CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

In which I face fear by inhabiting emptiness

 

In the process of becoming overly infatuated with the psychobabbloid confusion I was calling shamanic soul retrieval, I had fallen into my usual trap of evangelizing, forcing my pill down someone else’s throat because I was having a hard time swallowing it myself, and in response to my desperate need to share my over-involvement with the topic, my co-worker Cherokee—who I’m convinced was a distant relative of the Beast—engaged her beguiling ways to try and outdo herself as my best friend and confidante.  She even tried to help me get control of my infatuation with Ann M by explaining that Ann’s fresh youthful vigor—in other words, her age—was undoubtedly a large part of why it was so hard for me to let go of the feeling that I was losing something irreplaceable by missing out on her romantic ministrations.  Soon I was telling Cherokee everything: my oh-so-interesting past, who my secret power animal was, what kind of success I imagined I was having in my shamanic journeys, etc.  I couldn’t wait for opportunities to be alone with her at work so I could spill more beans and try to talk her into getting involved herself with the soul retrieval support group I fancied myself starting.  Pretty soon she came up with her own power animal, which she claimed to be seeing in visions and dreams, and her own missing memories from childhood which I assured her that soul retrieval would help her recover, but when it came time for the first meeting of our two-person support group, she stood me up in favor of the barbecue with her large family that she had scheduled for the same time.  I had dropped by her house a few times at her insistence, even brought Ann M out to the lake with me once to meet Cherokee and her family, but it was a lost cause and I knew it.  My small town goody-two-shoes middle-class background and her recklessly dynamic working-class family scene caused us to miss each other by miles.  I had to admit that either Cherokee pitied me and was trying to befriend me by establishing more rapport with me than was fitting, or she was cagily setting me up for an embarrassing revelation of my real interests to Mr. Moredock so she would have a better chance at getting my job, or both.

The upshot of my regrettable inability to enforce compatibility was that I became more resentful and distrustful of her than ever.  The lapses in her ability to make it to work were increasing to the point that even Mr. Moredock was getting a bad attitude toward her, but since he still worshipped the ground that she bounced on, he couldn’t confront her, so he did what many people have done to me over the years, which is to mistake me for a good listener, and dumped all his frustrations about Cherokee’s drawbacks as an employee in my direction, while frequently taking an unexplained harsh tone with her that caused her to come to me for sympathy whenever we were alone together.  Caught between my admiration for the two of them, and their mutually uncommunicated hostilities toward each other, and no doubt exacerbated by her extreme attractiveness as a female, I was being pulled apart emotionally.

By now I had traded in shamanism for Aikido.  Although I was taking Aikido classes nearly every day of the week, the dojo I attended, which was owned by a proponent of prosperity consciousness, had neglected to teach me the proper way to do a forward roll without hurting myself, since I had not yet signed up for the special rolling class that cost extra.  On top of the emotional and physical stress I was being subjected to daily, my main activity at home was to wedge my aching butt into my extremely uncomfortable couch and read books on Aikido for hours on end, hoping to achieve mastery more quickly by never thinking about anything else, till it was easier to stay seated and read another chapter than it would have been to try and stand up.  Eventually I could not bend over, sit down, stand up, attend Aikido classes, walk up or down stairs, or get in or out of my car without extremely painful spasms in my lower back.

At some point the pain ceased to be fun, so I attended a free demonstration of some sort of New Age chiropractism that Dr. Spendwell, a friend of my Aikido teacher, was foisting on the local self-improvement market, with an emphasis on Aikido students who had neglected to take the rolling class.  Although I was not impressed with the demonstration, since nothing happened, I accepted the promise of results over an extended period of time because of the standard hype that the treatments would release repressed traumas and their attendant missing memories, which I was still convinced must be lurking somewhere in the furthest reaches of my empty shell.  I pumped $62.50 a week into daily treatments from Dr. Spendwell, who treated a whole roomful of similarly gullible subjects at once by soft touches rather than the usual wrenching and joint popping that one would expect from a member of his profession.  Mr. Moredock grudgingly allowed me to take time off work for the treatments, partly because he himself had developed a stiff neck during the same trying period of time and had been going to a chiropractor himself, Dr. Napoleon.  And he could not deny that the pain and numbness that had started in my lower back and was spreading to my thighs was making it nearly impossible for me to function like a 37-year-old mail handler and notary public should be able to do.

After enriching Dr. Spendwell with over $1000 of my hard-earned pay while my back pain continued to get worse, and then giving a couple hundred more to Dr. Napoleon—who I accidentally smacked in the balls with my fist one time when he wrenched too hard and hurt me—I finally complained that I was not getting better.  When Dr. Napoleon sternly informed me that he was not through with me yet and was not going to let me quit making appointments, I got pissed and went to the bookstore, where I spent $3.95 on a book called Mind Over Back Pain, with the determination to never set foot in a chiropractor’s office again.  In the four hours it took to read the book, the pain in my back disappeared completely for the first time in months.  It was back the next day, but gradually disappeared while I practiced the techniques the book recommended, all of which were the opposite of the information I had read in brochures at Dr. Spendwell’s office the first day I was there, while waiting for my first treatment.

Here is the gist of what saved me from putting Drs. Spendwell and Napoleon’s kids through Harvard: Don’t avoid the spasm; doing so would cause the back to arch more and more, making the spasm worse.  Rather, strip the fear of pain away from the actual pain itself by moving into the spasm, breathing and relaxing.  This dissolves the spasm.  The spasm is caused by lack of oxygen to muscle tissues, which is benign and usually stress-related.  Remember that the human back has evolved through some intelligent process, for millions of years; being too careful, such as only lifting, sitting, lying and moving in “safe” ways, makes the spasm worse by reducing mobility, freezing the back into a place where the tissues can’t breathe.  Don’t choke off the circulation to your muscles by wearing those stupid-ass back braces.  I learned to arch my back backward, into the spasm, at the first sign of pain, with a big giant FUCK YOU to the chiropractic brochure I had read that advised the exact opposite.  During the recovery process which began the moment I set my mind on never giving my money to another chiropractor, a friend told me about the time he had been working in a chiropractor’s home while the chiropractor sat in a big soft chair listening to a tape over headphones.  When the chiropractor left for work, my friend picked up the cassette player to see what he’d been listening to. The tape was called How to Get Your Chiropractic Patient to Come Back Three Times More Often.  Around the same time, Mr. Moredock became irate when Dr. Napoleon’s secretary accidentally sent the bill to him instead of to his insurance company, and he found out that his insurance company was being billed substantially more than the cash price he had been quoted.  That’s all I have to say about chiropractors.

Mr. Moredock took another of his two-week fishing trips to Alaska, and while he was gone I failed miserably to be in a good mood, because I was so stressed-out about his continual harping on Cherokee behind her back while never criticizing her openly.  I considered it my duty to make an impression on her while he was gone, and to write her up if possible so that if she got mad and quit, which I hoped she would, Mr. Moredock would have documentation to show the Unemployment Investigators if she tried to file a claim against him.  Cherokee had obviously convinced Lisa that I had a personality problem, because the two of them were conspiring to ignore my attempts to pull rank on them, letting me handle rushes alone while they huddled together in the back and giggled about how seriously I was taking myself.  When Cherokee tried to get me to skip some petty step that I considered important, I barked at her to stop giving me orders and pissed her off, as well as the UPS driver whose time she was trying to save.  In retaliation, she took the liberty the next day of waiting till the last minute to announce that she was not going to be able to work her full shift, so after a grueling afternoon of doing the work of two people, I took the liberty of writing her up for leaving me in the lurch without notice.  When I showed her the paper and asked her to sign it to acknowledge that she had read it, she put her nose in the air and walked out.  She went home and called Mr. Moredock’s loudmouth man-hating battle-ax daughter, who knew as much about running the Mail Place as she knew about the dark side of Neptune, but nevertheless she took time off from her important job to rush over and read me the Riot Act in front of my customers, informing me that if I had a problem with Cherokee, I should hold my breath and whine to my boss about it when he came back from his fishing trip.  I told her I was in charge and she could think anything she liked, but I was the one who worked at the Mail Place every day watching her Daddy’s unspoken tension toward Cherokee tear the whole place apart, and I invited her to keep her irrelevant opinion to herself.

As soon as Mr. Moredock returned and saw what I had done, I became Public Enemy Number One and Cherokee was rehired instantly.  I was ordered to keep my opinions to myself and my personal agenda at home.  Thus began several months of hell that made the previous several months of hell look like a game of tiddly-winks.  My favorite job, stuffing the mailboxes in the morning, was taken away from me without any explanation.  Mr. Moredock only spoke to me when he had to.  Even Lisa, who had tried to help me by forcing me to come over to her house for lessons on her computer, told me that what I had done was weird.  After an uptight eternity of silence, Mr. Moredock blew up and accused me of keeping too much of my notary pay and ordered me to put it in the cash register, and I told him if it was his money then he could damn well ring it up himself.  He took me in the back and started hollering and waving his arms in the air, ignoring customers who waited in the lobby.  I hollered back that I had done nothing wrong but to take what was supposed to be mine, and told him I would not consent to being his scapegoat.  I reminded him that business had leveled off drastically starting three years earlier, and he was spending too much money on wages, which was not my fault.

Meanwhile, Cherokee’s husband had run off to Montana with her obese sister, and Cherokee was obviously smoking pot on her way to work with her new boyfriend.  I felt that it would be incredibly wise of me to not mention this to anyone.  While Mr. Moredock and I worked together in a spirit of compromise after our big shouting match, he had secretly discovered a problem with the cash count in the safe—which we left open during the day—that he had been tracking for some time without mentioning it to anyone.  It seems that the bundles of five dollar bills were growing thinner by the day.  Normally a bundle of fives was counted as a hundred dollars, but he had resorted to counting the individual bills and discovered that a five dollar bill was going home with somebody every day.  After watching me and watching Cherokee, he told me about the problem and said he’d determined that I was not the culprit.  He outlined a plan to catch the thief, and I agreed to help him pull it off.

Mr. Moredock and I counted the fives together and agreed that they were all there.  As soon as Cherokee got to work, he made a point of making sure everybody knew he was going home for lunch and wouldn’t be back for at least an hour or two.  When Cherokee went across the parking lot to get a cup of coffee, I counted the fives again, and they were still there.  As soon as she got back, I told her I was going out back to the alley to smoke a cigarette, or maybe two.  On her next alley break, I counted the fives, and one was gone.  When Mr. Moredock returned, I told him what had happened.  He took Cherokee in the back and sorrowfully informed her that since business was on the decline, he could not afford to keep her on the schedule.  He gave her two weeks’ severance pay and she said good-bye.  He finally admitted to me that he should have avoided the mistake of falling in love with an employee.

I still miss her.  I wish I had been a better friend.  I hope she is happier without me than I am without her.

The previous Autumn, before Ann M had gone home to New Zealand, I had noticed that one of the women in my organic food buying club was going out of her way to smile at me and engage me in conversation.  Libby seemed nice enough so I urged her to drop in and see me at work next time she was in the neighborhood, and she surprised me by doing so.  She was still smiling and seemed nervous enough to perhaps have something on her mind, so I suggested we attend an Indian pow-wow together that night so I could tell her what an interesting person I was.  That night we discovered that we were nearly astrological twins, both being Aries and born only five days apart.  I warned her that I was not the easiest person in the world to get along with, and illustrated my warning with specific examples, most notably the “Rick and Victoria Incident” at Campbell Hot Springs.

Back in the Spring, after wasting away all winter waiting for the snow to melt in the mountains, I had called the ranger station down south where my rose quartz mine was, and they told me the gates were going to open late that year because of late snowfall.  So I’d made plans to go rockhounding at several of my favorite locations in Northern California where the snow had already melted.  My first stop would be Campbell Hot Springs.  On the Friday afternoon that signaled the beginning of Memorial Day weekend, I got off work and threw some stuff in my car and headed for the mountains.  Spring was my time of the year, and I was excited and ready to cast off the winter gloom and have some fun.

I got to Campbells around midnight and hiked with gusto up the dark forest path to the baths after putting my registration check in the little box by the lodge.  In my day, we used to have a little trailer and campfire at the foot of the trail that led to the tubs, and you gave your $2 to the gatekeeper for unlimited 24-hour soaking privileges.  Hanging out around the fire with the gatekeeper was often the best part of going to the tubs, especially if the gatekeeper was named Jackie or Julie or Alice.  Now that Leonard Orr had sold Campbells to a rich yuppie New Ager from the coast, you had to buy a membership every year for $10 and then pay $6 every time you showed up, for two lousy hours in the tubs.  The warm-blooded gatekeeper had been replaced with a metal box on a pole.  But as a successful employed person I was happy enough to pay the $16, even though it would probably be my only trip there in the year-long duration of the irrelevant and superfluous membership.

When I got to the tubs, I ripped my clothes off and had one foot in the water when a woman in one of the tubs spoke to me through the darkness: “Did you pay?”

The woman, whose name turned out to be Victoria, had said the wrong thing to the wrong person on the wrong night.  Before I got the chance to say, “HUH?!” my whole past at Campbells as dishwasher, ditch-digger, tub-scrubber, entertainer, and unpaid lover of this land flashed through my seized-up mind, as well as everything that Mr. Moredock had put me through in order to turn me into the sort of customer service person who enjoyed making the customer feel welcome, or as Mr. Moredock used to put it, “People often thank me for taking their money.”

Victoria repeated, “I said, did you pay?”

I shook my head in condescending disbelief and got in the water.  Victoria went on to explain that my name was John, and I was drunk, and would I please turn around, get out of the water, put my clothes back on, and leave, and never come back!

I started breathing deeply in an attempt to stay calm.  All I could think of to say was, You’re crazy!

She expressed disbelief that I had spoken to her in such an insolent fashion, and said, Then if you aren’t John—who was asked to leave earlier today by my husband—well then, who are you?

I thought for a moment and replied, Not that it’s any of your business, but my name is Marvin.

I figured I might as well have a little fun with her.  She obviously needed to have her burdensome sense of duty as hot tub attendant lightened somewhat.  So I added, And I don’t have to pay, because I have lived here and worked here and I can come here any time I want, and these springs were here before your great-great-grandfather met your great-great-grandmother, so get out of my face and leave me alone, you ill-conceived New Age afterthought!

Victoria shot out of the water like a bottle rocket and announced that she would return shortly with her husband, Rick, and she hoped for my sake that I was gone before she got back.  The other paying customers gawked silently, and I wished her well, and expressed my heartfelt desire that her husband was less of a rude incompetent asshole than she was.

I went back to my breathing, with the intention of getting some good out of my time in the tubs in spite of the new regime.  In a few minutes Rick and Victoria came huffing and puffing up the path, and Rick ordered me to get out of the tub and leave the property.  I told him to give me one good reason, or eat shit and die.  He said he wanted me to leave because I had told his wife she was crazy.  I said, Well she is, isn’t she?  She thinks my name is John!

No, Rick said, Your name isn’t John, and it also isn’t Marvin, your name is Maxwell Zdaemon, and that is what I will tell the sheriff if you don’t leave right now.

How do you know my name?

It’s right there on your check.

Oh, then I did pay, didn’t I, Victoria?!

She started to sass me, so I got out of the water, buck naked as I was, and stood a foot away from her, and showed her how loud and long I could scream, and how many obscene insults I could get into one sentence, and I informed the pair of cringing misfits that I was hereby placing a curse on their rotten, misbegotten souls and told them they would both be working at McDonalds before long if they didn’t learn how to treat their customers with respect.

Please sir, Rick began exasperatedly.

I got right in his face, dripping water on his clothes.  Dooo yoooou MEDITATE??  I asked.  Ooooh, you must be spiritual!  Can I touch you?

Rick offered me my money back if I would leave right now.  I turned and walked back toward the tubs, and he ran past me and held his arm out to block my way.  I kept going, and shouted DON’T TOUCH ME! with maximum decibel thrust, because if he did touch my naked defenseless body, I fully intended to beat him to death and shove him down his wife’s throat.

By now I must have made an impression on them.  Victoria had apparently decided to keep her big yap shut, and Rick retreated to her side as I got back in the tub.  The other customers, who at first had tried to stick it out had disappeared by now, so I started my breathing again and got back in the water.  Rick informed me that they were leaving now, and he would call the sheriff if I didn’t leave too.

“See you at McDonalds, Burgerboy.”

I kept up the fast, deep breathing for another quarter of an hour, but couldn’t calm down, so I figured I might as well leave before the sheriff got there.  But it was too late.  As I started down the path, the sheriff was already pulling up to the lodge in his sheriff car.  From my vantage point up on the hill in the darkness, I could see him and he couldn’t see me.  I left the trail, thinking I’d sleep there if I had to, and let him try and find me in the dark.  He sat in his car with engine running and headlights on, waiting for me to come down, then eventually drove toward the wide path to the tubs.  I thought better of hiding from him, and hurried back down to the path so it wouldn’t look like I was trying to avoid him.  My heart was speed-rapping and the adrenaline made my cells sizzle.  I realized that I had only one chance of not being arrested, and that was to Get Real Calm Real Fast.  I mentally reviewed an NLP book I had started to read one time called Emotional Hostage, which broke different emotions up into their components to show how, by making the effort to change only one component of an emotion, you could transform the emotion into an entirely different, or at least less intense emotion.  So I started walking down the trail as slowly as humanly possible, I mean barely moving, dragging each motion out as much as I could without losing my balance, and breathing as deeply and slowly as possible.  By the time the sheriff car reached me I was only halfway down the trail, and I stifled a yawn as he drove up.

The sheriff stopped his car and rolled down his window.  I walked up to him and made sure I breathed in his face first thing, so he would know I hadn’t been drinking or smoking pot.  Too bad about the halitosis.  I explained to him that I had gotten a little upset when Victoria told me I was a drunk troublemaker named John; perhaps I had gotten a little too upset, but only because this was the first day of my vacation and I had purposely come to Campbell Hot Springs, one of my most favorite places in the whole world, to kick off my first vacation in many months, and had been shocked when my status as a paying customer, as well as a former resident and caretaker of the property, had been insulted by Rick and Victoria’s false accusations, but I was sorry I had yelled at them and as he could see, I was leaving as they had asked me to, so what the heck, all’s well that ends well.

The sheriff agreed to not arrest me if I could show him my driver’s license to prove I wasn’t some sort of wanted criminal, so we got that out of the way, and I got in my car and drove away with him following me for about 15 miles till he gave up and left me alone.  That was the end of that, except that once he was off my tail it took about a week to stop screaming at the Rick and Victoria in my mind.

Libby informed me that my story didn’t scare her a bit.  She told me some stories of her own, and it was decided.  We were gonna give the other folks at our organic food buying club something to talk about.

Libby’s twelve-year-old daughter Toni lived with her, and spent most of her time in her room with the door shut watching TV.  The two of them lived in a one bedroom cottage, with Libby sleeping on the futon in the living room, and they could barely stand the sight of each other, so I suggested they move in with me, since at that time Ann M was packing up to move back to New Zealand.  I immediately lost the popularity contest with Toni by vetoing the TV in the bedroom bit, but she forgot about the loss by spending more time with her friends and school activities.  She never did get used to the concept of a step-father expecting her to mow the lawn, especially when I always did the job over again after making her do it twice.  The way it worked out was that Libby and Toni’s sibling rivalry disappeared completely once they discovered what a good scapegoat I made, and from then on the two of them were the best of friends.

One day I returned home from work and went to the refrigerator to cut open a honeydew melon I had bought.  It wasn’t there.  I asked Toni and Libby if they had seen it anywhere, and Toni said she had eaten it.

The whole thing?

Yeah.

You didn’t think about maybe saving a little bit of it for somebody else?

Toni shrugged and stared at the TV.

I looked at Libby and the look she gave me said, Don’t look at me, it’s not my problem.

My insides flashed into a firestorm, not because the honeydew was gone, not because Toni had eaten the whole thing, not because Toni didn’t think it was a big deal, but because the two of them were obviously ganging up on me, when it was I who had saved them from ripping each other’s throats out by letting them move into my big house.  I started pacing through the house with steam pouring out my ears.  This was just like when I was growing up and my Mama and my sisters would all gang up on me whenever I tried to assert my opinion about something.  This was like the Beast—

—I saw my guitar, shut in its case, leaning up against the wall gathering dust.  I never played that thing, because every time I touched it I got reminded of the Beast, who had pulled it off a truck bound for the county dump, and given it to me so she could then extort favors from me.  It was the last thing left.  I had mailed dozens of her gifts back to her, one by one.  I picked up the guitar and smashed it against the floor, again and again, while Toni ran into her room to cry.  I went in my room and ripped down my Tiger altar, which had made me feel guilty every time I passed it in the year that I hadn’t used it.  I didn’t feel better, except that the Beast was finally out of my life entirely.  In fact I felt worse.  Libby scolded me.  I went in and apologized to Toni for scaring her, and admitted that the honeydew wasn’t that big of a deal.  I went outside and smoked several cigarettes, wondering what was wrong with me.  At least the Beast was out of my life.

Or so I thought.

I had gone to great and tortuous lengths to establish credit, and I finally had a little VISA card with a $500 limit.  I never used it, but intended to save it for my new air car project, which was to build a Tesla turbine, a revolutionary type of air engine invented by the same disgruntled ex-employee of Thomas Edison who had invented the AC electrical circuit, the radio, and many other things.  My correspondent in Canada, who has written me dozens of letters over the years, encouraging my research, sharing his ideas with me, and even donating $1000 for one of my unsuccessful tests on the Magic Valve, had located a set of plans for the turbine, which could run on compressed air or steam, and I got all excited and spent six months designing a fairly large and grandiose working model.  I took the plans to my machinist, Ivan, who was interested because Tesla had immigrated from Yugoslavia like himself, and he helped me out by critiquing the plans, redoing the parts I had tried to make myself, and charging less than he normally did.  When the turbine was done, the bill was only $3000.  I maxed out the credit card as a down payment and pumped all my spare change into Ivan for months till he was paid off.  When I tested the turbine, it turned on its shaft, but so lamely that I could stop it by grabbing the shaft with my bare hand.  I have some ideas for improving it, but meanwhile it’s just another 83 pounds of experience for me to haul around with me.

Libby had taken to spending most of her time in bed, depressed.  Sometimes it was my fault, sometimes she was sure she had a mold infestation called “candida.”  I hated to see her wasting her life in bed, and every so often I would try to force the issue of her going to get tested to see if she really had the illness.  Every time this happened, she miraculously stopped having the symptoms just before she was ready to get the test.  She developed the habit early on in the relationship of hating my guts for two weeks, then apologizing and being real nice for three days, then hating me for two weeks, and on and on.  She was one of those people who had a beautiful smile that would disappear as she walked through the front door into her own home.  Nice at work, mean at home.  I can’t blame her for it.  It’s not her fault she’s an Aries.

I had gotten in the habit of drinking a beer or two in the evening, and since I wasn’t a drinker, and also since I had a somewhat unpleasant relationship in my face, this amount of beer got me pretty high, even slightly obnoxious at times.  Once when I was trying to lounge around with Libby in bed I got a little carried away scolding her for the indulgence of being depressed all the time, and she started hitting me with her bony little fists.  I ordered her to take all her things out of my bedroom, and she set up a bed in my office.  She and Toni moved in and out of my house a couple times over the course of the year or so that we tried to be a family.

When the Tesla turbine failed to make my life complete, I started going to Grass Valley to buy pot from Sunny’s new boyfriend, Mistlefoot.  At first Libby liked the way pot mellowed me out, but before long it was just one more thing that made me inaccessible to her.  I tried using mass quantities of coffee to make me a more enthusiastic and energetic person, but after a few weeks of mania I had to cut back because it made my gut behave so extremely horribly.  We used to look up from our dinner plates and agree that we felt worse after we ate than before we ate.  I said the wrong thing one time and she pushed the dinner table at me.  I picked it up and smashed it against the floor.  I got an inch away from her face and screamed at her for using violence to express her frustrations, and she moved out.  She was back in a few weeks.

One time when we were getting along pretty well we all three piled into my car and drove the 300 miles to my rose quartz mine.  On the second day we went to a different rose quartz mine several miles away that someone else had a claim on, and I announced that we would hike from there to try and find a third rose quartz mine that was in the area, which I had never been able to find, although I’d looked for it four separate times.  I told Toni I’d give her $5 if she could find it before me.  She said, Follow me, and we did.  Along the way Libby decided to take a nap under a tree, and Toni and I kept going.  Toni walked straight to the mine, as if she had a map and compass in her head.  When Libby caught up with us, she was pissed at me for not wanting to sit around watching her sleep.

We got to camp too late that night for Libby’s tastes, because she had to cook in the dark.  She said something I didn’t like and I sulked the rest of the night, even though she made me the best hamburger I had ever tasted.  I couldn’t understand why my love of digging up rocks and going on long hikes to look for new spots to dig was such a bother to her.  I couldn’t understand why I had to sulk and ruin everything for everybody.  I tried to mellow out, embarrassed for having acted like a baby.  The next night as we were driving home I woke up in the passenger seat, and Libby was driving 90 miles an hour, having a genuine tizzy fit, but wouldn’t tell me why.  I told her to pull over and let me drive.

That’s how things went in that relationship.  I would come home with my fingers crossed, hoping that Libby would be in a fairly decent mood.  She usually wasn’t, and every two weeks she would admit it wasn’t my fault; she was just “confused.”  She could be the sweetest person in the world; when she liked me, her Aries intensity was as appealing as the other side of the coin was unappealing.  I considered it my duty to honor my commitment to her by putting up with her defects the best I could, and couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t take a similar approach towards me.

It was November of 1993 when Libby announced that she was moving into my air car office for the last time, and she told me I had to move my office stuff into what was now my bedroom.  She promised that she would not change her mind again.  With all my stuff in the room, I had no room to walk, so I bought a bunch of lumber and built a big king-sized bed with legs six feet tall so I could store stuff under it.  I put a little refrigerator under the bed, got a key for my bedroom door and isolated myself from two of the three women in Stockton who hated my guts: the ones who lived with me.

As a mail handler I hated christmas and still do, so I poured myself into Thanksgiving by adopting it as my favorite holiday except Halloween, (which I celebrate as the anniversary of the air car project, not to mention the birthday of my correspondent in Canada, which makes him a Scorpio, by the way.)  With Thanksgiving on the way and my house full of surly unsmiling faces, I decided, what the heck, why should I drive all the way to Grass Valley to try and uproot Mistlefoot from whatever tree he might be sleeping under, just so I can get him to find me some pot to buy, when he obviously needs a place to spend the winter and I have plenty of room under my bed?  So in the interest of getting some friendly faces into the house to dilute the hostility, I imported Sunny and Mistlefoot from Grass Valley to spend Thanksgiving with me, knowing they would hesitate to go home until invited to.  By the time I was able to talk Sunny into talking Mistlefoot into laundering his clothes and taking a shower so Libby and Toni wouldn’t make faces every time he walked by, Libby and Toni were packed and gone for the last and final time.

As a former-submarine-technician-turned-hippie, the dreadlocked Mistlefoot made the most perfect air car shop assistant I could have hoped for.  Not only did he know things I didn’t know about mechanics, but he also provided all the marijuana I could buy and was grateful to be out of his tent and into a real house.  Now that Libby was gone, my new housemates even got their own bedroom, and for that matter, so did I.  Not that we didn’t have any friction; Sunny and Mistlefoot were both Aries, for christ sake.  But between you and me, it was Sunny that kept Mistlefoot and I from each others’ throats by providing comic relief, although she alone thought her behavior was funny.  Her Daddy was in the process of leaving this Earth, and her response was to go in and out of her manic episodes all the time.  The normally apologetic worm actually smacked me with her fist once, hard enough to hurt me, when I tried to deny her conviction that her father was a spy.  Mistlefoot and I were trying to get a project done—a design I’d come up with to convert an old two-stage compressor into a two-stage air engine, which Mistlefoot was helping me build—and Sunny was too much of a distraction, so I sent her back to Grass Valley to occupy her own room which she was paying for and not using.  After a few weeks Mistlefoot went back to Grass Valley to get her when she promised to be good, but the two of them always fought like rabid Siamese-twin badgers while I was at work, and never left the house to give me any peace.  It got to where I knew one of them would come complaining to me about the other one as soon as I got home from work, and meanwhile it was Spring, I had a bad cold from being out in the garage with Mistlefoot smoking pot and cigarettes and drinking beer every night, he had gotten my house smelled up so bad with incense that I literally never got the smell out, and  my next-door neighbor, who was the landlady, came to my rescue by gently reminding me that my rental agreement called for a maximum of two adults in the house.  So I waited for Mistlefoot to wave some incense in my face, since he loved incense so much he actually thought it was medicinal in some way, and I said, Hey Rex, get that incense out of my face, I’m sick and I can hardly breathe anyway.  He was gone so fast I barely saw him go, with Sunny by his side as usual.  With Mistlefoot and I temporaroly in hate with each other, Sunny miraculously came out of her manic breakdown and prevented him from beating me to a pulp when, prompted by the temporary inability to choke down oxygen in my own house, I had called him all kinds of names—like Rex, which he hated the worst, because his parents had called him that—in order to stimulate his true Aries nature so he would gain access to the angry prophet who sat in the secret center of his being, swaddled up in his chubby mellow-dude camouflage, begging to be let out at the slightest provocation by any amount of criticism, real or imagined.  In other words, I threw his Aries ass out and he was ever so glad to move on, and the whole incident temporarily cured Sunny of her shizo-mania by giving her someone besides herself to take care of.

I must not forget to mention that the project he helped me with in exchange for free rent, which I have since named “The Mistlefoot Engine” was extremely helpful to me in my career as an air car advocate, because it gave me my first experience of building an air engine that actually worked.

My landlady talked me into renting Mistlefoot’s vacated bedroom to a yuppie friend of hers who wore so much cologne that I felt sure that I would never get rid of his stench.  But the day after he moved out, the smell of his cologne was gone, and the smell of Mistlefoot’s incense was still there.

Now that I had forcefully ejected marijuana from my life by personifying it as my friend Mistlefoot and then rejecting him, I decided to travel to Raging Bull Meadow and take some morning glory seeds to get back in touch with the Great Spirit and try to create a shamanic opening in my psyche through which my regrettable and debilitating tobacco habit might accidentally fall out and get lost forever.  When I arrived at my usual camping spot, I walked to the rose quartz mine and filled my backpack with rocks and then hiked halfway back up the hill to the steep meadow, where I sat in the sun and ate 365 morning glory seeds and made myself half sick chain-smoking cigarettes waiting for the hallucinogen to kick in.  Morning glories take a long time to come on, but I had a lot of cigarettes and plenty of time, so eventually when the wooziness from overdosing on nicotine gave way to the wooziness from overdosing on amides of lysergic acid, I puked once as I knew I would have to do, and waited for the inevitable second such incident which I knew would release me from nausea so the fun could begin.  But the nausea just sat on me and wouldn’t let me channel it, until in my desperation, the knowledge came to me that if I were to crawl over to the icy little stream of snow melt that ran down the meadow to eventually join the headwaters of the Crystal River, and scoop up a handful of the ice-water and apply it to the base of my spine . . . so I tried it and up came Chuck, and the fun began.

I lay down in the sun and had some interesting visions as I drifted in and out of a coma.  First I thought I was looking out over the meadow, although my eyes were closed and I was barely conscious, when I noticed a building across the way.  It was a long low stucco building, flat-roofed like you see in the Southwest, and the front of the building was attached to the main body of the building with a bellows-like structure, like you see on those fancy cameras.  The building was breathing in and out rather frantically.  Across the top of the building, above the bellows, was a big sign that read: OUTRAGE.

Then I found myself at the Aikido dojo, again not quite realizing that I was really laying in the sun in a steep mountain meadow with my head resting on a cow pie, and I saw my Aikido teacher go through a curtained-off doorway that I’d never noticed before, and enter a long featureless corridor.  I started to follow him, eager to learn the secrets of that passageway, and he whirled around and stopped me in my tracks by pointing at me and shouting sternly, “Black belts only!”  He yanked the curtain closed behind him and the vision ended.

I realized that it had been a mistake to take the moderately toxic morning glories in the sun, and sat up to try and motivate myself to my feet so I could walk up to my car where it was parked under the trees up at Good Day Camp.  While I sat there, I imagined, though not vividly or hallucinogenically, that Bear came to the opposite edge of the meadow where the breathing building had been, and made me a promise.  He told me that if I would stop smoking cigarettes, he would find me the perfect girlfriend.

Well that was nice, but in the meantime, I had to get out of the sun; a person can only puke so much on an empty stomach, and after that it would be many hours of waiting through hellishly unpleasant drugged stupor before the morning glories would wear off, unless I could get to a comfortable, cool spot to kick back and do absolutely nothing.  I forced myself to stand up, and wobbled under the heavy rock-filled backpack until the straps slid over my arms and hooked on my shoulders.  I inched up the steep hill one methodical stagger at a time, the supreme effort and the hot sun combining to choke my brain in a prolonged inner scream.  At the top edge of Raging Bull Meadow I stopped and wobbled in place for several minutes trying to catch my psychic breath.  I was looking inside and wondering if the stuff about Bear trying to bargain with me about cigarettes and girlfriends was a real shamanic experience or just my stupid fantasy life barging in on my important drug experience.  Finally I made an all-out effort to focus my eyes, and there on the ground at my feet, in the spot where I’d been looking and not looking, were two perfect bear tracks.  I could see the flawless impression of each toe, with a small deep hole in front of each toe impression where the bear’s long claws had dug into the soft mud.

That’s interesting, I thought, but I will have to get excited about it later when I have a nice soft car seat to collapse into.  I trudged up the forest path to Good Day Camp, dumped the pack on the ground, and collapsed into the driver’s seat of my car, where I sat with my eyes crossed and my tongue hanging out till the ornery sun disappeared, and the moon came up and went away.  Sometime after those many seemingly endless hours of excruciating brain cramps, I finally passed out.  In retrospect, I should have found a shady spot at the edge of the meadow to lolly-gag in, instead of carrying my heavy backpack up the steep hill in the sun.  But then I wouldn’t have seen those bear tracks that validated Bear’s promise to me.  And besides, I never was any good at sleeping unprotected in the woods.  I’m always afraid a wild animal might want to mess with me while I’m snoozing unawares.

After Cherokee went her way and Lisa quit the Mail Place to take computer and accounting classes, Mr. Moredock and I grew bored together watching business drop off more and more.  He had always been of the opinion that it was wiser to offer fewer services and do them well, than to try to do too much and fail to live up to his standards of excellence.  That policy worked well for him through the booming crest of 1988 and 1989, but he failed to adjust to the downhill slide that our industry was taking as the United States Postal Service and UPS became more competitive and harder to do business with.  Finally he admitted to me that he was fatally bored and might just sell the business, if he could find someone who he could trust to not run his darling into the ground.

That person turned out to be his acquaintance Stan Dante, who had recently retired from a career as a manager at Penneys, a career that had run parallel to Mr. Moredock’s former life as a Montgomery Wards man.  Mr. Moredock announced the imminent changeover, forbade everyone involved to throw him a good-bye party, made me promise that I wouldn’t let the new man fail, graciously accepted the book of maps I gave him as a farewell gift—since maps were one of the several interests he and I held in common—and dropped out of my life.  Stan—not Mr. Dante—brought a refreshingly casual and openly friendly, non-intimidating mood to the Mail Place, and for the first time in years I could come to work without my stomach and shoulders tightening up the moment I walked in the door.  He didn’t even swear.  When Stan’s ex-employees from Wards came to visit him, he always greeted them with a big bear hug.  He was only 5’-1”, portly and peppy, silver-haired and aggressively passive.  In other words, he was really a little napoleonic, but worked very hard to overcome this trait, and with my moods and self-importance to use as a mirror, he seldom was tempted to slip into his worst aspect.  He came out of retirement with a vengeance, ready to re-take on the world.  In the two years I worked for him he literally instituted at least one new service at the Mail Place every month, bought some new-fangled equipment that had to be programmed, and put me in charge of all of it, keeping me very busy and happy to be out of the doldrums, or should I say, the downhill slide that Mr. Moredock’s old school conservativism had put the business into.

Now that I was paying over $700 a month to live alone in a big house in a neighborhood that a regrettably long-gone New Zealander had chosen for me to live in, I decided it was time to simplify my life.  I moved into a small apartment in a cheap complex across the street from the Mail Place, eliminating the stress of commuting halfway across Stockton, and put all my excess stuff into the cheapest storage facility I could find.  Except for my pianos, my soapstone collection, and most of my rose quartz.  I had rebuilt and refinished two pianos in the two years I lived on Rose Street, with help and indulgence from Libby, who had to listen to how much I hated the work and did some of it herself.  Then I had been unable to sell the pianos, so I gave them to an alternative elementary school for a tax write-off I never bothered to collect.  I gave 365 pounds of soapstone, which I’d collected from a spot where Dab Mostly had taken me, to the sculpture class at the local community college, for another tax write-off I also never bothered to collect.  I took 365 pounds of rose quartz to my silent and disinterested mine claim partner Dab Mostly in Grass Valley, and he studied it quietly for a few years, eventually becoming quite fond of it, which later complicated my life to no end.

In the two weeks between the time I moved into the new apartment and the night I drove away from the Rose Street house for the last time, I cleaned every nook and cranny, removing every trace of Ann M and Libby and Toni and Mistlefoot and Sunny and the landlady’s friend and the landlady’s friend’s nasty old dog.  I re-experienced all the joy and anger and frustration and stupid horseshit and awesome peak experiences that had come from two years of not being alone and not being stuck with roommates that I had nothing in common with.  In those two weeks I drew a hard, clear line between the new place where I was living and the old place that I was cleaning.  For hours every single night I cleaned whether or not I felt like it, and smoked more cigarettes than I wanted, and drank more beer than I cared to.  I took my lunch breaks at the Rose Street house, and smoked there before heading back to work.  The cigarettes stayed at the old house.  I never smoked another cigarette at the Mail Place, and I never smoked a cigarette or drank a beer at the new apartment.  When I was done cleaning for the night, I was also done smoking for the night.

On the night that I finally had nothing left to do at Rose Street, I cried like a baby and drove away, free and clear of cigarettes.  It was two-and-a-half years before the evil nicotine monster found me again.