CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

In which I abandon the mountaintop from which the only way down is down

 

 

On our second day in Eugene, Oregon, Ann K found us a nice little one-bedroom wooden house to live in over in the highly affordable section of town just on the other side of the railroad tracks.  I paid our Czechoslovakian landlord six months’ rent in advance with funds extracted from a variety of credit cards, and the three of us immediately procured employment: I as a self-employed piano tuner, Ann as a retail clothes sales clerk, and Max had to settle for running around in circles in the house, now that he had no yard to chase me around in.  Actually we had a huge yard, but as the most overprotective dog parents who ever lived, we never let Max out the door without one or both of us attached to the other end of his leash, and a new dog tag with his new phone number went on his collar before we even bothered to get the power company to turn the lights on at the new cottage.

My job as part-time piano tuner, contracted for three years to the prestigious University School of Music—in charge of keeping 65 practice pianos and several harpsichords in usable condition—was not easy to come by, although I must not fail to mention that the head of the piano technology department, a student of old-style guitar like myself, was and continues to be one of the only piano tuners I have ever met who is not a complete klunker as a human being.  I had unfortunately saddled myself with several steady tuning customers in Stockton—including a high school music teacher who used me to keep a large room full of nearly fatally graffiti-stricken old uprights in almost usable condition during the last few years I was in town—and although I wasn’t completely away from the biz when I got to Eugene, my tuning was hardly up to the standards of the easy-going and reasonable, yet well-respected and exceedingly professional man who hired me.

My audition tuning took place in the office of the head of the piano department, a woman with a surname synonymous with “Haggerbyrd” who later donated one of her own pianos to the school until such time as the school had paid me to do $400 worth of work on it, at which point she changed her mind about donating it and took it back home with her.  Anyway, by the time I had finished struggling against one of the worst tension headaches of my 40 years of ever-increasing obsolescence upon this graying Globe, requiring over three hours to accomplish a pitiful audition tuning on the piano in her office—which I could have done just as well in 45 minutes if I hadn’t been trying so hard to impress myself—I was convinced after several dirty looks from the displaced officeholder that even the genteel young man who had set me down to tune that piano would be forced to admit, at least to me if not to the rest of the piano tuners in Eugene, and possibly the world, that my decision to be self-employed as a way of avoiding such nagging discrepancies as Stan Dante’s son Diamonte was an avoidable mistake that a search for a real job could have prevented, to say the least.

However, as it turned out, the only other serious competitor for the position had been my old classmate from Sioux City, Iowa, Billy Bullocks, who had been one of the class clowns, and as such, was—unbeknownst to me, because of my lack of sophistication in knowing the difference between a person with a sense of humor and a comedian—so full of himself that, as secretly confided to me by my new supervisor, he was even less knowledgeable of his own inabilities than I when it came to rectifying the shortcomings of an out-of-tune piano.  This surprised me, because it had been Billy Bullocks himself who had sent me in the right direction as a student of piano tuning.  So my benefactor spent fifteen minutes teaching me more about piano tuning than I had been able to teach myself in the previous twenty-one years, and after making me swear on a stack of Django Reinhardt albums that I would work for him for at least three years, he gave me a key to his office and I became the sworn enemy of Billy Bullocks, my fellow alumnus from Sioux City, who I had mistaken for a humorous little man.

The only reason I can say with certainty that it was Billy Bullocks and not my own lack of skill that destroyed me at that job, was that the fifteen minutes of coaching my benefactor had given me literally doubled my proficiency as a piano tuner, and tripled my speed.  The only other reason I can say that Billy Bullocks had more to do with my demise than I did, since I didn’t see it happen, is that he actually told me, as we passed in the hall one day—since he was a student at the music school at the time—that he and another party he didn’t name had turned me in to the Dean for incompetence.  And the only other reason that I cannot claim responsibility for the premature loss of my job at the University due to my own relatively low interest in piano tuning and my relatedly shitty attitude, is that not only the renowned Garnish Kashka—piano tuner puke excellence—but every other piano professional in town was linked politically to the aforementioned Billy Bullocks, who hated me for beating him out of a job he thought he had in the palm of his pudgy little hand, whereas I was linked politically to only a hairy little dog and a wife with a Twiggy haircut who lovingly provided me with the little sister I had always wanted.

The vacancy at the Music School had been pointed out to me by ZaRaggue dePue, a dykish piano store manager and frequent winner of her company’s Salesperson of the Year Award who took my player piano—which I had bought, refinished and restored in Stockton and brought with me to Eugene to sell—on consignment without bothering to tell me that her store would be closing down in a few months.  Once I came to recognize her style of doing business, which she had premeditated during her formative years when her mother had her tied to the piano bench ten hours a day, it became fairly obvious—after my wife pointed it out to me—that my player piano was a hostage at the store in order to actually prevent me from selling it and using the money to help establish myself as a piano technologist in Eugene, where ZaRaggue dePue’s piano tech connections included not only those few highly committed ultra-professionals who she would have anything to do with, but all the other tuners in town as well.  Does that sound paranoid?  I’m just getting started.  It was at ZaRaggue dePue’s piano store that I met the only tuner in town who had no need to advertise in order to stay inordinately busy, because of his feverishly hyperactive drive to exceed all the limits when it came to over-educating himself in his field and then over-connecting and overworking himself so that he could go on to overextend himself to the point of financial obliteration no matter how hard he worked.  Garnish Kashka was a scrawny little classical pianist with prematurely gray hair and fine little violin-string fingers who could wield his tuning wrench in such a way as to make any piano sound like a Steinway in 30 minutes, and would then jump up and race to his next piano tuning with his cell phone to his ear and his pager going off at the same time.  My pager, on the other hand, only went off when Ann K missed me and wanted to know when I was coming home.  As part of the overall plot to keep me from establishing my own customer base, Garnish Kashka further overextended himself to hire me to recondition old upright pianos at his piano shop 30 miles from Eugene, which he had overextended himself to purchase in the first place, and then as soon as he sensed that the delicate balance of the thing I called my life hung at least partially on the work he was providing me, he happily informed me that my work was not up to par, that he had been doing it over for me all along, and that my services would no longer be required.

To complicate matters somewhat, ZaRaggue dePue had sidled up to me one blisteringly unnecessary day when I was ostensibly tuning a piano on her showroom floor, to sheepishly inform me that she had gone to visit an elderly gentleman who had outlived his usefulness as a player piano hobbyist, and was looking for someone to divest him of his collection of player pianos waiting to be overhauled, and out of her inordinate sense of compassion she had unwisely promised the man that she would buy all his old pianos from him, and was now kicking herself because she had no place to put them and no one to work on them.  She assured me that she would absolutely love to see at least three of the old geezer’s five pianos on her showroom floor once I had them all spiffied up—once again not bothering to inform me that her store would be closing down in a matter of months—and by the way, was there any chance at all that I might be interested in taking a look at the pianos, since she had decided not to honor her promise to buy them from the old fart?

Since my approach to business at this point in time was to say Yes to Everything, based on my fear that anything else I could say might be political suicide in this snooty University town, it was only a matter of time before I had used my credit cards to rent a workshop for $300 a month so I would have a place to store the five incredibly thrashed barn relics that the old man in his excusable ignorance as a mere hobbyist had mistaken for repairable player pianos.  I even promised to pay him $3500 for those rat-eaten piles of dogshit when I sold them.  Then, as my wife began to wonder if perhaps I should have stayed behind in Stockton and waited for Diamonte Dante to quit his job—which he did two weeks after our departure for so-called greener pastures—I continued using my credit cards to pay $300 a month to store the pianos but went nowhere near the so-called workshop facility since from somewhere deep inside my empty shell I had invited ZaRaggue dePue to bamboozle me by using against me my own desire to please the very people who found orgasmic pleasure in destroying me with my own aimless momentum.

And so it was that well under a year into my three-year verbal contract with my benefactor—the only human being in the city of Eugene who wielded a tuning wrench—he gave up the job he had held for years and announced that the wretched University politics that made it impossible for him to enjoy his work would no longer be any part of his life, and he left the School of Music to partake of the fruits of his excellent reputation around town as the only tuner around who could keep up with the incomparable Garnish Kashka.  My friend wished me well and tried not to unduly besmirch what was left of my ability to maintain a usable working attitude, and as he walked away from the School of Music for the last time, I could already feel the vultures circling in on me.

The search for my benefactor’s replacement was begun while the famed Garnish Kashka was brought in to do the work my benefactor had been doing, and although Garnish Kashka was able to make $100 per hour out in the community since he tuned so fast and charged so much, his financial situation and reliance on University politics for his customer base was such that he had to take the cut in pay to come in and help the school out of its dire straits, and used his proximity to help Billy Bullocks badmouth me in the process.  One sullen winter day when I had just finished smoking two or three cigarettes in the cemetery next door to the Music School and was grudgingly headed toward that same institution to pretend to tune several practice pianos that I had no interest in tuning, Garnish Kashka was just leaving that same institution, his pale bony face tied in the usual knots of tension, and he delayed his usual sprint toward his next work commitment just long enough to hurriedly inform me that I was a horrible excuse for a piano technician and that he fully intended to take my job away from me and keep it for his own use.

I stared mutely as he sprinted for his van, and decided, What the heck, this jerk is in temporary charge of the piano tech department in the absence of a department head, so what can I lose—besides money—by staying home for two weeks and then blaming him for “firing” me when the Dean calls to find out where the hell I’ve been?  And that is exactly what I did, with the full understanding and support of my wife, who had no more need for a piano tuner in her life than a turtle has for a scorpion in its armpit.  When the Dean finally realized I hadn’t been to work in two or three weeks, and called me to find out what gives, I calmly informed him that Garnish Kashka had fired me, and he could damn well ask Mr. Kashka himself what gives.

The phone didn’t hesitate to ring again within a very few minutes, and it was Garnish Kashka accusing me of lying to the Dean in order to get Garnish Kashka in trouble, and Garnish Kashka sounded so upset about Garnish Kashka getting in trouble that I relieved him of finishing whatever it was he was trying to say and proceeded to build him a new asshole for the next ten minutes, referring to him by every sacrilegious and profane workingman’s insult I had been able to think up during the past weeks of leisure time, even telling him that he was an anus-sucking pussy for trying to step on a job contract that I had won fair and square when he knew good and well that he was highly overqualified for the job he was trying to take away from me for his own selfish and financially strung-out reasons.  He admitted I was right about some of the things I had said and begged me to call the Dean and promise him that I would take my job back, since Garnish himself had changed his mind about not putting in a bid to replace the man who had hired me, and he felt that my quitting in anger would make him look bad, and had in fact already done so.

Sucker that I am for anyone willing to humble himself and play the fool by pretending to believe that I might be right about anything, and woefully short of funds after concentrating for weeks on translating an old article from a French engineering magazine that described the most efficient air engines ever built, I immediately called the Dean and apologized for any inconvenience that my temporary absence had caused him, blamed it all on a misunderstanding, and went back to work at the Music School the very next day.

When Garnish Kashka lost his bid for my benefactor’s job to an outsider who was imported from another state, he enticed me to raise my rates and then matched my low bid, knowing that between the two of us, the new guy would hire him and fire me and there would be nothing I could do about it but to whine to the Dean about a verbal contract I had with someone who no longer worked there.  And who was I to whine?  I should be happy to get a letter of recommendation, and I camped out in the Dean’s office until that nasty little politician promised to give me one.  It was the only thing I could do.  It’s not like I wanted the stupid job anyway.

 

During my last few years in Stockton I had discovered the proof that compressed air is solar energy.  The evidence had been right under my nose all the time, in references from compressed air textbooks that seemed so bizarre that even I had ignored them for years.  In an attempt to paraphrase the basic facts of pneumatic engineering in clear language that non-engineers could hope to understand, I read enough versions of the technical spew that even most engineers make no attempt to digest during their so-called education, that I was able to accomplish my goal.

The result was my newly unfinished magnum opus, Air Car Design Manual, which explains how and why the energy source in compressed air is solar energy.  The gist of this greatest of all secrets of compressed air, according to those textbook writers who were brave enough to address the issue—and most ignored it for fear of being laughed out of their profession—is that when a compressor squishes air into a smaller than normal space, all of the energy used to do this is converted to heat, which dissipates to the surrounding atmosphere, or cooling water, or whatever is used to cool the compressor.  The resulting conclusion is that all the energy used to compress air is wasted as heat.  But wait!  If all the work is wasted, then what is left over?  Compressed air!  But are these textbook writers trying to tell us that compressed air is free?  That it creates its own energy source?  That would be against the laws of thermodynamics.  So why is compressed air able to do work, if the compressor that makes the air usable wastes all of its invested work to heat its surroundings?

The textbooks go on to explain that the usable energy in a tank of compressed air was already in the air in the form of heat that was put there by the sun before the air was compressed.  Our atmosphere is heated 24 hours a day by the sun, and thus is raised from absolute zero, which would be about 460º below zero degrees Fahrenheit, up to ambient temperature.  Some of this heat is made available by smashing the atmosphere into a tank.  When an air engine uses compressed air, its pistons are pushed by heat, not pressure.  Pressure is just a measure of how much of the pre-existing heat in the air has been made available for use by trapping it in a tank to raise the air’s pressure.  This is the textbook truth; it only remains for the would-be builder of a self-fueling air engine to be inventive enough to get air into the tank in a way that doesn’t take much work—like the Magic Valve—and then to use the air as efficiently as possible, although air car inventor Bill Truitt said that a highly efficient air engine isn’t even necessary.  Remember boys and girls: compressors do not create energy, as the engineering establishment would like to believe!  Pressure does not push pistons, because it is not energy, it is just a measurement; heat is the energy that pushes the pistons of an air engine.

Before I gave away all those player pianos including the one I spent many hours reconditioning so it could at least be played by hand, I used the workshop I was paying for to prove that the torquerack engine that I had brought to a reasonably successful stopping place could actually do work.  It did a jolly good job of operating a piston air compressor, as a matter of fact, against a load.  A year later I refurbished the Mistlefoot Engine and proved that it too was able to operate a compressor against a load.  I sent a tape of the engine to Sunny, who showed it to Mistlefoot, who was so overwhelmed by the concept of the engine being named in gratitude of his effort that he actually shed tears.

 

While I had struggled with my job at the Music School, Ann K had worked for a time at a snooty clothes store downtown, and after quitting in disgust because her wealthy boss suggested that Ann accept a demotion to become her personal assistant—a ploy meant to keep Ann away from the snooty customers who she found infinitely repulsive—my sweetheart found a different job in a uniform store which was owned by a German woman with a completely un-American sense of humor.  At her new job she had far fewer co-workers to play politics with, in fact there was only one other employee besides Ann, and this woman was a working class jokester who kept Ann entertained by breaking the least essential rules whenever the boss was out of the store.  The boss in turn pretended she didn’t know that her chief assistant had a tiny television behind the counter that came out whenever she went home for lunch, and Ann particularly enjoyed standing watch for the chief assistant so that the boss could continue to pretend she didn’t know what was going on.  The arrangement worked out well for everyone involved, and Ann K derived from the job a feeling of satisfaction, based on the eccentricities and friendly warmth of the people she worked with, although she began to complain of pain in her legs from being on her feet all day, not to mention the rude customers that would occasionally come in just to ruin her day.

Because she enjoyed this job so much, Ann K in her zesty zeal to please me decided that she no longer wanted to receive a disability check, and since I was nearly employed at the time myself, I went along with her decision, not realizing how much flack I would end up taking for this, up to and occasionally including the taking of all the blame for it having been decided to begin with.  But for a few short months, Ann managed to support both of us with the assistance of my credit cards while I closed down my so-called piano shop and pretended to look for another job.  I had been able to talk the old player piano hobbyist down from his original consignment price of $3500, to $1000 due immediately, and with the helpful contribution of the banking industry I was able to dissolve this debt over the course of the next year.

During this time of unemployment I received a long message on my answering machine from Dontego Bailey in Stockton, who had received an air car project newsletter from me, and he wanted to let me know that he was out there making contacts for me and keeping his eyes open for any possible benefactor or source of funding that might get me down the road to the air car career I envisioned for myself.  Since he knew I was destitute, he said I didn’t have to spend the money to return his call, and antisocial ingrate that I am, I did not disobey.

One day I stopped by my mailbox and found therein a letter from Janine, my co-worker from the Mail Place days.  After informing me of the short-livedness of Diamonte Dante’s stint there, she got right to the point and announced that my friend Dontego Bailey had wrapped his canary yellow sports car around a pole and—

—let me reconstruct this scene as if I had been there.  Dontego Bailey always had a lot on his mind, so let’s say he was on the freeway during rush hour, and had just passed an old Cadillac that was going far slower than his little canary wanted to be going, so he was steering the little convertible with his knees, tailgating someone in the fast lane while shooting the bull with someone else on his car phone, which he held in one hand, and trying to light a short roach with the other.  With the wind in his face it was not altogether unlikely that his fancy cigarette lighter blew back and caught his beard on fire, so while the phone flew one way and the lighter flew the other and the roach went the wrong way down his windpipe, he naturally lost control of his automobile, swiped a pole by the side of the road, which would have been an entirely survivable incident if he had not been thrown clear out of his car and landed in the middle of a lane of traffic where he was instantly pummeled to death by the next two cars that came by.

With Janine’s letter clutched in my hand, I collapsed on the futon in the living room, having driven all the way from my downtown mailbox to our house on the other side of the tracks before allowing myself to start blubbering.  Ann K comforted both of us the best she could, and I wanted to flush myself down the toilet for not having called my friend back when he left his message of hope and encouragement for the success of my cherished dreams.

It became obvious at some point that a vacation as a part-time student was in order, so I started out with the intention of becoming a computer programmer, since I figured anything that the diabolical Diamonte Dante could screw up, I could screw up better, but five minutes into my first programming class and after having spend hundreds of credit card dollars on programming books and software, I realized that this field was an all-inclusive life-form of its own that would take me away from all my other interests.  So I changed my major to accounting on the advice of a business school counselor who had once tested me and decided I needed to become an accountant because they didn’t offer mechanical engineering at that particular business school.  The work was easy enough and the instructor was entertaining and personable, so I took three accounting classes before pooping out and losing interest.  I kept running into Louie Kogg’s little sister at school, who did her best to avoid me since she had been the Beast’s little tagalong when she lived in Grass Valley and undoubtedly knew more about me than I knew about myself.  Once I asked her where her brother was living, and she replied, “California.”  I took that as a hint and let her keep her Koggishness to herself after that.

Eventually my wife found me a job as a bookkeeping office assistant working for a ramrod posing as a business owner who ran her one-woman sales company out of her immaculate finished basement.  The woman hired me to help out in her office exactly sixteen hours a week, taught me a computerized bookkeeping program and her other quibblesome little office details, and then headed off to her mother’s house in Iowa for a two-week vacation after my first month of training.  She called me every single day to transmit her impression that I was destroying her business one detail at a time and to resist with all her might the belief I had that I was actually doing nearly everything she would have been doing if she had been there, in addition to the normal activities I had been hired to do.

When she returned, she took a few days to survey the damage and finally mumbled something about how I had done a pretty good job, and then she got a phone call from Iowa that her mother had unexpectedly died in her sleep.  Back to Iowa she went for another two weeks, and this time I didn’t hear from her as much, but nonetheless I did everything I could to keep her customers satisfied.  Upon her return to Eugene, the woman was not in a happy mood and there was no one else around to blame for her anxiety and consternation but me, so she nit-picked me for working fifteen minutes longer than the sixteen hours per week that she had authorized me to work, and when she found out that I had actually called one of her customers to clarify a custom order, she reamed me and then came back to ream me some more, and then came back to ream me once more for good measure, so as you might imagine, my fellow sun-worshipping idolaters, she never saw me again after that day.

In the meantime I had already begun a second job that my wife had found for me, working for an engineer as an office assistant.  The engineer was a good engineer but not so marketing oriented as to be in an uptight mood about how much I worked or how little I bothered to brown-nose him, so quitting the first of my two office jobs was no great loss, especially since I was trying to go to school anyway and had no patience for any shit-head boss who didn’t appreciate me.

Max had developed a droopiness that was uncharacteristic for him, and we blamed ourselves for being gone all the time and leaving such a compellingly social person alone with only the radio to keep him company.  So we decided to keep our eyes open for another dog to join the family.  We wanted another young, long-haired Asian dog like him, but smaller and female, preferably black-and-white.  We made a few trips to the humane society and wanted to adopt every shaggy little dog we saw, but forced ourselves to walk away till the doggie of our dreams should come along.  One night I dreamed that we were in the park by our house where we walked Max every day, and found a small, long-haired orange and white dog there.  The next day on our regular walk, there was the orange and white dog.  He was old and frail and somewhat confused, obviously lost, so we took him home, fed him and called him Marvin, and since it was the weekend there was no way to check in at the humane society to see if we could find his owner.  On Monday morning I went to the humane society and found out who was looking for Marvin, whose real name turned out to be Foxy, and the owner, a fairly macho young man who had grown up with Foxy, handed me a twenty dollar bill and turned around quickly to get in his truck so I wouldn’t see the tears welling up in his eyes.

A few weeks later I again dreamed that I was in the park and found a dog there who immediately jumped into my arms.  This dog was just like Max except she was black-and-white and very delicate compared to our Tibetan Pitbull.  Actually Max is a Lhasa Apso, but I call him a Tibetan Pitbull because his thirty pounds is all muscle and he has been known to knock me over with his unrestrained enthusiasm.

The next morning I was rushing through my homework so I could go to the humane society and look for the dog I had dreamed about, and was five minutes away from leaving to go do just that when Ann K called me from the uniform store and told me that a woman from the humane society had just been there and she said they had a dog just like Max, a female, black-and-white.  I tossed Max in the car and we hurried on over to look at the dog.

A worker showed me into a back room where the dog was being kept separately since she had been taken away from an owner who abused her.  I wouldn’t have seen her if I had just walked in casually off the street.  It turned out that she was a Shih Tzu, a Chinese breed that looks very similar to the Tibetan Lhasa Apso, but with a much more delicate temperament than the Tibetan breed.  She was only a few years old, but was deaf and hadn’t been cared for.  Her long hair was matted and she smelled even worse than Max had when we adopted him.  The worker let me into her big cage and I kneeled down to say hi.  She jumped in my lap and started kissing me all over my face, her tail wagging so fast it was a blur.  It was a forgone conclusion.  I paid the $62 for the adoption fee.  Part of the adoption process had been to introduce her to Max to see if they would hate each other, and since they only ignored each other, I was allowed to take her home.

As soon as we walked in the front door, Max and Lila started wrestling and chasing each other around the house, and they didn’t stop playing together for three solid hours.  Lila has been with me for over five years now, and is sleeping under my chair as we speak.  Since she is deaf she sleeps as close to me as possible so she will wake up if I move my chair to get up.  She won’t go anywhere without me, and given the space to do it, Max and Lila still play together every day.

That summer we went on vacation to see Judas in California where he had built himself a house on his property, after living there in a teepee for two years while he cleared the house site and milled the lumber to build the house out of his own trees.  I had smoked less than ten cigarettes in two-and-a-half years, but for some reason which I cannot rationalize, I figured what the heck, I might as well be sociable and smoke with Judas while I’m visiting him.  In preparation for this rare treat I actually started smoking a few days before we got there, and by the time we went home to Eugene, smoking was once again an entrenched daily routine, although Judas begged me to quit while I still could, each of the several times that I bragged about how long I had abstained.  A few weeks after returning from vacation, I noticed the cigarettes were giving me an irregular heartbeat, so I quit again at that time.  I had earlier given up coffee completely for the same reason.

By now it was the Spring of 1997 and as I prepared to receive a large school loan check from the government so I could concentrate on school and continue to only work part-time, I fell into a sort of mania of not caring about the practical things in life and decided we had lived in this druggie neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks for too long.  I went out and rented the first house I saw, a white house with a white picket fence, which cost twice what we had been paying at the little cottage on the other side of the tracks, yet didn’t have what I really needed, a garage to use for a workshop.  Ann didn’t say much because she wanted out of that neighborhood too and we still had some room left on the credit cards to bounce around in, although we had spent many hundreds of dollars on major appliances and restaurant meals since moving to Eugene.  The new neighborhood was very nice, full of pretty old wooden houses and close to lots of parks where we could walk the dogs and look for agates in the river, but Ann didn’t like what we were paying for it and after a few months there she grew sullen, but didn’t say what was on her mind.  I thought she was just getting tired of her job, which she was, but mainly because her legs hurt all the time.

One of our two bedrooms never got used for anything, so we advertised for a roommate but none of the students who answered our ad wanted to barge in on our obviously self-contained little family unit, especially after we mentioned that we would want to check their credit before letting them move in.

One morning I was lounging around in bed, almost awake, when I thought I smelled cigarette smoke.  I looked through the house and couldn’t find my wife, but I followed my nose and finally found her hiding in the screened porch blowing smoke out the window.  I asked her what she was mad about, since she only smoked when she was mad at me, and she tearfully informed me that she had never wanted to move into this expensive house, had done it only to please me and now wished she had spoken up when she had the chance, and she threatened to leave me if I continued to make stupid money decisions with money I didn’t have, every time I got a little excited.  I asked her to please not threaten to leave me every time she wanted to get her way, and told her to go ahead and find us a cheaper place to live if she wanted.  She told me to stay out of it and let her find the house herself, or we would end up renting the first thing we saw and she would end up feeling lost in my trip again.  I could sympathize with her not wanting to feel lost in someone else’s trip, since I had gone through the same thing many times with Judas and had grown hostile towards him on those occasions when I needed to force a feeling of separateness between our two entities.

I grabbed Ann’s pack of cigarettes and smoked one with her, and I haven’t been able to quit since.  In fact I think I’ll go outside and smoke one right now.

It would not be fair to my loyal followers were I to bypass the task of relating to some small extent the degree to which I was friendless in Eugene, Oregon by describing the one friendship to which I did subscribe.

One fine day when I was working for the University, my benefactor handed me the name and phone number of a young fellow who had called him personally to hire him for a piano project that my benefactor did not have time to pursue.  I called the man, whose name was Paul, and arranged to stop by his house to set things right between him and his piano.  He explained that he was a retarded cripple and could not get his knees under his piano keyboard because his wheelchair sat too high, so he needed bigger wheels put on the piano to raise it up a few inches and also to make it maneuverable around the room, since he was in the process of remodeling his house.  I went ahead and ordered the wheels he needed, and when they arrived I told him I was coming over.  When I got to his house, he rolled up to the door after considerable banging on my part to try and be heard over the banging of the sheetrock installers working inside.  He had shoulder-length brown hair and a mottled complexion, and although he seemed like a nice enough guy and was obviously crippled, there was no evidence that he was retarded, so I had to assume that he was merely unique like unto myself in that he enjoyed making sport of himself.  He explained that he had forgotten I was coming and was too busy to deal with me right now, so we made another appointment for me to return and install his wheels and find out what else his piano needed.

Upon my return, I found a big old upright that had been painted chickenshit yellow at some distant point in the past, as many old uprights have been treated, and besides needing to be tuned several times, it needed lots of mechanical repairs and adjustments too.  After several hours I had completed this task and was just putting a bill together when a friend of his showed up, and Paul quickly ushered his friend into another room, whence before long I could smell marijuana smoke issuing forth.  At this particular moment I had been sort of hoping to discover a source for an occasional puff of the infamous weed, knowing that it would change my life as much as it altered my mind, but I was ready to throw caution to the wind and go for it.

Although I had not been invited to the party, I felt that based on what I had seen of Paul so far, I could expect that this had only been due to his ignorance of whether I would have wanted to be invited, so in a bold move I walked right into his office, put my bill on his desk, and held out my hand for the joint that the two were passing to each other.  Paul was a little surprised but not shocked, and from that point on he was my only smoking buddy in Eugene.  For some time I purchased my stash from him, then quit for a while at my sweetheart’s behest, then when I wanted to start up again he had quit selling it and fallen into harder stuff which I didn’t approve of, so I avoided him because he kept giving pills to my wife, who adored his happy-go-lucky retarded cripple act and would ask him for pills from time to time to entertain herself with.  I had successfully encouraged her to stop drinking wine when she was happy and to stop drinking whiskey when she was not, and I didn’t want to live with a pillhead either.  It was not once but several times that she talked me into giving up pot during the few years we lived in Eugene, because she felt left out and wanted the freedom to take something to get happy with when I was doing so.  I remember once I cried like a baby because I had been trying so hard to stop smoking pot, and she was being so good, and finally after this embarrassment, I was able to stop.  Once I searched the streets of the city for a new source when I wanted to have a stash, and finally found a young man working at a deli who let me come over to his house from time to time to make purchases, but as I got involved with schoolwork instead, I left him and his product behind.

Paul and I and Ann and sometimes another friend of Paul’s, an aging hippie who rode a bike everywhere and traveled with his wife every summer, returning to Eugene every winter to house-sit and work as a swimming instructor, would often have dinner at Chompala’s Mexican Restaurant, where Paul and Ann and the other dude would swill numerous huge margaritas, and Paul and his friend would eat way too much food, until we would have to leave because Paul’s friend always became belligerent when he was not allowed to drink more than three of the huge margaritas.  Paul was a strange bird.  One day he would be laid up because he had some people over the night before and got so drunk that he crashed his wheelchair playing chase with his friends.  He never used an electric wheelchair, even to travel many blocks.  The next week he would be working on his house, working in his huge garden, or pulling himself up the stairs to his second floor to find out what was up there that smelled so bad.  One night I held a lantern for him till 2:00 a.m. while he sat in the engine compartment of his truck and performed major surgery.  One month he would rent out all the rooms in his house to students, the next month he would throw them all out.  One week he would be trying to refinance his house to pay off his huge credit card collection, or trying to sell the house, and the next week he would be sending off for a dozen more credit cards, which he had to lie to get since his steady income was limited to a disability check amounting to less than $500 a month.  He loved music, and liked to listen to me play ragtime, which he called cartoon music, and Lost Wave Music, which he also called cartoon music, and from time to time we would sit around singing old pop tunes or singing and jamming along with his Jimmy Buffett albums.  Paul’s favorite song in the whole world was Margaritaville, which I had heard thousands of times but never listened to the words before, a wise and thoughtful dissertation upon the power of time to generate the perspective that one has no one to blame including himself for the ruined relationships he leaves in his wake.

As I mentioned, Ann K thought Paul was the cutest thing that ever rolled across the floor, so one day against my better judgment I allowed Paul to take her out on the lake in his boat.  I was invited but since Paul had given up pot for alcohol and overdoses of his many prescribed medicines, I had better things to do at home.  I knew they would be gone all day, and sensed that they would be gone most of the night due to circumstances beyond my ability to predict, and when the phone finally rang at about midnight, I knew it was either the police calling me to come down and identify their bodies, or Ann calling to tell me she was leaving me to move in with Paul, or, as it turned out to be, Paul calling me on his cell phone from the middle of the lake to inform me that his boat engine had fallen off into the lake and the spare engine he had brought with him appeared to be unwilling to start.  I asked if there was anything I could do to help out, and was relieved to hear that there was not; he was just calling out of courtesy to let me know where my wife was, and they were at that very moment beginning what would be an hours-long procedure of rowing the boat back to shore.

That was my social life in Eugene.

When Paul wasn’t doing anything else, it was because he was rolling to and from classes at the University, which he would do from time to time to get his head straightened out.  His example, as well as my fundlessness and my wife’s encouragement, inspired me to go back to school one more time, this time to study something that actually interested me somewhat and applied to the air car project.  As our time in Eugene was drawing to a close, I took two classes in computer drafting, which I had already taught myself at home, but I thought if I took something fun that I already knew something about, it would be less stressful than something like accounting which was boring, not to mention an insult to my creative drive.  My boss at the engineering office even let me try doing a little drafting for him, but at work my tendency to delve too deeply into the creative enjoyment of the act of drawing lines made the project drag on too long, and it was the last time he took on a drafting job for me to do.  Meanwhile, at school I completed intricately detailed drawings of my torquerack engine and the Mistlefoot Engine, which became part of the Pneumatic Options Research Library catalog, not that I was actually advertising, and hadn’t for over three years.

One day I called Al Margin’s brother up in Portland to see if he could put me in touch with my old acid-eating partner, and I was told that Al Margin had run off to Los Angeles a few years earlier with his girlfriend Pinkie, where they had lived the fast life until Al Margin stole Pinkie’s Mama’s car and wrecked it, putting himself in the hospital, but escaped from there because they wouldn’t give him any good drugs and because his next scheduled stop after the hospital was to be jail, and he has not been heard of since.  Spudboy, if you’re out there, thanks for making me play all those songs over and over till I could remember the words even with people looking.  And I’m sorry I was rude to you at Trucker’s party when you tried to tell me I “had to” play my new song, and I snootily informed you that I did not have to.

One weekend Ann K and I drove up to Portland to go shopping at the used record and book stores, though it was my chief ambition on this trip to track down my old friend Krishna Bernie, more than it was to add to my collection of material items.  When I lived in Stockton, Bernie had written me a few letters and even sent me an article on farcical perpetual motion machines that he had clipped out of a National Lampoon magazine for me.  That was the last letter he wrote me; I never had gotten around to writing him back.

We stopped at the building where Bernie and I had once lived, but his name was no longer on the mail box, so we drove to a large used record store we liked to go to which was actually a cooperative where several used record dealers stocked their wares in individual stalls.  Since used records was Bernie’s gig for many years, I figured it was a safe bet that someone in there would be able to point me in his direction.  Although he had talked for years about moving to India, he had eventually given up that ambition for a more ambitionless state that suited him better.

With my heart ticking warmly due to the great deal of enthusiasm I felt for the project at hand, I asked the man behind the counter if he knew where I could find my old friend Bernie Greene, and the man stepped back for a moment and looked at me closely.  He informed me that Bernie had died about eight years earlier from lung cancer.  I told him Bernie and I had been close friends, and thanked him for the information.  We left in a hurry and my best friend Ann K held me up while I stumbled down the sidewalk blubbering for all to see, and then I drove around aimlessly, blubbering some more.  Why didn’t I write him back?  Once again I wished I could flush myself down the toilet for being such a useless friend.

For many years I had been wanting to start an autobiographical writing project which I had tentatively entitled The Last Jesus Movie, but every attempt to get the project rolling had been stifled by the plaintive seriousness of the voice with which I kept trying to relate my bizarre tale.  Finally, with no marijuana to distract me from my normal state of confusion, I was able to home in on an honest expression of how I actually perceived myself—as a hopelessly inept pseudo-human trying to get a job as the savior of a race of beings so foreign to him, yet who resided on and defaced such a perfect Planet, that his motivation to complete the task was as hard to stay on top of as it was defiantly unstoppable—and before finally sitting down and breezing through the first few chapters of the not-a-novel that you hold in your hand, I realized that my goal had to be to somehow rewrite my life as a comedy.  An ironic, sometimes downright sinister comedy of errors, but the point being, any attempt to take myself seriously or to embellish my actual abilities had in the past embarrassed me into muteness, so I careened through the first 120 pages of the first draft in a month, focused finally on an achievable goal: to stay in touch with my own predilection for sarcastic self-deprecation and the merciless divulgement of the inexcusable shortcomings of those who dared to stand in my way, and to never stray any farther from that voice than absolutely necessary.  The successful discovery of the voice was prompted and inspired by none other than the novel Forrest Gump by Winston Groom, whose fictional narrator is a complete idiot who succeeds at everything he does without even trying.  My journey, on the other hand, had to be narrated by an unusually intelligent and talented fool who fails at everything he attempts not matter how hard he tries.

Behold.

Ever since the 1970s I had been hearing about a supposedly hallucinogenic plant called Diviner’s Sage that the shamans of Mexico cultivated.  One day I was in a bookstore In Eugene that specialized in weirdness of all kinds when I came upon a new book that gave all the details, including descriptions of the effects of the newly synthesized active ingredient of the plant, and since the descriptions were so terrifying and the author of the book was convinced that the plant contained the most potent psychedelic compound on the face of the Earth, I figured what the heck, I’d better find me one of these plants and give it a try.  This was easily accomplished in a New Age town like Eugene.

The book said I could expect the effects of smoking the plant to be unpredictable except that there would be no physical side-effects like nausea or headache, and that whatever effects did result from merely smoking the leaves would be over in a few minutes anyway, even if frightening, which I did not expect them to be to such a seasoned veteran of drug-induced panic as me.  Therefore, because I did not want to be disappointed with my first smoking session, I decided to combine the experiment with the decidedly harrowing and long-lived effects of the hallucinogenic morning glory seeds that I had played around with from time to time throughout my career as a complete idiot.  I had read that the smoke-induced trance was ephemeral at best for most people, and could be reinforced by locating the experience in a completely darkened room.  So I collected a few of the dried leaves that had fallen off my plant and stuffed them into the bowl of my water pipe.  I ground up 300 morning glory seeds and stuffed them into gelatin capsules which I choked down over a period of an hour, and during that hour I blocked and blanketed and taped off the window to my bedroom so that not one single photon could get through.  I did the same with the bedroom door, stuffing towels under the door, taping the edges, and when nothing else would keep the dim light from coming in around the edge of the door, I leaned the ironing board against the wall where it effectively blocked out the last rays of daylight.  I had made a bong to smoke the leaves in, and as soon as I started getting woozy from the morning glories, I lay down in bed and waited for the first and the second trips to the bathroom so I could disgorge the churningly eager contents of my stomach.  With this unpleasantness out of the way, I closed the door, put all my light inhibiting devices into place, lit a candle and lay back to wait for the more pleasant psychedelic effects of the morning glories to come on.  Having learned my lesson from my previous morning glory session in the heat of the sun at Raging Bull Meadow, I moved very little and just lay in bed dictating what I thought must be my most brilliant thoughts ever into a tape recorder until in the uppermost reaches of what I thought must be the most pleasant morning glory trip I had ever taken, I sat on the edge of the bed and blew out the candle and took my matchbook in hand to light the first bowlful of the Diviner’s Sage.  At this point I had been speaking into the tape recorder for over an hour, so goaded as I was by the momentum of the lysergic acid cousins hauling ass through my brain, it was only natural that I continue speaking into the tape recorder, describing each activity in turn: lighting the match, getting ready to take a big huge lungful, etc.

I took the first lungful of the smoke, discovering that it tasted like crude petroleum, held it for a few moments, and feeling disappointed that nothing seemed to be going on, I quickly reloaded the bowl and started on the second hit.  While holding the second hit in my lungs, I decided that the experiment had failed utterly to achieve any noticeable effect, but then realized that the smoke in my lungs was giving me the odd sensation that if I wanted to, I could hold it in there for the rest of my life.  I suppose this feeling that breathing was no longer necessary could have had something to do with the fact that I had more or less left my body.  I was just beginning to feel pleased that something was going to happen, ruminating briefly upon the first time I had succeeded in getting stoned on marijuana, and finding the two events highly comparable, when I felt my normal state of consciousness being grabbed by something akin to an automated and mindless psychic meathook and being dragged out of my physical form more quickly and completely than I had been prepared to experience, resulting in the thought that whatever I had just smoked—and I no longer had any idea what it had been—was smashing my mind irretrievably and permanently.  This thought became as real to whatever part of my awareness was still functioning as a gravestone is to a grave, and I honestly don’t remember knocking the bong over, jumping to my feet or falling to the carpet or whatever I did in those first few moments of the most complete panic I have ever felt or could ever imagine feeling.

My next conscious memory is of pushing my face into the carpet in an attempt to squeeze under the darkened crack of the door—not that I knew what a door was, or even where it was in the completely darkened room—and screaming: HELP!  HELP!  OH FUCK OH SHIT!  HELP ME!  HELP!  HELP! HELP!

Oddly enough, central to the overwhelmingly complete panic was a feeling of embarrassment for having really blown it this time: I could sense my neighbors crowding around the front door of my apartment wondering whether to break down the door or just call the police.  But at the same time, the language centers of my brain were not functioning enough that I could have said or thought words like “neighbors,” “door,” or “police;” I only felt these concepts, and felt them so strongly that I was able to force myself to stop screaming only because I didn’t want the embarrassment of having them see me out of control when they did break my door down, which I was sure they would.

I staggered to my feet—not that I knew what feet were, and I couldn’t really feel my body, but it was a sort of autonomous action.  Unable to actually balance on feet that I was not quite aware of, I leaned back against something and let that thing, whatever it was, take all of my weight, whatever weight was.  I could feel my body now, but my consciousness was completely devoid of the ability to describe anything, and therein lay the next thing to panic about, now that the embarrassment had faded.  Waves of panic swept through me like hurricanes, and all my rudimentary ability to vocalize could come up with was: YOU’RE GOING TO BE OK!  YOU’RE GOING TO BE OK! YOU’RE GOING TO BE OK!  I repeated this mantra for long minutes, not soothed by it but kept in one more or less contiguous piece by it, striving with every fiber of my being to keep those fibers of my being from separating from each other and going in random, irreversible directions.

I was leaning backward on my arms and hands, and I became obsessed with whatever it was that my fingers were touching.  Concentrating on this thing, whatever it was, held my consciousness from splintering through the next few minutes—which seemed like an eternity, and unfortunately I did know what Eternity was, because I could feel it, and I didn’t like having it in my face.  The object that I stroked with my fingers became in my mind the windowsill of my room, not that I knew what a windowsill or a room was, and I continued to talk out loud to myself, forcing empty promises that all would be well, not because I believed that all would be well, but because when I allowed the obverse of that thought to take hold, the panic became indescribably excruciating.

Finally, as I continued to stroke the knobby long thing that protruded from whatever I was leaning against, I remembered that I had smoked something, and then I remembered the general layout of my bedroom well enough that I was able to lower myself to the floor and crawl around till I found the ironing board and flung it across the room, exposing a strip of light that led me to the edge of the door.  I found the doorknob and yanked the door open, expecting to find a crowd of worried neighbors huddled there, but only Max and Lila had huddled outside the door with worried expressions, and as Max licked me back to a fairly usable state of awareness and I thanked the stars that I had not dismembered my animals during my delirium, I temporarily became the most devout anti-drug crusader the world had ever known.  By the time Ann K arrived home from work, I was just tripping on morning glories again, and could barely believe my own memories of what had taken place.

Other than to mention that I will never again combine Diviner’s Sage with any other drug, it is only fair to also mention that the few times I tried it by itself it still provoked an all-out—though short-lived—panic that could only be allayed by crawling from the room.  Although not everyone has this experience with smoking the leaves, apparently the vast majority of people who try smoking the pure extract of the active ingredient would never consider trying it a second time.  Since the plants were in my house for years after I stopped having any desire to ever try smoking them again, I eventually gave them away to the less faint-hearted, with serious second thoughts and warnings to not take the trip lightly, or without supervision, or combined with any other psychedelic, and especially to hide one’s car keys before smoking.  So far everyone has reported back to me that they had fairly interesting, fearless and innocuous experiences.  I have begun to wonder if there could be something wrong with my ability to process chemicals in my body, since I had major panics attacks when I first started smoking pot, and really still do, although I’ve learned to take that particular version of paranoia with a grain of salt.

At this point in my career as a dimwit, I became utterly convinced that my tendency to fear people and responsibility, as well as my tendency to develop compulsive habits such as smoking cigarettes when I actually hated the taste of them, hated the way they made me smell, and despised the fact that most of my girlfriends had refused to come near me unless I gave them up, all this plus more convinced me that there was something dreadfully wrong with my psychological makeup, and that I needed a personality transplant.  This new round of tobacco addiction was marked by a new symptom or two.  First, I could not run with my dogs the way I was used to doing because of the mildly nauseated way I felt all the time.  I kept telling myself that I had only a short time to give the habit up before I would go over the line to irreversible health problems.  Second, it suddenly became necessary for me to poop every time I smoked.  All my so-called adult life I had been plagued by the entertaining need to take a dump every time I walked into a bookstore or a library.  This unexplainable psychosomatic complaint, which my girlfriends had always found mildly amusing, had been with me so long I eventually forgot about it and it more or less went away, although because of my new infatuation with video stores, the urge sometimes overcame me there instead.  But when cigarettes became the trigger that made me instantly need to run to the bathroom, the problem became a major annoyance and a threat to my health, and there were many times when a cigarette was followed by a mad dash for home when no public toilet was available.  I later discovered that the disorder is called Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or IBS, and that smoking is known to make the condition worse.  My Daddy later informed me that IBS explained his lifelong love affair with the toilet, his frequent trips to the doctor which he wasn’t sure weren’t psychosomatic or stress-related, and his consumption of Metamucil and other products in hopes of obtaining some relief from the need to constantly relieve himself.

In hopes that a personality transplant would cure me of smoking and paranoia and everything else I had to endure from myself, I had tried many things during my life from Primal Therapy to Rebirthing to New Age hypnotists who knew so much less hypnosis than I did that they might as well have tried to induce a state of one-pointed concentration in me by tickling the bottoms of my feet with a feather.  Since I believed that only serious students of Ericksonian hypnotherapy or NLP stood a chance of getting my conscious mind to go to sleep so my unconscious resources could be accessed and rearranged for greater productivity, I contacted a woman who I had heard was a hypnotherapist with NLP training.  She informed me that she actually did not use hypnosis, but that she did have training in NLP, so rather than continue the search for what I really wanted, I proceeded to drain the next to the last drops out of my credit cards by going to her weekly.

Informing her that I expected a complete personality transplant, and that I had just recovered from a bad cold caused by smoking cigarettes, and that I had just managed to give up marijuana for the thousandth time, she decided I would be a good guinea pig for an experimental New Age therapy she wanted to learn on somebody, so although I wanted to tell her to take a hike at this point since she obviously had her own game of tiddly-winks in mind instead of what I had come to her for, with me paying $60 an hour for her to play it on my head, I was unwilling to back out of the game at this point, as if we were married or something, because I didn’t want to break her heart, and because she was nice to me.

Before starting on the experimental therapy, she did one NLP procedure with me which more or less changed my life in a small yet substantial way, and then she proceeded to assist me in divesting me of the ability to use my credit cards in large weekly chunks which I went along with against my own better judgment because I didn’t want to disappoint her or force her to seek a different guinea pig for her experiment in pop psychology.  The gist of the experimental therapy—which like everything else I’d ever tried was supposed to uncover repressed traumatic memories, thus curing me of my personality problems—was similar to a dice game.  My higher psychic centers were supposedly in charge of what came up in a spin of the wheel, and depending on where the pointer landed, we consulted a chart which told me what my problem was and what sort of hocus-pocus would cure me.  Like jumping up and down on one foot and hopping backwards in a circle while reciting a nursery rhyme, or consulting my subconscious for nice things I could say about myself.  Having read trillions of books on pop psychology in my desperate lifelong search for a meaning behind my compulsive, paranoid, anti-social nature, it was no sweat to provide affirmations or psychobabble truisms or whatever was called for by the game of chance she had decided we should play with the vast amounts of money I was spending on her.  It was when the spinner informed us that it was now time to tackle the psychodynamics behind my debt problem, and she frowned and wondered aloud if perhaps I hadn’t spun the spinner properly, that I got an inkling that perhaps this would be my last session with her, and by Golly so it was.

The one exercise she did with me that had anything to do with NLP, before we began the other psychobabble crap game, had a lasting effect on how I made decisions after that.  Although it didn’t transform me in any way or create an inner resource that I didn’t already have, it did give me a unique perspective: mine.  I heard no bells and whistles and saw no fireworks going off, but the effect on my so-called life was not subtle.  I was instructed to choose a person in my recent experience who I had had an angry encounter with, preferably someone I was still angry at.  I chose the boss lady who had snubbed me for keeping her business from going under while she vacationed and then attended her mother’s funeral in Iowa.  The exercise consisted of putting myself in her shoes and experiencing her perspective with all my might, then stepping back into my own perspective and doing the same thing, and although I don’t remember the exact details of all the perspective switching I had to do in those twenty minutes, I credit this exercise with giving me the ability to retain my sanity when my creditors started coming for me after I became unable a few months later to keep my perfect credit record unbesmirched by late payments and finally by no payments at all.  If not for this lesson in how to tell the difference between my perspective and others’, which served as a reminder that it was not necessary or productive to sacrifice my peace of mind in a misguided attempt to empathize with the needs of corporate banking institutions, I might have jumped off a cliff when it became impossible for me to continue being a good boy for them while ignoring my own needs.

While I dabbled with my part-time job as office boy for an engineer and worked day and night on my computer drafting assignments at school, Ann K had become unmotivated and unable to keep her schedule at work, and blamed me for supposedly talking her into giving up her disability check.  Because of the pain in her legs that made it hard for her to sleep or work, she went to the doctor and got some tests done.  She came home one day and told me that she had hepatitis C, an incurable form of hepatitis that can only be contracted by contact with infected blood.

The news numbed me from head to toe.  I didn’t feel anything except burdened.  By now my sweetheart had threatened to leave me so many times, seemingly every time we had a minor disagreement, that I didn’t know how I felt about her any more.  A veil went over my will to live out my dreams, and I decided without really thinking about it that I would devote the rest of my life—or the rest of her life—to helping my wife, but no spark of enthusiasm existed, no wave of melancholic martyred pride washed over me; I just shriveled up inside and waited to see which one of us would collapse into utter uselessness first, and whether the so-called marriage would survive the crash.  It became a bitter disputed issue between us whether she had wanted to move to Eugene with me at all, and she eventually came to the conclusion that she had only come there to please me.  We began to think about moving somewhere else.  I suggested Grass Valley, since I thought I had friends there, and that made her about as enthusiastic as a turtle floating in turtle soup.  Grass Valley to her was the very embodiment of her unwanted image of herself as a chameleonic tagalong.

One of the things that Ann K had learned to hate about me was my growing need to indulge in road rage.  I was never what I considered to be the perpetrator of these incidents, although I had had the problem off-and-on as long as I had owned a car.  My thing was to wait for someone else to aggress on me: to be rude to me or follow too closely or pass too aggressively or honk at me for going too slow or just drive dangerously or change lanes too much; that person became my sworn enemy and I would risk my life to write down their license number, then try to follow them so I could confront them, or tailgate them to get even, or scream insults out my window, or follow them home to intimidate them with the knowledge that I knew where they lived.  Nothing Ann could say, including threatening to leave me or reminding me that she and our dogs were in the car, could put me in an objective frame of mind; only embarrassment ever did anything to help me get my ridiculous self-indulgent need for an anonymous enemy under temporary control.  During the day I would frantically seek out trouble as I drove from time-wasting activity to money-wasting opportunity, and at night I would berate myself for being an asshole in public.  I would rein it in for a while, then it would pop out of me again when I became complacent and forgot to be vigilant.  An example of this complacent non-vigilance led to the second occasion on which it became necessary to use the self-defense strategies I had learned in Aikido.

One day I was downtown on my way to my daily time-wasting activity of checking my mail, which was always bad news anyway that shouldn’t have required a daily trip to rediscover, and as I spacily drifted up to a stop sign near the mail-handling facility where I rented a mailbox, a beefy-looking young man with long black hair was running down the sidewalk toward the same stop sign.  As I drifted a foot past the stop sign before getting my car all the way stopped, he ran out into the street in front of my car without looking, and then had to veer away to avoid colliding with my vehicle.  He made an angry comment informing me that I should have stopped at the sign, not past it, and without thinking I popped my head out the window and informed him that he was a pompous faggot for trying to educate strangers with his big mouth.  Not that I ever had anything against pompous faggots, but since in my younger days I had been the target of bullies who felt compelled to insult my masculinity, feeling powerful behind the wheel made me especially vulnerable to trying to do them one better.  There was nothing the slightest bit effeminate about the swarthy and self-absorbed pedestrian who had shouted at me, and that was reason enough for me to insult him, for he reminded me of a macho jerk named Pekarek in high school who had made it his business to call me a pussy every single time we passed in the halls for four years.

Having gotten the pedestrian, who I will call Pekarek, confused with a car driver—who disappears from sight in moments—I assumed the confrontation was over and parked my car.  But as I walked toward my mailbox place, I heard someone across the street yelling: Hey faggot!

It was Pekarek.  He was no longer in a hurry to get to where he had been running to, and instead was matching me step for step across the street.  Hey faggot! he yelled again.  I stuck my tongue out between my lips and sprayed as loudly as I could, he yelled another insult, I sprayed again, and again, and again, and finally he took off running, so I once more assumed that he was on his way and I had seen the last of him.

But as I came within ten paces of my mailbox place, I heard someone in front of me say, Hey faggot, you better hope you have martial arts training!  I looked up and here comes Pekarek, right at me, with the obvious intent to do damage.

My Aikido teacher had told us that you will know without any doubt when someone actually intends to hurt you, as opposed to someone who is just making empty threats.  When Pekarek’s long leg flew off the ground toward my groin, I knew that someone actually intended to hurt me.  However, my inner knowledge that I was the stupid loudmouth co-instigator of the event had put me off balance enough that until I saw his foot leap into the air, I was merely afraid of losing most of my teeth rather than ready to act.  So it wasn’t until the foot connected with my upper thigh, missing my family jewels by an inch, that I let go with a mighty kiai, as I had done hundreds of times in Aikido class, but rather than shouting Hey! or Back off! or any of the other versions of kiai that I had practiced, I shouted the name of the man who owned the mailbox place: DOAK!

That was his name.  Pekarek’s assault was diffused instantly by my kiai, as my Aikido teacher had assured us that most assaults will be, and Doak appeared on the sidewalk before I could see where Pekarek had disappeared to.  I excitedly hollered at Doak that some stranger had just kicked me in the nuts because he didn’t like the way I was driving, and the look of concern on Doak’s face prompted me to quickly add that the assailant had actually missed his target by an inch, and had not hurt me.  We heard someone yell, and there was Pekarek across the street again, shaking his fist at me.  Doak sneered and flipped him off and took me inside, begging me to not call the police since my assailant had already taken off at a gallop.  If Doak hadn’t been there to calm me down, I would have jumped in my car and gone looking for Pekarek and run him down if possible, claiming temporary insanity at my murder trial.  My lawyer would have had to bring the real Pekarek all the way from Hazing, Kansas to testify on my behalf that he had indeed done his very best to drive me off the deep end by calling me a pussy four thousand, seven hundred and eighty-nine times while we were in high school.

Meanwhile, up in heaven, a tall black man wearing sweats, a T-shirt emblazoned with “Hugs not Drugs,” and an old pair of leather sandals is wandering around amongst a sprawling conglomeration of shacks and huts and cabins and cottages of every conceivable description from every place and time during human history.  He is not overly concerned with much of anything, although he vaguely wonders where he is and how he ended up there.  He spots a small weather-beaten cottage that lacks any trace of paint on its exterior, and notices two drumsticks on the front steps, so he meanders in that direction.  Someone has carved a slogan in the front door: All for Air! and below it someone has scrawled in crayon, More Power to us All!

He picks up the drumsticks and taps out a long solo on the front door of the cottage, in the space between the two slogans, his entire life on Earth flashing before his eyes as he plays.  When he finishes the solo with a flourish, breaking both drumsticks in the process, the door opens a crack, and he speaks in a booming voice to the tall, beak-nosed, bearded man peering out at him: Howdy Commander!  Got a smoke?

The thin man inside opens the door a crack further and squeezes outside, and speaks in the accent of a New York Jew: I was just about to have one myself.  He shuts the door behind him and plants his bony posterior on the wooden steps.  He pulls a plastic bag out of the pocket of his faded red windbreaker, and from it he extracts two hand-rolled cigarettes, handing one to the newcomer, muttering something about how he misses his Benson & Hedges 100s.

What’s this we’re smoking? the newcomer asks, sniffing the little paper cylinder.  Parsley?

Yeah, the New Yorker responds, No tobacco in heaven.  He crinkles up his nose and laughs.  The black man laughs louder, and extends his hand.  Clark Kent, but my friends call me Dontego Bailey, if they know what’s good for them.

The other man extends his bony hand.  Bernie Greene, but my friends call me when they need emergency housing.  He crinkles up his nose and laughs, and Dontego Bailey laughs louder.

When they’ve finished their parsley cigarettes, Bernie hoists himself to his feet and gestures toward the door.  Wanna come in? he asks, raising his bushy eyebrows above his hawkish nose.  He continues, I’m warning you, once you come in you can’t go anywhere else till he finishes what he’s doing down below.

And who is this he to which you refer? Dontego Bailey asks.

Maxwell Zdaemon, our future savior.

Mister Air Car himself, huh?  Well I don’t have a car, no place to go, what’s the harm in helping old Maxwell out for a spell?

He’s not too easy to help, especially from here.  Bernie raises his eyebrows and gestures toward the door again.

Why not? Dontego Bailey booms, clapping the aging hippie on a bony shoulder blade and nearly knocking him down.  Do they have weed in heaven? he asks as Bernie opens the door.

Are you kidding?  Don’t need it.  Here we got TV like you never seen it.  Reality TV, if you can call watching a loser wandering around with his thumb up his butt “reality.”

You don’t say, Dontego Bailey remarks, closing the flimsy wooden door behind them.