Viewmaster

by Ferdinand Stowell

It seems as good a time as any to review those few lost days after Porky’s flight from San Francisco and sanity, which I’ve been enabled to do thanks to several subsequent short-tempered interviews with Porky and various concerned others, assembled and edited, admittedly, by one of the main instruments of his torture, namely me, and therefore not entirely objective.

  The Strange Round-About Where-Abouts of Emil (Porky) Flores After His Recent Debauchery But Before His Complete Abasement.

  Porky took Celestine’s personal information that I gave him and literally ran with it – out the door of my house and into his own. Pinky was out shopping and he took advantage of the opportunity to shower, grab a few articles of clothing and get his truck on the road.

  When he grabbed that address from my fingers, Porky took his destiny into his own hands and from thereon altered the course of our personal histories, but as soon as he hit the freeway, once again things started happening to him and not according to his will.

  He drove over the Bay Bridge around one and called me from the side of the freeway shortly after.

  “I lost it!”

  “Porky? Where are you?”

  “I’m in Oakland, on the freeway, I just crossed the bridge. I can’t find Celestine’s address and phone number. I can’t remember them. Can you give them to me again?” I gave him the information again but begged him,

  “Porky, please come back now while you still can.”

  “No, nobody is going to talk me out of this. I’m going, bye.”

  Porky’s the kind of guy who whistles theme songs to the more soulful of 70’s television programs. He really belts them out with all his heart as though he’s singing Faro or an aria from La Bohême. So, we can surmise that at some point soon after he got into his truck and out onto the freeway, he began whistling wide-ranging theme songs that once accompanied the travails of quirky television newsroom co-workers, various homo-erotic cop couplings and the side-splitting surgical doings of wartime medical personnel trying to get themselves laugh-tracked out of Korea.

  Another given, given that Porky is one of the most prodigiously phlegmatic people I’ve ever met is that he began the endless cycle of mucous sucking and swallowing, followed by throat clearing and grunting that is his expression of self-sufficiency. I have a brass spittoon, though it’s no longer expected to function as such, that saw its first usage in sixty years when Porky started coming over to do work at the house. He didn’t use it often, since he’s such a firm believer, as far as mucous goes anyway, in recycling, but it’s nice to know that the spittoon still works, just in case.

  I would venture to say that at some climactic point on his journey, the theme-song singing and phlegm sucking and swallowing were woven together in some crescendo that transported him out of body to somewhere hovering above his truck along mile after increasing miles from San Francisco.

  He sped along the freeway, through the towns of Oakland and Fremont, lamenting the lost opportunity of looking around due to all those concrete walls that have been erected along California’s once wide open freeway system. [“I hate those things,” he said to me, “you can’t see anything except the road. It’s so boring.”] He edged south at a good clip, neither too fast nor too slow, wanting to get there so badly but wanting to procrastinate, nervous that he was actually on the road doing this.

  About an hour and a half into his journey, he noticed a sign for food and gas and exited the freeway where he found half a dozen fast food restaurants and three gas stations, all of them in cutthroat competition with each other around the world but here forced into wary, proximate accord. He filled his gas tank and then, not caring to make up his mind about anything at that moment, he made four different stops at the drive through windows of four different fast food restaurants, and ordered an assortment of greasy flavors, on which, given his description of what he ordered, I would conservatively put an estimate of at least, for insurance purposes, ten thousand calories.

  Meanwhile, as the long stretch of the Central Valley still lay ahead, the atmospheric conditions were tilting toward some serious fog. Leaning that way, they finally tipped the balance as he descended down into the valley, erasing the existence of almost everything else. Porky doesn’t like driving in fog.

  “I hate fog, it’s like blind man’s bluff except you can’t cheat and peak under the blindfold,” he says.

  Dawned on

  As Porky drove down the freeway on the flat of the valley, with all visual connection to the landscape gone, he began inadvertently to speed up until two red eyes loomed towards him from out of the fog. He punched his foot onto the brake, causing several bags of fast food to belch forward down into the leg well in front of the passenger seat. “Oh, for cripes sake. What a mess.”

  As he crept off of the road into the breakdown lane in order to inspect and salvage the food, suddenly a girl walked into the path of his car and then jumped away from it to avoid getting hit.

  “What are you doing? What were you thinking?” Porky yelled out the window. “You could have gotten killed!”

  “Oh, my god, I’m sorry, I didn’t notice you until the last minute. I just want to get a ride.”

  “Who the heck hitch-hikes in weather like this?” he asked her.

  [At this point in our interview I interrupted and asked him to say “Who the heck hitch-hikes in weather like this” five times fast. “Do you want to hear the story or not?” he asked me with a funny look on his face. I said, “I said I did.” “Well then shut up and let me tell the story.”]

  “I didn’t think it would get so foggy this late in the day. It’s been a weird day,” the girl said.

  “You can say that again. Come on, get in; I’m not a serial killer.”

  “Me neither,” she said as she got in the car. That made Porky turn to give her a second look-over.

  [“Jeez, I hadn’t even thought of that,” Porky said to me later as he recounted the tale.]

  “Sorry about the mess, I was just going to pick it up. My name is Porky.”

  “Oh, I’m Dawn. Nice to meet you,” she said as she slowly gathered the fast food and bagged it all up. “Thanks for picking me up, I was starting to get cold.”

  “You’re crazy to go walking along the freeway on a day like this. You should have turned back.”

  “I had no place to turn back to. I’m afraid I’ve burnt my bridges.”

  “I just burned a bridge today, too, so I can kind of relate,” Porky said, with a mix of elation and dread. He drove on another five miles or so before the fog began breaking up just in time to see the sunset. “Oh, thank goodness, it’s clearing; driving in fog makes me hungry, which is my way of getting nervous.”

  “Yeah,” Dawn said as she smiled.

  “So where are you from?”

  “Portland.”

  “Did you walk all the way from Oregon?”

  “No, no. I’ve been hitching since San Juan Bautista. I’m from Portland, Maine, not Oregon.”

  “Portland, Maine?” Porky wondered, as though he couldn’t imagine such a thing.

  “Yeah,” she said as she smiled.

  “Oh, right,” Porky said, indicating he understood. He then told her where he was from and they got through a good part of their respective biographies before they began delving deeper into the recent events that had caused their paths to cross.

  “Well, the truth is I’ve left my wife for another woman.”

  “Wow, that is so freaky; I just left my boyfriend! It’s such a small world.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Why did you leave your boyfriend?”

  “He’s too nice.

  “Yeah, so’s my wife.”

  [At this point I interrupted Porky and told him he was an asshole, so we got into a fight but we eventually picked up where he’d left off, neither of us any wiser for the argument.]

  “I mean, he’s a good person, just too nice. Do you know what I mean?” Dawn asked.

  “Exactly,” said
Porky.

  “I just don’t want to be with someone who’s always so polite; it just seems so unnatural. Like he’s avoiding something, or covering something up, something he can’t deal with. I have no idea what that would be, still, that’s how I feel. I walked out on him and just kept walking. I made up my mind to go to this seminar in Big Sur, so that’s why I’m here.”

  [“I didn’t even think to ask her where she was going,” Porky said to me later. “I mean what if I hated her and was stuck with her all the way to Camarillo?”]

  “What’s the seminar?” Porky asked.

  “Oh, I have a girlfriend who told me about it. It really changed her life. She said it was amazing. She made me promise that I’d go, actually she was kind of a pain about it but I eventually told her I would because she had all this great stuff happen to her after she took it: she quit her job and went back to school to be a pastry chef, she met this really cute guy, she totally transformed her relationship with her family, oh, and she found a hundred dollar bill the night of her graduation ceremony from the program! Isn’t that amazing? I mean her dog died that week too but obviously that’s a separate issue. It’s called Odyssey. The seminar. They do them all over the world.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard of that. I don’t know. It sounds kind of cultish to me.”

  “I know exactly what you mean. I thought the same thing, but if you could see my friend and the difference it’s made in her life, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s not that expensive, $450, but she even offered to pay the tuition for me.”

  Porky was struck silent as a feeling he wasn’t familiar with crept over him. The best I could tell from the general incoherence of his attempt to describe it, was that he was feeling the kind of melancholy one usually associates with Elizabethan poets – very dramatic, very girlie, very snuffy and frilly. His co-traveler and co-relationship flee-er couldn’t help but notice the droopy-dog look he so self-consciously made up his face with.

  “You look like your thinking heavy thoughts. Why don’t you come with me to take the seminar. I think it could bring some clarity to your life and what you’re going through right now. I’ll pay the tuition for you.”

  “No, no, no – you can’t do that…..”

  “No, I insist, I want to do this. Don’t worry about it, my dad owns a shopping mall.”

  “Oh, really? Well, if you think it’d be OK, I mean, maybe…”

  “Absolutely – I insist!”

  “No, I don’t know….I need more time to think about it.”

  “Take all the time you want, no pressure.”

  To his credit, Porky was having all sorts of conflicting thoughts about love, lust, loyalty and respect. None of it was very clear to him at the time and he was thinking maybe a little more input and feedback wouldn’t be a bad thing. It was also getting late and he was thinking it wouldn’t be a good idea to show up on Celestine’s doorstep in the dark. He’d planned on calling her first, but the more he thought about it the less confident he was feeling. What if she didn’t want to see him again? What if it was just a one-night stand after all? No, it would be better to surprise her in person, that way his natural charm could counter any resistance she might have.

  It was easy to see the emergence of this strange girl from out of the fog as some kind of sign and Porky, liking the simplicity of easy things, saw it just that way. He decided he would go to the seminar.

  “Go with an open mind, no judgment, no expectations.”

  “No expectations? Why would I pay four hundred and fifty dollars for a two day seminar that I wasn’t expecting anything from?”

  Dawn seemed flattered that they were now close enough that Porky felt comfortable being bitchy with her. She considered it challenging and real, especially after her recent escape from Mr. Nice.

  “I don’t know, 450 dollars is a lot of money. I couldn’t let you pay for me,” Porky whined.

  “No, I want you to let me help. I can see this four hundred dollars….”

  “Four hundred and fifty,” he reminded her.

  “Exactly, four hundred and fifty dollars. I can see this money is a deal killer for you. It’s the roadblock on the freeway to a better future for you and I want to remove it. Let me do that.”

  Porky was in the mood for surrender, especially if it saved him 450 bucks. “Ok, if you want to I won’t stand in the way, thank you, it’s so generous of you. Sure, go ahead, if that’s what you really want to do.”

  “Thank you so much for letting me help you. I think this could be a really important weekend for both of us, maybe the most important weekend of our lives.”

  Porky wanted to believe that. He was daydreaming about his new future life with Celestine, one in which Pinky had reconciled herself to and blessed [I thought of calling him an asshole again when he mentioned this but decided it wasn’t necessary to restate the obvious.] He lulled himself with thoughts of the approval and admiration he might win from his fellow weekend seminarians, how he would stride into the seminar with all the treasure of his life on display like some Roman triumph and the crowd would roar. Then he would strut into Celestine’s with his brow beaming and take her then and there: big rewards for a big man.

  It wasn’t till late that they drove into the modernist encampment that was hosting the “Odyssey: Journey for Life” seminar. As they would see more clearly in the morning, it was a typical Big Sur location with that sublime “take a picture now because this could all slide into the ocean at any minute” beauty that relies on subtle threats of mass destruction to create that tension critics agree is critical for a work of art, or a tourist destination for that matter, to be considered great.

  Seminarians

  In the interest of full disclosure I will say now that I had in fact been to this location ten years before for the graduation ceremony of a friend who’d completed this very same seminar, which at that time was called “Odyssey: 12 to Life”, I suppose in reference to the 12 step program or maybe the number of months in the year. Anyway, I think they realized their phrase sounded like a prison sentence, because it wasn’t called that for long.

  Odyssey at that time was a leaner, meaner organization than it would evolve into. Its members wore Hare Krishna smiles and practiced recruitment tactics lifted from the Leninist playbook. I was braced for the worst because as a group of us were driving down to Big Sur to attend this thing, one of us started telling a harrowing story of his own ordeal with Odyssey. He’d gone down to support a friend, just as we were doing now and during the middle of the program he’d been kidnapped and brought to a room with only one little light bulb that was shining uncomfortably close to his face while he was being circled by a half dozen recruiters that looked an awful lot like Mormons but moved like a very focused school of fish who asked him over and over, “When are you going to start living the rest of your life?” “What’s preventing you from signing up for the full program right now?” All the while the room seemed to be getting smaller and the recruiters seemed to be getting bigger and while he still had the strength to do it, he ran for the door and out of the building.

  “Ok, so, two questions,” I said to him when he was finished with his story, “One: Why didn’t you tell us about this before we agreed to go to this thing?” I guess I was yelling by the time I finished my first question, because he was wincing. But I continued: “and Two: Why would you agree to ever go back after such a hellish experience?”

  “I feel safe with you,” he said. He was the only friend I had at the time who wasn’t an alcoholic and I seriously considered advising him to start drinking.

  Later that night while we were filing through the building on our way to the large seminar hall, we passed a door, which our friend pointed to and said in a low voice, “That’s it. That’s the room!” We remained silent with bowed heads until we were seated at the meeting. I started chewing on the inside of my cheeks.

  Anyway, Dawn signed Porky in as a latecomer and paid h
is tuition. I don’t think she realized that Porky was doing this mostly because by going to this thing he was saving 450 dollars but by not going, he wouldn’t be saving 450 dollars. That’s what’s called a no-brainer in Porky’s world.

  The two of them found accommodations right down the road at a motel which luckily had two rooms available, which was a huge relief to both of them because each was beginning to feel a bit wary of the other and sharing a room would have been an ordeal and possibly unsafe. Both slept soundly though and were able to approach each other with a fresher outlook in the morning. They had breakfast at the restaurant right next to the motel and Porky was dumbfounded to find out that Dawn could pack in as much food as he could, more even, because she actually ate his little packets of orange marmalade that he wouldn’t eat because marmalade makes the quote “muscles in my taste buds get all spastic” unquote.

  So they were well fortified, early and in a good mood. They agreed it was a shame to have to spend the day inside because the sky looked like a kindergartener’s smock that had been smeared with painterly wipes of orange, yellow and lavender. So if they didn’t find the smiles of seminar helpers who were guiding/herding them into the inner recesses of the building to be a good consolation for the sunshine missed, they were ready to do some important work on themselves, though I know if somebody had told Porky he would be required to do work on himself, he would have turned around right then and there and walked out.

  “This place is kind of a dump; I don’t get it. It’s so beautiful outside.”

  “No, they do it on purpose. They don’t want to distract from the message and the work.”

  “Work? What do you mean, work?”

  “Our attentiveness, our mindfulness; don’t get all bent out of shape. You’re sweating the little stuff. Like I said, you have to stay open, keep breathing, deep breaths. My friend told me that by the end of the program, you come to realize that the bare room becomes everything and nothing, a sacred space”

  “Yeah, but couldn’t it be sacred with some potted plants and a couple of lounge chairs?”

  “You’ll get it,” was all Dawn said in reply.

  Chapter XVII: Odyssey