CHAPTER FORTY

In which I attempt to raise myself from the dead

 

In the light of my recent frightening bout with joblessness, I tore into my role as temporary manager of the Mail Place with renewed mania, such enthusiasm no doubt reinforced by Mr. Moredock’s willingness to trust me in his absence with nary a phone call to worry me that I might be considered even slightly inadequate to the assignment.  Cherokee and our other hard-working assistant Lisa, a high-spirited redhead with a warm yet appealingly cynical sense of humor that complimented her ultra-reliability and worldly intelligence, seemed happy enough to have me back, and when Cherokee instructed me on the casualness of her approach to running things whenever she got the chance, I bit my tongue and knew without sharing my knowledge why Mr. Moredock had wanted me to come back.  I worked under the hopeful assumption that if the boss were to return to a reasonably tight ship full of happy sailors, an invitation to re-evaluate my decision to quit my job might be forthcoming, and as a matter of fact, when he did return, he offered me my job back within minutes.  I made arrangements to stay with Doc temporarily till I could get my own place, and was supposed to come back to the Mail Place the following day for one more shift before going to Grass Valley to get my stuff.

That night as I lay on Doc’s broken-down old couch sweating and swearing, I fell victim to my most dreaded enemy, the inability to sleep.  Looking forward to living with that feisty old flibbertigibbet again was like a condemned sinner laying on his deathbed waiting to breath his last, with nothing ahead but an eternity in the Hotel of Unholy Heat.  As I am wont to do in the evil clutches of sleeplessness, I completely lost my mind and snuck out the door about 3:00 a.m. and drove to Grass Valley, sobbing uncontrollably at the ruined job opportunity and the hurtful feelings I was undoubtedly causing others who were only trying to help me.  But as soon as I got a little sleep, I woke in a slightly more practical frame of mind, and called Mr. Moredock to explain exactly why I had failed to show up to work, and was relieved beyond belief when he poo-pooed the seriousness of my crime, then talked me into calling Doc to clean things up with him too.  I called Doc and blamed my disappearance on an inability to sleep because of my excitement at getting my job back, failing to mention that living with him was not my idea of a happy stroll through Pleasure Island, but he read my mind anyway and promised to make room for my sleeping quarters in one of the old trailers he had recently parked in his backyard.

Back at the converted miner’s shack that the Beast and I had called home for a few months, things were a little strained between us since she no longer would admit that she had been as unable to pay her rent as I—although we had somehow been able to give the landlord 30-day notice and thus expected our deposit to be returned—so it was now I who had supposedly broken her home and forced her to move by being the first to speak when we had originally announced, nearly simultaneously, our lack of interest in doing what it would take to continue living together.  I excused her selective memory as a combination of her learning disability and a personality defect, and proceeded to clean my room and pack my things.  She had already finished with her moving tasks, and said good-bye to the house for the last time.  After I returned from several trips to Stockton to dump my possessions in Doc’s back yard, I noticed that she had still not done anything with several boxes containing years’ worth of accumulated paperwork piled near the outdoor woodstove where it had been my duty as a member of the household to burn our household trash.  In my exhausted state, I could see no reason why I should consider her suddenly unwanted collection of personal papers to be anything resembling household trash, and thumbed my nose at it as I drove away with my last load of stuff.  I hoped that the landlords would return my half of the deposit anyway, since her name was on those piles of papers and not mine.

When a check arrived from the Beast in the amount of $19 instead of the $250 I had expected for the refund of my half of the deposit, I was outraged beyond words.  A haughty note accompanied the check, explaining that the landlords had forced her to return to the house to dispose of the piles of papers I had refused to burn, and she had kept most of my deposit to punish me for my slothfulness.  Apart from the fact that we had mistakenly assumed that our use of propane at the house would go unnoticed by landlords who had made us sign a 50-page rental agreement, the $19 was still an insult which I intended to haul her into court for, especially after I called the landlords to ask them why they had issued the whole refund to her instead of sending me my half.  I learned that in my lovesick stupor I had casually allowed them to write the deposit receipt in her name alone when we paid it, and she had conveniently not gone out of her way to remind me of this critical fact after we stopped getting along.  The worst insult was not that she had taken my money, but that she had taken it without negotiating for it.  Mr. Moredock talked me out of a court battle, based on his philosophy that to focus on avenging the evil that people do us is more detrimental to our happiness than any eventual returns can justify, but I still wrote her a four-word response to her letter: YOUR KARMA IS COMING.  Over the next year I gradually mailed back to her every article of clothing and other garage sale crappy gift she had given me in the years she had pretended to be my friend, keeping only the guitar she had given me, and let me be the first to notify you, my doldrum darlings, that I will never again under any circumstances voice any judgment to anyone about the badness of their coming karma, because of the way she eventually got even with me for not letting her forget her stupid greed.

In my hurry to get out of Doc’s house, and under the mistaken notion that I would rather live in the country and commute to work than to subject myself to the possibility of witnessing gang battles on casual drives through the so-called safe part of town, I rented a room in an isolated duplex out in the middle of a vineyard 25 minutes from my job.  Although the Little Voice of Wisdom shouted at me that I was giving my money to yet another macho alcoholic criminal, once I appeared in his living room with my cash I was embarrassed to admit that I didn’t want to live with him, and on the strength of that and nothing more sensible than that, I not only gave him the rent money, but in a highly successful attempt to insult my own intelligence I asked him if he wanted a deposit too.  That gave him a good idea: why not charge me a deposit?  I handed him more money, which I never saw again, since I didn’t want to call him a snake by asking for a receipt when I gave him the money.  This roommate turned out to be a member of a whole family of alcoholic cockroaches who liked to come over regularly and compete with each other for the Loudest Drunken Asshole in the World Award.  If not for my marijuana stash, which I was at that time consuming as conservatively as possible, I wouldn’t have had the patience to stay as long as I did—maybe two months—but when I found out that my gun-toting roommate had lied to me about the so-called promotion that had suddenly found him sleeping late into the morning and then going to town in a suit and tie—actually he had been fired for stealing money at work and was dressing up to look for a new job—I immediately rented my own duplex in North Stockton and vowed to live there alone forever.

I contacted Shade Further’s Mama in Hazing, Kansas to get my old buddy’s phone number, since my Mama had mentioned that she was now living in the San Francisco Bay area.  I used Shade’s house—a succession of them, really—as a pit stop on many research trips to the libraries in the area, and watched her go from the meek and beaten-down girlfriend of a sociopathic Aries drug fiend with an extremely flaky span of attention, to a first-time bachelorette homebuyer, to a determined-to-grow-up euthenizer of multiple pet cats, to yuppified office worker studying calculus so she could get a better job as an actuary, to a 12-step addict who gave up a lifetime of chain-smoking to instantly gain fifty pounds, who was so sure of her near perfection that she only asked me questions about myself to assure herself that I was beneath her dignity, then wouldn’t let me answer the question, but would answer it for me her way.

Shade Further came to see me a couple times in Stockton with the intention of fixing me up with a Stocktonian girlfriend of hers who was lonely.  They sat and talked about architecture and home decorating till I wanted to scream, and when we returned from a boring booth-infested 4th of July waterfront nothing—the best Stockton had to offer—her friend let us into her apartment building and as she held the door open for us to go in, she gave me this great big meaningful wink.  After waiting another eternity for the yuppie cuisine thing to happen, which took two hours to prepare and ten minutes to wolf down, I just wanted to go home and smoke pot.  As I said good-bye, Shade’s friend ran in her room and slammed the door, and Shade let me know by the tone of her good-bye and her unwillingness to look me in the eye that I would never see her again.

Typical meddlesome self-righteous 12-stepping yuppie.  I hope she is the happiest and highest paid actuary on Market Street.

To complement my abilities as an air car advocate, I took a class in Pneumatics and Hydraulics at the local community college, and although I was scholastically at the extreme head of the class, the other students were so much more comfortable in the lab, which was really a social club for real men—most of whom had already worked with hydraulics in the field—that I managed to avoid getting my hands dirty and therefore learned next to nothing.  The fact that the instructor never got around to the Pneumatics part of Pneumatics and Hydraulics—because he wasted too much class time bragging about his exploits in his sports car and how much coffee he had to drink because of how little sleep he got because of how much he had to work to make as much money as he needed in order to entertain the vast network of girlfriends that he had to somehow keep from meeting each other—prompted me to boycott the final exam.  He gave me an “A” in the class anyway, not to mention the guilty looks he had given me throughout the course, since he knew I was the only one in the class who was interested in compressed air.

I was still driving to Grass Valley twice a month to buy marijuana, and naturally my interest in smoking it as little as possible had dwindled to the point that my time at home was spent lost in reeferous clouds of depressed boredom and loneliness, until I found myself sleeping twelve hours a day and working up to my next attempt at giving up pot.  This downhill slide bottomed out when I got so sick that I didn’t even want to smoke, and shortly after I got better and wanted to smoke again, against the better judgment of the little voice calling from deep within my empty shell that told me I really didn’t want to smoke at all, I called my dealer in Grass Valley and was informed by his girlfriend that he was in jail for growing pot in his backyard.  I meekly admitted that things were going to have to change, and doubled up on my tobacco consumption because I hadn’t prepared myself for the loss of my only pot connection, and then I got sick again.  Although Mr. Moredock had never seen me smoke a cigarette, he again told me the well-worn story of how he had quit smoking Marlboros cold turkey many years ago, and sent me home with orders to stay away for at least a week, so I stopped at the bookstore on my way to my deathbed and purchased a book that had been calling to me, entitled Soul Retrieval by Sandra Ingermann.

I lay in bed crying and reading the book, and when I finished it I read it again so I could cry some more.  Something about smoking vast quantities of marijuana—probably the fact that it stifles the normal emotion-processing function of normal nightly dreams—causes things to build up in me to the point that I always experience an uncontrollable flash flood of feeling when I stop smoking it.  Fortunately, this time I knew better than to use self-righteousness as a motivator in my quest for permanent abstinence, so the feelings weren’t all masked as murderous rage the way they had been last time I quit.  However, I did know that unless I found something to focus my life on, marijuana would undoubtedly weasel its way back into the vacant throne at the center of my empty shell, so I settled on soul retrieval—which is sort of the primal therapy of the ancients—as my new goal, and on the Ingermann book as my new bible.  The gist of soul retrieval is that a shaman goes into an altered state of consciousness to the beat of a drum or an appropriate drumming tape, enters the spirit world and tracks down missing soul parts who deserted the subject at some point, usually in childhood due to some form of intense trauma that the soul part could not tolerate.  This whole scenario obviously applied to me, since I resonated so strongly with the case histories recounted in the book that I was reduced to a quivering mass of self-pity when I tried to read them.

I contacted an organization that trains people in shamanic healing and got the names of some of their graduates who lived near me.  But it was not enough to attend a soul retrieval session; Ingermann stressed throughout her book that in order for lost soul parts to be willing to stick it out once they had been forced back into my empty shell, it would be 100% necessary for me to establish a functioning support network for myself and my new soul parts full of recovered energy and inner resources.  Therefore I started hanging out at a hip coffeehouse in Mid-Stockton where the older neighborhoods had some class and the houses didn’t all look the same, in order to re-kindle my interest in the human race.  I joined an organic food-buying club, which forced me to socialize with other oddballs who might be expected to partially understand me.  I started taking Aikido lessons, which I’d been wanting to do for years, for the exercise, human contact, and to increase my self-confidence next time someone threatened to kill me.  I went to drumming circles where I made a fool of myself by jumping up and down like the maniacally serious apprentice witch-doctor I considered myself to be, while everybody else stood in one place beating their drums, putting about as much energy into playing Indian as they could have done by staying home to watch Tonto on TV.  I went to biofeedback, hypnosis, and massage sessions.  In short, by the time I got the soul retrieval sessions done, the boredom and loneliness—which were the only real problems I had at the time, once I ran out of pot—disappeared because of my new support network and I might as well have skipped the soul retrieval sessions.  But the shamanism provided a focus for my obsessive nature, so I discovered who my power animal was and built an altar to Tiger out of knickknacks I collected from thrift shops and fabric stores that depicted the tiger in some way.  During this period, I collected missing soul parts like I had collected air car inventors before and have since.  One of my returnees was a wooden boy made real by a blue fairy.  Another was an infant abandoned on an ant hill.  A youth living at the bottom of the ocean in one of those old-fashioned iron diving suits.  A baby flying around in outer space.  In a soul retrieval session I conducted on myself, I found a soul part named Limberluck, a happy-go-lucky wandering street philosopher who I sometimes personify in dreams, whose job it was to coordinate the others and integrate them into my new life.  All the soul parts had names, stories of why they had deserted me, and abilities that I had lost upon their departure, which I was supposed to get back if I could get them to stay.

So I became a shamanism junkie in the illusion that I would become the happiest boy in the world if only I could succeed in providing a good home for the returnees in my empty shell.  I went on shamanic journeys, like the ones that others had done for me in pursuit of my missing soul parts.  The purpose of the journeys was to gain access to the knowledge and energy and repressed memories held by the returnees, since they had been off lolly-gagging so long that they weren’t entirely convinced that the darkness inside my empty shell was the best environment for them.  I would put on my Tiger T-shirt and orange-and-black striped hat, and walk with one-pointed emptiness of mind for at least half a mile, then dance wildly in my living room to some kind of witch-doctor music, then retire to my bedroom where my Tiger altar, complete with burning cedar leaves, became the center of all kinds of mental focusing tricks, also known as rituals, until I felt capable of taming my mind long enough to go on a purposeful journey.  Then I would lay down on my back with a drumming tape on and visualize myself going underground through a little cave entrance where Tiger would meet me and guide me into a vast world where anything might happen. 

Although it was not as vivid or independently real as a dream or out-of-body experience, the shamanic journeys enabled me to have crucial meetings with people like my Daddy, Grandma Wrathburn, and Rose Stranghardt, to whom I had messages to deliver.  I met up with the boy who had told the truth to the Emperor of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and he informed me that I was in the silly habit of trying to purchase friendship.  I battled my fears like Yoda had made Luke Skywalker do.  In the end, I actually had a transcendent vision—not spontaneously guided imagery like the other journeys, but a true dissociated hypnagogic dream, with my conscious mind only along to take notes.  I was walking through a stone city of ruins, and turned down a narrow alleyway between two buildings, only big enough to fit my body through, when a glittering light appeared at the far end of the alleyway where it let out.  I stopped and focused on the image.  In quick succession, the light turned into a glowing image of the Buddha, then Lao Tzu, then Jesus, and other spiritual icons that I didn’t recognize or can’t remember.  The vision ended.  I went outside and smoked some sacred tobacco.  That was my last shamanic journey.  I was getting good at this stuff, but it still wasn’t making me the happiest boy in the world.

Something was bothering me about all this: the longer I obsessed on shamanism, the more it reminded me of all the other panaceas I had once over-optimistically relied on with all my heart and soul, from primal therapy to Pentecostalism, complete with the obligatory “Thank you Great Spirit,” and “Thank you Tiger,” that were threatening to make a beer-o-holic out of me to stave off the compulsive guilt-tripping so I could try to have some fun.  For months, the only reminder I had left of my shamanism days was an altar made of tigers and a guilty conscious for quitting before having achieved mastery.  A famous writer and Aikido teacher named George Leonard had written a book called Mastery that had pegged me as a dabbler.  So be it then; life goes on.  From then on I used my experience in shamanism mainly to start conversations with potential female admirers and left it at that.

Meanwhile, on my very first outing into the community in search of that all-important support network, I had ventured into the aforementioned coffeehouse to check out the vibe.  This was harder than it might seem, in light of the total isolation that marked my previously monastic lifestyle in Lodi and Stockton.  Mr. Moredock had almost turned me into a republican, for christ sake, and an anti-social conservative is the very definition of loneliness.  There was only one other customer there that afternoon, an old burned-out street cowboy named Berkeley Bob, but while I sat there sipping my coffee and scarfing cheesecake, in walked an exotically freckled, red-haired young lady with whom I instantly fell deeply in love.  She looked at me, smiled, and went over and sat with Berkeley Bob.  I fantasized going over to sit with them, but failed to get up the nerve.  Eventually I left, depressed and far lonelier than I would have been if she had not smiled at me.

Then, wonder of wonders, on my first meeting with my new food-buying club, there she was again.  If I thought I was in love before, this was by far the more real thing.  Once again I left dejected and defected, ready to slay the part of me that couldn’t start a conversation with a gorgeous girl.  This time she had smiled at me twice.  And to top it off, she had some sort of English accent.  I fantasized that she might be Welsh, Irish or Scottish, just to make myself more miserable.

In my utter loneliness I decided to look for a roommate, promising myself to search far and wide for a compatible person, if there even were such a thing.  The first and only call I made was to a phone number on a notice someone had left on the bulletin board at the coffeehouse.  Lo and behold, the person looking for a room was none other than the awesomely speckled red-haired girl with the British accent.  She turned out to be a New Zealander, and in spite of my worst fears, she didn’t reject the idea of moving in with a man.  She came right over and I immediately told her what an interesting person I was, in case this was my last chance, so she could change her mind now if she was going to be scared away.  She only seemed a little scared, so we made a date for lunch the very next day.

Ann M showed up less than a half hour late to meet me at the Mail Place the next day.  Her dotted white cheeks were flushed hot pink, and you could hear a postage stamp drop as Mr. Moredock, Cherokee, and Lisa gawked wordlessly.  Maxwell has a date with a girl!  I could hear them all thinking.  Ann M had brought a lunch menu with her from a Chinese restaurant she liked, and we stared at it together for a few minutes, then took off for our little date.  Mr. Moredock told me to take my time.  I could hear him winking at the girls behind my back as we left.  I could hear Cherokee take her first breath in minutes.  I could hear Lisa fanning her face with her hand.  If not for the courage of my fearless crew, this minnow would have been lost.

My eccentric and obsessive interests were the chief topic of conversation.  I was not only determined to scare her away immediately if that was what was going to happen anyway; she actually seemed interested and kept asking questions about me, and tried to steer the conversation away from herself.  We agreed to meet at the coffeehouse later that night, at which point Ann M informed me that she wanted to live with me, but not in a soulless duplex in North Stockton.  I wasted no time indicating that she could choose any poison and I would happily swallow it for her.  Later I made the stupid mistake of calling her last landlord, who happened to be the owner of the coffeehouse, and so far so good, but then I asked him how old she was.

Twenty!  Just my luck to fall in love with someone 16 years younger than myself.  My hopes began to fade, my previously unbridled lust partially clouded by the fear that I would be scorned as a child molester.  If only the coffeehouse owner had told me that they had been lovers, and that her reason for moving to this country to begin with had been to live with an American doctor she’d met in New Zealand.  If only someone had told me that she liked older men, I would have known what to do.  But nobody—starting with my Daddy—has ever bothered to coach me on the secret availability of women, so with a few exceptions, I’ve always assumed the worst and come off as apologetically unmanlike.

The next afternoon Ann M called me at work to say that she wasn’t feeling too well and it was noisy where she was staying, and she wanted to know if she could go over to my house to try and get some sleep.  Awesome.  She came over and got my key, acting shy or tense for some reason.  At least I could help this young traveler in her time of need.  What a nice guy I am.  After work I raced home to make sure she hadn’t slipped into a coma.  She was wrapped up in my sleeping bag, asleep on the floor.  I went in the other room and made a little noise so she would wake up and get dressed.  The sight of her bra strap poking out past the edge of my sleeping bag absolutely rended me.

Then she appeared in my kitchen, three feet away and facing me soberly with a come-get-me-now-or-forever-keep-your-pants-on look in her eyes.  I moved toward her an eighth of an inch and stopped.  I turned away and said something stupid and casual.  I cursed the day I was born.

We moved into a nice old two-bedroom house on Rose Street in Mid-Stockton that she picked out.  It was more expensive than I considered appropriate, but I wasn’t going to argue.  I needed this person in my life, and was willing to make sacrifices.  By now I had explained to her that because of the difference in our ages, and because of my passive personality and inexperience with women, if by chance she happened to be attracted to me, she would have to make the first move in order for me to feel that I had permission.  She explained, as she had to re-explain several times over the next year that we lived together as non-lovers, that I had blown my opportunity to aggressively sweep her off her feet while she was still impressed with me.  As she got to know me better, she became one of the best friends a person like me could hope for, and had the distinctly un-American ability to really listen when I needed a friend.  But the few times that I thought I was making inroads to some kind of sexual sharing event, she got grossed out by my squeamishness and backed out before the first kiss.

We spent a lot of time together, not enough to satisfy me, but more than enough to frustrate me and keep me from ever overcoming my hopeless infatuation.  She was a compulsive people meeter, and introduced me to dozens of people who were all so much younger than I that I ended up not keeping any for friends.  Finally, Ann M—who I had been so adventurous as to nickname Sparky—decided her adventure in the United States of America was over, and I took her to the train station.  I hugged her and told her she was a great friend.  I broke up into a million pieces, turned away and threw my hood over my face and staggered to my car, leaving her with a female friend to wait for her ride out of my life.