Viewmaster

by Ferdinand Stowell

I think the world would be a better place if people just stayed home. I wouldn’t want to widely disseminate this idea at the present time as it would be voting against my economic interests, which is apparently what large numbers of America’s working classes in the Bible Belt do. I’m not sure one could say I ever belonged to the working class, given my lifetime of spotty underemployment and now, since I’ve inherited property in one of the country’s most expensive real estate markets, I consider myself to belong to some other category which hasn’t been invented yet.

  This leaving home and going away business is a major project. Especially the short notice; it must be in the genes.

  Long before it became official U.S. policy, my father was a committed unilateralist as evidenced by his flat refusal to consult with anyone before he began major renovations or planned family outings.

  “You never even asked me,” my mother screamed as he began prying apart a living room wall one morning at 7:00 am.

  It wasn’t unusual to find him literally throwing things into the back of the station wagon agitated that no one else in the family had arisen at the crack of dawn to help him prepare for a trip they knew nothing about. The destination was usually some rancid strip of New England oceanfront noted chiefly for its strip joints and tattoo parlors.

  My drive down to Celestine’s was noteworthy only because I had the most extraordinary series of interactions with automobiles that exemplified my entire list of driving peeves. Everything that drives me crazy about people driving cars happened.

  I’m about to make a left turn. I notice an oncoming car going much too fast and when he sees me wanting to take a left turn the driver decides to bump it up a notch and squeeze some more speed out of the gas pedal. A driver has two options at this point: wait patiently for the pushy driver to work through his little power trip and then turn after he’s gone by or gun it and make the turn before he smashes into you. I’ve found my own third way: I make the turn when it works for me and I do it slowly, like I was really enjoying this turn and determined to savor it, forcing the rapidly approaching driver to jam on the breaks in acknowledgement of the fact that he’s driving too fast and he’s an asshole.

  This is another thing that bugs me: I’m stopped at a traffic light. The car next to me is creepy-crawling its way through the red light; it just can’t wait. But then when the light turns green it just sits there. So what was all that inching forward and then suddenly when it’s actually legal to move your car across the intersection, something changes dramatically for the driver, who suddenly loses all sense of urgency and is unable to move forward? I look over to the driver, who is heavily into make up and hydrogen peroxide and I realize it would probably take an eighteen wheeler and a dozen hunky guys to get her to move on.

  I do like to look around a bit while I’m driving. I notice an older car driven by a Latino man and his wife and several children; they’re being followed by a pick-up truck with a gun rack and a huge American flag billowing out from a pole on the cab. He has more American flags on his mud flaps, over which are the silhouettes of curvaceous naked women. Am I witnessing a vigilante stalking his prey? But, no, he surges ahead because he’s going about 90mph and hasn’t got the time for citizen’s arrest; probably he’s rushing to the border to prevent more of the mongrel horde from entering. I wonder what all these super-patriots who stalk our borders would do if we started enforcing the speed limits – probably swell the ranks of the ‘illegals’.

  Now that we’re on the topic of vigilantes, I have to confess that I often feel the need to police the traffic lanes like one of those Catholic nuns slapping her palm with a ruler as she files between the rows of desks with a disapproving stare. Sometimes when I‘m driving on the freeway and approaching my exit, I’ll purposefully ride the line between the right lane and the breakdown lane, basically cutting-off impatient drivers from using it as a means of getting off the freeway ahead of the pack. Once one car starts doing it, they all do and I can’t let that happen. And if I feel a car is about to pass me because they think I’m driving too slowly, I speed up, eventually forcing them back in line behind me.

  It amazes me how bloody-minded I get behind the wheel of a car. When somebody does something rude or stupid on the road, I sincerely wish for them to die horribly in a quick, fiery explosion, their body parts strewn amidst the wreckage of what used to be their automobile. I consider that an appropriate punishment for any old minor infraction.

  Sub-urbane

  I don’t get out of the city much and as I get farther away from San Francisco, I notice that the suburbs now follow the retail calendar when it comes to holidays. As soon as the collective suburban breath is caught after back-to-school sales (which begin in July), lamp posts are twirled round with spiders and their webs, trees festooned with hanging cadavers and various types of spooks and ghoulies are placed thoughtfully around the mostly unused front entrances.

  Even before Thanksgiving, whenever that is, has expired in a carbohydrate over-reach, Santa Claus peeks merrily from windows and teams of reindeer lit from within are frozen in the headlights of the on-coming season.

  I can envision a future where the holidays meld in one seamless mega-holiday celebrated daily throughout the year. People will be given holiday enjoyment-enhancing drugs subsidized by the government so all of us can enjoy the holidays as much as Lawrence Welk did. The government will have co-opted the imagery of holidays for use in its propaganda. Cupids with covered pudenda will admonish you to avoid foreign entanglements; good luck, the leprechauns will remind you as you purchase your mandatory state lottery tickets.

  “Every day is a Holiday under our Dear Leader,” the banners will say. ‘All Pay is Holiday Pay!’ The witches in posters have fingers to their lips, ‘Loothe teeth think thipths,” the type says.

  It was only some 4 hours after leaving San Francisco that I passed through Solvang, CA, an ersatz Danish village that has had any pretense of authentic culture sucked vampirically from it’s arteries. I wondered what a vampire would look like in wooden clogs and silly flood-expectant clothing. “Solvang, I vant to suck your veins with my fangs.” I said, again and again, as though I were one, sinking my teeth into that accent, when my phone rang. It was Maria.

  “Maria, hi. I’m glad you called. I feel so much better on the road. I really need to do this more often.”

  “So, I heard from my Dad,” she said. Her tone was steel-cold.

  “You did? Where is he? Did he ever get to Celestine’s? What the Hell is he doing?”

  “So, my Dad told me you gave him Celestine’s address.”

  “What?!”

  “You heard me. You lied to me. You said you had nothing to do with this, when in fact he never would have run away if you hadn’t told him where she lives.”

  “Now, wait a minute.”

  “It’s a good thing I found out you’re a liar now before I got in too deep. I was actually starting to fall for you. God! What was I thinking?”

  “Look, it’s not that black and white….”

  “NO! No, no. I’m not going skiing down the slippery slope with you. You lied, fact, end of story.”

  “Listen, this is a difficult time, ok. But we all have to work together and not be at each other’s throats.”

  “You know, I don’t care. Really, I don’t care. I’m pissed at you, I’m pissed at my dad, my mother is in a catatonic state – I mean, I found dust in my mother’s house this morning. Dust! The last time I saw dust in that house was when the vacuum cleaner blew up. And even then she had it cleaned up in five minutes. You and my dad can go fuck yourselves. Right now I’m taking care of my son, my mother and myself. Did you hear your name in that list? No. Good-fucking-bye,” and with that she hung up.

  Eeerr, I was so mad. I was so anxious. I was so depressed. My car trip, which had been filling me with a new sense of freedom from all responsibilities and constraints was ruined and I hadn’t even slept with her yet.
>
  Freud said: “For the libido to swell to a height, it needs an obstacle”. Mine, apparently, needed an obstacle course.

  Had I not seen Maria for a second and third time, I could have dismissed her from my life without the gut wrenching. But she had crawled under my skin and there was no turning her out by conventional means.

  My eyes dried fast enough; I know that some women respond well to tears, it brings out the mother in them but I wasn’t for wallowing on the way to Celestine’s but rather for picking myself up as quickly and as proudly as I could. It took some effort and a little help from an old friend, a certain cool drink of something on the rocks, but with friends like that, who needs enemies?

  I walked into the liquor store, all the bottles greeting me like shards in a stained glass window – glowing, pulsing with spiritual life. My heart beat quicker; I felt an almost sexual tension that gripped me first in the shoulders and chest, then shivered down into my ass and my penis and out my Achilles heel. I was foolish to be there but wise enough to wait till I got to Celestine’s before I actually started drinking.

  Shangri-la-di-da

  I was rounding a corner in Camarillo when I saw the landmark Celestine had described: a palm tree on her front lawn that looked like a big fat pineapple. As I would soon discover, her life was full of things that expressed themselves as other than what they were. Her Dachshund, Sammy, thinks it’s a seal; it waddles on its belly, pulling itself by its front legs as its hindquarters and extended legs slap the ground. And it barks like a seal – Uhr, uhr, uhr.

  She has a cat that thinks it’s a canary; it’s head darts and turns in quick, staccato bursts and the birds flit about it without even the slightest concern for their safety as it pecks at the ground. And I would see bugs that thought they were sticks or leaves, green leaves that smelled like lemon droops taste, strange Dr. Seussian phallic mushrooms that smelled like rotten meat and soil that looked and smelled like ground coffee.

  And here I had brought my own thing that was other than what one thought it was. Anyone viewing me in my car taking a swig of Jack would have seen a man drinking from a bottle. But I was really pursing the coin of my realm and like a juke box or an old amusement park mécanique come to life at the drop of a dime, that first sip of the first drink I’d had in a long time brought something inside me back to life, a darker, warmer, richer being primed to entertain.

  From the back of the yard a voice commanded me to enter the house. I opened the unlocked screen door and walked through rooms out the sliding glass doors that had all sorts of stickers on them (to prevent the death of birds, I imagined) and found her in the midst of magical land teeming with the most ostentatious displays of life.

  “Hello, Roy. I’m afraid I’m deep into gardening and won’t be pulled away from it easily. You can sit for a while and I’ll join you when I can, or you can follow me around, as you like.”

  “I want to help; give me something to do.”

  “Oh, this is too good to be true, somebody pinch me. First off you can start smiling.” I guess I was looking pretty glum.

  “Didn’t I tell you I have a hard time smiling?”

  “No, but come to think of it I never did see you smile, as such. You laughed, though.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s genetic.”

  “Is it really that hard for you to smile? Try.”

  I tried even though I don’t like what smiling does to my cheeks.

  “Is that the best you can do? You look like you’ve been sitting on the potty for a while and it just won’t come.”

  I laughed but something went down my windpipe and I started choking.

  “Don’t die on me cowboy, you haven’t done anything yet.”

  Celestine led me to a spot in the back where she had laid some tools next to clumps of plants with their roots showing.

  “This isn’t perfect transplanting weather; it’s best done on a cool, misty day, but I have to get these in the ground. First we’ll dig the holes and get everything ready.” I grabbed the shovel she handed me. It was a beautiful old thing and I commented on it.

  “English. A hundred years old. I’ve had it repaired several times at great expense. I’m lying, a woodworker friend of mine fixed it for me for nothing, the dear man.” I finished digging the holes and she directed my attention to a long wooden cabinet against the back fence. It too was beautiful.

  “Isn’t it gorgeous? Another woodworker friend made it for me. It houses the black plastic containers that really cook the compost. I just crank the handle to spin the containers and it all eventually ends up in these drawers at the bottom that just slide out on wheels. Ingenious design.”

  “So, do you only date woodworkers?”

  “No, but all my men are good with their hands.” She gave me another one of her trademark coy looks. “Those two were rivals for business and my affections. Guess which of them won.”

  “Mr. Sliding Drawers.”

  “You got it.” We quickly dug the holes. “Now we’ll empty the compost bin and get all this good stuff at the bottom,” she said, as she slid out a drawer full of rich soil.

  “It’s practically black.”

  “Isn’t it gorgeous? I get lots of coffee grounds from a local café.

  “Mmm… I can smell it. Coffee isn’t too strong for plants?”

  “No, it’s rich in nutrients, you can practically just grow things in it as is. And it makes even the soil in my garden smell wonderful.”

  “Who knew? All those grounds from thousands of cups of coffee tossed in the rubbish when I could have been growing prize tomatoes. Are cigarette butts good for the soil too?”

  “No, why? Were you a chain smoker?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I just remember them floating in coffee mugs and beer bottles and scooping soggy handfuls of them out of the sink and doing it for years. I can’t remember the last time though.”

  As I knelt before the three holes we had dug, Celestine showed me how to mix the compost with this fine crushed stone – for drainage she said – in the holes with the existing soil.

  “Always plant in threes,” she said. “It’s a magical number, the three wise men, the three graces, third time’s the charm….”

  “Blind mice, musketeers, three horsemen of the apocalypse, three-ways…”

  “That’s four and I take my lovers one at a time. You’ll have to excuse me, I need to use the ladies room.”

  With her out of the way, I leapt over to my jacket and removed my bottle. I had another drink; the effect on me was that of the slightest prick of some passing predatory creature on a hidden anemone in a corral reef causing it to spring into magnificent display. I could feel the heat and the colors as they over-ran every inch of my body; I sensed each of my little hairs moving to some invisible current. It was sick, sweet seduction.

  The coffee aroma has me musing. I see fields of freshly ground coffee recently plowed and seeded with cigarette butts that start pushing out roots and sprouting. From them emerge strange plants that grow rapidly to giant proportions. The roots drink their fill of coffee and the long, spindly stems and broad leaves take deep drafts of oxygen and exhale carbon monoxide with a smoker’s cough. People congregate under the enormous plants, which they begin to think of as sacred. A unique culture develops. Someone discovers Jack Daniels, and the rest is history.

  When she came back outside, Celestine took a bucket of the compost and carried it over to the roses.

  “Oh, my, here’s something,” she said as she fingered the leaves of a rose bush.

  “What’s that?”

  “Look closely.”

  “You mean the curled leaves?”

  “No, I’ll show you.” She touched a branch of the rose and part of it moved and walked away!

  “Wow, what was that?”

  “It’s a stick bug.”

  “No wonder.”<
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  As I helped her spread the compost around the rose bushes and then work it into the soil, two tiny squirrels chased each other up and down the pine tree in the next yard. It sounded like someone was unwrapping a really big candy bar.

  “Oh, that rose is huge,” I said, pointing to an enormous blossom flushed with pink, orange and yellow.

  “Beautiful isn’t it? Sad though, the bush is about to die.”

  “Why do you say that? It looks so healthy. How could you know that?”

  “I just know. Plants are like people that way, they’ll sometimes make one last burst of effort. It’s an old bush, planted before my house was built, which was about eighty years ago. When I first moved in one of my neighbors remembered the area when it was all part of a ranch back when he was a child. See that line of palm trees in back and that pointy little roof? That’s an old gazebo and just beyond is an old house and this was the rose garden of that house.”

  “I didn’t know roses could live so long,” I said, regretting that I sounded so ignorant about something Celestine had a passion for.

  “Oh they can live longer than this one, I’ve seen roses in France that are hundreds of years old. No reason they should live so long, they just do. Like that woman in Arles, heard about her?” she asked, arching her eyebrow as she cocked her head playfully my way.

  “I don’t know, what about her?”

  “She died at the age of 120, remembered that crazy, dirty artist in town Vincent Van Gogh. This is what she said, ‘The only wrinkle I have is the one I’m sitting on.’ I embroidered that on my favorite chair.”

  I was feeling a warm rush of poetry coming from deep inside me.

  “Ah, the lady embroiders. Methinks her talents are a match for her beauty.” I love it when Jack, in partnership with a woman, inspires me to say such things. Oh, God, here I was courting this woman who has a good deal more than one wrinkle, her with her sixty-three years and counting. A weak and wounded angel sits on my shoulder whispering in my ear, telling me I’m a loser, that other forty year-old men are having wild affairs with the young Latina cashiers at their favorite supermarkets.

  I watched as she snipped off the dead ends of rose branches. Her fingers looked like the sleeves of jackets that have been slept in, all wrinkled and puckered at the elbows. I took her hand and flipped it over. The palms were coarse and chapped.

  “Ah, her palm bears the stitches of her years and she spins them lightly.”

  “Who wrote that?”

  “I don’t know, I just thought of it now.”

  “You have a poet’s heart, Roy and the eyes of a little boy.”

  “Mmmmm.. If you’re going to do a tour of my body parts, make sure you stop before you hit my liver, it’s been swimming around in the Love Canal for years.”

  Celestine puckered her mouth and then bit her lower lip, making up her mind about something and keeping a smile at bay.

  “Oh, love canal, very interesting. Did you finish that whole bottle?”

  I felt a quick flush of shame but then I laughed and I held her hand still. “You need to moisturize. I mean, really, really, really,” I said.

  “Oh, I know, gardening exacts its toll but it’s a price worth paying. I always mean to rub lotion on but then I forget.”

  “Let me do it for you.”

  “Sure. But first let’s finish up; people will be coming over for Sunset Club soon.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, just a revolving group of friends and acquaintances that come over to drink, smoke, bullshit and celebrate the death of another day,” Celestine said as she pinched beetles off the roses and squished them to death.

  “You don’t mess around. I’d hate to be a bug in your world.”

  “Well, now, that depends if you’re a beneficial insect or just a pest. I coddle nice bugs but the bad ones I kill on contact. I got over the squeamishness long ago.”

  “A streak of heartlessness always becomes a woman,” I said as I surrendered to the fact that once again, Celestine had become an object of my desire. “So am I beneficial or just a pest?”

  “I think you could be put to good use,” she said.

  “So you promise not to squish me to death?”

  “You will feel no pain; that’s all I can promise.”

  Tequila Mockingbird

  I helped Celestine tidy the backyard and by seven all the regular sun-setters had assembled and were sitting around lazily. They ranged in age from 30’s to 60’s I guessed, five men to three women all with complaints, merciless humor at each other’s expense and periods of rumination. These were honest people who made eye contact a competitive sport.

  They had brought an ice chest of beer, bottles of wine and the best of tequilas.

  “Would you like a glass of wine?” Celestine asked me as she opened a bottle. “Did you tell me you don’t drink?” She was being facetious and flirty.

  “I usually don’t drink, no.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to be the cause of anything.”

  “I’d love you to be the cause of something.” And then I thought for a bit. “You know, I think I will have a glass. Why don’t you pour me two and save yourself the trouble later.”

  Someone squealed and references to shared histories were made that only mystified me. Celestine offered some sort of explanation,

  “I was what they used to call ‘a great beauty’,” she said, “back when a woman in our town had only that to make a career with.”

  “You are, darlin’. You are a great beauty. You got every man in Ventura over 45 looking to get into your business.”

  “Oh, I have younger than that trying to get into my business, as you call it.”

  I felt my face redden.

  “I don’t doubt it a minute, you old chicken hawk, you tough old bird,” said a grizzly-voiced guy with a scar on his forehead. “Give me a kiss, woman,” and at that he grabbed Celestine and nuzzled her neck.

  “Get off me you horny old coot. I don’t kiss ranch hands, and retired ones at that. Long standing policy.” He released her with a laugh.

  “You’d better get off of her, Larry. That woman’s pussy is a hornet’s nest,” said a handsome younger guy, “You’d only get stung.” Several of us dropped our mouths, including Celestine. She was a hard woman to read sometimes and I didn’t know which way she’d go with this one. We looked at her. Her eyes were wide and then she screwed them up and let out a gasp of laughter.

  “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to Jimbo, and I want to assure everyone present that this man has never been anywhere near my nest and never will; so all his knowledge is second hand. Jimbo, it’s nothing but honey and the queen bee down there – home, sweet home, honey.” We all hooted and whistled and stomped our feet and so the evening was strung out in raucous innuendo and reflective pauses.

  I like this Southern California comfort at eventide, passing joints and stony smiles with the losers and the dreamers, so celebrated in song when I was growing up, as they tip the last drops of wine, beer and tequila from the bottles. The sun was low in the sky, making everything, the palms, the wires hanging off the telephone poles, the huge satellite dish next door, look as though they were all dripping red hot in the middle of a blast furnace. I watch the setting sun light up the mellow brown and green bottle glass as it skims the wicker table and surfs the ribs of palm fronds that are waving in the breeze.

  “See that deep magenta flower?” Celestine asked me as she pointed to some tall plants. “Now watch as the sky darkens. Can you see the blue start to come out and intensify the color? It looks like it’s glowing, just before the whole thing disappears into the dark.”

  “Yeah, I see what you mean,” I said. I didn’t really but I didn’t want Celestine to think I was that insensitive. She got up to light the many candles and torches all around us and though she was dressed in blue jeans and a blouse, I saw her in a gossamer gown with Egyptian pleats and Greek
folds, her naked body glowing through the material.

  Seated once more, Celestine started laughing. All by her-self, just like that. And her laugh turned into more laughter and pretty soon she was laughing her ass off. Everybody was staring at her and some began smiling and laughing themselves.

  “What are you laughing at,” I asked.

  “You,” she said.

  “Why me?”

  “Because…” she was hyperventilating and trying to suppress her laughter long enough to spit out a few words. “Because you’re smiling,” and at that she burst forth again.

  “No, I’m not,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, you are.”

  “No, I’m not, I’m laughing.”

  “You’re smiling, dude,” said Jimbo.

  “Yeah, man, you’re definitely smiling,” someone else shouted out.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. And then a whole chorus of affirmative exclamations came from everywhere as candles and tiki torches flickered all around me.

  “You have had this stoned smile on your face for well over an hour,” she pointed out to me.

  “Oh,” was all I managed to say, “that’s really funny.”

  Celestine drew everyone’s attention to what amounted to a fairly significant event in my recent life. “I want everyone to give Roy here a hand.” Everyone began clapping, they didn’t even ask why. Celestine is commanding here at her seat, one does what is asked of one. She is old but in her full power.

  I continued sitting there with what I now realized was the dumbest smile on my face and I couldn’t shake it. I tried to stop and couldn’t and it was freaking me out.

  “I can’t stop smiling,” I said, a bit of panic in my voice.

  “We don’t ever want you to stop,” Celestine said, “you have an adorable smile, even if it does make your cheeks look fat.”

  “No, I’m serious, I really can’t stop smiling. I feel like I’m going to die from smiling too much. You know, like African laughing sickness.”

  Eventually, everyone quieted down and got pensive but not for too long because Celestine jumped up and said:

  “Ok, Sunset Club is closing early. Everybody needs to go home and get a good night’s sleep so you can be on for cookout tomorrow, one o’clock. Come on all you rascals, you’re being tossed out on your asses.” There was a bit of griping and good-humored rebellion, but everyone moved on, leaving us alone to blow out the flames.

  And while the Tiki torches were still smoking in the back yard, I began rubbing lotion into her palms as we sat on the floor of the living room polishing off a last bottle of wine.

  As I work more lotion onto her hands and up her arms, I find a patch of skin that dresses her shoulder blade and it is smooth and supple, a little island of the young Celestine surrounded by what actually exists now. I lick it and rub my nose and cheeks on it and I fold myself up into all the rest of her, which is a banquet for a starving man. Age improves cheese, wine – why not Celestine?

  And that was where we tumbled down the slope of lovemaking like two kids rolling themselves over and over down the hill, getting itchier and dizzier and higher than kites by the time we reach bottom.

  But as much in the heat of it as in the afterglow, I feel the need to protect her, wrap her in a cloak of some long-ago chivalry, like this is what she was accustomed to in the very earliest of the 60’s before the culture changed irrevocably when I turned two.

  I’d lost sight of what had brought me here in the first place. It’s not that I’d forgotten completely about Porky. I did think of him a few times but I forgot to continue thinking about him. Now the declining day begged the questions: What happened to Porky? Where was Porky?

  Chapter XVI: If Pigs Could Fly