CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

In which I become someone else in order to achieve the impossible

 

Alone again and with no distracting melodramas going on at my place of employment to over-occupy my reasonably empty mind, I plunged into my former interests with renewed fervor.  I studied Ericksonian hypnosis and NLP, but wasn’t miserable enough to care about psychology so I switched over to a 100-year-old book called Calculus Made Easy, which I got a third of the way through before my limited knowledge of algebra left me in the lurch.  I tried to get into cooking for awhile, but if I had succeeded in taking care of myself in that way, I would have had to deal with being perfect, so I settled for going out to eat almost every night, to keep myself grounded and get out of the house.  I went to movies.  I re-enrolled in Aikido now that my back pain was cured, took the rolling class that cost $50 extra, and found that the resulting complete lack of pain experienced by doing Aikido correctly made it twice as much fun as before.  But I vowed to stay on the lighter side of mastery and to enjoy being a dabbler.  Just to be difficult, one of the grim-faced black-belt New Agers at the dojo pissed me off with her personal need to lecture me about not using my muscles so much when throwing people across the room.  I thanked her very much and walked away.  Could I help it if I was an Aries, and this was a martial arts class?

Eventually I got bored and restless, tired of entertaining myself alone, disillusioned with the cliquishness of my fellow Aikidoists and food buying club members who seemed to tacitly disapprove of me or even fear me in some way.  Since an earlier pre-Libby attempt to force myself to ask women for dates had gotten me acquainted with more translations of the word “no” than I needed to hear again, I decided that rather than go looking for more frustration and disappointment or another chance to indulge my uncanny knack for emotionally and financially over-committing myself to the first female who condescended to look my way, I would go to Grass Valley and search for marijuana.  It was July of 1994, and I was ready to forget that I had no intention of ever smoking pot again.

In humble hopes that Mistlefoot also had a bad memory, I called Sunny when I got to town to see if her boyfriend could help me score.  She informed me that she and Mistlefoot had finally split up after four years of beating their hard Aries heads against each others’ unwarpable pridefulness, but she invited me to come over and meet her new boyfriend, Benny Joe Pelton, who—she gleefully announced—was totally blind.

So I hurried on over to the house where Sunny had rented a room to pile her stuff in for the past three-quarters of a decade, hoping that the new boyfriend was into smoking pot and wasn’t too much of a pain in the ass; I really just wanted to get high and go home with a small stash, and not get overly involved with Sunny and her friends.  As it turned out, she had inherited all Mistlefoot’s old customers when he left town, and was now happily engrossed in the pursuit of keeping them all supplied with pot, and since most of them were in debt to her for this, she had become a very important person.  Between her new business and her task of taking care of a blind boyfriend, she had developed a sober and self-assured countenance that I had never seen in her before.

Benny Joe Pelton came out to the living room to meet me, adorned with a head full of thick wiry gray hair, a beer belly, and a silly grin.  He extended his hand in my general direction, introduced himself as a blind multi-instrumentalist from Kansas City, Missouri, and told me he had heard so much about me and about the air car project that he had written me an epic poem in thirteen movements in celebration of our first chance to meet.  Before I could say, That’s nice, he launched right into a long and dragged-out, post-extemporaneous, cutesy but not funny, comic dirge of drivel about me and the air car project which quickly convinced me that I had walked into another of those sycophantic relationships based on the mutual need to smoke pot in spite of the basic lack of rapport shared by the participants.

As the ever-so-long poem finally dragged its fat ass over the dreary finish line, I heaved a huge sigh of relief and assured its creator that he was obviously a brilliant genius of cosmic proportions, and before he could jump into the rest of his infinite repertoire I brought up the subject of marijuana.  He hauled out his pipe and we smoked, then I spent the next hour or two pretending to listen to more jumbled-up narcissistic horseshit from this overgrown teddy-bear who had apparently gotten permanently lost within repressed memories of Romper Room reruns while overdosing on acid as a spoiled blind boy in Missouri.  I fought the paranoia ignited by the onslaught of marijuana on my thoroughly clean bloodstream, and changed my mind completely about actually purchasing any of the dad-blasted stuff.  Finally Benny Joe had to go to his room to find some more sheets of Braille to read to me—some kind of channeled exposé on the true nature of the universe—and Sunny used the opportunity to announce her intention to call her friend Ann K to cancel out on attending a barbecue at Ann K’s house since I had shown up unexpectedly.

I asked her if this Ann K was someone I knew, and she said, Oh, you remember, I introduced you guys about five years ago when she used to live here—

Call her up right now and tell her we’re coming over! I commanded.  Since I’d only met her twice, I couldn’t even remember what she looked like, but I could certainly remember being disappointed when she had moved to Pennsylvania before I had a chance to get Sunny out of the way so I could tell her what an interesting person I was, and I hoped that if nothing else should come of it, at least another body in the room might get Benny Joe Pelton to calm down a little and exercise more restraint in his quest to choke me with his unadulterated self-adulation.

At the appointed time, after I played a few of my songs and Benny Joe Pelton clapped gleefully and informed me that I was obviously a brilliant genius of cosmic proportions—which reeked of name-dropping more than sincere praise, since I knew from years of experience that I was a celebrity everywhere that Sunny and her big mouth meandered—Sunny and Benny Joe got in Sunny’s car and I grabbed my new guitar and got in my car, and I followed them over to the cottage that Ann K was house-sitting temporarily, since she had just returned from Pennsylvania and had no job or permanent housing as yet.

Ann was pleasantly happy to see me, and helped Benny Joe as much as she could since he had announced his intention to take care of this chicken barbecuing project all on his own.  She followed him around the kitchen wiping his greasy fingerprints off the walls of the house she was taking care of for somebody, humoring him by responding tactfully with the moral equivalent of “You don’t say!” to his pronouncements regarding the many handicaps suffered by the average blind person that he himself had conquered many years ago, because of his euphemistically eluded-to superior intelligence and quick wit.  Meanwhile, she used every opportunity to ask me about my interests, all of which she shared in some way, and when I hauled out my guitar after dinner, she kept saying “Don’t stop playing,” between songs.  Sunny did her best to jump between us and change the subject every time our interest in each other threatened to turn into a real conversation, so I retaliated by refusing to smoke any more of her marijuana, since there was something in the room much more interesting to me, and the object of my interest refreshingly had no interest in smoking pot.

All night I forced myself to show slightly less interest in Ann than I actually felt, hoping to not appear desperate, and just when I’d decided, around 11:00 p.m., that my strategy had failed, and conspicuously announced that I must jump in my automobile and head for home, Ann suggested that since Sunny and Benny Joe had brought their sleeping bags and planned to camp out on the living room floor, I might as well stay too, although since there were no beds left I would have to sleep with her if I elected to stay.  Knowing that I had to go to work in the morning, and since she hadn’t indicated whether she actually cared whether I stayed or went, I almost went home out of politeness, but after having serious second thoughts about losing a social opportunity based on trying to be too polite to a single woman who I might never see again, I figured what the heck, and decided to take her up on the offer of a shared bed, explaining that I would have to get up at 5:00 a.m. to take a shower and head back to Stockton.

Once in the dark bedroom, I boldly took off all my clothes and got into bed while Ann was getting her pajamas on in the bathroom, and waited with bated breath to see whether or not she would leave the bedroom door open that led into the living room, or whether she would shut the door to indicate a desire to be alone with me; Sunny had planted their two sleeping bags a mere ten feet away from our bed.   When Ann came out of the bathroom with her pajamas on and carefully closed the door into the living room, I rejoiced inside my empty shell: This night is mine!  Ann climbed into bed and we proceeded to have the conversation that Sunny had done her best to stifle over the past several hours.  We proceeded to tell each other our life stories.

Ann K was the youngest child of an effectively single, though never divorced, schizophrenic mother, and her alcoholic husband who had deserted the family when Ann was an infant.  Her Daddy had come from a business-oriented family in Oakland that owned a factory, but when he became a prisoner of war in the Philippine Islands during the second world war, he had become dispirited and returned home content to sit in a dark room listening to the radio and drinking himself to sleep every night.  His wife, on the other hand, was anything but dispirited, and carried enough bulging-eyed wakefulness for the two of them; since he wasn’t available to help raise the new baby, and two of the three other kids had already escaped from home and from the increasingly paranoid delusions of their Mama, he evaporated to New Mexico where many of his Army buddies lived, and cohabited with an Indian woman on the reservation, eventually drinking himself to death in a little trailer on the desert by means of cases of liquor mailed to him by his brother.  His brother, meanwhile, had kept the company and finally sold it, and was filthy rich but would have little to do with his brother’s wife Persephone, who hated his guts.

Persephone had started life as a fairly normal, though somewhat manic—Ann described everybody in terms of psychiatric impairments—French Canadian.  Around the time she let her brother-in-law talk her into sending her only son to military school, she started hearing voices in the walls, so her brother-in-law sent her to the nuthouse where she was repeatedly assaulted with electroshock “therapy” until, because of her personable sense of humor, obstinacy and intelligence, she was able to convince the hospital people that although she was incorrigible in her so-called delusions, she was still responsible enough to go home and raise her daughter.  Ever since that period of hospitalization she has been convinced that she is being zapped with radioactive rays and lasers by the power company, or by cohorts of her brother-in-law, or by the fat slob across the street, or whoever else she happens to find annoying.  To escape the incessant zapping, she moved every few months, occupying apartments in a large proportion of the neighborhoods in Oakland while never failing to hold down responsible positions in good companies, paying her bills, and making up for her mean streak and her never-ending obsession with what she calls her “problem” by keeping Ann’s pre-teen wardrobe up-to-date with all the latest soulful fashions that were happening in the city during the ‘70s.  Ann worked out her own hyperactivity and short span of attention by taking charge as ring leader of her networks of friends in her inner-city home.

Thus it came as an unrecoverable shock to Ann when her Mama announced that they were moving to a tiny little town in the high desert of the Sierra Mountains.  Ann’s colorful polyester suits in a town of inbred rednecks made her stand out like the bully bait that she suddenly became.  She had never played with a white child in her life, if she could help it, and now the natural aggressiveness and leadership ability she had developed as a child in and around the ghettos of the San Francisco Bay Area were stifled by the taunts of the desert rats who refused to accept such an oddly-dressed black girl with white skin and blond hair.  Her favorite hobby of building huge doll houses out of refrigerator boxes and carrying them around town to show her few friends attracted jeers, and at school everybody cruelly teased her because she was the new girl who lived in a house coated with tinfoil, which her Mama employed to reflect plutonium-laden laser beams off of the house.

Although her Mama had named her something else, Ann had taken her name from an Irish woman down the street who taught her everything she learned while she lived in Oakland.  She had always had a short span of attention, and the elder Ann patiently showed her how to do things that Persephone was too preoccupied to bother with.  On Persephone’s bad nights, Ann would crawl out her window and spend the night at her “mother’s” house.  On Persephone’s good nights, she would drag her daughter over to the wall and make her listen to the voices inside them, to prove to her that they were real.  Once Persephone chased her with a butcher knife and Ann escaped to a neighbor’s house, where her schoolmate’s father called the police.

Ann left home as soon as she turned 18 and went to stay with her sisters in Grass Valley, becoming their silent shadow as they partied their way through the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.  She hated being the kid sister and thought the speed-rapping coke snorters that her sisters hung out with were stupid, and developed a bad taste in her mouth for Grass Valley because of her experience there.  Her brother became successful in business and sent her to an expensive culinary school, after which she became a gypsy and worked in several classy and famous restaurants from coast to coast as a garde manger chef, eventually ending up in Philadelphia where she was in an experimental relationship with an abusive alcoholic black woman, a postal worker who tried to beat her up one time too many and thus got beaten up right back with the largest member of her crucifix collection.  The strenuousness of Ann’s lifestyle caught up with her around this time and she quit her last cooking job in a way that burned her bridges back to that kind of a job.  Her psychiatrist agreed to put her on disability if she would promise to stay in school, and when Sunny came to Philadelphia to attend the funeral of her sister who had committed suicide after getting caught cheating on her medical school exams, Sunny hooked her up with her late sister’s widower and Ann got to move into the grieving man’s three-story Victorian for $150 a month, where she lived alone with the task of removing all signs of Sunny’s sister’s shopping mania and closet alcoholism from the house.

Ann spent the rest of her time in Philadelphia hanging out with a group of eccentric gay and bisexual men, and attending school, until an experiment in renting rooms out to some of her kooky friends left her out of a place to live herself.  She eventually found temporary employment and housing by answering a personal ad that had been placed by a wealthy safari hunter with a fetish for photographing women’s feet.  That’s when she returned to California, tried to live with her Mama and couldn’t, and ended up back in Grass Valley as a last resort, which is where I stumbled upon her.

Friends and neighbors, let me assure you, I did not hesitate for one moment to beg Ann K to move in with me immediately, in spite of the fact that I knew with every fiber of my being that one day she would evaporate on me, and take herself in a random direction, leaving me high and dry and trying to put my life back together.  It didn’t matter.  Not that we had time to get physical that night, what with all these stories to tell, but no woman in many years had shown me the potential of warmth and affection that she showed me that night and I insisted that she end her wandering for now, and whether she wanted to be my girlfriend or not, pack her things and get ready to move to Stockton.

About 4:00 a.m. she informed me that she was pretty sure she was going to take me up on my offer, so I congratulated her on her wise decision and took a short nap before arising to the unwelcome thrill of an alarm clock, a quick shower, and an early morning drive home, beating my head against the steering wheel and singing hymns to Bear at the top of my lungs to stay awake.

The next weekend I returned to Grass Valley to grab Ann K and skeddadle back to Stockton with her, but of course Sunny and Benny Joe wanted to be rewarded with my company for having hooked me up with my new roommate, so we went to the park where Benny Joe Pelton insisted on barbecuing a stuffed salmon the way that only he knew how to do it.  The salmon tasted just fine, although it was the last time in the years I knew him that he ever lifted a finger to do anything more practical than to pop open a beer bottle or load a bowl.  I refused to smoke marijuana with our benefactors; Ann and I avoided the riffraff by chasing a playful kitten around the park in the dark, and split for our new home together at the earliest opportunity.  On the way to Stockton, Ann held my hand while I drove and at every lull in the conversation she requested another story about my interesting adventures on this Planet as a secret agent from outer space.  Therein, I believe, lay the seed of this present volume.

I was required by my new companion to undergo my first-ever AIDS test before we could consummate what we quickly came to consider a husband-and-wife partnership.  Ann ventured fearfully across inner-city Stockton on the bus to take the test herself, although I had to encourage her repeatedly whenever she had to leave the house alone, and she hated the heat of the Valley.  With a clean bill of health, we then embarked upon the aspect of our relationship which is none of your business, despite the otherwise near-completeness of the present chronicle, warts and all.

The first item on Ann K’s agenda was to get us out of my dismal little apartment in North Stockton, so I showed her the Mid-town neighborhoods that Ann M had once shown me, where we found a nice old wooden house with a big fenced yard enclosing a white fig tree and a black fig tree; the house had once been the farmhouse on a fig orchard.  I taught her my new hobby, making ear candles, which were selling like hotcakes at a health food store near the Mail Place where I had connections.  Ear candles are hollow tubes made of strips of cotton cloth held together with wax, which you insert in your ears and light; the draft from the flame is supposed to create a mild suction that draws earwax, spiders, lost gold mines and other foreign objects out of the ear canal.  I was obsessed with using multiple ear candles almost daily, under the mistaken assumption that all the yellow lumps of wax remaining in the burned candle stump had come out of my ear.  It eventually became obvious that most of the yellow waxy matter was really half-burned candle wax, when I had to take Ann to the emergency room to find out why her ears were completely clogged with a hard yellow waxy substance that turned out to be candle wax.  I gave up the ear candle business at that point, despite the fact that it was putting money in our pockets, to prevent a lawsuit or a raid by the FDA.

Although Ann was already not deeply in love with Stockton, I talked her into attending a new weekend introduction to Aikido that my prosperity-conscious Aries Aikido teacher had invented for the purpose of making money faster than he already was making it at his upscale dojo.  Ann had been exposed to Aikido and Jiu-Jitsu previously, and spoke fondly of her former instructors, but the grueling weekend workshop did nothing for her, although it cost me $325.  I was there as a volunteer to help the neophytes, most of whom seemed as unsure as she did that they had spent their money wisely.  The lack of room on the mat made it nearly impossible to actually learn anything, or even to feel comfortable being there, and the last straw for Ann was the way my teacher expected his pupils to dance around the room acting like New Age fairies for 45 minutes before each session.  I must admit that the prolonged dancing and meditation this teacher made us endure before each class had always felt like a waste of time to me also, not to mention how much I was paying for that time.

Ann was there to egg me on when I graduated from green belt to purple belt.  In order to do this, I had to perform a randori, defending myself from an attack by three black-belts.  In the past I had done poorly at this because my normally high stress level tripled at times when I had to perform athletically in front of an audience, in spite of my love of the art and my technical abilities in casual practice.  But I knew I could endure, because once in a marathon practice randori a junior instructor had forced me to stay in the fight so long that I was literally ready to pass out before he finally clapped his hands to call off my attackers.  I could barely see, I was so exhausted; the room and everything in it had taken on an orange-yellow tint and I felt like I had been kicked in the chest.

On the night of my scheduled graduation, things had already gone badly for me.  With memories of a failed randori only an hour old, I was almost nauseous with anxiety.  In that bout I had landed butt-first on the mat and had become disoriented, then taken too long to stand up, prompting the teacher to clap his hands to end the match prematurely so I would fail the match rather than get myself hurt or puke on the mat.  Later, when one of my classmates limped out onto the mat to do his randori and was sent back to his seat—his graduation postponed till his leg injury could heal—I got an idea.  Fortunately this dojo allowed clowning around; some of the black-belt graduations I had attended had been hilarious comedy skits with Aikido performances built into them.  So when the last of my classmates concluded his randori to earn his purple belt and the teacher nodded at me to get up for my rematch, I dragged one leg behind me as if I were crippled, and the roomful of spectators, who had been expecting another display of debilitating self-consciousness from me, howled with laughter.  This released the tension they felt for me; now I had to release mine.

As the soon-to-be-victim of three larger-than-life attackers who also happened to be considerably bigger than me, it was up to me to signal the beginning of the match by a nod of the head, which was often followed by the defender’s take-charge shout called the kiai, and then the charge of the vicious assailants.  I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, concentrating on the anxiety that racked my body, then rolled the tension up into a little ball in the back of my throat and shocked the audience by screaming like a man about to be murdered.  As the audience once more laughed uproariously, I nodded to start the randori and charged my first attacker, throwing him across the room before he knew what was going on, then spun around and plunged ahead to throw the next attacker, and continued in this vein of “don’t bother to come get me because I’m already in your face” until I eventually had a momentary lapse of concentration and one of the big black-belts knocked me down.  As I fell in seemingly slow motion I could see the teacher pull his hands apart to clap, reading in his expression that I just wasn’t ready to graduate yet.  Three big dudes were headed my way, and the teacher was almost shaking his head in pity, which pissed me off and caused me to spring to my feet so fast that he didn’t have time to clap to end the session; however, all three of my too-confident attackers ended up in a pile at my feet so fast that I blinked in astonishment with nothing left to do as the teacher grinned and clapped anyway to signal my successful graduation.  The audience cheered and Ann K jumped to her feet hooting and hollering and waving her arms in the air.

The ceremony was over and as people milled about the mat congratulating each other and Ann helped me put on my new purple belt, one of the black-belts who had been taken by surprise by my performance came up to me and soberly informed me that I was supposed to start a randori by nodding and then yelling, not the other way around.  I shrugged and threw my used-up green belt over my shoulder, grabbed my wife, and sauntered out to the parking lot.  I never went back.

Since that time I’ve had three occasions to actually use my Aikido training.  The first time was one night at home when Ann K and I were lounging around in bed in the dark, and I got up to pee.  Bereft of my glasses, I was about to walk into the bathroom, not realizing that the bathroom door with its full length mirror facing into the bedroom had gotten shut, when a man suddenly appeared a foot in front of me.  Because of my extensive daily training in the martial arts, I unhesitatingly let out a mighty kiai, raised my hands in a ready-to-go posture, and charged the mirror.  Ann laughed so hard she had to get up and pee too.

Since my new boss Stan Dante was such a happy-go-lucky nice guy, and more than happy to see me hooked up with a nice girl like Ann K, she would often come to work with me, even though she thought Stan was a little dweeb with a secret Napoleon complex.  The fact that he kept intruding on our perfect little world by hiring her to help out at the Mail Place and then insisting on re-hiring her after she would quit in disgust—either because she didn’t like him or didn’t like the serious side of me she saw at work—didn’t help matters.  One day she was at work with me when the elderly owner of a neighboring furniture store that was closing its doors forever came over to offer me the big oak desk he had used for 50 years and no longer needed.  Stan had gone to a Kiwanis Club meeting with Mr. Moredock, leaving his truck behind in the parking lot, so I sent Ann over with Stan’s truck to help load up the desk.  When Ann and the old man could barely budge the desk, much less lift it into the truck, Ann let her anxious fear of failing me get the better of her, and lashed out at the old man with foul language and stormed back to the Mail Place to sulk.  She told me what she had done, and I knew then that her unpredictable tactics for dealing with stressful situations were going to be a cross for me to bear, but I made the decision at that time that she was mine, and that was all that mattered.  I went to the furniture store and loaded the desk with the help of the old man’s brother, cleaning up behind her the best I could, well aware that her outburst could have gotten me fired.  In the long run I had to get rid of the desk anyway because she was a compulsive furniture re-arranger and the desk pissed her off every time.

In order to please me, and for no other reason, Ann obtained a job in the garden department at a local hardware store, where she worked for a week or two before quitting in disgust.  Her Norwegian complexion could not handle being out in the sun, she complained, and one of her co-workers was mean to her, and above all else, she did not want to give up her disability check in spite of moderate pressure from me to think about herself as something better than a psychiatric casualty.

Because she was fascinated with the world of finance, Ann K talked me into redoubling my efforts to establish credit.  She informed me that the standard way to start out was to get a Sears card.  I was able to do that, and one of our first purchases was a TV and VCR, which we only used to watch movies since I had a long-established contempt for television watching in general.  One night we had just finished watching Michael Moore’s hilarious anti-corporate, pro-human, muck-raking documentary Roger and Me, when a new person came into my life and changed it forever.

Three days earlier, Ann had walked across the street to get something at the store when she saw some little girls throwing pebbles at a filthy little stray dog in the parking lot.  The dog was rolling on his back inviting the girls to play with him, but they just cursed at him and threw rocks.  Ann chased the girls away and comforted the dog, so the dog followed her home.  That’s what she told me at the time, and what I believed for years, until finally she confessed that she had actually encouraged the nasty little thing to follow her back across the street to our front porch.

She showed me the dog and I shrugged and enjoined her to ignore it so as to not encourage it to stick around.  She didn’t say anything.  For three days the dog used our front porch as its headquarters, leaving the porch only to forage for food around dumpsters and to offer its undying affection to every human who walked past.  But it did not scratch on our door or whine or bark, so I tolerated its presence, but still gently kept reminding Ann that sooner or later the dog would have to find somewhere else to be.  She didn’t say much.  On the evening of the second day I took a bowl of water out to the porch and crouched on my haunches to visually inspect the dog, although I wouldn’t touch it.  He was a long-haired dog, but his white hair was so filthy that it was stained a pinkish-gray.  He was full of huge ticks and was obviously flea-bitten, and I informed Ann that he was hopelessly disease-ridden and would never be allowed in my house.  His long hair covered his eyes and hung from his starving bones in matted wads and clumps, dragging on the ground.  His tangles made my good friend Mistlefoot’s dreadlocks look like princely braids.  I left the water for him and went inside to try and distract Ann with more practical matters.

The next morning the dog was still there, and as I reached down to put another bowl of water on the porch for him, he sat up on his back feet and kissed me on the nose.  I went inside and washed my face, and left for work, assuring my sad-faced wife that the animal would go no farther with me than for a ride to the pound.  But at work I couldn’t stop thinking about that humble kiss, about the problems the dog was causing in the neighborhood by being loose, and about how quiet and polite he was; in three days he still hadn’t barked, whined or scratched on the door.  I admitted to myself that the dog was probably not disease-ridden or sick, but just dirty.  After work I rented Roger and Me and went home.  Something about the feeling I got from watching the movie gave me the sign I was looking for, and when it ended I stood up and went out on the porch and sat down.

While Ann hovered silently, the filthy little beast lay down in front of me, rolling on his back and grinning.  The hair fell away from his face and he looked me right in the eyes so steadily that I couldn’t stop myself from looking up to Ann where she stood above us, and I said, “His name is Roger.”

She smiled and said, “No, I have a dead friend named Roger.  His name is Max.”

We took Max in the backyard and I fed him a piece of lunch meat.  The next day we took him to get shaved, washed, flea-dipped, and to have the tics removed from his flesh after hard times as a street dog in Stockton.  It was obvious from the polite way he took food out of my hand that he was somebody’s lost pet.  It also became obvious over the next few weeks that he was used to living indoors with humans.  I decreed that he was to live outdoors, and only come inside for short visits.  We compromised by putting up a piece of plywood in the doorway that led to the laundry room, leaving the back door open since it was secured by a locked metal-barred gate.  His small size enabled him to squeeze between the bars when he wanted to go outside, which he seldom wanted to do.  He spent most of his time with his front paws propped up on the piece of plywood so he could watch us with his big brown eyes.  Whenever we got home from leaving him alone during those first few weeks, he was so happy to see us that he would lose control of his bladder, and I would have to turn him over so the pee would pool up on his belly while I carried him outside to hose him off.

For some reason beyond my present ability to comprehend, Ann K and I decided to invite Sunny and Benny Joe to visit us in Stockton.  Maybe it was because we only had one other friend, and he was a cynical ex-employee of Stan’s from Stan’s days as a Penneys manager, who liked us more than we liked him; he wanted to have sex with my wife and had mistaken me for someone who wanted to engage in verbal sparring as the butt of his sadistic need to have someone to insult.  Whatever the reason, Sunny and Benny Joe showed up with their sleeping bags and marijuana and Benny Joe’s saxophone, clarinet and harmonica, and proceeded to camp out in our living room waiting for an invitation to go home, never leaving the house to give us a moment of privacy.  The only thing I liked about their visit besides the marijuana was the music that Benny Joe Pelton and I sometimes played together; Ann had inspired me to rekindle my interest in ragtime guitar playing and I had learned several new songs after years of being bored with my worn-out repertoire, and the zombie-like attention of Sunny and Benny Joe as I played and practiced and even started writing a couple new songs made their visit seem worth the trouble to me.  But not to Ann; after the first two days she would go in the bedroom and ignore us, barely bothering to hide her contempt for the endless self-enchantment that marijuana caused in us.

Worse than that, the effort of paying attention to a dog who could not play music with me, listen to me talk about air cars, or smoke pot with me seemed like a distraction, so I redoubled my efforts to enforce my decree that any dog of mine would have to be an outdoor dog.  I locked him in the backyard one day and he responded by coming around to the side of the house where he could hear us talking through the living room window, and literally flinging himself bodily against the side of the house, as if trying to break in through the wall.  Despite his small size, he had hard muscles and was exceptionally durable in his insistence, so I finally let him in the house to appease my wife.

I ignored the dog and continued pretending to listen to Benny Joe Pelton go on about this and that.  I was really just waiting for him to load up another bowl.  Sunny went out the front door to get something out of her car, and forgot to latch the screen door securely behind her when she came back in.  After awhile, Ann came out of her bedroom, looked around, and seeing the door ajar, announced that her dog was gone.  I went out front and peered up the block one way and down the block the other way, told Ann that the dog would come back if he wanted to, and went inside to wait for the bowl to get loaded up again.  Ann took off down the street and came back an hour later without the dog, slamming the door behind her, and silently shut herself in the bedroom.  Seeing that I had obviously blown it, I loaded Sunny and Benny Joe up in my car and we drove around for awhile looking for Max, but he was nowhere to be found.  I sort of hoped that the dog tag with our phone number would somehow bring him back to us.

The next three days were a nightmare.  Ann K is not someone you want to mess with when she isn’t getting her way.  I was the worst scum that ever slimed the face of the Earth for letting Max get away and then not running down the street to bring him back.  I invited Sunny and Benny Joe to go home, so they did.  Despite her anger at my betrayal, Ann gradually got her equilibrium back.  I wondered if I wanted the dog back or not.  At first I was secretly glad that I hadn’t ended up with the trouble and expense of another mouth to feed, but as the marijuana left my system, and my energy level returned to normal, I found myself missing my animal.

By the time the phone call came from someone several blocks away who had taken Max in and found our phone number on his collar, I was genuinely disappointed with myself for not being a better Doggy Daddy, and when he was back wriggling in my arms and licking my face, I knew I wanted him forever.  The piece of plywood blocking him into the back room found a better use for itself, and Maxwell Maxfield Bobbins, the Jewish Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Pitbull, also known as Mister Greenburg after my friend Krishna Bernie, has slept in my bedroom with me for the past eight years, more than welcome to stay for another eight years, and another eight years after that if he so desires.

It was during an idyllic carefree coffee-guzzling vacation on the coast of Oregon that a strange and wondrous event occurred that temporarily shattered whatever my current self-image might have been by proving to me that insanity was not as deleterious as it was rumored to be.

We were strolling down the sidewalk somewhere when out of the blue a tinny little voice squawked out of the back of my throat.  I know that the voice was inspired somewhat by the “Thank You Masked Man” incident during one of Judas’s “When Ya Gonna Wake Up” radio shows.  But the intent and aftermath of the alternate personality to which the voice gave birth was unconscious, all mine, and unpremeditated.

“Hi Betty!” said the voice.

For some reason, Ann K thought the voice was the funniest thing she had ever heard, and she doubled over with laughter.  Out of her came an equally strange voice, a crude jumble of her vocal cords that was unburdened with any trace of feminine delicacy or urban sophistication: “Hi Brucie!”

We had determined somewhere during the recounting of our respective life stories that my parents had once intended to name me Bruce, and her parents had once intended to name her Betty, which all of our parents now deny, though we have pseudo-memories of them giving us this information at some indistinguishable point in the past.

Brucie and Betty Bobbins, New Age Couple, Cretins From The Cretin Planet, howled and snorted and squeaked and spewed and jeered and scoffed from out of our knotted larynxes during an unbelievable proportion of our private time together for the next few years or more.  They were our dirty little secret.  Returning from a social event with normal people, the first thing Maxwell would hear would be Betty’s voice coming out of Ann’s face: Brucie!  Brucie!  Are you still there?  You can come out now!  For me, the transformation was spontaneous and nearly complete, in fact the most spontaneous aberration that ever came out of me without the influence of psychedelic drugs.  Brucie Bobbins was sort of a cross between a hyperactive six-year-old with frogs in his pockets and snakes in his underwear, an adolescent exhibitionistic psychopath, a retarded 95-year-old pervert who had been forgotten in the dungeons of the state hospital at an early age with nothing to entertain himself but a book of dirty jokes, and an unloved abortion survivor on a pilgrimage from center-stage to center-stage.  I don’t know how else to describe him.  One minute he would be hiding behind the bedroom door hoping to jump out and frighten his Betty, but giving himself away with convulsive giggling, and the next he would be showing off some large and long household object or workshop artifact that he held between his legs, hollering in his most obnoxious voice, Betty, Betty, look at Brucie’s big pee-pee!  I won’t attempt to convey the breadth or scope of Brucie’s considerable ability to outdo himself in an effortless effort to expand his repertoire of outrageous and perfectly undersocialized cavorting.  There is no way I could hope to entice my ultra-sophisticated fans to lower themselves to the level of this preternatural farce of subconsciously concocted play therapy or self-indulgence or psychotic breakdown or some combination thereof, to resonate with what I knew instinctively to be the basic soundness and necessity of it, but I can at least claim, without hope of being taken seriously, that the phenomenon of Brucie Bobbins was the greatest gift that Ann K could have given me, by allowing him to exist, to exhibit, to foul his nest without fear of consequence, to play himself out, and finally to go away, back into the murky depths of my torturedly overly serious, self-involved psyche whence he came.  Brucie and Betty agreed on many things, disagreed on many other things, but the key to it all could have been that none of it mattered, because the grownups were out of the room.  One thing they definitely agreed on: that thing, I. Maxwell Zdaemon, was icky and didn’t care about anything except selling stamps.

So there.

During the same period of time, which I actually don’t remember very well since I wasn’t around that much, I was inspired to successfully complete my torquerack engine, to advertise my mail-order business, and to buy my first computer and stay up all night, many nights, learning how to use it.  I bought a car to turn into an air car and the two of us taught each other how to pull an engine before realizing, after a year in our house, that we had to move back to North Stockton so Ann could go to school and I could spend less time fighting traffic.  I paid a towing company to haul one more unbuilt air car out of my way.

And regrettably—though of course by now my faithful public must realize that I truly regret nothing—I collected a full deck of plastic playing cards labeled “VISA” and “MasterCard.”

Let me take this opportunity to shamelessly assert that the Corporate Empire that is strangling the humanity out of the modern world is the Antichrist, the Beast mentioned in the Book of Revelations; the Mark of the Beast—or the stigmatic lack thereof—is something that we in our modern time euphemistically refer to as our “credit rating.”  And the seductive and evangelical Voice of the Beast is television: from soap opera to sports hero to anchorman to political photo opportunist, life has become a TV show as we all struggle to out-stupid each other in the passive quest for the unmitigatedly redundant enrichment of the Modern Cannibals—the obscenely wealthy and powerful—based on the unquestioned faith that if It weren’t true, we wouldn’t have seen It on TV.

There but for the grace of the gods could I have gone, and still could end up, and when it came to becoming happily emblazoned on forehead and arm with the sixteen-digit numbers that shoulda made me happy, for all the grief they caused . . . sad, so sad.  Not that it was a problem to keep the credit cards in check while I stayed in Stockton and kept my wonderful little nursemaid of a job, but life goes on, you know what I mean.  And Stockton was no place for Luther and Ann.  We ached to be out of there, even out of California.  All in good time, I promised.  Meanwhile Ann kept herself busy with classes, making a few friends out of her teachers and fellow students, all of whom happened to be of Asian descent, since, as we all know, white people are stupid!

And speaking of descent, there was always the perfect job to come down from.  But before relating that grisly tale of terror, I must tell you about my good friend Dontego Bailey.

Born in Detroit of educated black parents who had themselves been born of educated black parents, Clark Kent—who changed his name to Dontego Bailey to avoid being tortured by stupid white people—was in his mid-fifties when I knew him, and had more somewhat-unrelated grandchildren than he was interested in bragging about.  It cannot be denied that it was his sincere, openly friendly and go-get-em approach to human beings that had gotten him everything he had, not that he had anything to speak of in a material sense except his big screen TV, his canary yellow sports car, and a bunch of grown kids who weren’t starving.  He even had a secret and short-lived love affair with my young co-worker Cherokee, the most sought-after female in North Stockton, sometime after her divorce and before his sweetheart from Detroit moved in with him.

I will never forget Dontego Bailey’s standard greeting: a booming, cheerful, ”Howdy Commander!”  or his big honest laugh.  If Mr. Moredock had chosen someone for me to emulate amongst the hundreds of steady customers we saw regularly at the Mail Place, it might have been Dontego Bailey.  He had been receiving his mail there since the prehistoric days before Mr. Moredock bought the place and turned it into a thriving symbol of North Stockton’s suburban opulence, and unlike the doctor’s wives and mortgage salesmen who frequented our establishment, Dontego Bailey was not only successful at whatever he attempted, he was cool.  He was relaxed.  No matter how well he was dressed, he never came across as pretentious, but even when he shuffled in wearing sweats and sandals, his coolness shone through not as arrogant yuppie shabbiness but as the mellow confidence that yuppies sometimes imitate in a pretentious stab at appearing grungy.  For the first several years that I knew him, he drove big old Cadillacs, but later he flashed around in a little yellow sports car, which he drove as fast as he could get away with driving it.

Dontego Bailey boasted about few of his many accomplishments; even after I had known him and then left town, I only heard of many of his abilities and achievements when I read a pamphlet that someone mailed to me.  He was a studio drummer, and had played with Motown greats.  He had his own show on the local cable station, reviewing recent video releases.  He produced rap concerts promoting druglessness.  He was general manager of a large overpriced video store till it went out of business because the white boys who owned it were too deeply in debt to risk charging a competitive price for their product.  He got involved with a movie deal in an attempt to stay out of the job market, then he landed a job with a non-profit organization as a person who worked with teenage dropouts to teach them how to find good jobs, the kinds of jobs that would get them off the streets by putting real money in their pockets.

At the Mail Place, Dontego Bailey was best known for his vast collection of VCR tapes.  Because of his cable TV show, he could get a free copy of any upcoming release, and he never charged a penny for anyone to borrow a tape from his library, nor did he ever offer one of them for sale.  Almost every wall in his apartment was lined from floor to ceiling with movies.  Since he knew I was a movie buff, for years I had an open invitation to come by and borrow movies from him, and it was Ann K who finally forced me to go over there and take advantage of him in this way.  She loved him more than any other person in Stockton that I introduced her to.  He thought she was being racially condescending with her frequent references to blues music, not realizing that old-fashioned blues guitar was my thing and she was really just pushing me to open up to him.  His thing was jazz, and he was frequently called away from home to fill in for someone on stage as a drummer or keyboardist, or to do a studio session in the Bay Area when the regular drummer didn’t show up.

Because of the brightness of this star who I had gradually come to look up to, it came as a shock to me one night when Ann and I were at his house picking out a new stack of movies to borrow when I walked out of a back room lined with videos and smelled marijuana smoke coming out of the master bedroom.  I hurried Ann out of there and told her about it on the way home.  She informed me that Dontego Bailey had been laying out hints in my direction for some time, to the effect that he might be considered a source of what everybody at the Mail Place had suspected for years was my secret vice; in my naiveté I had missed his subtle offers.  I had been hinting around to Ann that if she wasn’t so turned off by pot-smoking I might like to find a little stash, and she had responded that it wasn’t pot or pot smokers she objected to, but useless zombies who dragged me down into a low-energy state of expecting nothing of myself, with pot as the excuse, and as the be-all and end-all of existence.

And so it came to pass that after much deliberation and somewhat shallow soul-searching on my part, and repeated beggings for re-affirmation of permission from my common-law spouse, that I ventured a desperate and ill-advised remark while at Dontego Bailey’s apartment that I sure wished I knew where I could get some weed.  He pretended to be shocked that I was a smoker, and I pretended to be shocked that he was, and as it turned out he just so happened to have a little for sale, although he stressed that he could only help close friends in this way, and due to no fault of my friend Dontego Bailey’s, my perfect marriage began to slowly fall apart that night as I re-took the first well-worn step into a world that no woman with any self-respect had ever had the desire to follow me into.

Now that Stan Dante was as fully trained by me as he was going to let himself become, and actually getting a little testy about it whenever I tried to train him further, and now that he had instituted so many new services at the Mail Place that I was not only no longer bored but rather overwhelmed with work for the first time in years, and partially due to Stan’s thinly-veiled Napoleon complex that he worked so hard to keep out of the way but which nevertheless was easy for me to spot—since, as we all know, it takes one to know one—I finally after six unbelievable years of playing 9-to-5er began to secretly hate my job.  And the straw that broke the mule’s back, the one thing that made my obstinate tendency to run to spite become uncontrollable, was the perfectly regrettable circumstance that Stan Dante’s sociopathic son, Diamonte Dante, had lost his job.

According to my new assistant Janine—a middle-aged woman who helped out at the Mail Place in the afternoons as a way of winding down after her real job as a remedial math teacher in a junior high school—Diamonte Dante had been a problem child since before the dawn of time, a sore thumb in a family of liberal do-gooders, an incorrigible hate-monger wherever he went: an asshole from day one.  In fact, Diamonte Dante had spent such a large proportion of his life sneering that his lip had acquired a permanent curl, so that he even appeared to be sneering when he tried to smile.  Nothing that Stan or his wife or their classical-musician daughter could do for him was ever kind or good enough to make him be kind or good, and the world was his tantrum grounds as he left a string of social disasters everywhere he went.

But there must have been a seed of productivity somewhere inside him, because right around my Jesus year of 33 when I came to Stockton—and we were the same age—Diamonte Dante moved to Davis, California where he worked hard off-and-on for six years while sort of taking care of his little boy who lived with him, to earn a degree with honors in the field of computer programming.  Upon graduation he had conducted a mass-faxing campaign to distribute his qualifications to hundreds of companies seeking to hire zealous new graduates in his field, and he ended up taking his pick of the several offers that came his way.

And by the time that his Daddy’s chief assistant at the Mail Place—that would be I—grew restless and tired of his job, Diamonte Dante had already created enough personality conflicts at his own place of work to fill Pandora’s Box, and as a result, his unusually proud father was crushed to learn that his son was unemployed, broke, back on drugs, unable to legally drive a car, and blaming it all on the Old Man, who obviously hadn’t raised him right and had better start coughing up the bucks to make up for it.

After a process of deliberation that took into account more the needs of his grandson than the reality of the undeniable difficulty of the situation and the impossibility of actually making the right decision, and after throwing away thousands of dollars that probably went up his son’s nose, Stan Dante somewhat timidly announced to me that he had decided to “bring his son into the business.”

Like his Daddy, Diamonte Dante was a short person, in fact he was the short person that songwriter Randy Newman had been referring to when he wrote that “Short people got no reason to live.”  Before he appeared on the scene personally, I had already had some run-ins with him when he had called to demand money from the Old Man, offending me in the process by insulting me with foul language and extreme aggressiveness for my having been unfortunate enough to have picked up the phone.  Since I was the asshole who had kept hanging up on him when he had been in dire straits, it required of him some courage and stepping over the barrier of his own pride to walk into his new job with a positive attitude, by which I mean he expected me to instantly pass on to him every detail of everything I had learned throughout my years as manager of the Mail Place.  Whether or not it was wise or proper of me to snub him at this point by expecting him to start with smaller goals, and whether or not it was humane, benevolent, considerate, or compassionate of me to indicate by my coolish response to his pretended zeal that he should not assume too much about the future of our friendship, I considered it a point for my side that the too-positive attitude he tried to start our working relationship with was incredibly easy for me to permanently demolish like the house of cards that it was, by the simple act of purposely not joining him at his level of dishonestly pretending that he wanted to work for his Daddy and that he and I were going to be the best of friends.  I recognized his transparent ploy for my job as the inappropriate and unrealistic pile of horseshit that it was, and before he had been at the Mail Place for a quarter of an hour, he was as openly sneering with me as he had been earlier when he had called to demand that I hand the fucking phone to his father, on those occasions when he had been in need of immediate transfusions of funds.

In the subsequent weeks, Diamonte Dante punished me ceaselessly and systematically for those initial five minutes when I had unforgivably failed to acknowledge his panting proliferation of politeness, and I was shocked beyond the ability to know what to do when his Daddy took the position that it takes two to tango.  He had to take this position in order to uphold the illusion that his decision to groom his son to become like him was the decision of a seasoned businessman who was merely doing his job as chief executive.  It became increasingly obvious that this was a setup, that Stan Dante was as tired of my honest moodiness and secret need to give up and just be myself, as I was tired of the display of friendliness that he employed to cover up his own martyr complex and Napoleonosis.  Ann K turned up the pressure to get us out of there while we still had the chance, and my deck of barely-used credit cards was growing hot in my back pocket.

As a last resort I finally forced myself to recommend that thing called tough love to Diamonte’s tortured Daddy, since Stan’s inability to know what to do was creating a crack in his composure almost as wide as mine.  I explained that my own past had been somewhat similar to his son’s, and that I had been able to overcome my deficiencies not because of my generous Daddy’s willingness to help me, but because I had set out on my own without help to clean up my life all by myself.  I didn’t realize when I said this that my life at the top of the mountain was no more indicative of what my future was to be like than it was reminiscent of my past and its lack of socially acceptable levels of job-oriented accomplishment.  After thus revealing my checkered past to Stan Dante, he never again treated me with the level of respect that he had pretended to have for me when he had been under the pressure of my withholding from him what he already knew and was not invited to acknowledge that he knew about me.

Apparently unaware that he was getting his way already, Diamonte Dante turned up the heat.  Whenever his Daddy left the two of us alone, he would go to extreme lengths to—for example—jump out of my way whenever I walked past, purposely drawing attention to my easily injured sense of dignity just as my former co-workers at the Mail Place had purposely humored and quietly tolerated it.  When I made no attempt to engage myself with him in anything that could be mistaken for teamwork, since I considered him the most obnoxious species of worm that had ever grown legs and scuttled the face of the Earth, he would lean against the wall and stare at me, sneering and bobbing his head contemptuously while I tried to be cheerful and polite to my customers, daring me to lose it and fly in his face with the anger he knew was growing in me, unexpressed because as we both knew, his Daddy was not going to take sides.  One time after he made some crude remark or gesture I quietly said, Why can’t we just try to work together like two adults, and his Daddy jumped all over me in front of one of my best customers as if I was the biggest bully on the playground for forcing his little boy to respond to my request with obscene and threatening gestures that the old man had not seen because of his conveniently turned back.

This incident signaled the end of my ability to pretend that I wanted the job.  At that moment I didn’t care if Stan handed the whole damn business over to his son, and since he seemed to think I was supposed to fall for his son’s bullshit just because he was willing to do so himself, I grabbed my briefcase and hauled ass out the door.  But halfway to my car I realized that to drive away right now would be too final of a statement, and would make me look bad when I had done nothing wrong, so instead I hurried to the closest pay phone and called Stan.  He stated with some anger—and possibly a sense of relief that I had finally screwed up—that he didn’t like the way I had walked out on him, and I responded, somewhat honestly but not without the bias afforded me by the omission of details that wouldn’t help my cause, that I had not walked out on him; I had walked away from a fight.  He didn’t have a ready response and couldn’t deny the plausibility of my argument, so he softened up and offered to put me on a part-time schedule without loss of any income so he would have time alone with his son in hopes that he could train him in the workings of the Mail Place, as I had been unable or unwilling to do.

That night I rented a movie called Cape Fear, in which a mild-mannered lawyer has pissed off the wrong psychopath by putting him behind bars where he belongs, but now the psychopath is out of prison and is stalking the lawyer and his family.  Although I’d seen the movie before, the sneering psychopath and his deliberate scheme to psychologically torture the poor lawyer who had just been doing his job got me so scared and upset that I had to stop the movie and peek through the curtains to make sure that Diamonte Dante wasn’t standing across the street, leaning against a fence or a parked car, sneering a hole in my front door, waiting for an opportunity to break in and steal my dog or ravage my wife.

I sat back down in front of the TV and couldn’t turn the movie back on.  I was scared out of my mind.  Having reached the unacceptable point where I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, I called Stan Dante at home and told him that if he expected me to work with his psychopath son in any capacity whatsoever, then he obviously had absolutely no respect for my six years of service to the company, no respect for the fact that I had taught him the business from scratch, and no respect for the $60,000 that he had taken out of his savings account to purchase the business from Mr. Moredock.  I informed him that if the person who was currently using the Mail Place as his personal free-for-all emotional toilet had been anyone but his own son, that person would have been fired during his first hour, even by such a liberal and big-hearted boss as Stan.  I informed Stan that he had the choice of paying me two weeks’ severance and signing a letter of recommendation and never seeing me again, or seeing me in a courtroom.

Stan Dante told me to come get my severance pay and my letter of recommendation in the morning.  I told him this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I went to the trouble of doing whatever it took to keep the same job for six-and-a-half years, and he said he understood my position and was sorry his family problem had kept me from having a positive experience in the final days of my job.

Ann K congratulated me on my decision, and we began packing for our eagerly anticipated move to Eugene, Oregon, which we considered a haven for happy hippies on a mission.  At our garage sale, my old golf cart—which Dontego Bailey had helped me find to make an air car out of—went the way of several previous unbuilt air cars.