CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

In which I sacrifice my soul to buy back my life

 

Although Doc was not a hermit in the real sense of the word, he had never married because of the devotion that his Mama had always expected from him, and since she lived into her 90s, by the time Doc finished changing her diapers and had to give up trying to keep her alive, there was no chance of his ever becoming a man who wanted a woman around.  She had been a lecturer and a researcher with an iron will; her beliefs regarding health, race, christianity, and politics were carved in stone.  They had lived in their car many times when the going got rough.  He had been in her shadow too long to end up very much different from her.  He had lived in rented homes in Lodi for three decades; he got stuck there, as the old song goes, because that’s where his car broke down.  Since his friends were scattered everywhere anyway, he said it didn’t really matter where he lived.  By the Autumn of 1989 when Doc rented a trailer and drove to Grass Valley to bring me home with him, he was 78 years old, a frustratedly driven and bitter, iconoclastic do-it-yourselfer.

Until the fateful night when he arrived about 10:00 p.m. to load me up, I had known him only by his business image, the facade he maintained in order to keep from scaring people away.  As he worked harder to load the trailer with my stuff than I would have considered a frail-looking little old man to be capable of doing, I immediately began to compare his frightening need to push himself ahead of me with the persona Judas had developed as he had shriveled into adulthood as an incurable workaholic who would break his back to stay two steps ahead of his friends.  As I got to know Doc better, the two personalities melted into each other in my mind, as if Judas and Doc had been made from the same mold.  To compensate for his lifelong abstinence from coffee, sugar, tobacco, alcohol, women, and all drugs, Doc was always a flash away from a sputtering attack of swearing and throwing things across the room; if he ran out of dirty words to spew, he invented new ones.  Despite his fanatical beliefs on health and nutrition, he kept cockroaches in his house so he would have someone besides his roommates to swear at and strike out at with the intention to do harm.  His version of christianity was as uniquely his own as the rest of his beliefs; he attended church by watching it on TV and praised the lord by pretending to not work on Sundays.  That was his day to make long-distance phone calls to everybody he knew.  He was always trying to put the right people together to get some amazing invention or health product off the ground.  He invested so much energy in so many different directions that even he had to admit that he was a compulsive wheel-spinner, actually accomplishing next to nothing with all his blusterous activity.

In the car with him as he towed my trailer toward Lodi were his old friends and current roommates, Russ and Marvin.  Russ had been thrown out by his wife because he was so nice to everybody else that he didn’t have anything left for her.  Many times his sympathetic presence in Doc’s home prevented me from striking out on my own just to escape Doc’s sputtering torch.  Eighty-eight-year-old Marvin Siefken had known Doc for 40 years, and they had once lost touch with each other, but when Doc re-discovered Marvin half-dead in a nursing home, he brought him home and saved his social security check from obsoletion by getting him off the doctor drugs and bad food that were killing his body.  Nothing could be done for what was left of his mind.  One time Marvin and I watched a long news feature on Alzheimer’s Disease.  When it ended, Marvin turned to me and said, “I once knew what Alzheimer’s Disease was, but I have forgotten.”  Marvin’s favorite thing to say to Doc was, “I realize that you hold me in contempt,” and Doc’s favorite retort was, “Oh shut up, Marvin.”  The resemblance to the hierarchical nature of my relationship with Judas was eerily unsettling.

On that moving trip to Lodi, I followed in my Datsun as Doc drove like a bat out of hell through Sacramento.  I considered honking at him to pull over when I noticed sparks flying out of his tailpipe, but I was too intimidated to do it.  Finally he had to pull over anyway, which he only did long after his temperature gauge indicated that he was ruining his car’s engine, but to Doc’s way of doing things, getting another dead car home and parked in his back yard was just another of life’s happy little challenges to look forward to.  When we looked under the hood the engine’s exhaust manifold was a livid cherry red.  Russ stayed with the car and trailer, and Doc and Marvin had to squeeze into the passenger seat of my Datsun, since the rest of the car was crammed with my stuff, and I drove them to Doc’s house, in shock the whole way as he revealed his true feistier-than-thou nature for the very first time since I had known him.  He and Marvin argued the whole way: Marvin complained that he was not being treated correctly and Doc swore at him and told him to move over and give him room to sit.  After my previous experience of Doc as a kind old gentleman handing me $50 bills, “Shut the fuck up, Marvin!” all the way from Sacramento to Lodi provoked a sadness and disillusionment in me that was hard to swallow.

We dropped Marvin off at home despite his protestations that he suspected we were probably taking that trailer and moving far away, deserting him to fend for himself, and I took Doc to his mechanic’s house fifteen miles away in the ghettos of Stockton.  He got his mechanic out of bed so he could get the keys to the car he had in the shop that was capable of pulling a trailer, then we dropped my car off in Lodi and headed back to Sacramento.  We left the dead car at the side of the road and the three of us headed back to Lodi, pulling the trailer with all my stuff in it.  It was now after 4 a.m. and Doc refused to let me or Russ drive, although he had to swear continuously and literally beat his head against the steering wheel in order to stay awake.

That was my first night with the real Doc.  At first I hoped he was just tired and crabby, but as the days went by, I was first amazed and then totally drained by disillusionment when it became obvious that this level of intensity was not going to end until I could find a way to get away from him.  I used to eat the obligatory healthy meal that Doc wouldn’t let anyone help him prepare, then make some excuse to go to town and sneak fast food.  Not that I had ever particularly craved fast food before; I was just desperate for some sense of freedom, since pot, cigarettes and my other indulgences, not to mention the space to carry on with my interests and hobbies, were nonexistent in my new lifestyle, which was not mine at all.

I had been to Doc’s house once before, on the way home from a rose quartz hunt, and the transformation since then was remarkable.  Not only had he been forced out of the mail order business he had been in, because the authorities came to inspect the kitchen where he was bottling the health product he was selling, and thus his income had been slashed, but he had taken on Marvin and let Russ move in, and as a result had become so harried and distraught that he had started compulsively going to garage sales and flea markets as one of his chief forms of entertainment, and in the space of a year had managed to fill every available bit of space in his house with the most useless electronic junk imaginable, none of which he knew how to fix.  When you entered the small two bedroom duplex, you had to walk through the living room between aisles formed by piles of junk on either side of you that were taller than yourself.  A couch and two chairs were accessible if you were careful, and the back wall of the living room was lined with a stack of board-and-brick shelves which were loaded down with semi-functional televisions and VCRs.  Both bedrooms were the same way.  There were two old refrigerators in the kitchen and one in the garage.  The pile of books, papers and indispensable memorabilia in the garage was too big to walk around.  One end of it could be accessed by going in through the kitchen, but if you wanted to get to the other end of the pile you had to go outside and open the big garage door.  Somewhere in that pile was a box of letters from Bob Neal, and supposedly one—and only one—of those letters mentioned the Magic Valve.  I spent hours looking for that letter, and never found it, though I found a few other letters from Bob Neal, thanking Doc for Christmas presents and other such innocuousness.  Any attempt by Russ or I to cook, sweep, or mop would throw Doc into a rage.  He didn’t have “control issues.”  He was the living embodiment of control.  I could see his mother clinging to his shoulders like a black beast.

One day I couldn’t face going to the job that Doc had gotten me, working for his friend Copely Miles, who was as high-strung as Doc himself and a lot bigger, meaner and scarier.  Caught between my Boss and my Lead Roommate, I found my teeny-tiny little existence as soulless as that of a neophyte monk weeping in self pity on his cot at the cold heart of a monastery.  I soon fell under the impression that I couldn’t take it anymore, and tried to sneak out with an armload of the few things I figured I could get out the door with, without waking anyone up.  I was going to take my last $60 and move to Eugene, Oregon, which I had always thought would be a good place for a hippie like me to indulge my true nature, which was the opposite of the monastic trip I was on now.  Doc had given me his bed to use and he slept on what was left of a couch in the living room.  I woke up earlier than Doc normally got up, which I usually had to do anyway in order to get to work on time.  I figured the scuffing of my feet on the carpet wouldn’t rouse him, and I counted the steps to the front door as I held my breath and mentally kept my fingers crossed.  But it didn’t work.

He sat up in his boxer shorts and T-shirt and asked me in a concerned tone of voice where I was going with that armload of stuff.  As I stared at the floor sheepishly, feeling like a teenage ingrate trying to escape from the orphanage, I mumbled that I was going to get into my car and drive to Eugene, Oregon with a lousy $60 in my pocket to start a new life for myself.  Ohhh, noooo! he said in that reedy little-old-man voice of his, and he started to pull his pants on, but never got them past his knees, so upset he was over this sudden undevelopment.  He thought we were gonna get some tests done on Bob Neal’s special valve, and find some funding to build an air car, and get me started down the right road, and here I was leaving in a broken-down car with $60 in my pocket!

Russ and Marvin got out of bed and hovered, bleary-eyed at first, but then intensely interested and even praying while Doc went on and on for twenty minutes, his pants up to his knees as he sat on the edge of the sofa reading my mind for me and trying to rationalize and explain his bad habits and idiosyncrasies, as well as his religious and racial beliefs that he knew I did not share; I felt like the biggest shithead that ever lived.  This poor little old man, living off a fixed income, had stopped what he was doing, ruined a car, given up his bed, and found me a job, and in return I had tried to sneak out without saying thank you or good-bye, not just changing horses midstream but dismounting completely and leaving the horse in the middle of the river, almost guaranteeing that I would drown if some other horse did not appear by magic to drag me to safety against my will.

When Doc’s desperate monologue finally wound down and he asked me if I would reconsider, I told him that I would never be a christian, that I would never agree with him that the United States of America was meant by god to be a white christian country, or that black people were a different species, or that half-breeds—such as Mexicans—were genetically inferior, or that women should stay home and keep their yaps shut, or that the Jews had connivingly usurped the white man’s calling as god’s chosen person.  I acknowledged the fact that his beliefs didn’t prevent him from doing business courteously with women, blacks, Jews and half-breeds whenever the need arose, and I acknowledged that my car would never make it to Eugene, Oregon without several times more than $60 worth of repairs along the way.  I called Copely Miles and apologized for being late to work, explaining that I had been having chest pains—which I had—and he confided that he didn’t see how I could stand living in Doc’s house with his ten tons of junk, and promised to help me find a better place to live.  Russ and Marvin cried, Doc put his pants on, and I went to work.

Copely Miles was a big loudmouthed Texan, of which there is no shortage anywhere in the world.  Although he was in his early 70s, nothing could slow him down, mellow him out, or clean up his language except 5:00 p.m., at which time he would transform magically into a charitable christian gentleman.  He owned a machine shop and manufacturing facility full of mostly outdated equipment and cynical employees who hoped for better days.  One of the younger ones, whose ambition was to be a police officer, kept trying to get me to stand up to Copely Miles, assuring me that he had won the boss’s respect by looking him in the eye and ordering him to treat him with respect, or else.  This approach has never worked for me; if you don’t feel it when you say it, the target bully merely comes back with “Or else what?”  The last two bullies I tried this strategy on felt obligated to ride me till I had to flee for safety or call the police.  Because of the pain in my chest and/or upper back, I did try to talk to Copely Miles about how I felt inside when he swore at me, and he responded that he was just swearing in general, not at me.  I knew that’s what he was going to say.

Since I had a sharp pain in my chest that went clear through to my back, or vice versa, making it impossible to tell whether it was really in my chest or really in my upper back, Miles told me to take time off work; I wasn’t really needed anyway, had no relevant skills, and had been hired as a favor to Doc.  Once I had finished the drill-press job I had been taught how to do, I had specialized in trying to keep the floor swept so the metal shavings wouldn’t pile up around the other employees’ feet.  I got the impression that my presence was resented by most of the employees, who were convinced that they were underpaid, and by the boss himself, who was convinced that he was going broke.  So why did he hire me?  Doc had some kind of hold on Copely Miles, because of the nutritional consulting work Doc had done for him when Miles’ wife and then his son had been dying of cancer.  His son had been exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam.

While the other employees sneeringly looked on, I took Copely Miles up on his offer to move into a little house on the property that was currently being used for storage.  He took me to a warehouse full of furniture that was run as a charity by some christian philanthropists he knew, where he got me a free bed, chair, and  water heater.  I was under strict orders to move nothing in the house, but it was impossible to clean up the rat shit and set up the bed and the bookshelf I’d made from some old pallets without moving things.  I spent the next week trying to get the house clean and installing the water heater.  I tried to go back to work, but Miles caught me and when I admitted that my chest still hurt, he said, Why do you do things that threaten your ability to put food on the table? and sent me back to my shack.  Meanwhile, I had developed an abscess on my neck that was so big it bounced up and down as I self-consciously walked through the machine shop with my broom.  Copely Miles sent me to his doctor.  He sent me to his masseuse.  Nothing helped the pain in my chest, so I stayed out of the machine shop while it was open, and sneaked in at night and on weekends to try and build air car parts on machines that I barely knew how to use.  I broke a blade on a big electric hack saw that I didn’t have permission to use.  Nobody said anything, but then I was staying away during working hours so they wouldn’t see me.  My life once again centered around avoiding dirty looks.

One Sunday afternoon while Doc was off at a weird science convention in Colorado, leaving Russ to watch over Marvin, Copely Miles drove up by surprise and caught me sneaking out of the machine shop with a steel plate I’d made for a test I wanted to do.  He got out of the car and informed me that I was to return to Doc’s house to help out with Marvin till Doc’s return, because Russ had just had a heart attack and was in intensive care at the hospital.  Then he asked me what the metal plate was that he saw me set under a bush when he drove up, and I told him I’d been trying to make air car parts when the shop was closed so I wouldn’t be in anybody’s way.  He informed me that his insurance didn’t cover unsupervised or off-hours use of the machine shop, and politely requested that if I wanted something made, I should ask first.  He told me what I had put him and his shop foreman through as a result of the broken hack saw blade.  Thus ended my self-education as a machinist.  I was overjoyed.  The pain in my chest disappeared as I drove back to Doc’s house.

As soon as Doc returned from the convention, I got a phone call from Copely Miles wanting to know why I had moved things around in the little house he was letting me pretend to call home, because someone had complained that they couldn’t find anything anymore since I’d moved into it.  I explained that since he’d given me a bed to put in the house, I had to move things to make room for the bed.  He explained that he didn’t happen to like me very much, had no use for me in his manufacturing facility, and why didn’t I jump in my car and get my pansy ass over there at my earliest convenience, and remove any trace of myself from his life.  When Doc and I went to the machine shop after hours to load up my stuff, I saw the bookshelf I’d made, where Miles or somebody had thrown it outside against a tractor, mangling it beyond usefulness.  I started kicking and stomping it, smashing it the rest of the way.  Doc begged me to stop, and collected the little pieces of wood.  He took them home and added them to his pile of worthless junk.  Taking his cue from Miles, Doc neglected to give up his bed for me this time around, and let me sleep in the big station wagon he had ruined hauling my stuff from Grass Valley.  That was a relief; it was the closest thing I’d had to privacy in months.

One night I was hanging around in the Lodi Public Library mentally flailing about in a quiet fit of desperation about how to come up with the money it would take to get my own place.  I came to the conclusion that it was hopeless, and was dejectedly headed for the door when I passed a shelf of college catalogs.  Say now, that’s a novel idea!  I could go to school and live off of financial aid.  I hunkered down and made the important phone calls, filled out the required forms, stood in the appropriate lines, and made the essential threats, and one sweet day around the first of February, 1990, I loaded up my stuff and moved into a room in a duplex in North Stockton which I’d rented from a bachelor carpenter.  But the months of waiting for my check to come in had entailed several strenuous battles.

I had been able to start school back in October, taking nine classes to get the twelve units I needed for the maximum possible financial aid grant.  I took typing, English 101, career classes, how to go to college classes, beginning word processing, overview of industrial careers, that sort of thing.  Most of it was a waste of time, an easy “A” but I dove into all of it with unpremeditated zeal because of what that financial aid check would do for me when it came.  One day I passed by the employment office that the California Employment Division ran out of the school’s career center, and I figured what the heck, I didn’t know if I was really going to ever get that financial aid check or not, and in the meantime I had been bumming food and gas money from Doc.  The angel from heaven who happened to be running the employment office sent me over to check out a job as a “mail handler,” whatever that was.  I didn’t want to go, because I was afraid, but I was in a Castanedian mode of challenging myself to go beyond my irrational fears, so I took the job.

One foggy morning just before Christmas I was sitting at a stop light in Lodi, ready to venture through the early morning fog to Stockton where my job and school were, when I heard a strange noise behind me.  That’s odd, I thought, there had been no other cars in sight.  I looked in my rear view mirror, and saw that the noise was caused by a Chinese doctor in a big SUV pulling a big boat.  Or I should say, the boat was pushing the SUV; it was obvious that the driver had not seen either my sky-blue Datsun or the red light because of the dense fog, and would not be able to stop in time.  I tried to run the light to get out of his way, but my engine—which barely ran anyway since the State of California had forced me to put all the original smog equipment back on it—hadn’t gotten warm yet, so it died at the light.  The SUV slammed into the back of my car and totaled it.  The Chinese doctor’s insurance company gave me $700 which I saved until February when I got my financial aid check; the two sums together got me a Toyota with 130,000 miles on it that lasted me eleven years, and got me into my new home in Stockton.

In the meantime, I spent the month of January driving one of Doc’s cars, the only one he didn’t need that sort of ran, to Stockton every morning.  Because the fuel gauge didn’t work and it puked raw gas out of the carburetor and the tailpipe, and because I never had any money for gas, Doc kept a full five-gallon gas can in the trunk of the big car; if anyone had slammed that car from the rear in the fog I would have died in a conflagration.  I had no cause to even think about buying gas anyway, since the $3.00 I usually had in my pocket was barely enough to buy the carrots, apples and avocados I had learned to subsist on.  Since the car barely ran before the engine warmed up, and didn’t have a defroster, and I didn’t want to get out of bed early enough to wake up all the neighbors trying to get it warmed up, the ten mile trip to Stockton was fraught with manual windshield wipings and engine dyings and waiting by the side of the road for the carburetor to de-flood, or for groggy drivers to run off the road in the worst fog known to science and smack me in the gas can, blowing us all to kingdom come.  I quit my 7:00 a.m. lap swimming class because of these frightening conditions as well as the lump of oatmeal in my stomach that made me want to puke after 2-1/2 laps across the pool.  My 70-year-old boss, Mr. Moredock, was disappointed that I had quit the class, because he liked to get up early and wished he had time to go swimming before work, but he liked to be to work by 7:00 a.m. so he could get his private cigar-smoking time in before the doors opened every morning at 8:30 sharp.

The Mail Place.  Believe it or not, I suckled the Mail Place tit for 6-1/2 years.  When I first walked in with the referral slip from the employment service wearing my best thrift store slacks and a belt substitute that had cost me my last dollar, Mr. Moredock thought I was the most insecure young man he had ever had the opportunity to sling over his shoulder and carry to safety.  He took me on as a project, boys and girls, let me assure you of that.  He was at the peak of his success as a human being.  He had quit his lifelong career as a department store manager because when the yuppies gained control of the upper management, everything changed and his job was no longer fun.  Every morning when he got to work there would be a list on his desk of problems to solve, so at the age of 62 he developed acne for the first time in his life.  When it got worse by the week, he listened to his body, quit the job he had kept for 30 years, and mortgaged his home to buy the Mail Place.  His first few months there were the scariest times he’d experienced since the race riots of the ‘60s, because the previous owner of the Mail Place had run it with a combination of indifference and incompetence that kept anyone from wanting to spend their money there.  But Mr. Moredock’s popularity as a pillar of the community and a cigar-chomping republican and a past president of his Kiwanis Club eventually established a solid customer base of doctors’ wives shipping expensive presents to their Ivy League offspring back East on every conceivable holiday including Halloween, and by 1989 he had half a handful of employees and the Mail Place was His Place.  So he took me on as a project.  He could afford to.  He wanted to.  He saved my life.

On that first fearsome day I slunk in and handed him a couple of reference letters, one from each of the dishwashing jobs I’d had in Portland.  The one from Ross the Assistant Manager of Newfart Place was a whole page long, and peppered with lies, the sort of things he would have liked to say about me if they were true, but went ahead and said about me anyway: “cheerful smile,” etc.  Mr. Moredock made me hang around the lobby while he flung the bull around with some of his customers, and by the time he finally read the letters and beckoned me over to the counter, I was so intimidated that all I could squeak out was, “Maybe you could give me a chance.”  Honest.  That’s really what I said.  Ross’s letter got me hired on the spot.  Mr. Moredock told me to report to work in one week.  I was so afraid he’d change his mind that I called him twice during that week to remind him that he had hired me and to assure him that I would really be there on the appointed day.

The first in a string of duplexes where I resided in North Stockton was a roommate situation offered me by an alcoholic carpenter who had given up hard drugs and drug dealing long enough to find a good job, rent some furniture, and beat his girlfriend to a pulp.  After our first few months of uncomfortably playing at being sort of friendly to each other, I was happy to learn that he was scheduled to move into the County Jail, leaving me to man the fort alone.  On the night before his departure I found a tiny roach in his ashtray, the nearly non-existent leftover remains of what had once been a marijuana cigarette, and because of the anti-marijuana programming I had undergone at my own unyielding hands and which I considered crucial to my survival as a species, I flipped out and wrote him a note explaining that I had found marijuana in the house and expected him to go find himself another place to live.  Then I barricaded myself in my room with a hunting knife and a phone, and waited for him to come home.

My heart started doing an adrenaline tap dance as soon as I heard the front door open, and before ten long seconds had passed my roommate was pounding on my bedroom door, demanding that I open up and tell him who the hell I thought I was.  I didn’t respond, so he offered to beat me into an unrecognizable state if only I would let him in to do it.  I failed to acknowledge his offer, so he proceeded to break the door down, and neglected to carry through on his threat only because he heard me calling 911.  Instead he shouted himself sober mocking me for the obvious pettiness of what I was doing to him, and just when he calmed down the police arrived.  They informed me that my roommate was the leaseholder on the duplex and was therefore not evictable by me, and furthermore, they were not interested in pursuing the matter of a trivial amount of marijuana, and turned around to leave, but I begged them to stay long enough to make an impression on my roommate that assaulting me on his way to jail for assault was not going to simplify his life, no matter how much I deserved to be thrashed within an inch of my life.  They placated me to the degree they felt forced to by the nature of their mission as police officers, and left us to apologize to each other for our respective stupidities.

My stay at this duplex was not altogether wasted in that I did take advantage of my potless condition to begin construction of a crankshaft substitute that I eventually came to call the torquerack, one of the potentially energy-saving devices that the development of modern engine technology had ignored in favor of expediency and convenience, despite its advantages, especially for use in air-powered motors.  Work on this project was interrupted by my need to find a new place to live when the landlord paid me a visit to inform me that my roommate had called him from jail to give him notice.

At work, things started out on the wrong foot right away when I failed to accept the unwritten law that Mr. Moredock’s name, as far as his employees were concerned, was not Tom, it was Mister Moredock.  Each day that I worked for him he grew more distant until finally he stopped responding entirely when I said “Tom.”  Finally I reached into my grab-bag of Castanedian and NLP tricks, deciding that my self-importance was getting in the way of having the kind of rapport I needed with my boss, and in a grand all-out effort I walked into the back where the boss was occupied at his desk with his back to me, and called out, “Mr. Moredock?”  He spun around in his chair, his face lit up, and he said, “Yes, Tiger, what can I do for you?”  I was relieved to find that this particular boss was, at least to some usable degree, a mentor rather than a grudge-holding egotist.  In fact he surprised me several times over the years by mentioning how repulsive he found other men’s stupid macho behavior.  I eventually came to realize that Mr. Moredock was not really a macho person, he was just a Scorpio.

After he had succeeded in breaking me of calling him by his first name, I noticed that there was still a coldness to the way Mr. Moredock spoke to me, and it got worse every day until finally he caught me in an error that was worth giving me a stern mini-lecture about, and was also usable as a springboard to the subject he had really been wanting to broach with me.  As the mini-lecture wound down, I was obviously not the only one who was wondering why the intensity behind it, so he went on: “And another thing . . . ”  It seemed that I had, over the years of near homelessness, developed an insensitivity to my own body odor, and with a shortness born of his embarrassed reluctance to have to be the one to break it to me, I was ordered to find a deodorant that worked or get lost.

Finally I was pissed.  He had gone too far.  When 5:00 came, I strode to my car vowing never to return to that miserable two-bit job.  But that night I had a little talk with myself.  I liked the job better than any job I had ever had, and couldn’t imagine finding a better one on the strength of dishwashing references punctuated with long periods of unemployment.  I consulted with my desire to be a disciplined warrior as a means of avoiding having to live in poverty the rest of my life, the victim of my own self-importance, and made the decision that since I wanted to keep the job very badly, for its own sake, I would refuse to let the know-it-all Scorpio who owned the place ruin things for me.  I cut my hair, and in the morning put on the best clothes I could find, and as soon as I got to work I ran into the bathroom and applied some anti-perspirant that had been conveniently placed on the shelf, since I had no money to buy any of my own.  From that day forward, I became the Teacher’s Pet, and I vowed to keep the job as long as possible, despite my Daddy’s stinging insistence that I do something of that nature.

My co-workers at the Mail Place included a high-strung high school nerd who worked for us a few hours after school, a soft-spoken young married woman from Chicago who was full-time and had been there for over a year, and a new hireling, a single mother with three children who attended a Pentecostal church and didn’t use deodorant.  Mr. Moredock confided in me that the young kid had to go, since he treated the customers as disposable cash-dispensing objects and tried to get them out the door as quickly as possible so he could go in the back and do his homework and his bookkeeping from his paper route.  I myself had pegged him as a thorn in Mr. Moredock’s side from the moment I first saw him, since I am very sensitive to a boss’s dirty looks and used the opportunity to glean hints as to what kind of things my new mentor did and did not approve of in his employees.  I was in this for the long haul, and fully intended to be as ruthlessly selfish as necessary to use the inadequacies of my co-workers as rungs in my ladder to the top of the totem pole where I belonged.  The little nerd-thing would confront the customers before the front door had swung shut behind them, not by helping them feel welcome to our little mail-handling facility, but by attempting to get them to reveal what they were doing there, then he would rush them through their transaction.  For all Mr. Moredock’s toughness, he hated to criticize his workers because he had been around long enough to know that if he treated us harshly, he would find himself working in a hostile environment that would rub off on his cherished customers.  He also explained that firing people was a no-no, because they might file for unemployment, and if they could convince the Unemployment Division that they had been unfairly treated, Mr. Moredock would end up having to replenish a fund that the State used to help pay unemployment claims.  I took the hint, happily accepted the role of trainer for the little cubling, and then took the initiative to ride him till he pooped in his own bed by throwing tantrums and finally quit.

The little Jesus freak with the three kids was kind of cute despite her bad complexion and her BO, but the fact remained that she was a Jesus freak, and although she made it quite clear that I was expected to ask her out by repeatedly informing me that she was an excellent cook, and when that didn’t work, by leaning on me with both her breasts smashed up against my arm for at least ten joyous seconds, I didn’t take the bait because I didn’t want to carry her crippled five-year-old son around in my arms, and certainly didn’t want to go to church with her.  As she saw my schedule increasing and hers decreasing, and found no one willing to explain to her why there was a can of anti-perspirant conveniently placed on the shelf in the bathroom, she soon found a man who wanted to eat her home cooking and dispersed peacefully.

The kind and soft-spoken young woman from Chicago wasn’t so easy to get rid of.  She was manager, she usually had a good attitude and seemed to like her job, but she was in an unhappy marriage and missed her home back East, and after a year-and-a-half at the Mail Place she started getting grouchy and skipping crucial steps, spending time writing letters to her friends instead of finding tasks to keep her busy.  I seized the opportunity to mention the increasing frequency of her errors to her, and when she and her children went on a vacation back home, Mr. Moredock confided that he thought it would be better for everyone concerned if she didn’t bother to come back, and miraculously, she didn’t.  That made me the full-time manager of the Mail Place, and my head swelled to previously unimagined proportions.

As a strategy designed to occupy my mind with the potentially educational aspects of spending money, replacing my usual routine of obsessively spending it to keep my mind busy, I kept track of every single penny I spent and categorized my expenditures for over a year.  By the time I was tired of doing this, I noticed that I would accumulate hundreds of dollars in my checking account without even trying; this is how I managed to move so frequently, occupying four separate duplexes in North Stockton in a few years.  After the drunk carpenter closed down shop from his jail cell, I rented a duplex of my own and advertised for a roommate, taking the first applicant that came along.  His single mother, a bartender in a small town nearby, had named him Pacific, and had raised him to believe that he was beyond reproach.  He felt free to dominate his environment with his outgoingly sociable personality, and he drove me crazy by being on the phone during most of his waking hours, thumbing his nose at my resulting hostility.

One weekend I drove down to my rose quartz mine, and came home a day earlier than I’d anticipated due to restlessness and a lack of good fortune at the mine.  I got to Stockton around midnight and got stuck in the procession of Saturday night cruisers on Pacific Avenue.  Stockton is the only place I’ve ever lived where white people are often in the minority, so I politely stayed in line and drove the entire length of Pacific Avenue at 5 m.p.h. along with the cruising teenagers of all ethnic backgrounds.  When I reached the stop light at the Mail Place, I got into the left turn lane so I could go check my Saturday mail.  While the light was red, a man got out of a big windowless van two lanes to my right, and ran over to the gas station that was across the street from the Mail Place.  He ran back, got back in the van, and a procession of identically dressed young black kids jumped out of the van and ran in single file to the gas station.  While I waited for the left turn signal to turn green, I heard some sounds like firecrackers, and then I noticed that the light was green and the car in front of me was not going.  I looked over to the gas station and saw a bunch of teenagers running around outside the gas station shooting guns at each other and crawling around in the parking lot on their bellies, and smoke was coming out of a broken window of the gas station.  I got out of there and went home without stopping to check my mail, determined to never leave my house again after 10 p.m. until such time as I could find good cause to get out of Stockton.

When I arrived home, my roommate was out, and I was in the kitchen putting my camping food away when I heard the front door open.  I looked, and there was a hand—much whiter than Pacific’s hand—holding a big knife, inching into the house through the partially open door.  I walked up to the door, and when the white boy attached to the hand got inside, I ordered him to hand me the knife, which he did.  He explained that he was Pacific’s friend, and that Pacific would be here soon.  I informed him that he was lucky I hadn’t taken the knife away and used it on him, and told him to wait outside.  When Pacific got there, I verbally reamed him for underage drinking and for giving his key to someone I didn’t know, and then for allowing that person to carry a weapon into my house.  After that I kept on him for everything he did that I didn’t like, including turning my house into a full-time phone booth, and in no time at all, his Mama came and loaded up his stuff and they drove off with their noses in the air.

While I looked around for a new roommate, I got my air-powered torquerack engine ready for its first test.  It sort of worked, and made an awful loud banging noise as the piston flew back and forth.  In less than a minute, my garage was full of neighboring backyard mechanics—which in Kansas we used to call motorheads—all wanting to congratulate me on my great imagination, telling me I must be some sort of genius.  My neighbor across the street invited me to come over anytime I wanted, since he supplemented his income as a welfare father by working on engines, mostly taking them apart for scrap metal which he sold, and he had some gears he wanted to give me.

Not in a hurry to make friends, I ignored all my new acquaintances till one night when I was working in my garage the motorhead across the street came over with a handful of old gears and enticed me over to his garage to get the rest.  His big garage was full of engines and parts, and on a chair sat a bong and some marijuana seeds and stems.  I took advantage of this opportunity to announce that it had been an awfully long time since I’d smoked any pot, and thus ended my days of tee-totaling self-righteous splendor.  I started buying pot from my new friend, and once again had someone to talk air cars with.  Sometimes all the neighborhood motorheads got together over at Art’s duplex to listen to Art, a one-legged white-haired man who was on the verge of losing his health, talk about his seedy past while we smoked pot and pretended to play cards.

Needless to say, my concentration on building practical test models became obscured by the marijuana smoke and the torquerack engine sat unfinished.  In the meantime, the Beast and Louie Kogg had come to Stockton to see me a few times, and together Louie and I conducted another unsuccessful Magic Valve test using an air engine built by a local inventor.  The Beast was once again more than hinting that she had me in mind as her next potential roommate at the Kogg’s cottage in Grass Valley, since the Kogg family had all gone to hide from the Federal Government at their secret ranch somewhere in California, and Louie was thinking of joining them so he could sacrifice the Grass Valley property in an unwinnable test case over whether or not he was really required by the Constitution to pay taxes.  The Beast had been enticing me off-and-on for some time, despite her wrinkles, with long-winded complaints about Louie’s inadequacies as a boyfriend, which naturally stimulated my competitive nature and made me think from time-to-time that I was falling in love with her.

A tall, skinny, chinless, pock-marked Jewish guy named Rosenthrall came over to look at the room, and informed me that he owned his own duplex down the street, and that as soon as he finished evicting his tenants, he would like me to move in there with him and be his roommate.  He moved in with me temporarily while waiting for his evictees to clear out.  He was a business student who worked summer jobs as a parking valet in Reno, and cared about nothing in the whole world except his tight budget and resulting frugal lifestyle, his good credit, his class work, and playing basketball on Thursday nights.  He sat in his room and quietly did his homework, and I thought I must be the luckiest boy in the world to have such a boring roommate.  By now my pot connection had been forced to move to the ghettos of South Stockton and I had been driving to Grass Valley twice a month to score.  I kept my habit secret from Rosenthrall, and was happy that at least I’d learned to simplify my life as a neurotically ambivalent pothead by keeping my own stash so I didn’t have to whine for handouts, thus avoiding the trap of enslaving myself to the close companionship of other potheads.

When we moved into Rosenthrall’s duplex, it was a kick in my big fat swollen head.  Now Rosenthrall and his sleeping bag and alarm clock occupied the master bedroom while I had to keep all my stuff in my little room.  The kicker was that he had failed to mention until I started moving in that he expected to keep both of his piece-of-shit cars in his double garage, and my air car shop work could somehow be conducted in the margins of the garage as long as I didn’t scratch his piece-of-shit cars.  I hated his rotten guts and explained to him that he had apparently mistaken my recent spurt of non-activity in the workshop as some sort of way things normally could be expected to be, and then proceeded to hide in my room for the two or three months that I managed to stay there.  Rosenthrall felt bad and said I could put my crystal collection on the bare shelves in his bare living room, but I ignored the offer to attempt the mixing of oil and water.  The big duplex therefore contained little more than a card table in the living room where Rosenthrall did his homework; my first coffee maker which I abused by making coffee four times as strong as it should have been, thus giving myself a chronic case of the bloody runs; and little old me sitting in my room blowing marijuana smoke into a balloon so Rosenthrall wouldn’t smell it.

Meanwhile, things were going downhill at work.  Mr. Moredock refused to advertise for employees, since he felt he owed it to his upper crust customer base to keep the “blacks and browns” on the side of the counter where they couldn’t hurt his image, so we managed alone for months, working at a manic pace that I kind of enjoyed, especially since my so-called home was only good for smoking myself to sleep in.  But being the only one at work for the boss to converse with made my stomach and shoulders tight, since I was not about to open up to him any more than I had to, fearing that he would cue me to fail if I taught him to see me as a loser by describing my past to him.  Castaneda taught that one’s personal history is one of his worst enemies.  Finally Mr. Moredock put up a Help Wanted notice in the Laundromat of the apartment complex near his house, and before long we had a new assistant.  Mr. Moredock fell in love with Cherokee on first sighting, as did several of his steadier-than-ever customers, not to mention a large proportion of the City of Stockton’s male citizens who she would taunt from her red convertible sports car with her winning ways and charming personality.

My jealousy was unrequited.  It became obvious that Mr. Moredock regretted having made me full-time manager of his shipping and mailing facility, and considered Cherokee a happier, friendlier, more verbally competent specimen than he could ever force me to be.  I had ignored his offer to train me as a notary public and thereby earn myself the only substantial raise I was ever likely to get from him.  I had carried on a war of egos with a golden boy UPS driver who was merely over-enthusiastic about his own wonderfulness, which should have been no threat to me, mired as I was in humility.  Although I had once come to work each Monday morning with a new goal for the advancement of my abilities as a Mail Place clerk, somewhere along the line I had lost the spark, no doubt because I was itching to go home and smoke pot.  I had taken Castaneda’s advice by pretending not to notice Mr. Moredock’s tactful attempts to get me to talk about my past, until he finally gave up.  I had prompted a big performance out in front of the store that was put on by one of our new steady customers when I refused to cash a check for him because Cherokee had been whispering to me that the man was a junkie.  I still couldn’t quite get the knack for “letting it run off you like water off a duck’s back,” allowing pissy but harmless customers to ruin my day.  I had to be forced to speak my mind when something was bothering me.  I boilingly resented being left out of the picture when Cherokee repeatedly needed time off and nobody wanted to tell me why she could regularly leave us in the lurch without any loss of status.  Mr. Moredock defended his right to treat different people differently, and advised me to stop comparing myself with others.

So when I was visiting the Beast and Louie in Grass Valley one wintry weekend and they informed me that Louie had finally made the decision to move to his family’s secret ranch somewhere in California, I announced my readiness to move into the cottage and help the Beast pay her rent, and the Beast said, “Give notice at your job and apartment,” so I rallied my courage and did just that.  Mr. Moredock pretended to be sad, and maybe he was to a point.  Rosenthrall was crushed, and sputteringly claimed that his only recourse would be to move out himself and put the duplex up for sale.  I failed to give a shit, so he made up a lame excuse to steal part of my deposit.  “It’s standard,” he said, and put his nose in the air.  I called him a chickenshit mother-fucker behind his back—a term I had learned from Brazabell the Miner—and let it go, having learned from Mr. Moredock that pursuing petty offenders would only serve to put me in a vile frame of mind and keep me there.  I said good-bye to my mentor and committed two of his best pieces of advice to memory: “You’re not here to educate your customers, you’re here to make friends and make money,” and “You don’t nit-pick your good people.”

The Beast had made a point of privately announcing to me that she was now a single woman, so when Louie finally got everything out of the house that he intended to keep and promoted himself to absentee landlordship, I pumped up the volume on my love machine.  I had waited quietly for this for a long time, having only forced one kiss on her in the years that she had been torturing me to come after her.  The time was now.  But she was still not responding.  Something was wrong.  I kept up the pressure and kept waiting.

As I previously mentioned, the Beast was afraid to drive a car, so she rode her little motorcycle everywhere, and I had been forced many times during my sometimes carless past to ride behind her on her scooter with my hands on her body so I wouldn’t fall off.  When it came time for Louie Kogg to lose his court battle with the IRS, the property was absconded by the Feds so it could be given away at auction, and the Beast and I had to vacate without notice.  The day we got moved into our new place, I was elated because I figured that, with Louie completely out of the picture, maybe she would finally be ready to fall into my skinny little arms.  I had just unloaded the last of her stuff into the new house—for, as you might guess, a little motorcycle is no good for moving furniture—and we had picked up a little firewood to warm up our cottage with, and were headed for home.  She stretched hard to find something to criticize about the way I was driving.  I said something passively apologetic and mooshy, hoping she would be impressed with how conciliatory I could be, and put my hand on her knee.  “Don’t touch my body!” she snapped.  My hot soul parts instantly froze to the inside of my empty shell.  She might as well have added, “You grimy little creep!”

The acute disappointment and anger I felt at realizing that I was not next in line to be the Beast’s boyfriend anymore—now that my participation had solved the housing crisis she had been anticipating over the past few years of leading me on—was followed quickly by a sigh of relief as the sexual tension that only I had been tortured by suddenly dissipated into the puff of smoke she had apparently been blowing up my ass.  We lived together only a few months, as I came to the realization—and not for the first time—that the Beast was basically dishonest in her cloying demonstrativeness, annoyingly egocentric in her unending prattle, and brazenly selfish in her seemingly compulsive gift-giving, that is, saving herself a trip to the dump for each of the friends she owned.  Underneath it all, she was really just a Capricorn perfectionist with a learning disability which had made her dependent on men since her early days as what she humbly termed “a gorgeous go-go dancer in LA.”  One time she woke me up at 6:00 in the morning to inform me that in my attempt to wash the dishes the night before, I had failed miserably to remove all traces of peanut butter from a knife.  She learned from my response to never again wake me up in the morning unless the house should happen to be on fire.

In the meantime, I had been unemployed a total of 1-1/2 days.  My first trip to the Employment Division in Grass Valley had yielded me a “temporary” dishwashing job at the Crabapple Breakfast and Lunch Club, which quickly turned “permanent” when the owner of the Crabapple witnessed the relish with which I took to my tasks.  The Crabapple was an upscale breakfast-oriented joint where the lunch menu comprised a variety of glorified grilled cheese and avocado sandwiches, because of the high proportion of vegetarians in the area.  The owner, a clone of my Grandma Wrathburn whose name was Joy Joyburn, considered her homemade pies and elaborate fresh fruit garnishes the real reason her restaurant was so popular, and she was always there as head chef to ensure that a piece of bruised or overripe or under-ripe fruit never made it onto a plate.  She cursed the day she had built a menu around avocados.  She hated her job as much as she loved it.  She was getting tired, and it was always someone’s fault.  But for now, I had appeared to save the day by taking her away from the dishwashing station, where I found her working, nearly in tears, when I first reported in with the referral slip from the Employment Division in my hot little hand.  As the weeks slipped by, her apparent adulation of my work kept me happy enough most of the time, but I couldn’t help but notice that one person at the restaurant always got to play the role of scapegoat.

When I was promoted to prep cook just before the tourist season started—which meant that it was now my responsibility to get all those perfect nuggets of fruit ready for those perfect plates—a new dishwasher was hired who happened to be on the volunteer fire department.  Since the Crabapple was only two doors down from the fire station, every time someone in the Grass Valley area had a heart attack or caught their handlebar mustache on fire, the dishwasher disappeared out the back door like a bat out of hell.  Joy Joyburn, for all her liberal politics and her popularity as a singing and drama coach in the community, could not tolerate the frequent disappearances of her dishwasher and would throw temper tantrums every time she saw him scream past the restaurant in the fire engine, as if putting out a car fire could possibly take precedence over getting her perfect plates clean in a timely manner.  When he returned, which he always did as promptly as if the Crabapple itself were on fire, she would snub him and shun him till he was ready to wring her stubby little neck.  Before long her scapegoat headed for greener pastures, and I wondered: Who’s next?

Who else but yours truly.  Rather than ask me to remove or trim my beard, she ordered her son the waiter to remove his, and intimidated her longtime cook, Mikey the Mute, into trimming his beard substantially, apparently hoping that I was susceptible to “getting the message,” which I was not.  So as official new scapegoat, I was getting dirty looks from not only Joy Joyburn herself, but from the waiter and cook as well.  Lectures—complete with minutes-long explanations of reasons—on issues that could have been settled with a simple request, dared me to respond defensively, which made the next lecture more intense, and round and round it went, till I was getting the automatic cold shoulder all the time whether I had screwed up or not.  To top it off, that pain in my upper back and/or chest that only bothered me when I was doing manual labor had become so excruciating that I complained about it just enough to prompt her to complain back to me about her own aches and pains, in a tone of voice that made it sound like my fault.  By the first of July, with the tourist season threatening to make mincemeat of Joy Joyburn’s ability to choose objectively between driving me away or staying out of my way, I realized she wasn’t capable of the latter and waited for her next insult.

It came during the hairiest of all lunch rushes when I happened to venture into the kitchen in the course of carrying out my duty as stockboy, and as her way of showing appreciation, Joy Joyburn scowled mightily and threw a too-soft strawberry across the room in my general direction.  As we all know, a perfectly ripe strawberry can go from ready to raunchy in less than two minutes in a hot kitchen in July, but I was happy to see the strawberry fly, because it meant that so could I.  My preparations had already been made: I had already placed my personal items next to the back door and I had already written down the anticipated timing of the inevitable final insult on my timecard, so that all I had to do to make good my escape was to wait till everybody was out of the room where I worked, and presto, chango, no prep cook!  I saw one of my fellow workers some time later, and we had a good laugh about the fit that Joy Joyburn threw when she discovered that I had been gone for two hours before anyone had gathered the courage to report me missing.

With no more than $50 to my name, I loaded up my car the very next day and headed for the Second Wind rose quartz mine to celebrate my freedom with a serious attempt to make mining a paying proposition.  I already knew that my transmission was going out, but it turned out that a more immediate problem was brewing under the hood.  After driving all but 30 of the 400 miles to the mine, something went Ker-thunk! and my car’s temperature gauge hit the ceiling before I could slam on the brakes.  I pulled over to the side of the road and the engine turned itself off for me.  I couldn’t help but suspect that whatever had happened, it had happened at this particular moment—3:00 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon in 105º heat—because I had the unmitigated gall to tempt Fate by quitting my job to go play miner with less than $50 in my pocket.  I got out of the car and had no problem determining that my water pump was no longer a water pump.  Having no time to consider the options, I cursed my impractical idiocy and bad timing, and started walking to the next town as fast as I could, knowing that even if a parts store was open, the part might cost too much.  Reaching a gas station, I called the parts store and determined that I had 45 minutes to get there and would have maybe enough money left over to buy gas for the return trip to Grass Valley.  The worst part was that I would have to forgo the traditional pizza on the way home.  Having decided all this, I stepped out of the phone booth, and there sat a little brown man in a big brown car, staring at me with big brown eyes.

Having no other recourse than to hitchhike to town, I asked him for a ride to the parts store, and he had apparently had something like that in mind himself, for he spent the ten minutes I was in his car trying to talk me into letting him play with my pee-pee.  Normally I would have jumped out of the car immediately, but in my desperation to get my automobile fixed before vandals could fix it for me, and to get to the top of the mountain and out of the heat before beddy-bye time, I asked him if he wouldn’t mind just taking me to the parts store and forgetting about any kind of compensation whatsoever.  He shrugged and complied.  May he go to fag heaven when he dies.

I called the emergency road service I had started subscribing to when I was an upscale Mail Place worker, and begged them to send a tow truck to meet me at the parts store so they could haul me back to my car.  Once there, I grabbed my toolbox and replaced the water pump lickety-split while the tow truck driver was kind enough to hang around, since he had no other calls.  The job was done quickly and everything was in order, so I spent my last dime on gasoline and headed up the mountain, determined to make this ordeal worth the trouble.

The next day was wasted in the same crazed frustration that had plagued all of my days as a digger of rose quartz: I could find nothing but tailings, with an occasional hint of pink but nothing you would call a vein of virgin, previously unexcavated ore that might lead in a logical way to more of the same.  That night I lay in the back of my car mulling over what I could be doing wrong.  For two years now, every time I dug down through the tailings, after a few feet I would reach plain dirt containing no quartz whatsoever.  How could this be?  The quartz had to come from down below, it didn’t just fall out of the sky.

Then I remembered.  The very first time that Melvyn Skidrogue and I had returned to the mine for a bona-fide digging trip, I had dug into a bank of the steep hill and pulled good color out of a real vein.  But I had been so stoned and inexperienced that it never occurred to me to go back to the same spot and dig there again.  And then I realized my real mistake: I had assumed, on every one of the digging trips I’d made in two years, that the molten quartz had originally come straight up out of the ground.  I mentally pictured the steep hill where the mine was located, and could see clearly that the earlier lead had come out of the side of the hill, not by digging straight down.  It finally became obvious to my teeny-tiny little mind that this pipe of molten rose quartz had flowed out of the side of the hill, where I had found it before, and that is where I would find it again.  I was almost too excited to sleep, and hiked to the mine early the next morning where I moved a foot of dirt and found a large mass of pigmented quartz, a chunk over a hundred pounds, two feet tall.  The top was a pale gray, darkening into a pale pink, then hot pink, then magenta, then dusty rose, then dark purple and finally purple-black at the bottom of the mass.  I felt vindicated for quitting my job when I did, and spent the next two days not digging but carrying load after load of various colors of excellent star rose quartz up through Raging Bull Meadow to my car.

I arrived home with a car full of the first good rose quartz I had ever found in any quantity, and an empty wallet, and no job.  And a ruined transmission.

I was so embarrassed to be penniless and jobless and carless and living in a remodeled miner’s shack with the Beast four miles from town that I called my sister Mo and as I was about to start telling her my problems, I started crying and had to hang up because I couldn’t talk.  She bailed me out by loaning me the money for a new transmission and paying my way to the second biennial all-sibling reunion that my Mama was putting on at Mo’s house in Albuquerque.

When I returned from the reunion and the Beast returned from the vacation that she had simultaneously taken, we looked at each other and almost at the same time each announced that we didn’t have the money for the rent.  I called Dab Mostly over to look at the rocks I had found at what was technically “our” mine, though he had never been there, and he said I was getting better stuff than before, but not the kind of load that was going to pay the rent, and he advised me to keep the stone for future reference.  There was only one thing left to do.  I wrote a casual letter to Mr. Moredock in Stockton, conspicuously not failing to mention that all was not well with my new career in the restaurant world, and telling him about my exciting mining adventures, which by the way were apparently not going to be paying my bills anytime soon.  He called me and asked me what I was doing for a living.  I sheepishly admitted that I’d blown off my job at the restaurant.  He asked me if I wanted to house-sit for him while he went on vacation for two weeks, and work at the Mail Place while I was in town.  I couldn’t have been more ecstatic to accept the offer.