CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

In which I experience total enlightenment and its dire consequences

 

In the midst of one of Ann K’s attempts to get me to agree to move away to some other city where our problems would no longer exist, the phone rang, and it was someone I had never expected to hear from again: Dab Mostly, the King of Rocks.  I had sent him a christmas card with a color photocopy of the whole family on it, probably because I had thoughts of returning to Grass Valley now that I thought I might be less unemployable than I used to be when I lived there before, but I hadn’t expected to hear back from him.

Judas had mentioned during one of his diatribes against Dab’s eccentricities, paranoias, and supposed duplicities, that Dab’s only real ambition in life was to be the King of Rocks, and that he didn’t care who got in his way.  The epithet had stuck in my mind permanently.  Judas and Dab’s final go-round had been over whether Judas, as Dab’s friend and sometimes employee, had the moral right to date a woman who was working in Dab’s rock shop.  It was Dab’s position that Judas was putting some kind of unnamable pressure on him.  It was Judas’s position that Dab could get fucked forever.

It was many months past christmas by now, and Dab was calling to thank me—he called me Maxwell, by the way, the only friend I had in Grass Valley who refused to call me Luther—for the christmas card, to say hi, and to reaffirm that we were still “good friends,” as he put it, so with those words I sat back and held my breath for whatever melodramatic sequence of seductive  passion plays might be forthcoming.  He wanted to know what my interest was in the rose quartz mine that we had once owned together, and I explained that by now I had given the claim up after coming to the conclusion that owning a claim on the spot was a superfluous bit of red-tape-generating possessiveness, especially since no one else seemed to be interested in going there anyway, least of all my claim partner at the time, Dab himself.

A few years beyond the current account of Dab’s searching phone call to me in Eugene, when the knowledge did me absolutely no good, Dab volunteered the information that I am going to impart right now, up front.  It seems that Dab had, at the time of his surprise phone call, a girlfriend from Scandinavia who was itching to get into the rock business with him, and under this kind of pressure—since involvement with other people was not only a chief obsession but his greatest fear—he had been searching far and wide in his overactive imagination for some way he could involve her in his business without affecting his rock shop, which was his bread-and-butter and was strictly hands-off to all but himself.  Alighting on the resource of his undying love for the “heart stone,” rose quartz, and his perennial desire to own a rose quartz mine of his own, he was considering the possibility of putting a new claim on the mine down by Raging Bull Meadow and letting his girlfriend be his partner in the venture.  Since one of the greatest of his many overriding fears in life was that he would always be stopped anytime he tried to claim a mine and make it his, he was really calling me to find out if I had the sort of interest in the spot that could conceivably screw things up for him and his girlfriend.  But he did not reveal these motivating factors behind the phone call until much later.

In the meantime, Dab Mostly and I spent hours on the phone over the next few weeks, not only because I was getting hot for my rose quartz mine again and felt some pressure myself to protect it from being raped by bulldozers and dynamite—and I was afraid of Dab’s grandiose dreams of being the King of Rocks—but also because Dab was like a teenage girl in that once he got on the phone it was somewhat difficult to dismount him.  By the time his relationship with his girlfriend had gone the way of all his relationships, with her standing outside his rock shop screaming at him, throwing rocks at him, and embarrassing him in front of the neighboring business owners, and with him retiring into self-righteous indignation and the comfort of having simplified his life once again by divesting himself of emotional entanglements, I had caught rose quartz fever once more and was pushing Dab pretty hard to find me a way into the rock business so I could move to Grass Valley and be self-employed doing what I imagined might be more fun than working at a real job.  Ann K caught my enthusiasm and enjoyed watching me play politics with Dab over the phone, and she seemed willing to give Grass Valley another try, so I took the bus to Grass Valley in mid-August of 1998 and Dab drove me to the mountains of Central California so I could show him the three rose quartz mines I was interested in, which included the one he had owned with me once but had never gone to visit.

We left at 5:00 a.m., since part of Dab Mostly’s personality was to treat business as business and time as money, and he wanted to get as much done as possible while we were there.  He had had several years to study the 365 pounds of rose quartz I had given him, and had fallen in love with it when he realized it was “star quartz,” meaning that it contained microscopic fibers giving it the quality that if it was cut at the right angle, the light entering the stone would form a six-pointed star, like those seen in star sapphires or star rubies.  This made the stone much more valuable than he had at first thought it would be, back when I was bringing home gray quartz with just a little bit of color in it; now that he knew it was star quartz he insisted that even the gray and smoky magenta stone had some value, because it would star as well as the rare hot pink.

After he drove for hours he finally carried out his long-standing threat to pull over and get us something to eat.  Since he lived in an area overrun with health food enthusiasts, he was self-conscious about stopping at a fast food place, and kept making juvenile references to the meat by-products they supposedly used in manufacturing their patties as “penises and vaginas.”  Then he would look at me out of the corner of his eye to see if I thought his joke was funny.  This guy could make anyone uncomfortable, and seemed to enjoy doing it.  The meal was to be his treat, since I was almost completely broke.  He ordered three sandwiches and I ordered one sandwich and a small order of fries.  When the bag of penises and vaginas appeared, we hit the road jack, and he handed me my sandwich, but kept my fries for himself by stashing them in the far left corner of the dashboard.  I assumed he was testing me to see if I was a grabby little grub like he considered my good friend Judas to be, or if I was a conciliatory sycophant like he hoped I would be.  I kept my mouth shut so he would think I was the latter, aspiring to reassure myself that if we became partners in a real mining project he might consider helping me get established in Grass Valley, since I was desperately disinterested in scrounging around for a job in that little overpriced town, which was being overtaken by yuppies from the city and their ability and willingness to drive up the cost of living by paying twice as much for property as it was worth on the local market.  I hinted around aggressively and almost pushily for him to expose one tiny corner of willingness to commit himself to the kind of financial assistance he had given me before, but he eventually came right out and told me that in order to protect himself from getting overly involved with other people’s needs, he had to be purposely vague about what, if anything, he might be willing to do for someone.  Still he made all kinds of suggestions of his own, such as handing over the lower cabin on his property to me for use as a lapidary shop, but when I came back enthusiastically with a level of interest in taking him up on his offer that bordered on droolish, he retreated into the vagueness that always enshrouded his offers.  When I mentioned that it would be nice if Ann K and I and our two little dogs could move into the cabin temporarily, he got kind of terrified and used the dogs as an excuse to gently pooh-pooh the idea, blaming his own pathological need for extreme privacy for his reluctance to share his property, except for the purpose of temporary storage.  He stressed how much harder it was to make a living selling rocks than it had been when we had first met toward the end of the crystal craze that had paid for his property and the two-story house he had built on it.

When we finally turned off the main road to head up into the mountains, he cagily looked around for any sign of people, then pulled off the road and told me to move quickly: it was now time to steal grapes.  He ran into the vineyard next to where he had parked, and gleefully piled his arms full of bunches of ripe seedless grapes, and when he could carry no more, we jumped into his truck and tore out of there, eating grapes till we could eat no more.  He giggled gloatingly about his exploit, but wondered aloud if he had possibly made a bad business move by subjecting us to possible arrest, and I didn’t know what to say.  I have always been deathly afraid of being caught trespassing, and stealing grapes was a lot harder for me than it seemed to be for him.

Once at the Second Wind mine, where my obsolete claim stake still stood, Dab Mostly grew intensely anxious to discover clues that anyone else might have been there since my last visit.  He saw me looking at him sideways and assured me that he would overcome his attack of paranoia in a few minutes and settle down to have some fun.  I showed him around the little quarry and we hauled shovels, digging bars, hammers, rock chisels, and a wheelbarrow up from the truck.  He fished our marijuana stashes and pipes out of the mattress he kept in the back of his truck; he would not smoke while driving, afraid that his reputation as a businessman would be destroyed if he ever got busted.  The road leading directly to the mine was no longer kept locked, so he was able to drive directly to it and we set up camp 200 paces downhill from it.  Because of this, he never even saw Raging Bull Meadow.

Dab told me I could set my tent up as close to his truck as I wanted.  It was one of those statements he was always making that filled me with anxiety because I couldn’t tell why he would say something like that unless he was really hinting that he wanted some space.  When camp was all set up we hauled ass up the hill and dug like crazy.  I saw him growing discouraged early on, so I took him to the best spot in the quarry and said, Dig here.  I explained that the quartz had flowed out of the side of the steep hill, and not from below our feet.  In a few hours he dug out more good color than I had dug from the mine in all the years I had been going there.  He finally announced that he was getting tired and wanted to go back to camp and eat before it got dark so he could go to sleep early.  I said I could dig another three hours, and he seemed to take offense.  He didn’t like being over 50 and having to pamper his back.  After a few minutes of stifling silence from his direction I said he was right, we better quit and go make dinner.  We walked down to camp and he took an exaggerated sharp left at his truck and said good night.  I was surprised he didn’t think we should eat together, smoke together, and get sleepy shooting the shit like Judas always wanted to do when we went digging.  I couldn’t imagine how anyone could get tired of me so fast.

We had so much rock already that Dab was ready to go home by mid-morning of the following day.  I was heartbroken that he didn’t want a grand tour of all three mines, but he seemed anxious to get home or to get away from me, I couldn’t tell which.  I didn’t say much, although it was traditional for me to spend as much time at each of the three mines as I could spare, every time I bothered to drive so far.  Of course he had dug up so much gemstone compared to the quantities I was used to getting that the truck was already loaded to capacity and he was tired of digging.  And maybe tired of me.

When we got back to Dab’s house he wanted to take a bath and go to bed, and since I was excited to be back in Grass Valley I felt like a prisoner to his whim, so after sitting in the guest cabin for a few minutes where he had sent me with instructions to take a nap, feeling sorry for myself and starting to get pissed that I wasn’t still in the mountains digging, I went in his house and called Sunny to come get me so I could get some real attention.  Being on Dab’s property and being expected to give him some space made me too uncomfortable and I didn’t want to blow it with him by telling him how I felt and thereby injuring his feelers, so I assured him that I would make Sunny promise not to run around town drawing maps to his house, and disappeared with my sleeping bag to spend the next few days with more easygoing friends.

I tuned Benny Joe Pelton’s piano for him; that was exactly four years ago, and I haven’t tuned a piano since.  After a portentous run-in with Jonesy in a grocery store—in which Jonesy walked up to me and spoke these words: “Self-denial is a negative head trip”—Sunny drove me around showing me rentals and buying me junk food, Benny Joe and I played music together, and on a trip to the local food coop I put up a notice on the bulletin board, on a spur of the moment inspiration, in which I requested that anybody who knew of a good donatable rental for the air car project or a caretaking position for Luther, Ann K and their two dogs should call me in Eugene and let me know about it.  Before leaving for Eugene I went back to Dab Mostly’s property to evaluate our haul, with which we were both quite pleased.  I took two fist-sized rocks for myself and told him to keep the rest, then jumped on the bus and went home.

Over the next few weeks the reality set in that being a mine partner with Dab Mostly was not going to be my piece of cake, and Ann K was happy to see that I was losing interest in moving to Grass Valley.  We started talking about staying where we were or finding a new place to go where we could start fresh.  Moving to Grass Valley had pretty much come to seem like a stupid idea and we were both relieved that I’d gotten it out of my system, when the phone rang.

It was the Beast.

She had seen my notice on the bulletin board at the food coop.  She explained that she was moving to Colorado with some friends and told me about the caretaking position she was leaving behind, suggesting that I call her landlord to see if I could take it over for her when she left.  She was so calmly friendly that I went goofy over the concept that Grass Valley really was the place for me: I had friends there, for crying out loud, and I was tired of not having a social life.  Ann let herself get carried along by my re-discovered enthusiasm, and we used the last dribble of credit we had left to rent a U-Haul and move to Grass Valley, where we put all our stuff in Dab Mostly’s lower cabin.

As the Beast used to say, “The universe doesn’t give us more than we can’t handle.”

Thank you, Beast, for luring me back to the one place in the world that has always done its best to destroy me.  I must have had it coming.  I hope you aren’t pleased with how I didn’t handle it.

In the process of getting ready to move, I became obsessively infatuated with a new revelation, a spiritual and psychological insight that I employed to remove all doubts, fears, and neurotic feelings from my critically overloaded psyche:

 

THE UNIVERSE IS NOT BROKEN.

 

That means I don’t have to fix it.  That means I don’t have to fix me.  That means I can smoke as much pot as I want, fail at anything I care to fail at, and everything will be fine because it isn’t my job to make myself miserable over a problem that doesn’t exist: the universe is not broken!  I announced that I had become completely enlightened, and embarked on a binge of ballistic bliss that lasted over a month, at least till we got our first apartment in Grass Valley.

Before leaving Eugene, a rift had formed between Ann K and myself over her habit of threatening to leave me every time she couldn’t figure out how to get her way on minor or major issues.  Having no plastic “money” left with which to run around town eating in restaurants and buying whatever we wanted, she had become less and less the friendly, encouraging, companionable asset in my life, and since discovering that she had an incurable disease that could easily take many years off her life, she had not been an easy person to live with.  We had an argument about something, and again she threatened to leave me.  I didn’t tell her, because I didn’t think I should have to, but I turned off my love light at that moment and quietly waited for the relationship to grind to a halt, assuming that we would end up going our separate ways at some point in Grass Valley.  Because we had no money to rent a place where we could live together when we got there, she and Lila stayed with a friend of hers while Max and I stayed with Sunny and Benny Joe.  I secretly hoped that she would find herself a happy new direction in these conveniently separate circumstances, but when they said, Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they were talking about the heart of my best friend and best little sister Ann K.  She called me constantly and single-handedly rekindled our companionship, and besides that I had the car and she needed rides to look for a job, and best of all, she still needed me.  I had no complaints; the universe is not broken.

Foremost on my mind as a new arrival in town was to find work so I could cling desperately to my totally enlightened state, which I secretly feared would not continue to buoy me up if I allowed my pathetic financial condition to degrade to the suicidally depressing point of having to beg money from my Daddy.  He had supplied funds on occasion when we were in Eugene waiting for financial aid checks, but we had always been able to pay him back, and because previous to that it had been many years since I had asked him for anything, I was eager to get out of the habit of using him in that way.  My first job came from a temp agency where I had applied for office work and accepted construction work instead.  As a totally enlightened person, I would have considered it silly to turn down a job, so I spent the three longest weeks of my life in the sun on a steep metal roof and climbing up and down a wobbly scaffold with a pot-smoking, beer-guzzling madman.  Ann quickly found a job in a foo-foo gift shop full of useless glass knickknacks that women buy when they have too much time on their hands, and money to spend that they should be giving to the poor.  She soon quit the job in disgust and found the dream job instead, working in a bookstore.  When my roofing job expired I was to be promoted to ditchdigger, but Ann had told her own temp agency about me and they called me out of the blue one day, although they had never met me, because they were desperately seeking the type of person who not only had office and computer skills, but who would also be willing to work for the famed Jay Biggerberg.

Ann got all excited when I told her about the offer, because she had known Jay Biggerberg during her stint as her older siblings’ tagalong, when Jay had once climbed in her bedroom window in the middle of the night, in a drunken stupor sometime after a party had wound down before he did.  Ann assured me that Jay was the funniest little Jewish guy I could ever hope to work for, so I took the job and put on my office clothes and headed over to his office to meet him.

Although Jay Biggerberg was neither little nor particularly funny, he was Jewish so I took the job and hoped that it would work out.  My interview consisted of following the tall, balding gray-haired Scorpio around a big office as he tried to clean up after himself, using my presence as a motivator and letting the cleanup process double as the grand tour of his work scene, which it would be my job to organize and pack so he could move the whole operation into his basement at home.  He made me address envelopes and make copies to prove I could do it, and complained about the six or seven employees he had just fired for stealing clients from him to start their own firm.  He mumbled so much I couldn’t hear most of what he said, and showed the typical Scorpio talent for quickly finding and acknowledging my insecurities with funny looks and marginally disparaging comments I was not allowed to respond to.  If he asked me a personal question about myself or my abilities, he could be counted on to interrupt my best attempt to respond, by finishing the sentence for me the way I should have said it in order to prevent him from being bothered with the details.  When I tried to soften him up by telling him that my wife was Ann K who used to baby-sit his daughters, he mumbled something insincerely polite and changed the subject as quickly as possible.  His intimidating manner bothered me at first, but when I eventually discovered he was just another Scorpio pothead and alcoholic, I started dressing down to his secret lack of standards and let him go ahead and think worse of me, since that’s what he was going to do anyway.  He often wore a hat with a button pinned to it that said, “Fuck you.”  His truck was covered with bumper stickers like “I’m not suffering from insanity, I’m enjoying every minute of it.”  He had reinvented May Day by naming it Jay Day, and every year on the first of May he threw a big drunken get-naked-and-pass-out-under-a-tree party at the lake, seeking out a different lake each year since he would not be welcome at the same campground two years in a row.  Once he forced me to create a computer-graphics party invitation with a nude photo of himself as the centerpiece.  I worked for him off-and-on for three years, quitting in disgust regularly, though he always called me and begged me to come back to work for him when the disaster zone that he called his office became piled too deep with the fruits of procrastination for him to wade through.

The inevitable offer to work for Dab Mostly in his weekend rock shop was not altogether good news, especially since it was too small to have a rest room and I’m one of those people who finds no glory in hoarding the contents of a full bladder or bursting bowels.  The other thing I didn’t like is that he was such a worrywart that he made me afraid of him, and on the other hand was so condescendingly patronizing that I had to act cheerfully grateful for the token gifts he was always bestowing on me, usually meals when I wasn’t hungry.  The worst part of it was that we now owned three mine claims together.  This man had seduced me into turning my rockhound hobby into a business commitment to be beholden to, complete with himself as a complicated hermit crab of a partner who liked to spend hours on the phone with me brainstorming about what kind of equipment we could get in there to rape the Earth with, for a profit that I doubted could be made off of rose quartz.  And after my generous gesture of granting him half-ownership in the three mine claims, basically since I didn’t have the money to claim them myself to keep him from claiming them for himself, he turned around and paid me minimum wage to work in his little shack downtown every weekend, making certain that his bookkeeper paid me exactly the same amount of money each week based on the fourteen hours per week that the shop was officially open, not taking into consideration the fact that I had to get there early to open the shop and haul thirty boxes of rocks out on the porch before my minimum wages started accumulating, and then stay past closing time to haul thirty boxes of rocks back in, count his money, and wait on tourists who would fearlessly walk in when I was trying to close.  To make up for being a penny-pincher, he was generous in other ways, stopping in to bring me cheese and bread and cans of soup, or covering the store while I walked to the restaurant of his choice so he could treat me to the breakfast or lunch he suggested.  It reminded me of kindergarten when we all had to lay down on our blankies and pretend to take a nap.  The worst part of it was that he wanted so badly to be liked, but I knew what had happened to everyone who had ever tried to be good friends with him: all his friendships ended up in the dumpster, casualties of his pathologically reliable ambivalence toward the human species.

In other words, we were made for each other.

Ann K and I quickly accumulated the funds to rent our first place, a one-bedroom at the Suicide Manor Apartments with a big picture window looking out on the Laundromat.  We were there only a few months, giving as our chief reason to move the fact that my only known cure for a peculiar itch I had developed several years earlier was a daily attack with very hot water under high pressure, and the Suicide Manor Apartments had neither.  We gave 30-days’ notice and even got our deposit back after making the necessary threats, then moved into a one-bedroom cottage that one of our friends had found for us.

The new place was right up the hill from Pineless Creekless Shopping Center, and was owned by a couple of ex-bikers-turned-Bible-thumpers who were both working for the local chemical dependency halfway house and raising their second set of teenagers.  For a few minutes we were happy to get into the house, although the rent was too high for a little semi-finished granny cabin that looked like it had fallen from the sky and landed in a gravel parking lot surrounded by chicken coops, horse corrals, broken cars and boats, and two other rental cabins, not to mention the landlord’s house that was separated from ours by only a concrete pad that was to become a garage, but for now served as a basketball court outside our bedroom window.  The landlords, Graham and Sandy Land, also owned an auto repair shop which they had just built to house Graham’s long standing mechanic business that he worked at when he wasn’t counseling druggies at his other job.  Sandy Land had mentioned when she first auditioned us for the part that we could share a storage shed with one of the other cabin tenants, Dasher, although after we moved in we discovered that Dasher had not been apprised of this arrangement and he steadfastly refused to have anything to do with it, so my tools and equipment sat on the front porch under a tarp and grew a layer of rust that made me feel as old and used as my tools now appeared to be.  Ann K immediately despised the Lands, the house, all the unsightly accumulated junk—which didn’t bother my tinkering self one bit—and the feeling that we were being watched.  I shared the feeling that we were under scrutiny, but tried to get along with the Lands even after they cleared out half of the storage shed they used themselves, for me to put my equipment in, and then piled their own junk on top of mine.  It was a win-win situation for somebody, but not for Ann and I.

On the very day that I had first gotten to town and started out by camping in Sunny and Benny Joe’s living room, Sunny had gone to Reno with two friends in a small pickup truck with two bucket seats.  Since she was the only girl in the cramped little cab, she sat in the crack between the seats, despite the fact that she was not only still obese and sedentary, but now over 50 and prone to falling on her face with alarming frequency, which means to me that she should either have insisted on her own seat or stayed home.  By the time she returned from the trip, her hands and arms were tingling and numb.  The tingling and numbness never went away.  Her quest for a diagnosis lasted two years.

Sunny’s perennial role as air car project groupie—which had not been entirely unproductive since she and Benny Joe had once traveled to Joplin, Missouri for me to interview Terry Miller and photograph his new air car, The Spirit of Joplin—made her keep bugging me to meet her friend Bigg Bangg, a telemarketer who made an excellent living raising money for the deaf.  She insisted that he would be the perfect fund-raiser for the air car project, and I counter-insisted that the air car project was not in any condition to have funds raised for it, promising to contact Bigg Bangg the very moment I had a working model for a fund-raiser to brag to potential sponsors about.  In the meantime, I named Sunny Public Relations Director for the air car project and informed her that when there was actually something for a Public Relations Director to do, she would be the first to know.

Ann K from time-to-time would invite Sunny and Benny Joe over for dinner, and by the time they arrived late and failed to be helpful and expected her constant attention and spilled food all over the house, she would be hiding in the bedroom with the door shut so she wouldn’t have to listen to their bullshit or try and relate to three zombie potheads pretending to have something in common.  This trend continued, with the occasional confrontation from my sweetie as to what, exactly, I saw in those two.  I had to admit that they were my only friends, and she suggested that she would like to be friends with the me I had once been, before falling into a pot-enhanced brain freeze.

I made it through the christmas season working extra hours at the rock shop and simultaneously pushing myself to finish various moving-related packing and organizational tasks so Jay Biggerberg could get out of his expensive office in time to use his deposit as the last month’s rent, and then my schedule dropped off on both jobs, so one day as I was wandering around looking for a way to spend my last dime after dropping Ann K off at her bookstore job, where she had been promoted to a sit-down computer job since her legs hurt—and since she had proven a smidgen feisty with some of the more annoying customers—I noticed a pizza joint with delivery drivers running in and out of it like harried worker ants and decided, what the heck, and wandered into Flagellant Pizza and picked me up a third job.  I figured, since I hated the other two jobs, I might as well go get a third one too, right?

The young red-haired assistant manager who the general manager assigned to orient me was casual to the degree of being slouchy, and instantly gave me the impression that I had come to the right place.

The three-job concept turned out to not be as impractical an idea as I’d hoped; not only was the pizza job more fun than any job I’d ever had, it wasn’t more than a week or two after I began the seven-day-a-week work program, on a Sunday afternoon as I was getting ready to start getting ready to start getting ready to close the rock shop for the week, that Dab Mostly called me from his easy chair at home to pick a fight with me.

This came as no surprise.  Dab’s frantic need to try and mine me for inspirational and organizational support for an expensive and doomed equipment-leasing and/or purchasing scheme for plundering the mountains of Central California of every trace of rose quartz that they might be hiding had met with every form of stonewalling and noncommittal yes-manning I could come up with, instead of actually telling him that I would never allow anything with an engine to roll onto my precious mines.  He had tried to pick the same fight with me way back when I first moved to town, but I had been motivated to stall him off with, Hey, I thought we were friends! since at the time the rock shop job was the only one I had, and when he realized that the christmas shopping season was just around the corner, he must have decided that his attempt to destroy our friendship was premature, and admitted that he was just being overly anxious and paranoid about our compatibility as mine partners, and begged me to have patience with him and not to quit my job.

So over the course of the next few months Dab Mostly had proceeded to wear me down more cleverly and gradually, forcing me to spend long hours with him gabbing on the phone—when I wanted to be playing with my dogs or watching movies with my wife or staring at my computer screen—and inviting me over to his house occasionally so he could torment me with vagueness and make me eat his bachelor-style cooking, and show me the gemstones he was making out of our rose quartz but then refuse to commit the equipment, time and energy it would take to teach me how to do the same thing.  He even got me to bring Ann K over with me once, and since she was fascinated by eccentrics who were too smart for their own good, having been raised by one, the two of them sparred verbally for hours in a pseudo-friendly way while I smoked his pot and stared into space.  He seemed committed to convincing us, and especially my wife, that he was really quite mad, and when we tried to leave after I had my dozenth yawning fit, he kept waving us back and stuffing junk furniture into my Toyota, with a story for each item explaining how that item had come into his hands and why it was so meaningful to him and why he was finally ready to give it up.

Then he started calling my house while I was at my office job, pretending he hadn’t realized I wouldn’t be there, and keeping Ann on the phone.  At first she was enthralled with his intelligence, his interest in world travel, and his goofy crazy-guy act, but she finally told me to make it stop, because she was afraid he was really just hitting her up for information about me that he could have asked me myself.

On the Saturday previous to the Sunday when Dab and I had our spectacular row, he had called me, as he did every day while I was manning the rock shop, to bounce a new brainstorm off me.  He said he wanted to make wooden molds in the shape of huge quartz crystals, fill the molds with concrete, and paint the resulting phony concrete crystals different colors and market them worldwide.  I was not in the mood to play the devil’s advocate to someone who was obviously going off the deep end waiting for his business to finish dropping off to nothing; he was already so unmotivated that he had cut the shop schedule from seven days a week to two, and couldn’t even make it into town to work the shop himself on those two day.  Rocks is all he knew.  He was a rich kid from the Bay Area who didn’t want to change careers at the age of 52.  He had watched his artist father destroy his inherited family fortune with drinking and wishful thinking related to the overestimation of his own talentedness, and then watched his real-estate-owning mother save the family from complete ruin by giving up the properties she had worked hard to acquire.  He was plagued by confused and tortured feelings about failure, considering humiliation in the business world—especially his chosen field of gemstone mining—to be a fate worse than death, a concrete reality as hot and hard and hurting as the sidewalk in front of his shop that brought fewer and fewer tourists through his door.  The Internet had devastated his mail-order business.  He was obviously grasping at straws to find a way to stay in the rock business, after doing well for himself at the little shack downtown for almost 20 years.  So I failed to realize that with the introduction of a ridiculous idea such as painted concrete crystals, my sincerity was being tested—assuming that I have read Dab’s mind correctly in retrospect—and I kept on giving him the equivalent of, Yeah, that’s interesting, that could work, I’ll go home and think about it.

The next day he called me to inform me that he had decided I was a bad mining partner, and he was ready to give all three mines back to me.  My insides hollered, Yippee, but I was afraid he was overstating his real intentions.  I had let him pay all the claim fees and other costs knowing all along that I would rather have left him out of it and paid the fees myself, to keep it simple, or better yet, not bothered with claims at all.  So instead of saying, I accept, and hanging up the phone, I got all irate and self-righteous and screamed at him while his customers stood there trying to get me to take their money, until they finally left.  I found those mines and gave them to you for a few hundred dollars and now you think you can call me a bad mining partner, and on and on.  He quickly realized I was embarrassing him in public, since he had made the dreadful mistake of announcing his displeasure with me while I had control of his rock shop.  He begged me to hang up and go home and call him back from there, but I tortured him purposely by keeping him on the phone until such time as he was willing to make a firm, not vague, agreement with me about how we would split up the mines between us so that we could each use them separately without having to get permission from the other to go down there and have our respective versions of a good time.  After an hour he finally admitted that there was no way he was willing to really give up all interest in the mines, just because he didn’t like mining with me, and that taking it to the courts would be as bad for him as it would be for me, and we agreed to stay out of each others’ way and use the mines without each others’ supervision or meddling.  Although he claimed he would be willing to share what he found with me, I never had any interest in a rock that someone else had dug and didn’t push for that option.  I mainly refused to agree to inform him of my comings and goings to the mines, tacitly giving up the same consideration from him, so although there was still some vagueness, he had calmed down and claimed that he didn’t want me to quit working for him at the rock shop.  I scoffed at that and asked him where he wanted me to leave the keys.  In his usual cryptic, open-to-interpretation style, he urged me to keep the keys.  That was the end of that job.

A few weeks later Jay Biggerberg was satisfied that his new basement office was set up the way he wanted it and sent me away with a few mumbled niceties that I took as insults, and I walked away from what had supposedly been a temporary job anyway resenting him for laying me off, not that I liked working for him that much, but as it turned out it didn’t matter because Flagellant Pizza was getting ready to promote me to Shift Manager, and while my dismal wage only went up by a dollar while my level of responsibility tripled, at least my schedule quickly grew to full-time so I could hope to make a living off the only job I had left, and the only job I wanted, ever again.

True to her calling as the only pot connection I had, Sunny loyally kept me supplied at all times even if I had to run up a tab against her generous eagerness to keep me indebted to her so she could extort time-wasting and pointless socializing from me.  To keep things less surly between Ann and I, I limited the visits from Sunny and Benny Joe to those times when I all-too-frequently actually needed to score.  In the daytime when it was important to me that I keep my grubby little fingers out of my marijuana stash, since the pizza job started late in the day and I couldn’t cope with more than my natural quota of fatigue and paranoia while trying to run a busy restaurant, I spent a lot of time writing long letters to Dab Mostly telling him what I really thought of his grandiose schemes to rip the heart out of my mountain paradise.  I explained that he had the nasty habit of approaching everything he did, from business deals to platonic friendships to actual attempts at romance with women, as a tricky maneuver, a seduction, and that the only part of any relationship that mattered to him was the conquest of the other person’s sense of individual autonomy—the very same thing that he would never himself sacrifice to any relationship, which is why all his relationships were so fleeting.  Calling him a vampire didn’t get him to write me back, and I had blocked him from being able to call me on the phone after a series of harassing phone calls he had made just to annoy me.  He had even come to my house and demanded that I return the rock-grinding apparatus he had given me, which he then proceeded to destroy in my yard, along with the Howlin’ Wolf tape he had made me borrow, since Howlin’ Wolf was the only music he liked to listen to and he had tried to share his style of blues with me.  What did get him to write me back was when I called him a pussy in the last of the letters I wrote him, and while I was satisfied at last that I’d emptied my mind of all the bothersome negativity that was threatening to keep me locked into homicidal fantasies the rest of my life, he finally wrote me back, called me a pussy too, and impaled me smartly with the words grabby and greedy Napoleon, and then his letter fell apart into semi-intelligible meandering.  He was obviously not as proficient as I at organizing his hostility into a coherent framework of neatly systematized spite.

In spite of the fact that Flagellant Pizza was a sports-oriented establishment with a big-screen TV as its centerpiece, at work I was as happy as a pig in poop.  There I could escape Ann K’s depression as she flailed about trying to come to terms with an incurable illness, as well as her decidedly marginal interest in my squalid pot-infested social life, and her sincere belief that I had talked her into giving up her disability check, talked her into moving to Eugene, talked her into moving to Grass Valley, etc.  I had taken all the threats I could take from creditors constantly calling, and had responded to the first ad for a bankruptcy lawyer that ran an 800 number past my overloaded brain, and I was therefore spending $100 a month for a total of $1000 just to avoid shopping for a better deal or filling the forms out myself.

But at work I got respect, casual friendliness, and occasionally someone would even flatter me by asking me for advice, because of my advanced age, or better yet, by laughing at my dry, sarcastic humor that peppered my better days.  One day I walked into a kitchen full of busy little bees filling orders, but not with their usual constant casual buzzing.  I timidly took my place on the pizza-making line, and by careful observation out of the corners of my eyes, I was able to ascertain that the general manager, who was cutting and boxing pizzas at my extreme left, and the assistant manager, who was tossing dough on my extreme right, were both in absolutely vile moods, and the mood of the room was thus stifled into the uncharacteristic silence of a tomb.  This will never do, I thought to myself, and just then another manager got to work and strolled innocently into the snake pit of tension, and without thinking I turned to him before he could say a word to anybody and I spoke: “I hope you’re not in a bad mood too, because if you are, I’m gonna take you out back and kick the shit out of you.”  Everybody in the room cracked up and my victim stood there wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and I turned all red in the face, but the spell was broken and everybody including the two pissed-off managers returned to their normal socializing immediately.

At the age of 43 I was the oldest person at Flagellant Pizza: older than the assistant manager, older than the general manager, even a few years older than the owner.  As such I fell completely in love with my current self-image as a flawed but competent, firm but respectful, serious-about-my-job but not about myself, feisty old geezer with an intense but harmless fiery attitude.  I was so grateful to the job for saving me from my other jobs and for getting me out of the house that I usually made the effort to avoid the trap of finding incorrigible scapegoats to pick on, perfect prima donnas to dethrone, and harmless enemies to vanquish.  When one pretty, intelligent, but nervous and inexperienced high school senior was hired and it became apparent to me that the other managers were going to try to prove her incompetent by picking on her till she fell apart, I made it my mission to give her a successful job experience, taking her aside inconspicuously to teach her the motto that had helped me get through my initial fear of my more outgoing co-workers: Remember, it’s only pizza.  As she found her place and grew more comfortable and well-liked at her first job than she had ever felt as an outcast from the cliques of hyperactive jocks at school, I patted myself on the head and considered part of my need for revenge against the world of jocks erased.

Now that I had settled into a work routine that entertained me and challenged me and socialized me without giving me any particular cause to be miserable, it was Spring and the dreaded phone call from the ultimately seasonal Jay Biggerberg came, wanting to know if there was any chance I could come back to work for him.  I had shelved my experience with him with all the other despicable temporary jobs I had endured only for the money, and my heart sank as I responded to my inner need for cash and said I thought something could probably be worked out, although I wouldn’t quit the pizza job since they had just promoted me to Shift Manager.  When I got off the phone and told Ann K what had befallen me, she comforted me the best she could.

Jay Biggerberg had recently been arrested for drunkenly trying to intimidate some of his competitors into ceasing and desisting a project that encroached on the land of one of his clients, and he was in a completely manic state to track down and document every detail he could use to get even with the men who had lied to get him arrested.  As someone who wished he had pursued a law career instead of getting the two masters degrees that landed him in the career he ended up in, he was obsessively spending thousands of dollars on legal fees to find a way to sue the people who had supposedly threatened his reputation as an egotistical drunken liar by getting him thrown in jail for trying to see justice served.  But as I got his office back in order and started making progress on some of the work he had allowed to pile up, he gradually delved back into more practical matters and eventually put his latest brush with the law on a gentle simmer, eventually getting his arrest for assault invalidated and stricken from his record.

While I worked up to 14 hours a day, and tried to display a modicum of enthusiasm at my mornings with Jay, then tried to learn the antiquated computer program at Flagellant Pizza that was supposed to help me get the books in order before going home at night to smoke pot and lay on the couch going over every detail of the social interactions at the restaurant which so fascinated me that I couldn’t stop fondling them in my mind, Ann K’s ability and willingness to keep her schedule at her bookstore job had dropped off to less than minimal, and as a result her schedule had been cut back to nothing.  I allowed the Creeping Callousness of Comparison to infiltrate what should have been a more compassionate attitude toward my best friend and cohort, by becoming decidedly fat-headed about the number of hours I was working in order to continue paying the swollen rent to Graham and Sandy Land so they could afford the expensive hobbies that they couldn’t help but flaunt in our face, since they lived two inches away from us.  I refused to consider moving.  In the five years that Ann and I had been living together, we had already lived in seven different houses, so there was an element of the practical in my refusal to listen to her complaints about residing in an unsightly junkyard belonging to next door neighbors who had promised us a happy little commune and then turned out to be pseudo-christian capitalists who had to be harassed and cajoled into honoring some part of their agreements and obligations as landlords; they thought all they had to do for their $575 a month was to placate us with pats on the head and superficial smiles.  Nevertheless I was determined not to spend the rest of my life recovering financially from my last move, so I continued finding ways to keep the capitalists satisfied while ignoring the needs and interests of my wife, who was ready to give up on me.  Whenever she would visit her sister across town—and I was not invited on even one of these visits—she would come home more determined than ever that I was the source of her flippant frustrations.

When my work schedule settled down somewhat—although I still considered a nine-hour work day something of a day off—I spent my spare time for months building a computer spreadsheet that could be used to predict the performance of air engines by filling in various parameters and reading the results off the bottom line.  The purpose of the huge, complicated spreadsheet was to make it possible for myself and my mail-order customers to answer simple questions without hours of slaving over a calculator.  When the spreadsheet was finally complete enough to share with others, Porsche Doer, who no longer lived in Grass Valley with her ex-boyfriend Grave Darn, came by for a visit and insisted that my price of $30 for a copy should be at least tripled.  Sunny and Benny Joe gave me $100 that an engineer friend of theirs who wished to remain temporarily anonymous wanted to donate for a copy of the spreadsheet, and I began to fantasize that there was a real live engineer out there looking at my work.  When I inquired of Sunny what her friend thought of it, she first claimed he hadn’t been able to get the file open on his computer, so I converted the spreadsheet into several versions for both PC and Macintosh and gave that to her.  Then she claimed she had lost the disc, so I gave her another one.  Then she kept berating herself for not getting around to actually delivering the new disc to the engineer.  Eventually, she admitted there was no engineer; she had just wanted to donate $100 and talked Benny Joe into going along with the charade.  Now that the cat was out of the bag, Benny Joe sort of hinted around that he wouldn’t mind getting his $100 back, and I sort of hinted around that he could eat his sycophantic shit and crawl into a shallow grave.

Now that I had finally more or less come to the conclusion that Dab Mostly was only as evil as I had made him be, I unblocked his phone numbers, thinking he had forgotten me and found fresh victims to entice into his confused web.  One day I picked up the phone and his high, soft, airy voice said, Hey!  You unblocked the phone! and the seduction started all over, although without the mutual dishonesty that had set it up to self-destruct before.  We both admitted some of our pridefulness and stupidity, although I still didn’t trust him or want to get involved, and he suggested I drop by the bank downtown where he had some of his larger rose quartz specimens on display.  He had just returned from a two-week marathon of digging at the Second Wind, which he had re-named the Western Sunrise.

When I walked into the bank lobby I was instantly overcome with jealousy.  The rocks that Dab had dug out of the Second Wind ledge without me were so big and so purple that they made my best hauls from the mine look like a lackadaisical stroll through a souvenir store.  I got out my camping equipment, drove to the mountains and toured the three mines—two of which Dab never did go to, since he was so enthralled by the first one I showed him—and now that my competitive juices were flowing, I finally became able to go straight to the best spots and dig up the biggest, best pieces.  I staggered up and down hills with chunks of gemstone so awesome that I would have considered it impossible for anybody except somebody else to find them at my mines, until someone else did.  My pieces still weren’t as big as the ones I saw in the bank, but that wasn’t the point.  The point was to conquer jealousy by raising my expectations for myself and then doing my best.  Then I could sleep again.

When christmas rolled around, Ann K got a hankering to invite her Mama to spend it at our house.  Although I had my doubts, based on my experience that the two of them couldn’t stand each other for more than a day or two, I went along with it in hopes that Persephone’s rollicking laughter might brighten up the house.  One thing I could count on: Persephone liked me.  No one else had ever done better for her baby girl, perhaps including herself, and in particular, no one else had ever before been able to get her baby girl to be nice to her.

Back when Ann and I were perfect companions for each other—and this inconceivable condition lasted at least three years—Ann had actually seemed proud to show her Mama off, guessing correctly that I would appreciate the old woman’s obsessive, Earthy intellect and self-indulgent kookiness.  Persephone had gone to college in middle age, for crying out loud, and earned a whole entire degree in electrical engineering, just so she could prove that she was being mercilessly zapped by the power company and their plutonium laser.  Now there’s someone I could appreciate.  She always showed up with boxes full of gifts, being a compulsive shopper who lived on nothing herself, reading by candlelight and heating bath water on the stove because she had unplugged the power company decades ago.  For a few years I had been able to take on the burden of buffering Ann and Persephone from each other, especially someone like Persephone who thought I was the bee’s knees.  Still, her need to keep bringing every conversation back to her Problem was aggravating, and reminded me of myself when all I had ever wanted to talk about was air cars.

Persephone arrived for a week of christmas cheer, and 45 minutes later, she and Ann were already baiting each other, and within a few more minutes they were predictably shouting about whether Persephone had destroyed Ann’s life with her Problem.  Ann went in her room and slammed the door, and Persephone grabbed her suitcases and started hauling them out to her truck, but I followed her out and stopped her to inform her that she had come to have a family celebration and immediately pooped in her own bed by bringing her Problem up and shoving it in Ann’s face, and now she could Jolly well come back inside and sleep in the bed she had made.  She thrust out her lower lip and obediently trudged back in the house.  I hugged her and she cried in my arms like a little girl.  She stayed for most of the week she had planned to be there, but she just sat in a chair reading the whole time and I decided I should have let her go have christmas with her friends back home.

That first night, after the big row, Ann K ate a dozen pills and wandered around in the dark outside the house, beating the house with a stick.  She didn’t remember doing it the next day.  I was just happy she woke up the next day.

It was around this time that I started fantasizing about finding a new friend, preferably a single female.  I called Porsche Doer and got her to give me Jaia’s phone number, but I never called her; I was waiting for my current relationship to shit or get off the pot first.

Jaia and Darshan had broken up back when they lived in Hawaii, after their travels around the world.  The way Darshan had described it, the very week he had succeeded in simultaneously giving up pot and beer and coffee and masturbation, he had woken up one morning to find Jaia sitting up in bed staring at him.  She said, Darshan, you’re just not the same man I married.  He agreed and walked out of her life that morning.  He came to Grass Valley and predicted that Jaia would soon be arriving to reclaim her turf, and she did, eventually getting married and having children.  Sunny assured me that Jaia was once again single, though Sunny didn’t encourage me to get in touch with her.  Sunny never encouraged me to meet single women.

Right around Valentine’s Day, while a lunatic friend was staying with us since he didn’t have any better place to have his mental breakdown and drink cheap tequila, Ann’s contempt for me finally reached crisis proportions.  She had kicked me out of my bedroom already, since I spent most of my time at home lounging on the couch wallowing in marijuana fantasies anyway, and my hyperactive friend verbally sparred with her for six days and kept her sick with cheap alcohol until I told him to get lost.  I had business to attend to.  I had a bankruptcy hearing to get out of my face.

The day before the hearing was to take place, Ann and I had some sort of words about something, and of course she threatened to leave me and I told her to go ahead, and at that point she started hitting me.  To tell you the truth, my memory of that incident is extremely vague, and if it’s all the same to you, I’ll just leave it that way.

The bankruptcy hearing went smoothly.  Over sixteen thousand dollars of credit card debt disappeared like magic.  It was as easy as flushing the toilet, except that the toilet paper had cost me $1000.

The next day I was at home with my sweetie and she started to apologize for attacking me the other day.  I had informed her a week earlier, as we screamed at each other in the parking lot of Pineless Creekless Shopping Center, that she had already hurt me as much as I could be hurt, and there was nothing more she could do to make me feel worse, so she might as well lay off and find a new scapegoat.  So the day after my bankruptcy hearing—where I had gotten her off scott-free by keeping her name and therefore her credit rating out of the bankruptcy proceedings altogether—I had no intention of falling for more empty apologies, and told her so, and then I proceeded to scream in her face that it is wrong to hit people, and I was not going to tolerate that kind of treatment ever again.  Of course she took that as a dare, and jumped on my back and reached around and grabbed my face, breaking my glasses trying to scratch my eyes out.

For the third time since my Aikido days, I was forced to use my training in self-defense.  Holding her wrists to keep her from gouging my eyeballs right out of their sockets, I staggered around blindly to get to a place where there was some open floor space, and fell to my knees.  I let go of her wrists and reached around behind me, grabbed her shirt with both hands, and pulled to the left while I shifted my body to the right.  She flew off my back, and as I guided her onto her back on the carpet below, the world moved in slow motion, and I knew with my whole body what I loved about this woman: she was the helpless little sister I had always wanted, someone to hang on my every word and follow me everywhere I went.  Any anger I had instantly dissolved into the love I had for her and the gratitude for what she had tried to do for me at the expense of her own needs, and I carefully held her arms so neither of us would get hurt till she calmed down enough to start packing a few clothes and call a friend for another place to stay.

It took Ann K a month or two to get all her stuff out of the cottage.  By then we were friends again, and she had even stayed at the cottage part of the time.  She had even made tentative attempts to patch things up, but I had no more patience for a little sister.  I was an overworked office assistant and restaurant manager, and had plenty of little sisters at work.  I wanted to prove myself to the world again.  I had every intention of finding a new girlfriend immediately.  Jaia’s phone number was on the top of the top pile on my desk, though I didn’t know how long it would take for me to get up the nerve to call her.  I hadn’t seen her in many years.

Forty-five minutes after Ann K removed the last load of her stuff from my house, the phone rang and I picked it up.  It was Jaia.

It turned out that Porsche Doer had told Jaia that I’d asked for her phone number, and Jaia had been fretting for months about why I had wanted it, and then when I didn’t call her she grew frantic to have her curiosity satisfied, so she had finally called to put the question before me, and I answered it.

I explained that I had always liked her.  She laughed and said, Give me a break, you can’t stand me!

Over the course of the next two weeks I worked very hard through a series of late-night phone calls to make Jaia understand that in spite of my initial allergic reaction to her incessant babbling about her opinions and her journey and her this and her that, I had liked her and also lusted after her from the first time I saw her.  Her occasional references to the attraction she had felt for me while she lived with Darshan—while going out of her way to be my friend—did nothing to discourage my sales pitch. After many checks and tests and cross-checks over the phone and lots of time to think about it, she invited me over to meet her young children, assuring me that I could forget about hugs, kisses, love or sex, at least on this particular visit.

When I got to the little trailer she was renting out in the country where the children’s abusive father would never find them, she made me play with them for some time, and supervise them in a digging project in the yard, and as the evening progressed she proved to be the best hugger and kisser that ever graced my woebegone days.  Of course this was all with the understanding that I was not lying seductively or misleading myself about wanting to help her raise her perfectly wonderful offspring.

I was in hog heaven—what is it about swine that makes humans so sure they’re ecstatic?—and before long my cottage had become the center of our family activities, much to the chagrin of Lila, who is very nervous around children.  The first night that Jaia slept with me in my bed was the first night that Lila didn’t.  I cried.

Before long, I asked Graham and Sandy Land if Jaia and her family could move in with me.  They responded in characteristically christian form: no.  I argued my case.  Absolutely not.  I threw a tantrum.  Don’t even think about it.

After several weeks of bliss the hard reality set in that I had made a tough commitment.  Working two jobs and paying a lot of rent and suddenly being a devoted father and husband to a very devoted woman who lived eight miles away was starting to scare the hell out of me, based on my past performance as a fleeting ghost nearly everywhere I went.  To add to my confusion at finding that Jaia’s loving devotion was making me feel guilty, Ann K had been calling more and more, crying on the phone, wanting me back.  With both of them making me feel guilty with their love, I wanted nothing more than to not feel guilty when people loved me.  I stopped picking up the phone when Ann called; I couldn’t deal with the pressure.  I realized—not that I hadn’t ever not realized it—that Jaia had been right to question and prod me as to whether Ann and I were really done with each other, and if so, whether I had considered how long it usually took for people to recover from broken marriages.  I had shrugged it off by claiming that the marriage had been broken for years, that I’d gotten used to the idea long before she actually left.

Then one day I was puttering around the house, alone for a change, when the phone rang and I waited for the caller to announce himself.  After the beep, I heard the most awful, plaintive, out-of-control wailing over the machine: Luuuu-theeeer!  Luuuu-theeeer!!

Nothing that Ann and I had been through had prepared me for this level of emotional hysteria.  I grabbed the phone and made her promise not to hurt herself, and rushed over to where she was.  I was as gentle as I could be without giving her false hope, quietly explaining that I had moved on, and trying to encourage her to do the same, for her own good, before she drove herself crazy.  She promised to try harder.

But it was me that was going crazy.  I couldn’t concentrate when Jaia and I tried to make love, because I felt guiltier for rushing into this new so-called marriage than I’d felt about anything for many years, and that’s saying something, because guilt is one of my specialties.  I came up with a hair-brained scheme to have two wives, and we could all live together happily ever after, and if any other women fell in love with me they could move in too.  Jaia angrily informed me that I was a lunatic, but the next day she said she would be willing to try it if Ann would.  But I couldn’t suggest such a thing to Ann.  She was still calling me, leaving long messages, alternating between pure evil spite and lush melancholy loneliness.  She whimpered about wanting to take her dogs and walk down the middle of the highway till someone new should adopt her.  I was afraid she might do it.

Finally the signal came to make a change: I couldn’t sleep.  That I will never tolerate.  I went to Jaia’s trailer and shook her kids off when they tried to pounce on me.  I took Jaia inside and we sat down together on the edge of a bed.  She started caressing me and I froze.  She asked me what was wrong, but she already knew.

It took Jaia a long time to forgive me.  We are best friends now.  But first she had to hate me for a while, calling me every name in the book.

From Jaia’s house I drove immediately to the bookstore, where I knew Ann K was just getting off of work.  Funny, I thought, after months of thinking I was forever through with her, it feels so cozy to still know when she’s about to get off work.

She was standing at the front counter, looking pale and thin.  She had lost fifteen pounds since she moved out.  She looked up and saw me.  She was so delicate and lost.  So was I.  She tried to be a good girl and make small talk, since she had promised not to bother me about that old relationship we used to have.  I interrupted and told her I wanted her to move back in with me.  She grabbed her stuff and we went home to that vile, hateful little cottage.

Now that Dab Mostly and I were moderately friendly, he was moderately eager to get me involved with his ambitions again.  He repeatedly tried to get me to take back my weekend job at the rock shop, reminding me that I still had the keys, and I repeatedly declined.  Finally we decided to try and fill out a form, called the “Mining Plan of Operations,” to announce our intentions to the Forest Service about what we planned to do at our claims.  Since Dab had dropped his interest in going into debt to lease equipment, submitting the plan was just a formality to appease the Forest Ranger who was not convinced that we had been keeping up with the paperwork she expected from us.  Dab suggested that we each fill the form out and mail our respective versions back and forth to each other, gradually coming up with a collaborated final draft.  I worked hard on my version and he worked hard on his, and we mailed them to each other.

I read his Mining Plan of Operation with great interest.  It started out normally, with great attention to such Forest Service requirements as fire regulations, etc.  But when he got to the part about what we planned to do about shitting in the woods, he filled the space in with a crude joke, and it went downhill from there.  The rest of the form was filled with pre-adolescent sub-humor about perverted co-mingling amongst forest rangers and bears of any and all genders, and the margins of the form were filled with his cartoon illustrations of the trans-species arrangements that he was suggesting.  I filed the form in my “Mostly, Dab” file and forgot about him for a while, wishing we had never put claims on the mines.

Probably in response to the sinister suspicion that nothing had really changed between Ann K and I—since I hadn’t given up pot or cigarettes and hadn’t replaced Sunny and Benny Joe with productive friends who might raise my sights rather than keep them as low as they would go—in other words, to save the marriage, Ann and I decided to get married.  It was really her idea, but I had no objection as long as she continued her new practice of not threatening to leave me when we didn’t agree on something.  We made plans to get married at the Yuba River and jump in the water after the ceremony to symbolize the unbridled joy of the event. We invited some of our friends and some of my relatives, though only my Mama showed up from my side of the family.  She was on her way to a real wedding in Portland, so why not.

Everything went quite smoothly.  Ann had talked her sister, who hated me, into performing the ceremony, since her sister had one of those mail-order preacher diplomas and she was willing to do it for free.  My Mama drove us halfway to the river with the parking brake engaged on her rental car, and someone had to wave us down and inform us that our wheels were smoking.  Halfway through the ceremony my Mama’s camera ran out of film and we waited while she nervously fumbled around trying to get it reloaded, which caused Sunny to go into an uncontrollable giggling fit.  I had talked Benny Joe Pelton into playing “Tequila” on his saxophone for the wedding music, so the night before the wedding Sunny chose to announce to him that she wanted to break up with him; hence he was choking back tears of grief and self-pity on the wedding day and only played for about a minute-and-a-half.  It was raining a little, although it was August, so we didn’t jump in the water after the ceremony.  The used pickup we had bought in place of the Toyota that had lasted me 11 years was in the shop the morning of the wedding for a re-do on a job that the mechanic had botched the first time, and since he botched it the second time too, I had to take time out of my wedding day to beg his assistant to shelve his other projects and re-do the re-do so we could take the honeymoon we had planned.  When it took four hours longer than we’d hoped to get to the honeymoon spot where we had planned to camp, because of the stupid route I chose to take, Ann K fell into a bad mood and didn’t think she should have to sleep in the back of a truck in the rain on her honeymoon with two dogs and a bunch of rock digging tools, so we searched far and wide for a motel that would take dogs and went to bed about 3:00 a.m. without consummating the marriage.

It could have been worse.  We still loved each other, despite the fact that I apparently didn’t think enough of the honeymoon itself to leave my pot and cigarettes at home.  But at least we had learned the spirit of compromise: I didn’t complain about her bad mood and she didn’t complain about my smoking.  That was almost as good as sex.

A month later, Ann K had already moved out because the first time she threatened to leave me I started packing her stuff for her.

That was around the time that Sunny finally got a firm diagnosis on the numbness and tingling in her arms and hands, after two years of letting doctors give her the run-around.  She found out she had multiple sclerosis.  By now she had to have help standing up out of a soft chair or sofa, and she couldn’t sit on the floor anymore because it would take three people to get her back onto her feet.  She perfected the long-standing habit of falling down constantly, and it was only her inches-thick layer of fat that kept her from breaking her delicate mal-nourished bones when she did.

After nearly eleven months at Flagellant Pizza, I was afraid I would lose both my jobs because I couldn’t keep up the nine-hour days much longer.  Having to choose one job or the other, I chose to keep working for Jay Biggerberg since he paid twice as much and was constantly grumbling that I could be working a lot more hours than I was and it wouldn’t hurt his feelings any.  I had always had a flexible schedule with him since he had broken his promise to put me on a payroll, forcing me to pay self-employment taxes at the end of each year.  My consolation prize—the flexible schedule—made it impossible for me to get to work early in the morning, since without a schedule carved in stone, I was always up late at night trying to smoke myself to sleep after the pizza job, but each bowl I smoked kept me up longer so I could squeeze enough dazed mental meanderings out of the pot to make it worth what I was paying for it.  So I was always groggy and irrationally irritable when I got to the office in the morning.  I thought if I got rid of the job I liked, the job I hated wouldn’t seem so bad, so I gave two weeks’ notice and left Flagellant Pizza the day after Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving itself had been quite the sensation.  Ann K had moved out of Grass Valley entirely, with my help and cooperation. First she had stayed with me briefly while she made her preparations to temporarily stay with Judas on his land about an hour inland from the coast.  Since she didn’t share my masochistic desire to outdo herself in the pursuit of some Scorpio’s overbearing and overriding interests, she soon left Judas’s land and moved to a nice hippie town on the coast where she quickly set up a support network of people she enjoyed and appreciated.  Bravo.  Meanwhile, dropping her off at Judas’s had been like sending a kid off to college: not the end of anything either of us needed anymore, but the end of something.  I cried all the way back to Grass Valley.  I had encouraged her through school, helping her earn her two-year Associate’s Degree in less than six years.  I had done my best, she had done her best.  Now at least we could be friends.

So here it was a week before Thanksgiving.  I’d started buying my pot from my next-door neighbor, Dasher, after purposely avoiding him for two years because I knew that he was a pothead, and I knew myself better than to establish more pot connections than absolutely necessary.  But he’d gotten into dealing so he could smoke for free, and when he had been fired from his furniture-moving job because he failed a random drug test, he had obtained a job as a bank teller instead.  So now that Dasher was an aristocrat he started bugging me to come over and roll his joints for him every day.  This wretched turn of events came just when I hoped I might be able to quit smoking because my only source at the time was Sunny and she had grown flighty and unreliable ever since her diagnosis came in, frequently traveling to Reno to party with her credit cards.  Over the years she had learned to take her mania out of town; it’s one of the reasons she had been able to live in the same house for twelve years.  The other reason is that her squirrely housemate-landlord, a co-tenant who rented her a room, enjoyed taking her money and rattling her cage.  That’s when the dad-blasted phone rang.

It was Benny Joe Pelton.  He made this funny noise that sounded like a blind multi-instrumentalist pretending to cry, and announced that Sunny had just gotten arrested when he had called his Mama and Daddy back in Missouri to complain about her manic behavior, which was scaring him, since in the six years they’d been together, she’d never had one of her bona-fide schizo attacks.  Li’l ole Mama and Daddy Pelton back in Missouri had called the hotel security in Reno and Sunny was hauled off to jail, thence to the booby hatch, and Benny Joe was calling me to warn me about Sunny’s condition in case they ever let her out.  He suddenly switched from boo-hooing, back to his normal tone of voice, telling me about his latest thirteen-verse song that was part of a much greater thirteen-song medley which was part of a much greater thirteen-medley harmonica-and-kazoo epic, and he cheerfully promised to come see me as soon as he got back to Grass Valley.  I responded in a tone of voice chosen to convey as little interest as possible, and when he did come back to town he wisely and considerately avoided me like the plague; he was only in town long enough to collect some of his stuff and skedaddle back to his Mama and Daddy in Missouri where he belonged.

The next memorable phone call that came in was the one that prompted me to subscribe to our telephonic corporate benefactors’ fairly recent invention: caller ID.

It was Sunny, calling from her new hotel room in Reno, after being released from the custody of her jailers who found they would rather not attempt being anywhere near her at the present time.  She proceeded to tell me the story of what she considered to be Benny Joe Pelton’s overreaction to her falling in love with the hotel janitor, and I let her talk for 45 minutes in a vain attempt to ascertain whether she was truly in her manic mode.  I considered myself an expert on these matters, and finally decided she was just her normal talkative self, so I let her talk me into arranging for someone to come to Reno to get her and bring her back.  For my part in returning her to her home, her landlord/housemate has never spoken to me again, for I had grossly underestimated the caginess of Sunny’s ability to hide her out-of-control behavior when she wants to get a ride somewhere.

In the meantime, Ann K—whose middle name is “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”—had called to invite me to Thanksgiving dinner at the communal household where she had lived when she first moved to the coast, and when I told her that Benny Joe Pelton had deserted Sunny, Ann added her to the guest list.

Sunny kept up the good behavior just enough to tempt me into taking her along, and I even announced that since her no-good bigmouth blowhard boyfriend would not be coming around any longer, she could expect a higher level of tolerant acceptance from me in the days to come than I had been willing to afford her in the previous several years.  Within minutes after she climbed into my truck for the trip to the coast, she began to test the soundness of my claim of tolerance, and by the time we were an hour into the six-hour drive, she had completely demolished any fantasies I might have been entertaining myself with about her being back to her normal passive and apologetic self, the self that made me want to gag, as opposed to her manic self that made me want to gag her.  Halfway to the coast I was almost ready to turn back and take her home, but instead I figured I still had three hours to get her calmed down, although I feared greatly that her presence at Ann’s Thanksgiving dinner—which Ann was really putting on for her friends and former housemates—would do nothing for my renewed friendship with either of the women.

Also present at the dinner was Kinky Breedlove, a Jewish former housemate of Ann’s, younger than her but over half her age, who she was quite fond of; and a young lady who had imported her avant-garde artist boyfriend from Southern California to stay with her as long as he wanted, to replace her mammoth attack dog which she had recently had to give up to the humane society to keep her from being evicted.  Absent from the dinner was my mellow hippie friend Devin, who I liked to play the guitar with; he was reportedly sulking in his room because he had been making pretty good progress through the bases with the aforementioned dogless young lady until the artist showed up.  My fears that Sunny’s antics would ruin everything for everybody were somewhat unfounded; I had not taken into account that these young strangers were unfamiliar with Sunny and were thus vastly entertained by a Thanksgiving dinner with an aging Jewish hippie lunatic as a centerpiece.  Also absent was my friend Judas, who was a good friend of the owner of the house and had helped convert it from a moldy old wooden church building into a moldy old communal residence, and as such it was Judas’s privilege to sleep at the house whenever he was in town.  It had been my worst fear that Judas would be there, since he couldn’t stand Sunny and had even had her arrested once when both of them were living at Campbell Hot Springs.

It took serious and dire convincing tactics to get Sunny away from the artist from Southern California, because she wanted to ooh-and-aah over every single one of his excellent and highly original bizarre little paintings in an attempt to decide which one of them to purchase with a cash advance she planned to get from one of her credit cards.  After the dinner, everybody was already tired enough of Sunny to jump up and run the other way, so I apologized one more time to Ann K for bringing Sunny after I had thought better of it, since we now had to head on over to Ann’s apartment where we were supposed to crash.  Fortunately Ann’s housemate—a young Jewish man who was trying to grow dope in his bedroom with huge hot lights, hydroponic nutrient pumps, and great big blowers—was out of town, so Sunny had his bed in the living room to pretend to sleep in and I stayed locked away with Ann in her bedroom, which was unbearably hot and smelly because of the plantation in the other room.  Ann was afraid to open her windows because her housemate didn’t want passersby to smell his pot plants and get him arrested and/or evicted.

The next day Ann K’s grinningly friendly Jewish housemate and his soberly reticent Jewish brother, who was his business partner in an enterprise which I shall not specify, showed up to take care of some things, and the brother was so horrified by Sunny’s attention-grabbing behavior that he canceled a snowboarding trip to get away from the apartment.  Ann was similarly horrified, so I talked Sunny into getting in my truck and I hauled her downtown to the bus depot, where I informed her that her ride back to Grass Valley was not going to involve me, and I dumped her off there and headed back to Ann’s apartment to patch things up.  But Sunny liked the little hippie town where I had dumped her, so instead of getting on the bus for Grass Valley, she bought a cell phone with her credit cards and wandered around town in her sleepless state of glee, hoarsely and aimlessly conversing with everybody she saw and everybody she could think of to call, until a coffeehouse employee invited the police to stop in and experience a conversation with her.  Somehow it became my fault, in Sunny’s lame excuse for a brain, that she ended up in the loony bin in a strange town, although she was quick to forgive me since she was used to the inside of loony bins, having resided briefly in a great variety of them over the years, and she found the respite from wandering around in the rain to be somewhat of a relief.  When she finally got back to Grass Valley, her landlord/housemate of twelve years had put all her stuff on the front porch and obtained a restraining order to keep her away.

As soon as I returned from the coast I called Jaia, who I had not seen or heard from since I had attempted to buy back her friendship by giving her my dead Toyota—a project that wasted weeks of her time as she carefully disassembled the top half of the engine where the car sat next to my house, with the help of her retired engineer friend who wore rubber gloves when he worked on engines and made me turn down my own stereo, only to find out that the car needed more work than she was willing to invest in it—anyway, Jaia and her children had been forced to move, as they frequently were, and they were currently in temporary quarters, sleeping on couches and chairs in the home of a friend who lived down the hill from Graham and Sandy Land’s junkyard estate.  Every day I drove past Jaia’s house, where she and her kids had been crashing for months, and I had finally gotten Jaia to acknowledge that I hadn’t actually been trying to destroy her life by giving her a car, so I thought just as a friendly gesture I would call her up and warn her of Sunny’s condition, in case Sunny ever got out, since Jaia had never been around one of Sunny’s manic episodes and I didn’t want her to overextend herself to her if she showed up looking for new headquarters upon discovering that she no longer had a home.  To my dismay, when Sunny did return to Grass Valley, and not in any condition to deal soberly with her needs, Jaia went out of her way to help her out as much as possible, skinning her knees extravagantly in the process.  It least it wasn’t me this time.

Right around the traditionally-celebrated anniversary of the birthday of my Predecessor, the previous unsuccessful Savior of the Human Race—the one who got himself stapled to a tree for refusing to keep his big mouth shut—I again insisted to Graham and Sandy Land that they should allow Jaia and her children to stay with me temporarily, and upon their abject refuse-all, I proceeded to inform Sandy Land—who had recently met with much scripture-quoting from me upon her suggestion that they might soon raise my rent just a little—that she knew nothing about the faith she was always spouting, and cared less.  I removed all my equipment from the storage facility that the Lands were supposedly sharing with me and built a workbench on my back porch, ready to prove the Magic Valve to the world so I could get on with the next phase of my life: the successful one.

Since Max had broken a side window out of the camper shell on my truck to try and get to a dog he wanted to socialize with, I made a new window for the camper shell out of cardboard and wrote on it with magic marker: “Practice random acts of minding your own business.”  The offending loose dog belonged to a family of the Lands’ acquaintance that consisted of a mother, a daughter, two horses and a donkey who were all camped out in the Lands’ front yard where I had to witness the true meaning of Sandy Land’s opening statement when Ann and I first moved in, that her property was a sort of “commune.”  After I threw a hissy fit regarding my dog’s having been tormented into freeing himself—by means of destroying my property—to share conversation with the Lands’ freeloading friends’ free-ranging dog, their dog was left tied up in the hot sun day after day with no water.  I got dirty looks for taking water to their dog, and from then on I got dirty looks all over town—and a few hearty snickers—for advising the local New Age community by means of the sign on my truck, as well as similarly advising all other superficial do-gooder religionists, to Practice random acts of minding their own business.  As my way of following my own injunction, I spent much of my spare time that rainy winter with a large tarp draped over myself and my workbench on the back porch, as I made a mighty attempt to build a working model that would prove the Magic Valve.  Because of the lack of funds—not that Graham and Sandy Land were lacking my funds—I was once again not able to pull the feat off, so instead I pulled the feet off the happy face that Sandy Land had hired to wander around the property, and left that grinning idiotic hosanna-monger out in the rain to eat mud and drown.

On one of Ann K’s visits to hang out with me in Grass Valley, she seemed to have something on her mind, and in my own special way I finally got her to share her concern.  She told me that she thought she might be pregnant.

Not that she hadn’t been trying to get that way.  She had called me one night after drinking some wine and confessed that at the age of 40 her biological time clock had kicked in like a forty-alarm fire.  Although she had always maintained that she had no intention of raising children, since she had been forced to circumvent childhood herself so she could watch out for her crazy Mama, now that she had found the seat of her soul by following me around for several years till she burned out the part of her that wanted to live someone else’s life, it had become apparent to her that motherhood was the answer to the dilemma of what to do with herself.  She told me that she had just called her friend and former housemate Kinky Breedlove, and offered him an open invitation to come over and impregnate her any time he cared to, simultaneously relieving him of any further responsibility should the experiment succeed.  It seems that the experiment had perhaps been a success.  But since Kinky Breedlove had quit his job on the coast to return to his ancestral home in Philadelphia for a christmas vacation, with only tentative plans to make it back to California someday, she was at a loss as to how to proceed next.  I informed her that a pregnancy test would be the logical next step, so we hurried to the nearest drug store where I purchased such a device.  The test was positive.  I was happy for her.  And it wasn’t my problem.

A month later I happened to be visiting Ann K at her apartment, where her housemate was still trying to get rich quick with a marijuana plantation in his bedroom.  Because the apartment was smack dab in the middle of town, he was venting the hot air from the growing room into the hallway outside Ann’s bedroom door, afraid to vent the aromatic fumes outdoors for fear of being detected by thieves or law enforcement officials or landlords.  He was out of town, and although it was winter, the apartment was so hot and full of sticky particles of marijuana resin that Ann had developed a case of pneumonia.  I asked her if she was being paid to watch his crop in his absence.  No.  I asked her if her share of the rent was being reduced because of the inconvenience, odor, heat, threat to her unborn baby’s health, or fire hazard.  No.  I went into the growing room, and saw that the power strip leading up to the lights, pumps, and blowers was sitting on a plastic drop cloth in a puddle of water.  That was all I needed to see.  I unplugged that son-of-a-bitch and let the geeky fuck figure out why when he got home.  Not that he wasn’t a nice guy.  But neither Kinky Breedlove nor I would have ever treated Ann or any other pregnant woman in that way.

A week later Ann K called me to bounce a novel idea off my overloaded imagination.  Let’s say, for example, that she hadn’t been able to get in touch with Kinky Breedlove in Philadelphia, and let’s say she seemed unsure of his ability or willingness to do what it might take to get back to California, find a job, and support a family.  Not that he was required to do so.  Let’s say, she continued, that perhaps she had not considered all her options when she left me; for example, she could have been rebelling against the concept of playing the role of wifey in a socially-acceptable marriage, more than she was rebelling against me personally.  Let’s say we had been getting along pretty well lately . . .

I honestly don’t remember the actual conversation we had, except that she seemed to be struggling to compare my ability to commit to a long-term project with the ability of her excellent friend and cohort Kinky Breedlove, who couldn’t say when he would be able to get back to California because she hadn’t been able to get him on the phone.  So let’s say I offered to drive my truck to the coast and load her up and bring her home where she belonged.  After all, we were married, after all.  It would be so convenient.  We wouldn’t even have to go through with the divorce.  OK, let’s do it.

By now my sweetie was seriously pregnant and in dire need of moving anyway so she could get rid of the pneumonia before it affected the baby.  The only thing she thought she was losing by leaving her coastal paradise was her midwife, all her friends, the temperate coastal climate she liked, a hothouse she couldn’t possibly live in, and the somewhat attractive remote possibility of ending up with Kinky Breedlove.  I kicked into the highest gear I knew how, started trying to get to work earlier, completely stopped smoking cigarettes and marijuana, and gave everything I could imagine giving to my best friend Ann K.  In return, she was the perfect sweetheart.  We were as inseparable as we had ever been.  She was my perfect girlfriend again.  Never mind the dumb marriage.

But in the next few weeks I started to become secretly frustrated.  Ann wanted me every minute of the day.  She didn’t truly and honestly want me to leave for my awful job early in the morning; she enjoyed running around spending money with me all morning doing errands that neither of us liked to do in the evening when we were tired.  Every night I promised myself that I would get to work early in the morning.  Every dollar I stupidly wasted would be the last.  I hid desperately from the feeling that, as a provider, I was doomed, which could spell doom for the relationship and could start life out on the wrong foot for a new human being who didn’t deserve to be raised in a house of doom.  I had quit a bookkeeping client for breaking a 9:00 p.m. appointment with me, a good friend and client of Jay Biggerberg’s who now wouldn’t speak to me.  Something was failing to properly motivate me.  Perhaps it was Grass Valley; the kind of people I was working for; the business I was in.

A month into the experiment, Ann K talked me into giving notice to Jay Biggerberg and the Lands, and making definite plans to move into my friend’s—Judas’s friend’s—rooming house on the coast.  Ann’s midwife was the landlord’s wife, and nothing could be smarter than living next door to your midwife.  I collected boxes and made speedy progress on getting things packed up.

One day I opened a credit card statement Ann got in the mail.  Besides paying all her bills, I had already been making all the payments on this particular credit card for several months since she had given me a copy of the credit card to enable me to buy new glasses, go to the dentist, anything I wanted.  Originally she wasn’t going to use the card herself, but she had tapped into it a little at first, then a little more, and then she had nearly maxed it out.  On the new statement was a charge for a $50 phone call from Ann’s coastal home to Philadelphia during the christmas season.  That’s odd, I thought, she said she hadn’t been able to get in touch with Kinky Breedlove.  Then I remembered all her old friends from when she lived in Philadelphia herself, and dropped it from my mind after mentioning to Ann that she had gone over her $5000 limit and it was going to cost me plenty to get the account back up to speed.

The next morning we were running around wasting time and stopped by the post office so I could get my mail.  I opened my new phone bill and my insides turned to red hot chili pepper sauce.  There was another $50 phone call to Philadelphia, this time charged to the calling card I had given Ann when she became pregnant so she could call me anytime she wanted.  I showed it to her and she admitted she had definitely been in touch with Kinky Breedlove but had been afraid to tell me that she’d been working on both of us at the same time.

It’s not that I was jealous.  I didn’t care that she had spent hours on the phone with him when she was trying to decide who to talk into taking care of her, even though she had told both of us when starting down the pregnancy trail that she would not hold her impregnator responsible for the actions of his sperm.  I hadn’t even taken her up on her offer to participate in the baby race.  Sex was not what our relationship was all about.

Jealousy had nothing to do with it.  She had lied to me, saying that she hadn’t been able to reach her sperm donor, buttering me up like I was something great in her eyes, better than that other guy.  Meanwhile, she had put her hand in my pocket and squeezed the life out of me, just when I was starting to get my bookkeeping business going.  And the phone calls she supposedly hadn’t made to Philadelphia were going to cost me more money than I knew how to come up with now that I had quit my job.

I drove us home, knifing myself in the gut with every “How could you,” and “You lied to me,” that puked through my uncontrollable vocal cords.

There had been a long message on the machine the night before, or two nights before, or three nights before, from Kinky Breedlove himself.  He had just returned to the coast, and he was very upset to find Ann gone.  He had said he was in love with her and he was lonely.  He hadn’t sounded the least bit ambivalent about wanting to take care of her and their baby.  I had tried to put the phone message out of my mind, and had gone in the other room when she called him back to comfort him.

It wasn’t that I thought she had done anything purposely malicious to hurt me.  But she knew how I felt about being lied to.  She knew how I felt about my money disappearing into thin air without any benefit to me.  And she knew how I felt about being chosen as the one to take care of her.

I drove home the fast way, raced in the house, considered throwing furniture but thought of the baby inside my sweetheart’s belly.  So I sat down on the couch and put my face in a pillow and screamed like a man about to be murdered, about twenty times.

I got up and went in the bedroom to make sure she was OK.  She was laying in bed with the covers up to her neck, crying.  Her cheeks were all mottled.  These were the times when I loved her the most, when I used to kneel at her side and smooth her hair and tell her it was all going to work itself out.  This time I wanted very badly to be dead.  Nothing could have been worse at that moment than to actually exist.  I paced back and forth next to the bed, then pulled a chair over to the bed and sat down.  I spoke as gently as I could: “What do you think I should do?”  I didn’t have to elaborate; she knew what my options were.

She said, “You’re tired of me, aren’t you.”

I said, “Does he love you?”

“He seems to be quite fond of me.”

“Will he get a job and take care of you?”

“I think so.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded, and a pile of tears fell off the end of her nose.

“Call him and make sure it’s not too late.  I’ll take you to the coast tomorrow.”

“No, I’ll help you load the truck.  Take me back today, right now.”

Ann K called her sweetie and made damn sure that he would be there at 2:00 a.m. when we arrived.

The next six hours were the worst six hours of my life.  I’m not exaggerating: the next six hours were the worst six hours of my life.  I’d rather have severe leg cramps coupled with a migraine headache and a freshly broken arm than to go through that torture again.  She was mean to me.  She had never been so mean to me before.  It suddenly became all my fault.  I was rejecting her.

I tried to keep perspective, but couldn’t.  I said mean things back, like, You have no integrity whatsoever.  I got into her backpack while she was in the bathroom at the gas station and took her copy of my truck keys, because—

—because I had always known from the very start that she would someday disappear from my life, leaving me to put it back together, after first training me to use her as my reason to live.

I couldn’t go to work for two weeks.  Jay Biggerberg outdid himself when he actually came to my house and put money in my hand and told me he wanted me to get better and come back to work.

I spent those two weeks packing the rest of my things into boxes, although I had no intention of going anywhere.  Having begun the process of packing everything I had, there was no other spark in me to be found.  I packed those boxes to keep my spirit alive, and to keep my empty shell as empty as possible under the circumstances.

 

My most memorable birthday gift in those first few months of the new century and new millennium, in the Spring of the year 2001, was presented to me by none other than the President of the United States, by way of his specially appointed courier, Dab Mostly.  Allow me to elucidate.

Shortly after my annual mid-April donation of my annual birthday money to that august committee of extortionists and thugs that we in this great nation of ours complacently and euphemistically refer to as the Internal Revenue Service, I found myself in one of my annual Spring moods of renewed hope and forgiving vigor, and as a result I determined that now would be as good a time as any to visit Dab Mostly at his rock shop for the purpose of announcing my compromise-happy and retractful ambition to formally split our three mines up in some way that would make us friendly non-partners in the three mine claims that we still owned together.  For example, I would be willing to give up all ownership interest in one of the mines in exchange for a similar gesture from him regarding the other two mines.  Since he had never even visited two of the mines, and hadn’t called me at all in the months that had passed since he had sent me mining forms filled in with prurient jokes, I thought the chances were good that he would help me to simplify my life by allowing me to disentangle it from his, insofar as his signature and mine still lived together on the same claim forms.

With this harmless little Saturday-morning mission in mind, I jumped in my truck and drove downtown to the rock shop.  It was still early, before the shop was due to open, but as I suspected, Dab Mostly the compulsively early riser was already there; I could hear Howlin’ Wolf howling from the ghetto blaster that Dab kept on the desk behind the counter, which was only allowed to play mellow New Age music during the hours that the shop was open.  As I approached the shop on foot, staying on the other side of the street in order to retain an objective perspective before venturing onto his turf, I saw Dab standing outside conversing with one of his fellow downtown businessmen.  When he saw me walking up, Dab shook the other man’s hand and came across the street with his usual openly worried smile and mildly extended hand to greet me and welcome me to his block.  After he made his usual open-to-multiple-interpretations remark about how long it had been since I had visited him, he affected a downcast expression and said, “So you heard about them taking our mines away.”

My heart skipped a series of beats and my mouth dropped open.  Expressing surprise that I obviously didn’t know what he was talking about, Dab went on to ruin my nice Spring day and a succession of nice Spring days-to-come by telling me about what I came to call the Clinton-Gore Campaign Trail National Monument.

It seems that in his zeal to build a monument to himself during his last days in office as our nation’s most infamous skirt chaser, and while campaigning on company time for his vice-president’s hopeful succession to his soiled throne, Wilgrim Adolf Clinton had gone to the inordinate trouble of getting his public relations staff to locate a few leftover groves of unusually large trees located within the same national forest as the Second Wind rose quartz mine, which my partner Dab Mostly had renamed the Western Sunrise.  Just three days before my 45^th birthday, on Tax Day 2001, Billy Boy Clinton had stood up on a platform 25 miles from the Western Sunrise and with his very own Executive Magic Marker had drawn on the map a big huge circle encompassing hundreds of square miles of National Forest and a few dozen larger-than-life trees, and had declared, as President of These United States, that henceforth and forthwith, the magically marked area would be designated a New National Monument, within whose borders it would be forever banned to set foot with pick and shovel.

It’s not that I can’t keep paying fees on the claim if I wanted to.  It’s not that I can’t go there and stare at the ground with a great big lump in my throat.  It’s just that any attempt on my part to deliver even so much as one pink pebble unto the depths of my pocket shall henceforth and forever be damned as an arrestable offense resulting in huge fines and at least a year in jail.

I murmured that in the interest of not ruining my happy Spring mood I had not been following the news, and asked Dab, What about the other two mines.  He informed me that in his grief he had called the lady Forest Ranger who was in charge of administering paperwork requirements to would-be miners to discourage them from actually digging holes in the forest floor, and she had informed him that the whole Clintonesque Catastrophe had happened so fast and with so little consultation from local forest officials and forest users such as Dab and I, that her advice was to consider the presidential act as something akin to the Tienanmen Massacre and advised that we should stay the hell away from all three mines until such time as the smoke should clear.  In Dab’s words, “She went ballistic on me.”  But she also sympathized with us.  The Presidential establishment of a National Monument in a part of the mountains that was barely used by vacationers and tourists—because of its proximity to the stifling and extremely boring Big Valley through which tourists were wont to drive as expeditiously as possible—and was already protected quite effectively by its status as a National Forest, had stunned the forest workers who did not see any reason to change the pristinely unpeopled beauty of their stomping grounds into a federally-funded tourist trap that would probably fail to pay for itself.

(Upon later studying the boundary map I discovered that the Western Sunrise came within a half mile of not even being within the border of the huge National Monument.  I considered re-naming the mine Big Stumps, since that’s the closest thing to a Big Tree I’ve ever seen near the rose quartz zone.)

Dab Mostly detailed the depression and outrage that he had experienced in the two weeks since the President had ripped his little pink heart out, thrown it on the ground and stomped on it.  He bitterly reminded me that his recent attempt to claim some rose quartz mines in Northern California had been stifled by the local rockhound clubs up there who considered the spots theirs by tradition, and got their friendly local Forest Ranger to harass Dab with legalities till he formally dropped his claims.  Not to mention the famed Lavender Star project that had been torpedoed by Tan Boone back when Dab and I had first met.

I feebly thanked Dab Mostly for passing the news on to me, told him why I’d come and collected a pat on the head for it, and crawled home to fall apart into hysterical wailing and uncontrolled sobbing for no less than 45 minutes. Then I smoked a big one and wrote a letter of righteously indignant whining to Rush Limbaugh, who at that time had a special website for jokes about Clinton’s recent rash of National Monuments to himself, and before I had a chance to change my mind I embarrassed myself by mailing a copy of the letter to everybody I knew.

By now I realize that my wanting to personally possess a publicly-owned gemstone resource held some sort of symbolic and grandiose meaning to me that made about as much practical sense as cows chanting “Eighteen.”  Dab’s accusation that I was “greedy and grabby” still rings in my ears.  Owning a claim takes away one’s right as a citizen to collect rocks in the National Forest without writing for permission and paying a fee; it makes a miner-with-obligations out of what could have been a rockhound with a pleasantly unsupervised hobby.  As Dab put it, it is just telling on yourself so the bureaucrats know where to send forms for you to fill out and fines for you to pay.

But at the time, my truck sign—Practice random acts of minding your own business—became emblazoned with invisible ink across the scowl lines on my forehead and radiated from the chip embedded in my shoulder.  I began to disappear within my empty shell into the comforting darkness that included the one thing that couldn’t be taken away from me: and that would be me.  I had never unpacked the boxes that I had packed before the evil night when I dropped Ann K in the mud back at her sperm donor’s house on the coast, preferring to preserve the symbolism of the chilling loss of status.  Now I could add another loss to my list.

In the weeks that followed, Dab Mostly mailed me back all our paperwork on the mines and all the photos that he had taken of the mines, and the ones that I had given him.  He returned all the maps I had drawn to help him get there if he wanted to go by himself.  He sent me samples of gemstones he had cut or paid to have cut from our stock.  He even sent me a little rose quartz penis.  I couldn’t find a comfortable place to keep it and couldn’t think of who I might want to show a rose quartz penis to, so I threw it out in the middle of Graham and Sandy Land’s horse run, hoping their teenage daughter would find it and put it on her night stand next to her Bible.

Dab built me a new rock-grinding apparatus like the one he had once taken back from me only to destroy.  When he brought it over, there was a downcast finality to his voice as he stated, more than asked, that I probably never wanted to work in his rock shop again, did I.  I said probably not, glad that he had finally gotten the message, but worried that he had taken it too far.  He drove away from my cottage, waving good-bye.  I found the keys to his shop that he had enigmatically made me keep, and threw them in the trash with a guilty sigh of relief.

A few months later, when I had reason to delve into my “Mostly, Dab” file, I discovered that the forms with the bear-and-ranger cartoons, as well as the letter Dab had sent me containing similar content, were missing.  Since I didn’t keep my doors locked, I could only assume that Dab, in his infinite concern for his reputation, had thought better of leaving them in my possession.  I remembered phone conversations we’d had, back when he was sending all my photos and maps and mine memorabilia back to me, when he repeatedly and searchingly and hintingly had kept asking me if there was anything I had of his that I thought he should get back.  I had no such concerns, and didn’t see the point.

And what was it that made me dig out my “Mostly, Dab” file?

One morning around 10:00, in my haste to not get to work, I had stopped by the post office to pick up the credit card bills that were already piling up, since I had discovered that once you’ve filed bankruptcy it’s easier than ever to get credit cards.  On the sidewalk outside the front door of the post office stood a lonely little newspaper dispensing machine full of copies of the Grass Valley Union, and although I almost never purchase or read a newspaper, it was my habit to waste a few seconds whenever I passed one of those things to momentarily bend over and read the headlines, just to make sure there was not an all-out manhunt going on for me or anyone I knew.

Woe to the gossip-hungry: the headline screamed tidings of the utmost gloom: a local business man had been found dead in his home.  Was it murder?  Was it suicide?  Was it anybody I knew?  Doubtful.  I had long ago dropped any pretense of wanting to know anybody in this yuppie-infested skidrow of drunken ex-wanna-be gold miners and leftover potheads from back in the days when Grass Valley had been the coolest thing going in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains.  I scanned the article for a name.

Dab Mostly.

Beloved owner of Fairly Honest Dabney’s Rock Shop.

You know, that shack downtown.

Oh.

I was ashamed when the first emotion that pecked its way through the numbness was sensationalistic curiosity.  I grabbed a copy of the paper and rushed home to read it.  By the time I got there, sensationalistic curiosity was the last thing I had to deal with.

Let me reconstruct the final events of Dab Mostly’s life from my overtaxed imagination, as if I actually knew what I was talking about.

He had arrived at the shop early on a Saturday morning to get ready to open up for the weekend dribble of tourists and crystal freaks whose contribution would barely keep his financial nose above the water.  After making his child support payment to the now-teenaged daughter whose every whim he had pandered to for many years, but who he abstrusely refused to visit any longer, he wondered if there would be enough money left over for groceries.  Not that he cared to eat.  He sat with his head in his hands and stared with unfocused eyes at the dark gray desk in front of him.  The dark gray was comforting.  He tried to get lost in it.  He thought about turning on his Howlin’ Wolf tape and cranking the volume way up, but even the hope and promise of pissing off his neighboring shop owners didn’t cheer him up.  Finally unable to dredge up the smallest drop of give-a-shit, he wrote a note saying, “The rock shop will be closed this weekend,” taped it to the door, locked up and slowly drove home.

Once home, where he had taken steps to make sure no one would ever visit him again, he rolled a big joint and then threw it in the toilet after one puff.  He cranked up Howlin’ Wolf, and sat down in his soft chair with the TV on but the volume off.  When Howlin’ Wolf stopped howling, he turned the tape over to listen to the other side.

That’s evil, sang Howlin’ Wolf.  Evil is goin’ on wrong.  I am warnin’ you brother, you better watch your happy home.

Dab Mostly arose from his easy chair with conviction, announcing out loud, What kind of pussy-ass loser sits around feeling sorry for himself?  He tore off all has clothes and danced around the room.  He ran up and down the stairs.  He slid down the banister.  He threw rocks and books at his Daddy’s watercolor paintings of Fairly Honest Dabney’s Rock Shop.

He stood in the middle of his living room floor, his chest heaving.  He wanted to cry, but could only laugh.  Nevertheless, big crocodile tears splattered his long hairy toes.

Somewhere in the course of these proceedings a decision was made, voted on, and finalized.  Dab Mostly locked all his doors and windows, then found his favorite pocket knife and climbed the stairs to his second floor bedroom.  He climbed slowly, deliberately, one step at a time.  He forced the memories of building those steps himself out of his mind.  He forced everything out of his mind.  He forced his daughter, Crystal, out of his mind.  He forced his mind out of his mind.

Quick now, Dabney the Dabbler, Successor to Failure, do it now before Howlin’ Wolf stops howling.

Dab Mostly lay down in his bed.  He played around with poking holes in his wrists; tasted his own blood.

Oh shit, now I’m going to change my mind and call an ambulance or run to the neighbor’s house for a cute little Band-Aid.  Now I’m going to be in the newspaper: Local Businessman Attempts Suicide, Admitted To Psycho Ward.

This is not me.

Dab Mostly brought the blade to his throat, dying of embarrassment and humiliation, and ended his day early.

The only note he left: “The rock shop will be closed this weekend.”  It was six weeks before someone thought to break down the front door of his home.

 

I wanted to leave a gift for Dab on the front porch of his rock shop.  I remembered the time I had gone to my job at the shop wearing a black T-shirt; Dab dropped in, saw the shirt, and was horrified.  He explained that black was not the color to wear to work at his rock shop.  He usually wore long-sleeved sky-blue shirts himself when he worked there.

I found a long-sleeved sky-blue shirt in my closet, which my Mama had given me for christmas, and wrote on the back with a ball-point pen, “Thanks for everything, Dab.  You are the King of Rocks.”  I went to the record store and used one of my new credit cards to buy a Howlin’ Wolf CD, took it home and made a copy for myself.  I opened one of my many boxes of rocks, found a good dark magenta one, and headed for the rock shop, with Howlin’ Wolf blasting unabashedly from my car stereo.  There were several gifts on the porch of the little shack already.  Flowers; crystals; a photo of Dab wearing his famous boyish grin, with writing on it: “I love you Daddy.  Crystal.”  I folded the sky-blue shirt with the lettering showing, placed it on the porch with the Howlin’ Wolf CD and the piece of rose quartz on top.  I stood there for a moment.  I looked in the window of the rock shop.  I jumped in my truck, and Howlin’ Wolf and I headed for home.  I had dire business to attend to.

I ran in the door and grabbed my phone.  I hauled my seldom-used little address book out of my wallet.  I called everybody in the area who I knew, who I had once known, who I had ignored or avoided or begrudged or exploited, and invited them all over to my house to sit in my hot tub with me.  The only live human I could reach was Sunny, who said, Oh no! and made me promise to come get her right away.  I left a message on Jaia’s machine; all I could choke out was, My friend died, please call me.  I left a message on Melvyn Skidrogue’s machine: This is Luther (choke) I (choke) have to hang up now.  I told Grave Darn I needed to see him.

Sunny and I sat silently in the hot tub behind my house that night, and I added a quart of salt water to the brominated brew of bacteria-clogged spa water.

Jaia called me back: I’m sorry about your friend.

Your friend too, I said.  She had worked for him and like most New Agers in town, adored him and made a point of having a perfect relationship with him.

Really?  (Silence as she puts on her psychic armor and sits down.)  Who would that be?

Dab Mostly, King of Rocks.  He ran out of friends and slit his throat.  I might as well have been holding the knife.

I told her about the horrid letters I had written him.  When she found words, she told me it wasn’t my fault, that I in fact had not been holding the knife.

When Sunny and I had gotten to the house, the message on the machine was from Melvyn Skidrogue.  In the past three years we had failed to return each others’ phone calls rather consistently.  Luther, this is (choke) Melvyn.  Listen, buddy, (choke) I think it’s time we got back down to the mine together, (choke) let’s go right now, I’ll cancel all my gigs and start packing.  Call me back right away.

So you see, Dab Mostly, for all his secret humiliations and fears of nothing and inability to share himself with people . . . oh, never mind.  People say the lamest, most dishonest things when someone dies.

Melvyn and I visited all three rose quartz mines, and while the local New Agers held a wake for the mysterious gentleman behind the counter of Fairly Honest Dabney’s Rock Shop, who they didn’t really know, Melvyn set a dozen beeswax candles on the front bumper of my truck and we played music together for the first time in all the years we had tried to be friends.  I played some of my Lost Wave Music, but couldn’t remember the words.  He played his portable keyboard.

When I got home, someone called me with a report from the wake I had missed.  Jaia had recruited the person to call me, since she couldn’t bring herself to attend.

For weeks I drove past the rock shop almost every day, blasting Howlin’ Wolf, blubbering like a boy who has lost his pet chicken, making no attempt to hide my scrunched-up face from passing motorists as I drove around town choking on snot.  Finally I realized I was torturing myself and tossed the Howlin’ Wolf tape out my window, screaming: If you want to die, then die!  Get out of my life!

I had a dream: I’m at the cemetery at night, eagerly digging up Dab Mostly’s decomposing body.  I have a mission.  I grab him and throw him over my shoulder, and stagger to town.  I toss his body in the nearest dumpster, and slam the lid shut.

Jaia came back into my life as the best friend a person could ever hope to have.  She helped me crawl out of my own half-dug grave.  She helped me fill out my divorce papers.  She let me fall in and out of love with her while refusing to complicate my mind with false hopes.  She made me borrow enough money from Sunny to pay my last month’s rent on the cottage, where I had made a fool out of myself after quoting scripture to Sandy Land, by throwing toolboxes out my back door and dishes out my front door.  Jaia showed me places in the woods where I could sleep in my truck since I planned to become homeless in a month, having no money to rent a place.

Since I was smoking myself to death, I had a constant headache and had become dependent on Extra-Strength Excedrin to help me make it through the days.  Jay Biggerberg was sympathetic about my string of misfortunes, but growing tired of my frequent attempts to convince him that he was an asshole who didn’t deserve the honor of my company.

My Mama’s biennial sibling reunion, this time at my brother Dirk’s house in Southern California, saved my life.  In my sister Glenda’s car on the way down, I was in a coma.  I gave up pot and cigarettes for a week while I shuffled around in a wide-eyed daze, constantly rubbing a piece of rose quartz between my fingers, and gradually allowing people to be nice to me.  I didn’t tell them anything that had been going on in my so-called life.  I didn’t want to spoil the picnic by grabbing center stage.  My brother Dirk’s puppet show was the most thrilling live theater event of my life.  The museum I went to with its display of torture instruments almost made me throw up.  The anti-social giraffe at the zoo that had picked on the other animals until a zebra turned around and bit its tail off was the funniest thing I ever saw.  My nieces and nephews and their husbands and wives and children and girlfriends were the cream of the ever-loving crop.  Going back to Grass Valley to move my long-packed boxes into storage and adopt homelessness as my new solution was the only part of that week I didn’t like.

Sunny had moved into Bigg Bangg’s house, which doubled as a board-and-care home.  According to Jaia, Bigg Bangg was a heartless snake with no conscience who stole people’s social security checks while doing as little as possible for them.  Sunny had spent many hours at my cottage whining that he used her car, borrowed her money, expected her to pay $500 phone bills that weren’t hers, and screamed at her when she tried to look at the bill up close; then in characteristic fashion she failed to take my advice, refusing to stand up to him, and came back with the same complaints next time.  I had told her to take the time out of her busy schedule to contact her millionaire brother for the kind of assistance that he could easily give her if she acted like she gave a shit.  Jaia and I had finally given up on wasting hours trying to talk her into making her life work; we had honed down our advice to one simple exhortation: So move out already!  Thus Jaia’s advice to me came as a surprise, when I complained upon my return to Grass Valley that Max and Lila didn’t deserve to be homeless, locked up in my truck all day while I worked in Jay Biggerberg’s basement.  Finally she told me what I had to do.

I had to join Bigg Bangg’s circus.