn it into an estate worthy of the nobility of their ambitions.  Rendall Stuckey had paid someone to dig what was to be a deep lake on one steep hillside, and during those protracted rains of 1986, the drain at the bottom of the huge hole became clogged and the lake started to fill up before schedule.  Because nothing had been done to keep the whole hillside from washing away should the lake fill up with water, Judas took me out there on Rendall’s orders to assist him in what he hoped would be a simple drain-unclogging exercise.

He tied a rope around his waist and handed me the other end of it.  The newly excavated hole was a slimy mud pit now, with several feet of water in the bottom.  With floods occurring everywhere around town, Judas’s sense of heroic urgency had overtaken his senses and he was sure he must preserve the future existence of Lake Rendall by unplugging that drain.  I was inwardly saying good-bye to him, for it was fairly obvious that he was about to lower himself to his doom in a slime pit that he would never be able to climb back out of.  I rared back on the rope, trying to plant my feet in the deep mud at the edge of the hole as Judas took two steps backward, his feet sinking almost a foot with each step.  He stopped for a moment, and looked me in the eyes.  There was nothing between us but wind and rain.  I remembered the dream I had when we lived at the Freedom House in the Rivendell days, in which I had been mourning his death at the hands of a flood.  I wondered how I would ever be able to get him back up a thirty-foot precipice of knee-deep slop.

Get me out of here, he said, and that was the end of that.  He explained that he was not willing to die for Rendall Stuckey’s pipe-dream lake, and we slogged off through the downpour to work on one of the many other less deadly grandiosities that Rendall had cooked up for the indefatigable Judas to accomplish.

Since I still had a check coming each month from the piano tuner in Hazing, Kansas who had bought my business, the odd jobs I helped Judas with easily prevented me from starving and more or less kept me out of trouble by giving me something to think about besides my guilty feelings for abandoning my step-daughter and for leaving Trudy with a mortgage payment and whatever loans happened to be in her name.  In the Spring, I got a phone call from Trudy who laughingly told me that she had been watching movies over at a friend’s house one night, before I had moved out, with one of the guys from Tony’s Frozen Pizza Factory who she had stopped having sex with when she married me.  She said that he had raped her in his apartment, and she giggled.  I asked her what kind of movies they were watching together, and she replied that they were X-rated movies.  I explained to her that a woman doesn’t go over to a guy’s house to watch X-rated movies with him unless she intends to have sex with him before she leaves, and she hung up the phone on me.

Shortly after that, one of my monthly checks, which the piano tuner had been giving to Trudy to mail to me, since he was renting both of her basement rooms to help her get by, failed to arrive.  I called him to chew him out, and he assured me that he had given the check to Trudy as he always had in the past.  I scraped up what I could from odd jobs and headed for Hazing, Kansas to get one more load of my stuff and say good-bye to the rest.  I hadn’t warned Trudy that I was coming, so when I was 10 miles from Hazing I called her and told her where I was.  She informed me that her lawyer was going to give me a reaming that I would never recover from, and that the Separation of Financial Affairs Agreement she had signed would never hold up in court.  I peered into my vault of inner resources, and this is what I said: “Your lawyer wants no part of any childish bickering, and you and I are going to settle our affairs simply like two adults.”  I hung up the phone and that was that.  She never gave me any problems after that.  Without the knowledge I had gleaned from reading books, and living with literally hundreds of wackos, everything would have gone completely askew, because I would have stupidly joined her in a pissing contest to see who could end up owing more money to lawyers.  But as it turned out, Trudy arranged for her lawyer to type up the simplest possible divorce papers, and the battle ended before it began.  The entire relationship, from our first date to our divorce, lasted less than a year.

If Terry Miller was the father of the modern air car movement, then Willard “Bill” Truitt of McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, was the father of the self-fueling air car.  I had several photocopies of articles about him, including some old promotional flyers of his own that were peppered with his address and phone number.  Rallying all my scarce and scattered fearlessness, I called the number to see if he was still alive, and by Golly, what a surprise, he was not only alive, but willing and happy to talk about his air cars as long as I was willing to listen.  It turns out that he had built his first air car in 1920, and by the time our government foisted the phony fuel crisis on us during the 1970s, he had pretty much perfected the workings of the self-fueling concept.  His third and last air car never ran out of air, but because of harassment from oil companies and stalkers, he gave the car and the rights to his invention to NASA and the US Army.  Because he no longer owned the rights, he was unwilling to tell me the secret that made it possible for an air car to keep its own tanks full without breaking the laws of physics: he would not tell me the difference between a self-fueling air car and an impossible perpetual motion machine.  I asked if his air pumps were putting low pressure air into a high pressure tank, as George Heaton had claimed he had been able to do, and Bill said, “It’s all high pressure,” but I thought he spoke too fast or something, as if trying to distract me from a discussion of that topic.  Other than that, he was no fast talker.  He had nothing to sell me, and gave no indication that he cared whether or not I believed him, so I did believe him, or at least wanted to very badly.  Once again I had climbed Air Car Mountain, and went over to Rendall Stuckey’s hilltop construction zone to tell Judas the good news and to see if I could fly, for I had a suspicion that I was dreaming.  Finding that I was unable to fly—though Judas was a little worried about me when I tried—it seemed only natural that Bill Truitt was as honest as he had sounded.  Thus began my search for the Magic Valve that could allow low pressure air into a high pressure tank.  According to Bill Truitt, his secret valve worked like a heart, but that’s all he would say, except that nothing would work without it.

Darshan and Jaia—or, as Judas called them, Darvon and Jaw-ya the Autodwellers—had been traveling a while back and when they returned from Santa Barbara they imported to the Grass Valley area an old street wanderer who called himself Jonesy.  Judas claims that Jonesy had stayed with us at Rivendell under the name Preacherman, but Jonesy denies it.  Little old Jonesy became a permanent fixture of Grass Valley, walking the streets in fantastic colorful costumes entertaining the tourists and locals and aggravating the shopkeepers by singing snatches of real and made-up songs, preaching half-serious and half-lunatic impromptu sermons that were semi-Biblical and sometimes marginally obscene.  His big hooked nose and thick white hair and long dresses and other bizarre costumes were his trademark, and Grass Valley was to be his final playground.

As Autodwellers, Darshan and Jaia would often drop by Porsche Doer’s house to hang out, paint signs, or just get out of the car for awhile.  Sometimes Jaia would hang out with me while Darshan was off working somewhere, because I appreciated her ever-ready input more than Judas or Grave Darn did.  One evening they brought Jonesy over because he was drunk; Jaia had decreed that he had to be removed from the public eye while he sobered up.  For hours we all hung out in Porsche Doer’s living room, smoking pot and fantasizing about air cars.  Finally, everyone had left except Jonesy and myself, and Jonesy spake unto me, and this is what he saith: “Now this is all good and fine, all this fancy talk about air cars this and air cars that, but let me tell you what I’d like to see.  I’d like to see you stop wasting your time talking about it, and get off your butt and do something.”

His words echoed my sentiments exactly; I was almost as frustrated by my own inaction as I had been before I had discovered my calling when I was itching for something important and worthwhile to do.  I thanked him for his stern encouragement, walked over to what had once been Pa Partridge’s egg room and was now my air car shop, opened up my little plastic file box, got out my scissors and rubber cement, and made that first frightening cut into my prized collection of photocopies.  Within weeks I had finished my first 300-page compilation of air car research findings, Air Car Access: Volume I, and made several hand-bound copies to sell to my friends, relatives, and fellow researchers.

Since Porsche Doer had said I could use one of the classic autos she’d inherited from Ma and Pa Partridge to make an air car out of, I got all misty-eyed over her current lack of viable transportation for herself and her four-year old twins, and let her have my Datsun.  Every day I walked the two miles to town to check my post office box, even when my legs hurt from the so-called sciatica or whatever it was.  Walking once again helped define my identity as a do-it-yourselfer, a voluntary outcast from a fat society that I despised, and an idealistic rejecter of the prevalent toxic form of propulsion that I could not afford to pay for anyway.  Since Porsche Doer donated my living and working space to the air car project, it made me proud to give her something back, although the car continued to be in my name.  Not that it was registered or insured.  Fortunately there was nothing on my Kansas license plate to tell the local Grass Valley Police that the car was an illegal vagrant.

Based on twisted logic and bad math, I soon built a device that was designed to prove something about compressed air that is neither here nor there to this particular account.  I called it an equalizer, because it mixed atmosphere with existing high pressure air to produce a medium pressure.  When I called everybody over to the air car shop to witness the first test, Grave Darn took pictures and everybody watched as I proceeded to prove myself wrong once more.  However, I eventually learned that this was not the only equalizer that had ever been made; parts of what I was onto were close to what a Magic Valve would need to be able to do.  It was my reasoning behind where an energy source might come from that was still completely unsound.

One day I was in my shop, standing over the equalizer, nonchalantly spacing out, with nothing on my mind, and for no reason I reached over and opened a valve.  A piston rod extended at ballistic velocity and went THUNK and stopped less than an inch from my left temple.  After this near-lobotomy I made rules for myself, such as, Don’t open valves for no reason, and Don’t leave air in a machine after a test has been completed.

Porsche Doer’s sister was staying with us for awhile, and she was instrumental in encouraging me to continue my research.  As a photographer, she had used compressed air in automated photo labs.  One day we went to the local Northstar Mining Museum, which was really a compressed air museum, because it was built around a 30-foot water-powered wheel that had been used to drive a 1000-horsepower air compressor which had provided tool air and ventilation for the Northstar Mine and for the nearby Empire Mine.  At the Empire Mine I eventually discovered a compressed air locomotive, which I had seen twice before I realized what it was.  I have often considered renting a crane so I could lift the locomotive out of the yard and take it home for my collection.  I have a photo that Porsche Doer’s sister took of the Northstar Mine guest book from January 1, 1899.  An Edward A. Rix had signed the book that day, and in the comments column he wrote, “He of the Compressed Wind.”  Upon investigating Mr. Rix, I found that he had designed some of the earlier, more interesting compressed air locomotives that had been used at the local gold mines, that he had received countless patents for improvements on compressors, and that the compressor manufacturing company he founded in Oakland is still in existence.  He also wrote one of the compressed air textbooks that I have in my collection.

It turned out that Porsche Doer’s inspiration to participate in the so-called patriot movement had come from the Kogg family, a prideful bunch of Jewish iconoclasts who lived close to us.  The whole family had been converted to back-to-the-constitution patriotism one at a time and most of them had been arrested on purpose for not having driver’s licenses and for other similar nonsense, all out of a silly need to pretend that it was still 1776, and to make test cases out of themselves in court.  So far they had failed to prove in court that it was still 1776, although I would be the last to argue against the obvious fact that our court systems are still in the Dark Ages.

One of the Kogg boys, Louie Kogg, lived with his girlfriend in the smaller of the two houses on their property.  Louie was several years younger than me, and his girlfriend, who I affectionately refer to as the Beast, was considerably older than both of us.  I eventually came to think of her as my “worthy opponent,” a term popularized by Carlos Castaneda.  The Beast is the only Capricorn I’ve ever known of who had learning disabilities, but it was not due to any lack of intelligence.  She was a high-strung and extremely demonstrative Mexican-Indian gypsy hippie from Los Angeles who hugs everybody she meets, knows everybody, asks unabashedly for anything her heart desires, changes the subject of most conversations to revolve around herself, and generally lets it all hang out.  I had first met her years earlier when she bummed a ride to Campbell Hot Springs, and once we got there, she jumped out of the car and ran off to the baths without saying thank you, and I didn’t see her again for years.  Her new age leanings were tempered by her extreme love of marijuana.  Her age, fear of driving cars, and learning disability made it necessary for her to cling fiercely to her job at Fountain of Truth Foods—a large health food distribution warehouse that started in a garage in Grass Valley—from nearly its inception and for many years thereafter.  Louie Kogg considered himself quite the precocious whiz kid.  He was interested in electronics, patriotics and unemployment, and he liked to talk air cars with me and bought me the big stainless steel air tank that I am using right now for my most current experiments.  I believe his parents and friends paid him for being a patriot, the way that people occasionally pay me to be an air car advocate.

After a year-and-a-half at Porsche Doer’s house, I had written a little booklet called The Solar Air Car, because I had discovered evidence for a possible energy source for the self-fueling air car.  It seems that the most efficient air engines ever made for locomotives were able to absorb heat from the atmosphere surrounding the locomotive, thereby increasing their range between fill-ups up to 60%.  It was some time before the full impact of this discovery actually hit me, but for now I put it into my little book, which I advertised for sale in the Mother Earth News, and sent a copy to my step-father Sam for his comment.  He had once been an engineering student, and although he made a point of remaining aloof from my crazy ideas, I thought just once I would try to drag an opinion out of him.  When he wrote me back, something in his response made me go to the library, a term that I had heard before but didn’t know anything about: heat pump.

It was the perfect example of how one of air’s purported disadvantages—the fact that it gets cold when you use it—became one of its most important advantages when looked at in the properly optimistic light.  Although Sam’s carefully guarded words had not been intended to spark my knee-jerk optimism, when I read about heat pumps for the first time, that is exactly what happened.  For it is one of the first things you will discover about heat pumps upon a cursory examination that because of the refrigeration process involved, they are routinely in the habit of making several times more energy available for use than the amount of energy that is required to operate them.  My sources explained that although this at first appears to be a form of perpetual motion, or the impossible creation of energy, it is actually just a way of moving existing energy from one place to another, from a place and state where the heat in the atmosphere can’t be used, to a place and state where it can.  All this is made possible by the Freon that heat pumps employ—a fluid refrigerant that is used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and heat pumps to move heat—because when you compress and expand it, it changes temperature.  Like air.  Thus air is also a refrigerant; although it is considered an inferior refrigerant, when it comes to self-fueling air cars and Magic Valves, nothing could be finer than to find your automobile literally plowing through its own fuel, anywhere on the Planet that you drive it.

Another major discovery of these rollicking days of world-shattering research was the steam boiler injector, which had been invented 100 years before I was born, and which at first met with much skepticism.  Like the heat pump, it at first glance appeared to do the impossible.  With no moving parts, the boiler injector used a jet of high pressure steam out of a boiler to sweet-talk cold, unpressurized water into entering that same high pressure boiler.  The process is so totally analogous to George Heaton’s claim of being able to put low pressure air into a high pressure tank, that its discovery in the course of my research was more than music to my ears.

My new mail order business did less than nothing for my income, but was the beginning of a good thing; at least it gave me the feeling that I was doing something about my driving need to, as Al Margin used to put it, “save the world.”

Since I now had a dishwashing job at the historic Goldhook Hotel in downtown Grass Valley, I took the Beast up on her offer for me to move into her Airstream trailer, which was parked right next to the little house where she and Louie Kogg lived on his Mama and Daddy’s property.  She only charged me $150 a month to live there, explaining that she had been unable to make her payments to the friend who had sold her the trailer.  Now that I was out of Porsche Doer’s hectic haven for the homeless, I plunged ever-deeper into my new identity as a righter of wrongs by way of researching the hidden and forgotten capabilities of that which perpetually surrounds us.  Since it was now my Task to make all my research findings available to the world, each time I returned from Berkeley and San Francisco where I gleefully gleaned their ancient libraries for the forbidden knowledge that I compulsively sought, I would be up to my elbows in rubber cement and white-out for weeks, laying it out, pasting it up, putting my findings into book form for all to see.  Not that I could afford to advertise, but nonetheless my Pneumatic Options Research Library quickly grew from one to several volumes.

Meanwhile, Porsche Doer had gotten one of her cars running, and my little Datsun sat rusting away in her front yard while I continued walking two miles a day to check my empty mailbox and two miles a day to get back home.  So I asked for my car back, and Porsche Doer gave it to me with the warning that she knew for a fact—having once owned an auto repair shop—that the rear end was about to go out.  So I parked the car in front of my trailer and for another six months, I continued hobbling at least four miles a day to make sure my mailbox was empty.  Then one day I figured, What the heck, and drove the car over to a transmission repair shop for an estimate.  The man drove it around the block, put it up on the rack, took a little ball-peen hammer and went PING on one of the u-joints, and insisted that I drive it away.  Sure enough, the foreboding noise that Porsche Doer had been so worried about was gone forever.  I forced the man to take $5 from me.

Then the Beast, in one of her talkathons about herself, let it slip that she had not been making her trailer payments, even with the money I had been giving her for rent.  At first I stewed about this, until I realized it would be the perfect time for me to ask her to cut my rent in half, as a donation to the air car project, and let her do any damn thing she wanted with my $75 per month.  She granted my request.  Now I had more money to travel back and forth to the big libraries in the San Francisco Bay Area.

My chief correspondent in Florida, the one who had sent me the fat envelope of clippings on self-fueling air car inventors, had called me when I lived at Porsche Doer’s house to introduce me, by way of a three-way phone conversation, to a little old man who lived in Lodi, California, a mere 85 miles from Grass Valley.  This man, commonly known as Doc, since he was a lecturer, researcher and consultant in the field of naturopathic medicine, had been interested in air cars for almost as long as I had been alive, and had even seen one, built by an inventor named Raymond Starbard whose chief claim to fame was that the State of California had tried to deny him a smog certificate on his air car because his air engine—which of course burned no fuel and created no fumes—contained none of the smog equipment that had come on the original engine.  Doc explained that of all the air engines he had heard about, the one that had always seemed the simplest and most important for further study was Bob Neal’s.  He had met Bob Neal once, unfortunately after Mr. Neal’s air car days were long over, and they had corresponded for years.  I found Bob Neal’s patent, and lo and behold, it was all about a special valve that made it possible to put low pressure air into a high pressure tank.  The kicker was that his special valve was called, you guessed it, an equalizer.

The search for the Magic Valve now had a piece of hardware to focus on: a series of check valves inside the tank, valves which permit air to flow through them in only one direction.  But the simple two-page patent description failed to explain why or how the valve worked and still did not specify a source of energy to distinguish the self-fueling air engine from an impossible perpetual motion machine.  The new addition to my research findings frustrated me as much as it excited me, and spurred several new and fruitful directions for me to spin my wheels in.

When Doc came to see me at my trailer, I was impressed with his kindness and gentleness, as well as his advanced age.  He was well-spoken and businesslike in a casual way that made me comfortable, and he was elated to have found somebody like me to carry on in a more technical vein than he was able to do, for he had promised Bob Neal before Mr. Neal passed on that he would do his utmost to bring air cars to the general public.  Before he left, Doc handed me a $50 bill and invited me to visit him in Lodi anytime, and hinted that there might be more $50 bills coming my way if I wanted to find a way to do simple tests to discover and prove the scientific principle behind Bob Neal’s patent.

Doc was true to his word.  I had kept my air car shop over at Porsche Doer’s, much to the chagrin of Grave Darn who coveted more and more space to store useless junk in, so I plunged earnestly into the workshop aspect of trying to get to the bottom of all these rumors and insinuations about a Magic Valve.  Doc gave me money for every test I wanted to do and told me to spend some of it on my bills so I wouldn’t have to waste all my time working in restaurants.  Everything I tried failed dismally, but at least I kept learning more and more about what not to do.  There came a time when the business that Doc was in had to be shut down and he ended up living on a fixed income, but in the meantime I acquired several pieces of junk machinery that gave me something precious to haul around with me every time I moved during the coming years.

Besides the time that I spent washing dishes at the Goldhook Hotel and fighting with the waitresses over the puniness of their tip-sharing habits, I also had been offered the golden opportunity to take over part of the Beast’s workload at Fountain of Truth Foods.  I became the Chief Spillage Consultant, meaning that when one of the speed-enhanced near criminals they had working in the warehouse dropped a case of juice bottles or pierced a bag of flour with a forklift fork, it was my duty to clean up the accident and repackage the usable remains for sale to the employees.  As a scraggly-bearded hippie wearing big black plastic framed glasses—since my real glasses had worn out and become unusable after far too many years of not being replaced—the real men who worked the real warehouse jobs found themselves obligated to poke fun at me constantly, pulling my beard, asking me what the hell was wrong with me, and whatever else it was they did to me that always kept me in a bluster.  As a result of such antics, and also because of the Beast’s need to remind me from time to time that I was her subordinate, the year or more that I worked at this job was punctuated with occasional periods of time when I actually didn’t manage to work there at all.  I was able to take advantage of the fact that I had two jobs, to occasionally tell one of the jobs to go piss off.  The real reason I kept going back to Fountain of Truth Foods was that the Beast could nearly always get someone to take us in the bathroom for a puff of marijuana, and the real reason I kept going back to the Goldhook Hotel was that I kept walking out on the Beast whenever she got to shaking her finger at me too strenuously.

According to my sincerest efforts to reconstruct the timing of the events which I am calling my life, it was April of 1988 when I found myself unable to care whether I had any job at all.  For this reason and perhaps others which have escaped the steel trap that some have called my mind, I determined that the Oil Companies were probably after me for attempting to distribute information about the self-fueling air car—and if not, they should be—so I found myself bound by my duty to stay alive in the service of my Task to take what little money I had and move into my car, and for that matter, I seriously believed that I was going to move to Seattle while I was at it.  I spent some time at Krishna Bernie’s apartment in Portland while pursuing leads at the library and trying unsuccessfully to get air car builder George Heaton’s wife to speak to me, then I went on to Seattle where I stayed with Jimmie Joe U-Haul in the apartment he had rented in an attempt to be a father to his biological offspring, who he called “Son.”  After photocopying more information on compressed air locomotives than I ever dreamed could have existed, I was so excited and broke that I felt called to return to Grass Valley before I ran out of gas money.

Now that I more or less knew where I was, it was much easier to relax and concentrate on the theme of the year, which was to prove the previously mentioned Ouija Board correct—the one that had predicted I would discover the secret of the self-fueling air car in 1988.  I lived in my car for three months, hanging out with Judas and his new white Rastafarian girlfriend and her white Rastafarian girlfriends out at Rendall Stuckey’s partially-built mountaintop estate, and sleeping in a forested location after nightly sessions of marijuana-powered brainstorming about the elusive secret that gave me reason to live, and that gave me cause to avoid finding a so-called real job.

One day Judas and I went for a hike with our friend Sue, down a creek whose headwaters formed on Rendall Stuckey’s mountaintop and led all the way to some of the deepest and most isolated swimming holes in the Yuba River, complete with trout that were almost two feet long.  It was a lovely day to take acid with a smart and attractive single Capricorn female, and about halfway to the river when the drug’s effects had kicked in and then leveled off to the point that I should have been able to function reliably, we came to a spot where the “trail” we were walking on stood about fifteen feet above a deep pool formed by a waterfall, which fell from the level where we were walking.  As always, Judas got well ahead of us, which gave me a chance to act manly by boasting of my hiking prowess when we came to this spot, which Sue was slightly afraid to attempt.  The trail at this point, directly above the deep pool where the waterfall fell, was narrow, curved, slippery and right at the very edge of a steep precipice rising up out of the pool.

Sue was nervous about negotiating this slippery curve, which Judas had of course already passed without even noticing it, so I pointed out to her that if one were to lean into the boulder that defined the inside of the sharp little curve in the trail, one could cling to the boulder with the fingernails and hope that the feeling of security gained by transferring part of one’s weight from the slippery trail to the great boulder would encourage one to make it past that one steep, slippery curve in the trail.  I actually said the words, “And besides, even if you did fall, it would be an easy fall to take,” referring of course to the presence of the happy little pool directly beneath the scary zone in question, as I proceeded to demonstrate with what ease a manly—and single, I might add—born-in-the-Rockies kind of guy like myself could accomplish the feat I’d described, without the slightest fear.

I don’t doubt that my highly sophisticated audience knows without being told what sort of troublesome trials and tests we are likely to give birth to when we bombastically insist on tempting Fate.  With the words, “ . . . easy fall to take,” still ringing in my ears, I felt the slippery, steep, narrow little trail disappear from beneath my ever-so-experienced climbing feet, and since I had been leaning forward into the boulder at the time this happened, it all happened behind my back so that I had no visual clues warning of what I was about to experience or what I might reasonably be expected to do about it.  What followed was sort of like a synthesis of all three of the Three Stooges and one hit of high quality LSD, combined with the braggart’s good luck.  Having no time to think, but only time to act, I instantly integrated everything I had once learned by watching ten seconds of a video about Aikido—a Japanese martial art that resembles square dancing—and spun around 180º so that I could see what the hell was going on.  I couldn’t help but notice that a large log, which had once been a tree but had fallen into the pool in a standing position, was pointing straight at my head, and since I was now sliding swiftly on my backside down the nearly vertical little cliff feet-first toward the pool ten feet below, and the top end of the log was about three feet from my face, I spontaneously performed another of Aikido’s circular moves, which was to swing my arm in a wide arc in front of me so as to bump the dead tree just far enough to the side that I could continue sliding feet-first toward the pool without being decapitated on the way down.

That part of the Aikido lesson accomplished, I next took a further step into my training in defense from myself by practicing what martial artists often refer to as “taking a deep breath.”  At that point my feet touched water, and in less than a split second I beheld a most beautiful sight: a pristine, emerald pool fed by a gorgeous waterfall, from the unique vantage point of many feet below the surface.  Tapping into a small part of the adrenaline available to me at that moment, I dashed for the surface before it should darken and disappear, remembering that my cousin Ronnie and countless other good swimmers had drowned during similar unforeseen visits to deep pools hidden within creeks of wading depth.  As I sputtered and sprayed above the surface of the pool, I loudly promised any god who might be listening that I would never again tempt Fate to bring me up against claims of abilities that I could only hope I actually possessed.  By now, Judas was standing there watching me climb out of the pool with my knees shaking like a cartoon character, and Sue was howling with laughter, slapping her jeans with one hand and pointing at my quivering legs with the other, unable to speak, sputtering almost as much as I was.  Of course the unruffled Judas knew what to say: “You’re OK, let’s get going,” and off we went, with me keeping up the best I could and Sue looking back from time to time to make sure that I was actually able to walk.  Not since kindergarten, when Skip Baloney the School Principal hollered at me for leading my whole lined-up kindergarten class down the hallway in the wrong direction, had I experienced such a rubbery and Jell-O-like feeling in my legs.

It was during these days of youthful sociability—inspired, no doubt, by the temporary reprieve that he was enjoying from bachelorhood—that Judas invited the local shaman, Duckman John—so called because he had once been a carver of wooden mallards—to come out to Rendall Stuckey’s land, where Judas now lived in a big trailer as caretaker, to evaluate Judas’s proposal to carry out sweat lodges there on the land.  Duckman John, besides giving seminars and workshops on shamanism, was a retired Army man, and wore his steel-gray pony tail and distinguished paunch with the authority of someone who has been around the block a few times, crawling on his belly through barbed-wire the whole way.  I noticed something quiet about his demeanor, perhaps the fact that he did not speak throughout the whole tour of the site of Mr. and Mrs. Rendall Stuckey’s mountaintop estate, which by now had been mostly cleared to make way for the ostentatious gardens and outbuildings and lakes and swimming pools and houses and barns that the Stuckeys had begun to erect on their acreage.  By the time Judas finally ran out of pitches to make and returned Duckman John to his own vehicle, my friend was practically begging the shaman to say something, anything.

Duckman John frowned and paced for a long, mute minute, and finally he looked at Judas and said, “You want to know what I think?  Well, here’s what I think.  I’ve done sweats.  I don’t have to do sweats.  I’ve already been in a sweat lodge before.  Why should I be in another one?  Look at this land.  All this land for two people?  All these trees and living things cleared away so two people can look at each other and say, My, my, look at us, aren’t we clever and successful!  You want to know what I think?  I piss on this land!  I puke on this land!  I spit on this land!  I shit on this land!  Go ahead and do your sweats, little brother, and don’t you dare invite me.”  Then Duckman John’s eyes narrowed and he pulled his head back onto his neck as he peered deeply into Judas’s eyes.  “Ahh,” he said, “I see what’s going on here.  You’re a Scorpio aren’t you!”  Judas nodded wordlessly.  “So am I,” said Duckman John.  “You and I will never get along; we should avoid each other like the plague.  Give me a hug, little brother.”  Duckman John gave Judas a big bear hug and laughed in his big gravely voice, then jumped into his pickup truck and drove away, waving and smiling.

Judas mumbled that he didn’t really want to do sweats anyway.

One of the several reasons I liked to hang around with Judas and his girlfriends while they listened non-stop to every album of reggae music that had ever been recorded, no matter how bad it was, was that these women were all somewhat single, quite attractive, casually sloppy like me, and possessed of the continuous need to share their marijuana.  Unfortunately, besides Judas’s actual girlfriend herself, who was involved with the local community radio station, there were only two of them: Holly who was only 17 and called me “The Professor,” and her mother Darryn who was 37.  Since I was only 32 at the time, Darryn intimidated me a little, and since she was, god forbid, a Gemini with Scorpio Rising, she intimidated me a lot.  What is a Gemini with Scorpio Rising?  Her late husband had committed suicide, that’s what a Gemini with Scorpio Rising is.  She was nut brown from lounging in the sun, on sabbatical from her nursing job in San Francisco, moody and quiet, but in spite of the fact that she seemed to be wrestling some internal demons, I couldn’t help but take it personally when she repeatedly went out of her way to look me in my eyes and smile.  Soon it became obvious that if I wanted to impress her, all I had to do was tell her the things about me that she would like—leaving out the rest, of course—and after only a month of observing our quiet conversations together, Judas couldn’t stand it any longer and invited the two of us to house-sit his trailer one night while he and his girlfriend went out of town.  Knowing that this was an arranged seduction did not stop me from experiencing a sense of relief that I could finally stop fretting about how to get the job done and just get on with it.

Darryn and I met at Judas’s trailer on the appointed evening and I suggested that I show her the headwaters of the creek that formed on Rendall Stuckey’s land and flowed all the way to the Yuba River.  When I had a little trouble finding the creek, Darryn confided in me that she was afraid of wandering around in the tall grass the way we were, in case there happened to be a snake hiding there.  When I tried to explain to her that there had never been a rattlesnake reported anywhere on the property, she changed strategies by grabbing me and kissing me, and begged me to take her back to the trailer.  Once there, I was ready to get on with it, but first she wanted to smoke a fat joint she had with her, which she said she had procured from her ex-boyfriend.  A voice in my head said, Don’t do it.  I knew this weed was going to wipe me out and completely drain the humble modicum of self-confidence I had mustered just for this event, but I was afraid that a refusal to smoke the greatest ganja that had ever been grown would stop Darryn in her Rastafarian tracks, so rather than derail her, I went ahead and derailed myself by smoking the joint with her, then proceeded to attempt the final stages of the seduction—the sex part of it—while in the throttling clutches of near-fatal paranoia.  Unfortunately, the whole embarrassing event was thwarted by the complete lack of a spontaneously aggressive male or female in the room.  After a night of our mutually pretending to sleep, Darryn neglected to honor my ever-reliable morning stiffie, and after two days of silently following me around and letting me act like we were a pair, she stood me up and avoided me religiously from then on.  I suffered from extreme humiliation, anger, and dejection for at least three months before allowing the non-event to pass into the great sea of semi-forgotten disappointments.

Fortunately, Judas’s Rastafarian days were numbered, due to his complete incompatibility with his girlfriend and the utterly goofy way he looked in dreadlocks, but he had in the meantime gone ahead and taken the radio announcer class at the local community radio station, so enamored he had been with his refreshingly playful mate; as the most incurable mumbler who ever lived, he shocked me by getting his own radio show.  Nothing short of a bout with romance could have made him do this.

Naturally Judas brought his own way of doing things to his 2:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. show, the “When Ya Gonna Wake Up Show.”  When a listener called to complain that he was playing too much reggae music, Judas retorted, You don’t smoke enough pot.  One afternoon he was filling in on someone else’s daytime show when a snooty bunch of aristocrats showed up at the American Victorian Museum, which housed the radio station’s studio, for one of those social functions where the real reason to be there is to make impressive business contacts.  He cranked up the volume to the speakers outside of the studio door and played German rock star Nina Hagen’s song, “I’m the Mother of Punk, So What the Fuck!” several times.

The last time Judas invited me to hang out with him at the studio while he did his late night “When Ya Gonna Wake Up Show,” I picked out a few things for him to play including a monologue by Lenny Bruce called “Thank You Masked Man.”  I had seen it put to a cartoon accompaniment in a fine arts movie theater years earlier, and since I couldn’t remember what it was about, I figured, what the heck, I might as well play it on the air so I can hear it again.  It turned out to be ten minutes of uninterrupted gay-bashing, overtly not politically correct in the way that only Lenny could do it, and I don’t know if it was really that funny or if it just gave us a big thrill to be bad, but we laughed so hard and so long that for the rest of the night our sides and faces ached, and the carpet was rumpled where we had fallen down on it..

While Darshan was away at his mother’s funeral in Los Angeles, Jaia and I rented a large pile of movies to watch at the apartment they were house-sitting.  At that time Jaia was a huge consumer of high-grade marijuana, and normally the quantities she forced me to smoke with her would have put me into a coma, but because a part of me was in love with her and jealous of Darshan for wedding the woman of my dreams, it was easy and natural for me to sit next to her watching movies for eight to ten hours at a time without completely passing out.  The movies that failed to hold my interest at least gave me a legitimate excuse to sit close enough to Jaia to feel the heat from her body.

When Darshan returned, he and his lovely wife became obsessed with how to spend his modest inheritance.  Besides traveling around the world, they wanted to share some of the money with friends and righteous causes.  After patiently listening to them muse about the possibilities for what seemed like hours, I couldn’t take it anymore and blurted out, Why don’t you shitheads give me some money for the air car project?  They blinked in surprise at my tactfulness and looked at each other, then proceeded to embarrass me by informing me that they had set aside $1000 for me to use on parts for my tests and expected me to use some of the money for living expenses while I was at it.  I fell all over myself thanking them for their generosity, and in a few days Darshan accompanied me to the salvage yard where he bought me an old air-powered wood boring drill and an old two-stage compressor.

I had built a loft bed to sleep in at my air car shop at Porsche Doer’s house, since I was afraid to sleep with the back hatch open in my Datsun station wagon, sure that a bully or gang of bullies prowling through the forest in the night would catch me unawares and want to mess with me.  As a result, I had a good start on a backache from never sleeping with my legs stretched all the way out, and besides that, I had seen lights at the edge of the forest clearing where I parked at night, and rather than meet my fellow squatters or would-be tormentors or whatever they were, I abandoned my fervor for autodwelling and relocated my brainstorming operation to the air car shop which I’d been using for storage anyway, although Grave Darn had also taken to using it for storage while I appeared to be giving up dibs on it.

With respect to Darshan and Jaia’s generous contribution, I wanted very much to honor their exhortation to use the money to build something that I could employ to attract more attention to the air car project.  The obvious solution would be to build some sort of simple air powered go-kart.  I had a little go-kart chassis that I’d bought in Hazing, Kansas for $5, and now that I had the powerful air powered drill motor that Darshan had bought me, it seemed I had everything I really needed except the fearlessness and drive to go ahead and do it.  I wasted days in turmoil over whether it would be worth the trouble to build anything but the perfect air car, and whether it might be better to do more tests to try and figure out how and why the Magic Valve was supposed to work, but finally as the money seemed to be magically dwindling down to nothing and ideas on the Magic Valve were not forthcoming, it became apparent that the go-kart was the way to go.  I identified my reluctance to take action as some sort of fear-born tumor of the motivational process and forced myself to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and make a drawing and a list of parts.  After five hours of design work, I was my usual gung-ho pneumatic self, and dove into the workshop with true air car fever.  In five more hours, the go-kart was finished, and in my zeal to get it out of the shop and into the great out-of-doors where I could test it, I assumed—wrongly, as I later discovered after calming down a little—that it was too wide to roll out the door, so I picked it up in my arms and carried it outside, tweaking my back the rest of the way and ending up with chronic lower back pain that lasted on and off for several years till I finally figured out how to prevent the spasm from taking hold.  In the meantime I kind of enjoyed the martyred feeling of sacrificing a part of my health and feeling pain as a tribute to the completion of a part of my Task.

With great trepidation I sat down on the go-kart.  It consisted of only a few main parts: the chassis, a scuba tank filled to 125 psi, the drill motor for motive power, a valve to let air out of the tank and into the motor, and the straps and blocks mounting the drill motor to the chassis; these latter are what took me ten hours to design and build.  When the first attempt to get the car to go ended quickly with the power of the motor mangling its mounting system, I hollered, Bullshit, I’m not quitting now, and picked the car up in my arms again and carried it back into the shop to re-rig a slightly better system.  With this complete, I picked the car up again and carried it outside and set it down on the narrow sidewalk leading uphill from the door of my shop.  I sat down and took a deep breath, mentally prepared for nothing of consequence to happen.  I opened the valve, and the little go-kart took off up the steep hill like a bat out of hell, and it was almost more than I could do to steer it.  The small amount of air I was able to get into the scuba tank with my little compressor only took it about twenty feet or so, but this was to be expected since it was not a self-fueling air car.  I filled it up several more times and savored every moment of my latest climb up Air Car Mountain.  When Porsche Doer and her girls got home, I put the twins on the seat together and ran alongside helping them steer.  It was their birthday.  It felt like mine.

When I called Doc in Lodi to fill him in on my activities, he was amused but not particularly impressed.  He wanted to know if it would help me concentrate on practical ideas better if I were to move in with him.  I politely declined, partly because I still had—for the third time—my job at the Goldhook Hotel, but I filed the offer in the back of my mind for future reference.  A few days later he called me and said he had just spoken to Bob Neal’s son, and urged me to call the man to try and glean any possible bits of useful information from his foggy memories of 1937 that could help me define the true nature of the Magic Valve and its mysterious ways.  I thought I’d better get at it while I was still in the mood, or I’d end up procrastinating until 1937 had become a matter for archaeologists to deal with, so I hauled my little tape recorder with the special adjustable recording level into Porsche Doer’s living room so that I wouldn’t miss a thing.  I had found in my two interviews with Bill Truitt that taking good notes in the heat of excitement was hard to do.

Once the interview with Bob Neal’s son was over, I rewound the tape to listen to it, and sure enough, in the heat of excitement I had forgotten to adjust the recording level before calling him up, and the whole thing was so softly recorded as to be nearly indecipherable.  But after hours of listening to the tape over and over with my ear pressed against the speaker, I was able to reconstruct nearly everything that was said, and this is what I learned.

Bob Neal was a humble shoemaker in Arkadelphia, Arkansas back in the 1930s when he used to burn the midnight oil in his workshop trying to perfect the Magic Valve that made his air tank a self-fueling supplier of compressed air.  It didn’t come to him overnight, pre-packaged and ready to patent; in fact, when he finally got it working and applied for a patent, the Patent Office tried to deny the patent because they have a policy of not giving patents to perpetual motion machines.  But the engine works, Bob Neal told them, and they said, Too bad, it’s a perpetual motion machine and those things are impossible.  An engine cannot use its own power to create its own energy source.

So the inventor built a scale model that he could carry in one hand, and his eight-year-old boy packed his little suitcase and accompanied his Daddy, Bob Neal the shoemaker, to Washington DC on an airplane.  Bob Neal plopped his scale model down on the Patent Commissioner’s desk, turned it on, and said, Now see hear, Mister Fancypants, this is a working engine, and I want my patent now.  So the Patent Commissioner gave him his patent and sent him back to Arkansas.

As soon as the patent was published, as all patents are, the Germans came to visit Bob Neal at his home in Arkadelphia and tried to pester him into divulging the secret of his Magic Valve.  This was before the United States of America and Nazi Germany had recognized each other as unwelcome visitors to each others’ soil.  But Bob Neal was not going to give away his hard-won future to any foreigners, so they kidnapped his little daughter.  Bob Neal still would not tell them what they wanted to know, however in order to entice them into returning his offspring, he disassembled his engine and scattered its parts across the countryside, and informed the Nazi thieves that they might as well return his daughter, because he was forever quit of this troublesome beast, the self-fueling air engine.  They gave his daughter back, and (I might add) went home to Germany and eventually designed a flying Magic Valve—which the terrified citizens of London nick-named the Buzz Bomb after it began falling on their houses—and which worked on the exact same principles as Bob Neal’s peaceable device, but with the addition of gasoline, to propel an explosive device through the air and across the ocean.  The French got wind of the same concept somehow and simultaneously designed their own Buzz Bomb, which, like the German version, flew through the air without an engine, but went a step further by eliminating the valve whilst retaining the magic.  The magic?  Putting low pressure air into a high pressure tank without a compressor.  The tank or cylinder was kept at a high pressure by burning gasoline in it; by leaving the back end off the tank, it became a flying depositor of explosives.  The Buzz Bomb was also known as the pulsejet or V-2 rocket.

Now back to the part that Bob Neal’s son knew about.  After his father passed on, a famous inventor named Bill Lear, who had hit pay dirt with his invention commonly known as the Lear Jet, came to Bob Neal’s son and tried to make him remember how the Magic Valve worked.  He bugged him a couple times, but to no avail; Mr. Neal had been a little boy in 1937 and never did know that much about his Daddy’s air engine, except that to the best of his recollection, the Magic Valve looked like a long, skinny plumb-bob.  This was a point of interest to me, since the patent drawing shows a simple cylindrical pipe, while a plumb-bob has a distinctly tapered shape.  But then most inventors reveal no more in their patent than what they have to, knowing that all patents are published so that evil nations and industrial giants can steal the invention and force the inventor to take them to court to prove he is being infringed upon.  This is how the average homespun inventor makes a living: winning small settlements against evil empires and their big-time lawyers.

Bob Neal’s son thanked me for my interest in his father’s work, assured me that his family had no financial interest in the invention, having allowed the patent to go into the public domain.  He wished me well in my research, and that was that.  Except that I was now more convinced than ever that the self-fueling air engine is as real as real can get in our big, messy, confusing illusion of a world.

My friend and neighbor Louie Kogg took the matter up with his Daddy, Darwin Kogg, a retired mechanical engineer, who took a few hours out of his patriotic endeavors to evaluate the concept of the Magic Valve.  It was he who tipped me off that the Magic Valve could possibly be some sort of tunable resonator like the pulsejet engine or the organ pipes in pipe organs, and thus it was Darwin Kogg who started me down the path of investigating the workings of the pulsejet for inspiration and information that could possibly illuminate the concept behind the Magic Valve.  Because of Darwin Kogg’s participation in my research, I felt compelled to bring home thousands of pages of photocopies over the years relating to tunable devices that use sound waves to do the kinds of work on fluids like air or water that would normally be done by machines with moving parts. 

Judas’s newest friend and benefactor in the business community was a hermitoid rocks and minerals fanatic named Dab Mostly, who ran a tiny rock shop in town, just big enough to fit about thirteen people, as long as they all moved in the same direction.  This was during the great crystal craze of the 1980s, when a large proportion of hippies and New Agers were convinced that purchasing the right quartz crystal or wearing the right mineral specimen around their necks would get them where they wanted to go in life.  Dab Mostly had started out as a hard-working rockhound and gemstone cutter working out of his quaint little metal shack in the tourist-infested Grass Valley downtown, but because of the crystal craze, was now a crystal magnate quickly paying off his property due to the quartz addiction of the local healie-feelies as well as the ever-reliable tourists.  He could even afford to hire people to work in his rock shop so he could stay home—the only place he really liked to be—and spend long hours on the phone wheeling and dealing, trading a pile of this for a pile of that.  He was several years older than Judas and I, handsome and soft-spoken, passive and aggressive, ultra-friendly to his customers yet completely paranoid of his friends and employees.

A direct descendant of Daniel Boone named Tan Boone had owned a claim on a totally unique variety of lavender star rose quartz in the High Sierras north of Grass Valley for 30 years, and because of his age he had stopped working the mine and filled in the small quarry with its own tailings, and finally—just what Dab Mostly had been waiting for all these years—Mr. Boone had neglected to file the annual paperwork that was required by the Feds in order for him to legally hold his claim in the National Forest.  Dab pounced on his oversight by claimjumping him, filing his own claim on the same spot, and planting his own claim stakes.  Since then he had been paying Judas and others to camp out at the mine and bust out lavender star quartz as fast as they could, accumulating tons of the prized material at his property.  Judas had been bugging me to go digging with him, but I still had my dishwashing job and couldn’t get away.  Besides that, Judas and I had only just recovered from a gigantic argument over a box of thrift-store dishes that I had loaned him for so long that when I asked for them back, he claimed that I had given the dishes to him, and it turned into a great big fuck-you festival and we hadn’t spoken to each other for some weeks.  It was during our vacation from each other that Judas had gone looking for a new best friend and discovered Dab Mostly.

Despite my reluctance to trade in my coveted dishwashing job for another chance to fight with Judas, I couldn’t stop thinking about the many cherished hours during my childhood when I had sat at the back of the big closet under the basement stairs in Forward Falls, Colorado with a box of rock specimens in my lap that my Mama and Daddy had collected throughout their years of camping and hiking.  Equipped with a flashlight and a couple of rock identification manuals, I used to go into a comforting alien world there at the back of the big closet under the steps, and nothing could ever make me forget those many hours of marvel-eyed wistful splendidness when being alone with those rocks felt better than anything I could imagine.

And so it came to pass that one afternoon Judas came to me with an offer I couldn’t refuse: Dab Mostly, who had yet to meet me, wanted to pay me $450 a week to go camping at the lavender star rose quartz mine in the National Forest.  Judas handed me the keys to Dab’s extra pick-up truck and I took a big deep breath and quit my job at the Goldhook Hotel for the third and final time, and went home to pack my backpack.  By the time that was accomplished, I was rarin’ to go, and stopped by the Jiffy Lube to spend my last $20 on a sorely needed oil change for Dab’s vehicle.  I met Judas at the rock shop and stayed just long enough to experience Dab’s cold-fish handshake and become queasily uncomfortable with something about him, then Judas and I headed for the mountains with a big garbage bag full of pot and boxes full of digging tools and food.

As soon as we arrived at the quarry, Judas jumped out of the truck with his rifle and scurried about looking for footprints and any other sign that anyone had been there poaching on Dab’s claim.  I rolled my eyes and bit my tongue and vowed to enjoy my newfound career in spite of the present company.  Since I was clueless as to the true nature of the mine and the veins of rose quartz running through the ground somewhere beneath the tailings, I mucked through the tailings for leftover pieces of purple rock, each of which thrilled me to no end.  Judas, on the other hand, proved to be a crystal magnet, pulling out huge chunks of flawless lavender quartz that made the junk I was finding look paltry in comparison.  Nevertheless I was happy to be there, too stoned to do any better than I was, and thoroughly impressed with the whole experience, although somewhat bitter about the lack of corner stores and the resulting lack of available candy bars.  Judas grudgingly gave up on trying to tell me where to dig, accused me of taking the time to name each piece as it came out of the ground, and eventually just ignored me.  After a week we went home to dump our pile in Dab Mostly’s yard and buy more groceries.  I had been looking forward to a few days off to spend my money, but Dab was critical of the quality of our load, and also seemed antsy about the soundness of his claim on the spot, as if there might be someone hovering in the background waiting to take it away from him after his years of patiently stalking it.  So we took showers and headed back for the mine, after listening to Dab repeatedly mention that Judas was foreman of the operation.  As consolation to me for the lack of a day off, he made me promise to take a couple days off when we got there, to hang around camp or explore the woods.

Unfortunately I was too restless and easily bored to hang around doing next to nothing, and having been born and raised in the Rocky Mountains, I had little fascination with the forest or mountains in the absence of some kind of project or goal; even more unfortunately, I did not acknowledge to myself that above all else, what I really needed in the way of a few days off was a few days off from Judas, so after getting depressingly mired in boredom I smoked a big fat joint and headed over to the quarry to casually help out doing the sort of easy stuff that a person might elect to do on his day off.  To me, that meant getting up above where Judas was working so I could rake back the rocks and pebbles that were threatening to fall on his head, since as usual he was burrowing into a veined wall of Earth and was threatening his own safety by setting up the necessary prerequisites for a cave-in.  I barely noticed that my activity above him was sending a little dust and a few pebbles down his way, since in my way of looking at things, I was potentially reducing the likelihood of much larger rocks falling on his head.  However, I couldn’t help but notice, somewhere in the back of my pot-fogged brain, that Judas was displaying the sort of twitchy body language of someone who is passively communicating extreme annoyance.

It wasn’t long before one of the pebbles I dislodged actually smacked him on the top of his head, and when the exaggerated Huge Sigh of Exasperation I’d been waiting for escaped his lips, I was ready for it.  I threw down my tool, muttered something under my breath, and stormed back to camp.  Judas followed me over in a few minutes, completely apologetic about his irritability and about spoiling my fun, even showing me a little green crystal he had supposedly found, as if I was a little child who needed to be comforted with placating distractions.  I responded by lambasting him for every time he had ever pulled rank on me or failed to acknowledge the worthiness of my contribution until, thoroughly dejected, he blamed Dab Mostly for making him play foreman to his best friend, and went back to work, leaving me to sulk on my sleeping bag.

My mind was completely overtaken with the accumulated insults of the past, the insultingness of which was proven to me beyond any shadow of a doubt by Judas’s insistence on playing boss when no one was around to be impressed by it except his best friend of a fifteen years.  If he hadn’t learned to treat me as an equal by now, at least on my day off, then for christ sake, he could at least grant me the benefit of the doubt by hiding his obvious contempt for my judgment and abilities.  It was time to kiss this lopsided friendship good-bye forever, and besides that he could take his garbage bag full of marijuana and shove it up his ever-loving ass.  I was sick of being stoned all the time anyway.  I packed my backpack, rolled four joints to take with me so I wouldn’t change my mind and be enticed back by the garbage bag full of buds, wrote Judas a note explaining why our friendship was over forever, and snuck out of camp the back way, being careful as a warrior sorcerer must be in his battle to extract himself from the entangling needs of others, to leave not one footprint anywhere to give away my whereabouts.

I walked back downhill the way we had driven up, stepping on rocks and sticks and leaves to avoid leaving footprints in the dusty road.  Since Dab Mostly was scheduled to visit the quarry that afternoon, and I hated his visits more than anything because he was even worse than Judas about trying to tell me where to dig, I kept my ears peeled for engine sounds.  When I heard Dab coming, I hid behind a tree, experiencing a pang of remorse as I watched him drive by with the innocent expectation of finding me happily lolling about camp savoring the day off he had so graciously insisted that I take.  When he had gone by, I high-tailed it down the road in case one of them should come looking for me.  I was through with both of those potheads forever.  I smoked two of the four joints and, feeling only contempt for the dizzy weak state that they put me into, dug a little hole and placed the other two joints in an X, symbolizing the Moment of Choice, then buried them and charged down the mountain.

I walked twenty miles till I finally reached the paved road leading to a main highway, where I caught a ride.  I stopped at Campbell Hot Springs in the middle of the night and slept in one of the cooler hot tubs, purposely without paying or registering at the lodge, then snuck out before dawn and headed down the highway for home.  Along the way I stumbled across a little pry bar that someone had lost at the side of the road, an automotive tool that coincidentally happened to be the same size and shape as the special digging bars called “gads” that we had been using at the mine.  I kept it and still have it, and have worn the tip off it several times over; it seems that either in spite of or because of the frustrating experience of digging rose quartz for someone else, I ended up becoming a rose quartz addict myself, and have never missed an opportunity, given the time and gas to accomplish it, to scout out a new place to dig that stuff up.

Judas honored my request that he leave me alone, returning the rest of my camping equipment during the middle of the night the next time he came to town for supplies, by leaving it on the hood of my car.  It turned out that the next time he came to town was sooner than he had expected; a few days after my escape, Judas pulled his head out of a hole when he sensed a presence, and there, standing above him with a shotgun, was Tan Boone himself.  That was the end of Dab Mostly’s claimjumping days; based on Mr. Boone’s thirty years of prior ownership, he whipped Dab in court, and Dab Mostly never returned to the lavender star rose quartz mine.

I cannot say the same for myself.

For reasons not fully understood by me, perhaps having something to do with the gestation and birth of their latest offspring, Porsche Doer and Grave Darn moved in with a friend and left me to caretake their property, which consisted of cleaning up part of the mess they’d left behind, and that was about it.  I moved into what had once been Ma Partridge’s gift shop, and stayed alive by resuming my on-and-off career as Chief Spillage Consultant at Fountain of Truth Foods, since the Beast and Louie Kogg had gone out of their way to forgive me for moving out of her trailer without saying good-bye.  I savored the privacy and established a no-pressure lifestyle, smoking pot only about twice a week, watching one TV show per week (60 Minutes) on Grave Darn’s television set, drooling over the six tiny pieces of rose quartz I had collected for myself, and staring guiltily at the shelves full of engineering books I owned that I had never cracked open.  I honestly don’t remember what I did to entertain myself; maybe the feeling of being alone on two acres was all I needed out of life at this point.  Porsche Doer kept me advised of Judas’s whereabouts, knowing that I was happy to not be spending most of my spare time riding around in his truck with him for a change.  He was spending the winter working in the huge Arkansas crystal mines, where Dab Mostly had financed a season of digging through the hard clay for the best clear quartz crystals that could be found outside of Brazil.

One cold, rainy night I was lounging around in the house savoring my aloneness when I heard the outer porch door squeak open.  I snuck over toward the glass-paned front door, which was partially covered with a curtain, and saw a hand below the bottom edge of the curtain.  The hand went tap, tap, tap with its knuckles, and I knew by the roughness of the bony little hand and the tentative softness of the tapping that Judas was back with a load of crystals to show me, wanting to be friends, and probably needing a place to live.  I knew that if I let him in, his soft mumbling desire for my companionship would win me back, and I would inevitably become his shadow again.  I wanted to tip-toe out the back door and go hide, but his soft approach was already working on me, and I couldn’t locate my mean streak at that time.  I opened the door.  Hi Luther, he said.  Hi Judas, I said.

Around the time that Judas moved back into Porsche Doer’s house, a couple of Grave Darn’s friends found themselves homeless and were invited by Porsche Doer the Great Mother Goddess to move into the house as a temporary measure while getting their lives back together.  Dilly and Frilly were a lesbian couple with Dilly’s little boy in tow, as well as a filthy little bird they kept in a cage on the dining room table, which I could no longer use as an eating surface as a result.  The little boy was a five-year-old idiot because no one ever spoke to him; his mother Dilly was nice enough but remarkably unattractive and possessed of no mothering skills whatsoever.  I guessed that her gayness was more a strategy to combat loneliness than it was a sexual preference, though I don’t claim to be an expert on this sort of thing.  Frilly, on the other hand, was an infamous local barfighter who was more likely to kill you with her bare hands than she was likely to take one iota of shit from you.  She was better looking than her partner but I couldn’t imagine her coming within 100 miles of any man with her pants off.  Within days they had trashed the house that I had sort of cleaned up after Porsche Doer and Grave Darn, and then turned it into the preferred hangout of the most macho women in the county.  Fortunately for me, Frilly’s drug habits were under control at the time; the fact that she was currently limiting herself to marijuana, taking a break from the hard stuff, probably saved me from a vacation in the local intensive care ward.

For you see, as soon as Judas had my lily-white buns parked back in their accustomed spot in the passenger seat of his pickup truck, my insides turned to a festering rage generator, but just because he had craved my companionship and needed a place to stay was not an excuse for me to overtly resent him for taking away the barely-earned private home that Porsche Doer and Grave Darn had handed me on a silver platter.  The dyke squad, however, was a different story.  They had moved in for a temporary stay and then proceeded to not only take over the whole house, but had already grievously over-stayed the temporary part of the arrangement, and to make matters infinitely worse, their little club of vile man-haters far outnumbered me.  To make up for their numbers, I fostered and fed enough hostility inside my empty shell for any four of them, based on a strong intuitive hunch that some kind of violence towards me loomed in the near future.  Then I proceeded to look for an opportunity to turn my hunch into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This playground nonsense all started to gel one fine, hot summer morning when I walked into the house and found the usual gaggle of ganderettes sitting in a circle passing around a fine-smelling joint of high grade weed.  Putting on my best lesbian-loving happy face, I sat down in the circle and politely waited.  But each time the joint came to the person sitting on either side of me, it somehow turned around and went the other way.  Back and forth it went, never once being offered to me—I guessed the girls were upset with me for having informed them that the dining room table was no place for a bird cage—until finally the joint was nothing but a quite usable roach which Frilly made a point of smashing to oblivion between her fingers, dusting the filthy carpet with its remains.  I dropped the happy face and charged out the door, and on my way across the front lawn I stopped to yank a dead tree stump out of the ground and heave it as far as I could.  This symbolic act of contemptuousness did not go unnoticed.

Porsche Doer’s house was on a busy two-lane highway, but it normally was easy enough to pull out onto the highway because the house came with a circular driveway.  This convenience was short-circuited, however, by the apparently permanent abandonment of Dilly’s dead car right in the middle of the driveway.  As a result, Judas had to back out onto the highway whenever he had to go someplace, and since he was the original uptight driver, his cursing of the two women’s baffling inconsiderateness grew more intensely aggravating to me each time I had to listen to it; of course he knew better than to say anything to them about it, so it was yours truly who had to absorb his road rage and try to not let it get stuck in my empty shell, which unfortunately was lined on the inside at this time with something akin to rage flypaper.  I tried to keep up the calm, centered act, not wanting to do Judas’s communicating for him, but finally I couldn’t take it anymore, and when we arrived home on that spiteful afternoon, I leaped out of the truck and beamed myself right over to Dilly and Frilly, who were ploddingly engaged in the rearranging of whatever it was they kept in the trunk of their car.  I looked Dilly right in her too-widely-spaced eyes and informed her that I would certainly appreciate it if she would move her dead car to another part of Porsche Doer’s two acres until such time as it was no longer dead.

Dilly said OK, but Frilly turned white as a ghost and strode up to me like a shorter version of John Wayne in the climactic battle scene of True Grit, and made it quite clear to me that if I ever spoke to her girlfriend in that way again, I would wake up in a hospital bed with the pansy-ass shit beaten clean out of my frail, dickless corpse.  I was temporarily speechless, so rather than test her willingness to take immediate action on her threat, I spun around and stalked away.  Dilly and Frilly went inside, leaving their friend Wolfey, an athletic-looking young woman who might have made a fairly decent heterosexual if not for her unsurpassably extreme hatred of anything presumably endowed with a penis, out in the yard to stand guard like a starving pterodactyl.

I tried to carry on with whatever Judas-oriented activity Judas had wheedled me into helping him with, probably unloading the symbols of his manliness from the bed of his pickup truck, but the slightly unexpected intensity of Frilly’s verbal attack had pretty much unhinged me and I was certain that I would not be able to sleep again until I forced myself to stand up for myself as the original and more deserving of the property’s inhabitants.  I could feel the blood pounding in my face, my jaw and biceps clenching and twitching, and as we all know, there’s one thing I won’t tolerate in my life, and that is insomnia.  It’s now or never, I reasoned, so in mid-stride I threw Judas’s shovel down on the gravel driveway and headed past the dead stump that I had uprooted that very morning and into the house to confront Frilly, barely noticing Wolfey where she lurked next to the front door.

I found myself standing in front of Frilly where she slumped on the couch trying to watch Sesame Street with her stepson, screaming my head off about how Nobody Threatens Me In My Own Home.  At first she tried to respond semi-calmly from a seated position—perhaps remembering her last vacation in the county jail—but she did not fail to mention that she would fucking well threaten anyone she felt like threatening.  But because of my once-effective strategy of repeating over and over an undeniably true statement till the offending party was worn down and forced to agree with me, and perhaps because of the decibel level of my argument, Frilly lost her ability to remain seated, and stood up, thought better of it and sat back down, stood up, sat down—

—and I noticed a movement in the corner of my eye.  I looked, and Wolfey was standing there, her jaw thrust forward till you could see all the way into her knotted gut, and she was coming my way.  What did you say to my friend? and she was all over me, pushing me repeatedly by the shoulders toward the back corner of the room.  I was no longer concerned with threats, but groping blindly in my vault of inner resources for any kind of experience that would get me out of this situation before I got mangled.  What came to mind was the time Boss had been play-sparring with a friend and his friend accidentally punched him in the throat, causing him excruciating pain and ending the sparring match instantaneously.  Coupling that with the memory of the time I’d won a junior high school boxing match in gym class by faking to the stomach so I could land a punch on the jaw that knocked my opponent dizzy, I waited for an opening, faked the stomach punch and struck out with my right fist, fully intending to pop Wolfey’s Adam’s apple out the back of her throat.  I missed her by a mile, and she jumped on me, knocking me down and landing on top of me.  Fortunately I landed on my back on a pile of dirty laundry and toys, so I wasn’t knocked senseless by the unexpected loss of my legs, and it now became my chief concern to prevent Wolfey—who in her loss of composure had resorted to girl-fighting—from scratching out my eyes and kneeing me in the groin.  To this end, I grabbed her long, pretty wavy brown hair by the back of her neck with my right hand and held her chin down firmly against her chest, which kept her from seeing what she was doing and kept one of her hands busy trying to get my fist out of her hair; I grabbed her other hand, which was still trying to scratch my eyes out, with my other hand and held it away from my face, and put one of my feet in her stomach to hold her squirming torso far enough away from me that her flailing knees could not reach my vulnerable privates.  I said nary a word and breathed as slowly and deeply as possible to conserve my strength while she sputtered and snorted and cursed; although I was so hemmed in by furniture and piles of clothes and toys that I couldn’t throw her off me, her position on top did her no good because she had used all her strength up and was now trying to get away from me, but I wouldn’t let her up because she was also in the way of Frilly and Dilly, who I reasoned might be waiting for their turn at me.  I was running out of strength and could imagine myself losing without any trouble at all if Frilly didn’t stay out of it.

Finally Judas condescended to enter the house—he told me later that he’d been waiting outside for the sound of crashing furniture—and of all things, he calmly knelt at Wolfey’s side and stroked her hair gently, asking her if she was willing to get off me and stand aside while I left the room.  I was ready to pass out from exhaustion, and wasted precious breath hissing at him through clenched teeth to get her off me.  Finally Wolfey promised to stand aside and let me leave the room, and Judas ordered me to let her go.  I barely had the strength to feel insulted that he was being gentle with her and firm with me, though now that I bother to think about it, I can see that in his infinite wisdom he was establishing the rapport he needed in order to be effective by pretending to sympathize with those who outnumbered us.

Judas held quiet diplomatic conferences with Frilly that I wasn’t invited to, he and Porsche Doer begged me not to call in the authorities, and as a consolation prize for the insult I had endured, Dilly and Frilly had to move out immediately, and to my sincere delight, they were forced to live in a barn while seeking better accommodations.  My only other trophy from this event—which I admit I must have incited for my own entertainment—is a nearly invisible scar above my right eyebrow, which I admire in the mirror once every five years.  Wolfey complained of the loss of a hank of hair, which impressed no one except her immediate circle of friends, which unfortunately included the irascible Grave Darn, who valued her friendship for reasons I should not mention.

There was a homeless alcoholic schizo who wandered the streets of Grass Valley in those days who everybody called “The Puker” because he would be seen walking down the sidewalk with his window-washing bucket, and from time-to-time would unexpectedly turn his head over his shoulder and puke in the gutter without breaking stride.  He lived in an abandoned shack not far from Dilly and Frilly’s new barn home, way out in the woods.  One day he decided it would be a good thing to collect the numerous bits of toilet paper that he could see poking their little white heads above the surface of his front yard, put them in a neat little pile, and burn them.  The result of his Suzy Homemaker impulse was the infamous 49er Fire, which burned 33,000 acres, starting at the Puker’s shack on the Ridge, traveling down the Yuba River, and then moving up the bed of a creek whose headwaters formed on the nearly completed estate of local acupuncturist and former employer of my good friend Judas, Rendall Stuckey.  Mr. and Mrs. Rendall Stuckey watched the fire march their direction from the balcony of the so-called barn they had built, which was actually a Japanese wood shop downstairs and a comfortable apartment upstairs that the Stuckey family resided in while waiting to begin construction on the real house at the mountaintop site which had in the meantime been cleared of all but a dead tree and planted with a huge field of clover.

Rendall’s pregnant wife eventually grabbed their little daughter and left for safer ground, but Rendall scoffed and stayed to watch the fire from the balcony, knowing for a fact that the fire, which was still miles away, could not touch him.  When it turned out of the river valley and headed up the creek toward his home, he turned on his sprinklers and stayed put.  He had cleared enough land that the resulting firebreaks would keep his recently completed “barn” out of harm’s way, even if the fire did keep coming his direction, which it would not.  When the firefighters arrived at his property, he would not leave and they could not make him.  When the fire raced onto his land, he wept but stood his ground.  As his “barn” burnt around him, he tried to put it out with wet blankets, and would not leave the burning structure.  A firefighter had to knock him down, lay on top of him and throw a fireproof blanket over the both of them.  Somehow they survived.

Several days later, when the fire was finally dead, Judas and I drove to the estate he had worked so hard to build, in order to survey the damage, feeling like sheepish tourists.  As we drove the several miles of little roads, we noticed that, for the most part, it had been a speeding ground fire in these neighborhoods, burning mostly bushes and neatly clearing out the untidy brush, but just scorching the outside bark of trees and bypassing every house we saw.  Even when we drove down the last dirt road that led to Rendall’s land, we wouldn’t have noticed that a fire had been there if we hadn’t been looking for the signs of it.  Then we turned the last bend before the property, and our jaws dropped open.  There was not one tree left, just little black sticks.  Even the dirt had burned.  You could see for miles.  We ventured shakily out of his truck and walked down to the trailer where he had lived as caretaker.  The trailer had melted to the ground.  It was now a foot tall.  Then we walked up the hill to the “barn.”  What barn?  There was nothing there but metal roofing material covering a little pile of soot.  Then we walked up to the house site at the very top of the hill.  The huge field of clover was still green.  The fire had not touched it.  But the dead tree in its very center was still smoldering—no, it was still on fire, flames sleepily licking at it three days after the firefighters had gone home.  The heat of the fire that turned Rendall Stuckey’s dream estate to ash had reached all the way across the huge field of clover and ignited the very last tree on the property, the dead one.

Let’s get out of here, Judas said.

That winter Judas worked out of town as a tree planter, and although he said it was the hardest work he had ever done—and never even began to suggest that I join him at it—he stuck with it through several seasons, making enough money to buy land near the Northern California coast with some fellow tree planters.  I saw him occasionally when he came to visit Grass Valley, but once he bought his land and stopped coming by, I made the decision to leave well enough alone and try to become the independent self-made man that I was afraid I could never be if I didn’t get out of Judas’s shadow and stay out of it.  When I finally left Grass Valley after 3-1/2 years—the longest I’d ever stayed in the same town since high school—I lost track of him on purpose, and for years I thought he was just a memory.  But that was just me thinking.  In the meantime I had another year in Grass Valley to screw up my so-called life.

Now that Porsche Doer and Grave Darn’s new baby boy was no longer the only thing on their mind, they moved back to their property.  While they had been living with their friend—a woman who had been a partner in a mining supply company that had gone belly up—the two women and another woman had been recruited by an evil 54-year-old dyke named Brazabell who liked to play local politics, lived with her elderly parents, and made a living starting mining projects and then suing her mining partners.  As we all know, the court system is workable only to those who know how to work it, and as a patriot trying to live in 1776, Porsche Doer certainly did not know how to work it.  Brazabell was fond of claiming that her mother was senile and her father was deaf, in order to keep her associates from holding conversation with them and possibly learning something about their daughter’s way of doing business.  Since I was hired on occasion to work with the four women in their mining project, I met her parents once, and let me assure you, her mother was not senile and her father was not deaf.  They were, however, blinded by the same devotion that blinds all parents, though I cannot say what they found to love about the beady-eyed gargoyle that they believed they had given birth to.

My first job for the gold-mining venture was to go down to their claim at the creek where they had all their huge equipment—which Porsche Doer had single-handedly purchased for the group by mortgaging her property—and get busy panning gold from the exact spot where Brazabell told me to pan gold.  Panning gold was my new hobby, and I had been to the Yuba River almost every day that summer to dangle my feet in the water and pan gold, finding about $10 worth of gold all summer by doing it.  So there I was down at the creek, ecstatically picking more gold out of my pan in an hour than I had found all summer, when up drives a man who was there to meet with the girls about becoming an investor in their venture.  Brazabell hauled him over to where I was, and I jumped up and eagerly showed him the pretty little pieces I’d found in my pan in such a short period of time.  In retrospect, I have little doubt that the spot where Brazabell told me to pan was personally salted with those numerous baby nuggets by Brazabell herself, since subsequent pans came up suspiciously empty.

My second job for the foursome—at least three of whom didn’t know gold mining from chopping carrots—was to sleep in the little trailer at the site to discourage other gold miners—who Brazabell was convinced had only evil intentions and could not be trusted—from sneaking around vandalizing and stealing the equipment that Porsche Doer had traded the deed to her property for.  During this period of time, my car suddenly started losing power, and would stall going up long hills.  By the time I figured out that the car’s wiring harness had somehow gotten wrapped around the fan blades, the whole electrical system had suffered so much that the car became nearly useless.

My third job in relation to the mining project was to take care of Porsche Doer and Grave Darn’s three children in the afternoons, first picking the twins up from school, then picking up the new son—who was almost two by now—at the baby-sitter’s, then taking them all home and trying to keep them from crying for their parents until such time as one of the parents saw fit to come home.  Apart from Porsche Doer’s lack of interest in the actual tasks related to being a parent and Grave’s continually pissy mood, they were fine, loving parents and the kids all three turned out well, quite independent and unusually brave.  But Grave was jealous of me because his son wouldn’t take a nap in his parents’ bed without first screaming for an hour, whereas all I had to do to get him to go to sleep instantly was to take him next door to my bed and he would be out like a light without a whimper.  Grave also didn’t appear to appreciate the fact that one day as he and I and the twins sat at the table eating some smoked salmon and crackers that my Daddy had sent me, one of the twins looked at him and said, out of the blue, Daddy, we love Luther more than we love you, and the other twin said, Yeah, Daddy, we do.  Neither Grave nor I said a word, but I could hear his blood boiling from four feet away.  I was pretty sure he also hated my guts for sleeping late into the morning, and for getting paid $50 a week by the mining partnership for baby-sitting, on top of getting free rent, when Porsche Doer had recently made him go out and get a real job for the first time in years.  Once during one of his tirades in the kitchen when he was trying to cook dinner for his kids at 10:00 p.m. and they wouldn’t stop coming in and reminding him of the degree to which they were hungry, he asked me, Luther, what the heck am I doing wrong? to which I started to respond, but two words into my response or the bit of advice I thought he had just asked me for, he picked up a glass coffeepot and accidentally smashed it against the wall.  I decided to not finish what I’d been about to say.

So it was not too big of a surprise one morning as I was drooling on my pillow about 8 a.m. and still desirous of two more hours of sleep, when the twins came over and pounded on my door to tell me that their Daddy said to go tell Luther to get out of bed and take them to school.  Well, that was not the arrangement, so I told them to go back and tell their Daddy that Luther said no.  Grave barged into my happy little apartment to inform me that my services as a baby-sitter would no longer be required, and while I was at it I could pack my shit and get out of his face forever.  Well, as a citizen of the United States of America he had a right to free speech, but the owner of the property, his unmarried girlfriend Porsche Doer, was not in support of his behavior or his attitude and I knew this, so I ignored his request, but got in the habit of keeping to myself in my apartment and experienced constipation for the first time in my life as a result of not wanting to go in the house to get glared at malevolently on my way to the only toilet on the property.  He used my dismissal as an excuse to quit his job so he could stay home and take care of his kids himself, although I knew he was just guarding his girlie magazines and marijuana stash from me, and we all found out later that his real thing in life at this time was a secret cocaine habit.

Since things were quickly going sour within the mining partnership, and the new investor they had used me to help attract was extremely irate about something and was backing out of any involvement with the project, I headed down to the mine to pick up some tools I’d left there while I still could.  As I walked onto the claim, the investor was just slamming his car door and driving away.  When he got to me, he stopped and rolled down his window.  Hi, I said.  He spat in my face and drove off.

A few more weird things happened to me during this shaky period.  I was lolly-gagging in my apartment at Porsche Doer’s house one afternoon when someone knocked on my door, and there, of all things, was Frilly—who Brazabell had insisted on hiring to be her personal assistant and my replacement as night guard at the mine—and to make matters increasingly suspicious, she was smiling, and to raise the level of unbelievability to absurd proportions, she was wearing a dress.

Now, as naive as I undeniably was and probably still am, I was not a complete idiot, having managed to crawl nearly a third of the way around the block in my designer diapers with a little help from my friends, so as Frilly wandered around my room unbidden, pretending to ooh and aah over my small collection of rose quartz and crystals, her beady little eyes were everywhere, and I asked myself: Is she here to butter me up for another assignment to play the patsy for Brazabell?  Is she here to coax information out of me or to stake out my apartment for any valuables I might have that Brazabell can then try to sue me for while she sues Porsche Doer and her other partners?  Or is this what it appears to be: tacit intimidation by way of a sneeringly friendly social visit from a hit man?  Deciding on the latter, I pretended to be as stupid as Brazabell thought I was and met Frilly on her level by being nice, but said nothing specific to clue her that Porsche Doer had warned me to stay the hell away from her and Brazabell at all costs, and to consider them armed and dangerous.

Not long after that, I was tuning a piano at a bar out on a two-lane highway where my friend Melvyn Skidrogue was going to be playing, and when I finished and was heading back toward town on the little highway, I noticed that the tailgater behind me was shouting and shaking his fist at me.  Normally I slow down for tailgaters, but in this particular instance I was on the lookout for trouble, which my earlier bout with Wolfey had encouraged me to actively avoid, so I speeded up in case the driver behind me thought I was driving too slow.  He speeded up too, staying as close to my back bumper as possible.  I speeded up more, and so did he.  I wondered if perhaps he just wanted to get around me and was afraid to pass, so at the earliest opportunity I pulled off the road.  To my dismay, he pulled off too, jumped out of his big nasty-looking yellow car and headed my way.  He was quite the unsavory-looking character: wild hair, eyes bugging out of his head, dirty sleeveless T-shirt accentuating his rippling muscles, tall tattered jeans and grimy tennis shoes.  Aha, thinks I, This is the hit-man that Frilly came to prepare me for.  I let him get pretty close to my car, then screeched out into the highway in hopes that the big truck that was coming would serve as a buffer between my car and the rusty yellow one twice its size.  The tallish tweaker shocked me by sprinting back to his car and pulling out into the highway right behind me, forcing the big truck to slam on its brakes, and then he proceeded to chase me all the way to town.  At this point I was happy to drive as fast as he wanted me to, knowing that the faster I drove, the greater would be the chance of stimulating the curiosity of potential witnesses to my impending murder.

When I got to town, I stopped at the first red light and put on my right blinker, signaling my intention to head straight for the highway patrol office, which was half a block away.  The man rammed the back of my little Datsun with his big chickenshit yellow sedan, pushing my car forward a foot or so, then he got around me and screamed away through the red light and was out of sight before I thought to look at his license plate.  Since the assault was apparently over and since my car was still neither registered nor insured, I decided not to turn myself in to the highway patrol, and that was the end of that.  No clue to the man’s identity or the cause of the attack has ever surfaced, but I have always been convinced that it was a second warning from Brazabell to keep my big mouth shut and stay out of it.

Brazabell eventually won her lawsuit against Porsche Doer and the other partners, and although she had no reason to win or even to file a suit, except for her superior connections amongst local politicians and her intimate experience with the infamous local courts, Porsche Doer lost her property to the company that had provided the partnership with $30,000 worth of gold mining equipment that Brazabell had then proceeded to distract them from learning how to use.

Before Porsche Doer lost her property, Grave Darn had plenty of time to finish the informal eviction proceedings he had started against me by way of harassment, threats and dirty looks.  Eventually, under pressure from her so-called common-law husband, who was able to apply said pressure by virtue of the fact that he had gotten his job back when the gold mine became useless as a source of income because of the court case involving it, Porsche Doer came to me with an aching heart and informed me that she had made the decision to stand by her man, and in the course of so doing, she had to ask me to start looking for a new home for myself and the air car project.

While I still occupied my apartment at Porsche Doer’s property, Sunny moved back to Grass Valley after having lived in Los Angeles for a few years pretending to be a new age trainer of some kind.  She announced her willingness to be my girlfriend, and I patted her on the head and reminded her that I would never be interested.  She did, however, lie to her housemate Ann K, before she brought Ann K over to my apartment to introduce us, claiming that she—Sunny—had dibs on me.  This explains why, despite the attraction that Ann K and I felt towards each other, Ann K failed to make the first move and soon moved to Philadelphia instead; but never fear, she did not stay there forever.  After she left I tried to get Sunny to help me write my memoirs, which I then planned to entitle The Rough and Ready Tapes, since I lived down the road from a town called Rough and Ready, which had once tried to secede from the Union, an act which I greatly admired.  I reasoned that if Sunny was going to worship me, then she could dang well do it with a practical purpose, and I wanted to record the true facts of my life, since I was now 33 years old, and the way things had been going, I would consider myself lucky to live longer than Jesus, who like me had apparently not had the sense to keep his big mouth shut.  But even though I was in my Jesus year, Sunny didn’t have it in her to help me with this project, and kept going to sleep on my sofa, which was the waste of a good sofa, so I sent her home and avoided her after that.

Because of my barely deserved and somewhat spurious credentials as a piano tuner, a musical acquaintance of Porsche Doer and Grave Darn’s named Melvyn Skidrogue had been bugging me to do this and that for him, knowing that I would be happy to grudgingly accept marijuana as payment in spite of my pressing need for cash.  Then he won a lawsuit against his highway patrolman brother who had stolen Melvyn’s share of their inheritance, and while he still had money in his pocket, he decided that he wanted to pay me to refinish and rebuild his big old upright piano.  One night Sunny and I were hanging around in Porsche’s house since everyone else was away and I didn’t really like having Sunny in my bedroom, and I was giving her the lowdown on the repeated threats I had been getting from Grave Darn on account of my simple refusal to get out of bed one morning when I had made other plans, and I got myself so stirred up that I spontaneously grabbed the phone, called Melvyn Skidrogue, and asked him if there was any way he would consider allowing me to live in his house temporarily while I finished his piano project, and trade work for rent, as I had no other way to pay him any rent.  I told him about Grave Darn’s consistently intimidating behavior, and although Melvyn is, of course, a Scorpio, he is the most soft-hearted one I have ever met, and so it was that I was finally able to thumb my nose at the miserably insolent and perpetually insolvent Grave Darn, and move in with someone who had better pot anyway.

Although my car was in the throes of a whole-hearted electrical meltdown, I managed to get it over to Melvyn’s house, and parked it.  This was the Autumn of 1988, and earlier that summer I had been in a used bookstore where I had spent my last $30 on a gem and mineral guide to California, and for the sake of something to talk about—since I was really there to mooch pot—I had showed him the part where it talked about the extensive opportunities to find rose quartz in the mountains of Central California.  Melvyn surprised me by getting all wide-eyed and drooly, explaining that the location I had mentioned was near his birthplace, and he had joyously found rose quartz in that area when he was a child.  One thing led to another, and when it became obvious, after I moved in with him, that his girlfriend needed her car to get to work worse than we needed to borrow it to go look for rose quartz 400 miles away, I spent the entire winter with my car’s wiring harness in my lap, tracing and replacing every broken and melted wire, building a new fuse box out of wood since the old one no longer existed to speak of, and in the Spring when Louie Kogg came over to help me troubleshoot the newly re-installed wiring harness, which barely worked, I found that by consistently doing the opposite of everything he advised me to do, I was able to get the whole blasted car working perfectly again.  By late April, Melvyn and I were hot to trot, so we loaded up the station wagon with more tents and mattresses and chairs and musical instruments than I would have ever thought to take, since I wanted to dig up rocks, not go camping for recreational purposes, and headed south for a five day trip to the mountains of Central California.

Melvyn Skidrogue couldn’t really help out with the driving, for although he was a professional piano player, he had broken his neck in a car accident after stealing his Mama’s car as an outlaw 14-year-old on speed.  As a result of the neck injury, which he recovered from—as well as recovering from the hard drug habit, which he credited pot for enabling him to do—Melvyn’s hands were crippled, bony and curled up like claws, but his musical training was already so complete by the age of 14 that, with the encouragement of his Mama and her sister, who were both professional jazz piano players, he was able to relearn how to play the piano in ways that the ordinary mortal would not consider worth the trouble, and in the Grass Valley area he was popular for both his musicianship and his irreverently wacky and gracious personality.  But he could not hold onto a steering wheel worth beans, so that whenever he was forced to drive, it was in a blind panic with the accelerator pedal held flat to the floor and the steering wheel sliding through his fingers like a buttered banana.  So I did all the driving on our trip down south.

After sleeping on Melvyn’s Aunt Betty’s floor as long as our excited condition would allow, we stashed our sleeping bags under her dining room table and jumped back into the car, and drove up through the foothills to where Melvyn thought would be the best place to gain access to the mountains.  When we finally reached the entrance to the National Forest, we encountered what is commonly referred to amongst rockhounds as a goddam locked gate.  We got out of the car, stiff as rigor-mortised mongeese after ten hours of driving and five hours of sleep, and approached the gate, rubbing our bleary eyeballs in hopes that the Forest-Service-green gate was a mirage.  But we were not so lucky.  Melvyn Skidrogue cursed the gate: Bad, bad gate! he scolded it as he would never do one of his dogs, who were perfect in his eyes, although I secretly considered most of them smelly nuisances.  I hauled out my maps and identified two more possible entrances to the National Forest, and we drove more miles to see if they were locked too.  At the next locked gate we got out and walked four miles down the dirt road to scope out the cabin his Mama and Daddy had once owned.  After an unsuccessful search for rose quartz in random areas of the forest surrounding the little village of summer cabins, we trudged the four miles back uphill to the car.

On our way to the third and final possible way to drive up into the mountains, I was zooming around a curve on a paved road when I slammed on the brakes and slowed to a crawl.  What’s wrong? Melvyn asked.  I informed him that when we got around the curve, there would be a cow standing in the middle of the road looking at us, and it was not her day to die.  Sure enough, there she was.  I went around the cow, and launched into the description of two dreams I had just remembered from years earlier.

On my 20th birthday I dreamed I was hiking up a steep mountain meadow full of cows, who were chanting in unison: “Eighteen!  Eighteen!  Eighteen!” when I encountered a red cow sleeping in my path, blocking the little gully I was using for a trail.  As I considered whether to turn back or go around her, she lifted her head and looked at me with annoyance.  I took a step backward.  The annoyance grew into indignation and I became alarmed.  I looked behind me, seriously thinking about going back the way I’d come, and when I looked back at the cow, she had gotten to her feet and was glaring at me.  She was much larger than I had at first thought.  There was no way I was going to try to get around her now, so I turned around and started downhill.  She followed me, and each time I looked over my shoulder, she had become more menacing, and my fear grew proportionately, or vice versa.  Her horns got bigger, then the whole cow got bigger.  She changed from red to black, and by the time I had pumped myself up into a serious panic, she was no longer a she.  I cut across the meadow of chanting cows and ran to a lone tree in the middle of the meadow to hide behind it.  Once I got behind it and saw the big black bull pawing the Earth and getting ready to charge me, it became obvious that the tree was but a narrow sapling, not big enough to hide behind, much less protect me.  I realized that I was doomed, and at that moment the bull charged.  It reached me in a split second, and leapt into the air.  As it crashed through the sapling, leaving it in splinters, I realized I was dreaming and woke up.

The other dream that came to mind was also from long before I had ever given a thought to rose quartz.  I was walking along a dirt road on a sunny day with another man, and we both wore long robes and leather sandals.  We came to a barricade across the road, about chin height and made of stone.  I grabbed the top of the wall and hauled myself up it, and looked over.  On the other side of the short wall it was dark as night, and the wall was the top of a huge stone embankment that sloped down and away from me like Hoover Dam, except that it glowed with a soft, dark purple light.  I ran my eyes over the glittering magenta vastness that eventually disappeared into utter darkness, and I was filled with an overpowering euphoria.  Then I was filled to overflowing with the knowledge that I was to be the savior of the world, and the feeling that accompanied that knowledge was both profoundly melancholic and profoundly satisfying.  The dream ended there. 

I apologized for the conclusion to the second dream, explaining that I had no idea what it meant and could only assume that it was completely symbolic; however as you and I both know, I have always been more than willing to save the world, if the world would only roll over and let me.

Melvyn Skidrogue was underwhelmed by the account of my dreams, and as Scorpios are wont to do when someone talks about himself too much, he changed the subject.

Before long we arrived at the third locked gate, and although it was already late afternoon and we had already walked nearly ten miles that day, we decided to hike up the road about six miles to a dirt road, which—according to a forest ranger we had questioned—if we followed it for a couple more miles, would lead us to where we thought the rose quartz was supposed to be: Raging Bull Meadow.

We gathered our strength for the hike up the winding road, and re-gathered it, and re-gathered it, until Melvyn finally admitted that he would not have enough strength to get back to the car unless he turned back right now.  I had no argument with that, since it allowed me to indulge the fullness of my manic preoccupation with finding that old rose quartz mine before dark.  I charged up the mountain to where the road leveled out, as the forest ranger had said it would, and kept going, always hoping that I was somehow closer than I thought, until finally I had to admit that Melvyn’s plan to return the next day was more sound than mine, so I turned around and charged back downhill, catching up with my companion right around my favorite time of day: twilight.

I was carrying a big plastic bucket with rocks and tools in it—although we had found no rose quartz, we had kept every other ugly piece of common quartz we could find—and Melvyn was carrying his rocks and his marijuana stash in a pillowcase which was almost too heavy for him to grasp in his gnarled fingers.  Before you know it, here comes the county sheriff, wanting to know what we had been doing down by the cabins earlier that morning.  Melvyn’s glib explanation of how he had so dearly wanted to go take one nostalgic look in the windows of what had once been his Mama and Daddy’s summer cabin when he was just a tike seemed to be almost enough for the deputy, but not quite; he wanted to look in Melvyn’s pillowcase too.  He shined his flashlight that way, and the first thing that caught the light’s reflection was a plastic baggie full of marijuana.  Before he could say anything, I pretended that the sheriff had asked to see what was in my bucket too, by noisily dumping its contents on the pavement.  The deputy jumped and shifted his light over to me.  Rocks and tools, I said, as if he had asked.  This subterfuge was probably unnecessary, but it gave the deputy the distraction and time he needed to ask himself whether he really wanted a second look inside the pillowcase, and he decided not.  He drove off, probably glad I had given him the chance to play dumb; otherwise it would have been a night of filling out arrest reports and a pointlessly spoiled vacation for a couple of harmless pot-smoking hippies.

That night we lay on our sleeping bags staring at Aunt Betty’s ceiling, wondering how we were ever going to find the old rose quartz mine if we had to walk uphill eight miles just to get to the Raging Bull Meadow area where it had supposedly been.  It turned out that the gates into the National Forest were never open before Memorial Day.  In the morning, Melvyn was sort of overplaying the party-pooper act, claiming that his legs hurt, and although I was secretly quite willing to go hiking without him, I appealed to my own generous nature and pretended that it was my idea that we take the day off so he could visit some of his old friends while I tuned Aunt Betty’s piano, and as my consolation prize for not hiking in that day, we could drop by the BLM office instead and research mine claims in the area, in case any clues could be found in that way.

That night we lay on our sleeping bags staring at Aunt Betty’s ceiling, wondering how we were ever going to find the old rose quartz mine if we had to walk uphill eight miles just to get to the Raging Bull Meadow area where it had supposedly been.  I visualized the forest ranger telling us which roads he would take in order to drive there.  I visualized the roads to drive.  The map.  The roads to drive.  The map.  Drive.  Map.  Drive?  Drive!  I jumped out of my bed of sorrow and hollered, That’s it!  We’re not driving anyway: we’re walking!  I hauled out the map and sure enough, there was a trail that led straight up the mountain from the locked gate to the meadow in question, and this trail, called Raging Bull Cattle Drive, was not an eight-mile route, it was a three-mile route.  Straight uphill, sure—the way cows go—but straight uphill three miles is better than straight uphill eight miles, any way you look at it.

In the morning we jumped in the car and streaked up to the locked gate.  In no time at all we found the trail and charged uphill the three miles.  There was Raging Bull Meadow, right where the map had said it would be.  We climbed up the steep meadow, boulder hopping when possible since the meadow was marshy with snow melt.  There were plenty of big white quartz pieces, stained yellow with iron from the ground, but no stretch of the imagination could paint them pink.  However, one thing was for certain: this was the exact meadow that I had dreamed about, complete with cows.  Even the Raging Bull was there, in the form of a sign at the top of the meadow that said “Raging Bull Pass.”  And although the cows in the meadow were not chanting “Eighteen,” the map showed that if I had continued up the little gully in the dream, going around the sleeping cow instead of waking it up and scaring it into turning into a raging bull and attacking me, I would have crossed over Raging Bull Pass and headed down the other side into what the map termed “Section 18.”

Melvyn was still underwhelmed by my psychic dream, but like me, he was charged up to find the rose quartz mine.  It was the fourth and last day of our excursion; we had to leave in the morning to get him back in time for his regularly scheduled musical engagements.  But after hours of fighting the shrubs and vines and stickery, tangled undergrowth, we finally came back to the dirt road at the bottom end of Raging Bull Meadow, and took a left.  Whaddaya think we should do?  Melvyn said.  I replied that I thought he should take a look at his feet.  He jumped back, his eyes wide.  Quartz!  He reached down and pried the fist-sized chunk out of the ground with his knobby little fingers.  Although we tried to make it pink in our minds, it wouldn’t happen, so we left it where it was and kept going down the nice flat road.  We spent another two hours exploring the forest, fighting the bushes which seemed to be grabbing at our skin and clothes as if they were living things.  My legs finally ached, my spirit finally ebbed, my mind wanted me to give up and go back to Aunt Betty’s for a real home-cooked meal, and then my determination finally faded to nothing in light of the obvious reality that we were stumbling randomly through the forest at the end of our strength, and at that moment, my instincts finally clicked into place, and I stopped and looked Melvyn right in the eye.  He said exactly what I was thinking: We have to go back to where we found that piece of quartz.  It is our last chance.

As we re-approached the spot on the road where the rock had failed to stop us in our tracks earlier, I squinted at the piece from afar, and then I remembered the infamous tailings from the rose quartz mine that Dab Mostly had overpaid me to dig up a year earlier.  Those tailings had not been pink: they were the same color as the rock at my feet.  Gray, yellow, brownish-red, off-white.  We charged up the hill with what we thought was the last of our strength, but what we found after about 200 paces was more than enough to put the tiger back in our tanks.  We pounded each other on the back.  I asked Melvyn if he was ready to get rich—based on the fact that Dab Mostly had offered Judas $400 for a ten-pound chunk of lavender that Judas had high-graded from him—and Melvyn shrugged and grinned.  He explained that he just wanted to have fun and find some rocks for his yard and his fish tank, and didn’t care about making money off of the mine.  I thought he was being naive, but in the long run, as we all know, it takes one to know one.

On the way home we decided to name our new claim on the old mine “The Second Wind.”  I should have named it “Blood, Sweat and Tears.”

Through the course of the summer to come, Melvyn and I returned to the mine together a few times, but when it became obvious that his life in Grass Valley was not going to be stopped by owning a mine claim 400 miles away, I started going there by myself.  Still possessed by the need to dig through tailings, I pathologically ignored my best leads and kept coming home with loads of rock that I had to admit made me look over-optimistic, if not color blind.  After the gates opened up into the National Forest, I still had to walk a mile to get to the mine since the road it was on never did open.  It became my happy little cross to bear that none of this was going very smoothly, but the beauty of the area, from the way it smelled to the utter lack of other hikers and rockhounds in that part of the woods, and the uphill climb it all represented and of which I was inordinately proud, made it mine.  I often indulged myself in fantasies of coming to the spot every year for the rest of my life.  Whenever I got depressed and considered doing myself in, this was the spot where I planned to do it.  Whenever I got excited and wanted to show something off, this is what I wanted to show off.  Mine all mine.

Eventually I came to the point where I had to enlist the involvement of Dab Mostly, knowing how badly he wanted his own rose quartz mine, and knowing how badly my car needed a new clutch.  Melvyn Skidrogue graciously gave up his half of the ownership of the mine claim, since he had no interest in commercializing what he considered to be a great picnic spot, and I gave Dab Mostly half ownership in exchange for the $400 it would cost me to get my car running and go down there to actually put claim stakes in the ground.

In the meantime, Melvyn Skidrogue had been forced by my apparent ignorance of the situation to remind me that I had moved into his house on a so-called temporary basis, but had already been there almost a year.  My moodiness and disinterest in working for a living had made me bad company, and were partially to blame for Melvyn’s resurgence of interest in smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, which he had given up in response to his Mama’s deathbed request years earlier.  We had yelled at each other till he cried and made me shake his hand and promise a half-dozen times not to hold it against him, but in order to restore equilibrium to his household and concentrate on his relationship with his girlfriend, his music career, and his dogs, I had to take my miserable attitude, which I blamed on smoking pot, somewhere else.

In a supreme endeavor to give up marijuana forever, which everybody from Judas to Grave Darn to Melvyn Skidrogue to Dab Mostly had supposedly prevented me from being able to do, I read anti-drug books and purposely blinded myself to the tenuous and arguably non-existent advantages of the intensely pleasurable lack of interest in practical matters that pot-smoking afforded me, and purposely created a list in the very front of my mind of the insults I had endured from potheads, which I pretended were not universal to the whole human species, and on the day that I put all my stuff in Melvyn Skidrogue’s basement and moved into a house which I was to caretake for only one month—after which I assumed I would be forced to live in my car, should I decide at that time that life was actually worth living—I quit smoking pot almost completely and became finally able, for the first time in my life, to thumb my nose at anyone who offered it to me.  I even wrote a song called “I Don’t Have to Be Liked by Losers,” which I have since neglected to incorporate into my repertoire.

I had already burned through Dab Mostly’s generous attempt to employ me at his rock shop and on his property by complaining to him that if he were to carry out his threat to make me manager of a second rock shop he wanted to open in a nearby town, Dilly and Frilly and Wolfey and Brazabell would find me and hurt him by hurting me.  I left him a note on the door of his house claiming that I was a paranoid schizophrenic and could not handle his assignments anymore.  He gently suggested that my knowledge of this fact was probably a good sign, but the onslaught of suppressed emotions that slammed me 24 hours a day when I finally stopped smoking pot—all of which were masked as murderous rage—combined with the self-righteous indignation I had rallied as the only lever I knew of that could pry me out of my imprisonment to marijuana, confused me because of my unaccustomed state of clarity to the point that only total isolation from human beings was able to calm my nerves.  But the month of house-sitting didn’t last forever, and when it became possible to count those remaining days of peaceful isolation on the fingers of one hand, the seeming failure of everything I had tried to do in Grass Valley for the past 3-1/2 years threatened to come crashing down on me, and I was forced to write one of my famous letters.

It seems that the Grass Valley Police Department had finally discovered that my car was neither licensed nor insured, and when I had dragged my feet for months about paying the $425 fine that the Great State of California thought I should be able to pay when I couldn’t even afford a lousy $30 for the registration, they naturally upped the penalty to $600 and put out a warrant for my arrest, giving me the option of spending three days in jail or paying the full amount.  Had I taken them up on the offer of free food and rent for three paltry days out of my otherwise unnecessary life, things might have gone better for me than they ended up doing.  But instead I wrote a long letter explaining that I had totally screwed up my whole life by not admitting to myself in a timely manner that I was a useless pothead, and spent my last $5 to buy stamps and to make photocopies of the letter.  I took the letters to the post office, and with great trepidation and dozens of second thoughts, I dropped them in the mail.  One went to my Mama, one to my Daddy, and one to each of three elderly gentlemen who I hoped would be willing to help me by providing me with the $600 I needed and/or a place to live.

My Mama and my Daddy each wrote me exasperated letters explaining that they could not live my life for me, sending a little money but not enough to solve more of my problems than the immediate need to eat.  My Daddy pissed me off by ordering me to “Get a job and keep it.”  They were apparently still practicing tough love as they had been taught a dozen years earlier by the Family Group that had taken place as part of my 40 days of in-patient drug counseling.  One of the three elderly gentlemen—all of whom were contacts from the air car project —was permanently scared away by the letter.  Another offered to rent me an empty trailer for $300 a month even though his property was for sale.

Doc, on the other hand, called me immediately and asked me which of the many problems I had whined about in my letter needed to be solved first.  He sent me the $600, and after he had ascertained that I had spent it on what I had said I was going to spend it on, he called again and insisted that he come get me and all my stuff and move me into his house in Lodi, California.  I could not say no, and received his offer with infinite gratitude, for after the house-sitting situation ended I had found myself sleeping in my car in Melvyn Skidrogue’s driveway without asking his permission to do so, and I had even clipped a few buds off his marijuana plants, although I was far too embarrassed to let anybody see me smoking pot after my extended and relentless self-righteous tirade against pot-smoking and its adherents.

As a consolation prize for the fact that I failed to use these years of taking advantage of others’ generosity in Grass Valley as a road to freedom or at least a better life, I really did discover the secret of the self-fueling air car in 1988 as the Ouija Board had predicted I would, although it was some years down the road before that year’s half-formed revelations and suspicions became solidified and vindicated by other key facts that I eventually found in old compressed air textbooks.  However, in relation to the Magic Valve and its innumerable incarnations in my mind, I had one interesting and relevant experience in the workshop, which later inspired me when I wanted to design a Magic Valve that would work.  It was Porsche Doer who was there to see the one and only apparently successful test I had conducted in regards to the possible function of the Magic Valve: she and I were able to blow air from our relatively low-pressure lungs into a flow of high pressure air, through a series of check valves that I rigged up in a special way.  This test eventually came to mind when I started the design I am currently working with, the intention of which was to design a Magic Valve that couldn’t not work.

One day I had been in a used bookstore in Grass Valley when I happened to pick up a book on weird scientific phenomena, and in my usual poking around in the index in search of anything whatsoever that the book might have to say about compressed air, I flipped to a chapter on “Maxwell’s Demon,” a topic I had never before heard of, and which instantaneously became a primary focus of my research, as well as one of the key discoveries of my entire career as an air car advocate, not to mention further validation that 1988 was to be the year that I was to come to know something important about the secret of the self-fueling air car.

It seems that way back in 1870, decades before the first air powered locomotive ever chugged down the streets of Paris, New York, Chicago, Berne, Toledo, etc., a prominent Scottish scientist published a textbook called Theory of Heat.  The laws of physics which we still use today were already well in place, but in this book he proposed an argument—not a machine, exactly, but a way of thinking—that he believed could point the way around something called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the scourge of those who would presume to invent perpetual motion machines of the second kind.

James Clerk Maxwell was not some fringe crackpot to be ignored, and his proposal sparked a debate which will never go away.  Amongst other more technical contributions which I cannot hope to convey, he predicted mathematically the eventual discovery of x-rays, gamma rays, etc., by hypothesizing the previously unsuspected existence of a theoretical structure we now call the electromagnetic spectrum, placing thereon all the visible and invisible colors of light, radio waves, etc.  Albert Einstein, who my able readers may have heard of, called Maxwell “the father of modern physics” or some such thing.  Maxwell was the first scientist ever to use mathematics to predict a scientific discovery which had not yet taken place.

The conceptual argument Maxwell proposed, which later came to be called “Maxwell’s Demon” by the physicists who love to debate the issue in terms of little demons in air tanks—as opposed to myself, who would like to remind these eggheads that an air tank is a piece of hardware in the real world, and a demon is not—has to do with the possibility of operating an air engine by means of some device capable of creating unequal zones of pressure inside a pre-filled tank of compressed air.  Believe it or not, reading about Maxwell’s Demon created quite a stir in my empty shell, because the general process—which I just described by summarizing and paraphrasing Maxwell’s argument in terms of real-world hardware—can most easily be accomplished by putting low pressure air into a high pressure tank without a compressor.  Thus, by all appearances, I have claimed the title of the Official Vindicator of Maxwell’s Demon in terms of an actual device, such as the Magic Valve used by Bob Neal, George Heaton, and probably several other air car inventors.  Meanwhile, the physicists will continue to orbit the real world in their lofty arguments built on surrealistic pillows of abstraction, forever insulated from minds like mine, which will never follow them into their ivory towers of overpaid uselessness.  As the old song goes, “We’ll be buying breathing air from the boys that brought us smog.”

But Maxwell’s Demon is not, as the Encyclopedia Brittanica would have us believe—and a Scientific American article agrees with me on this—Maxwell’s Demon is not a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, because it has a continuous energy supply: the great god of the sky who flies from horizon to horizon each and every day in order to prevent us from experiencing something that thermodynamicists call “absolute zero.”  In our culture, this god is sometimes called Sol.