Kumbaya, Space Hippie

by Paul Neuhaus

  Ty felt around until he found the chair next to the door. He put it down halfway between me and the exit and sat. He put his long case on the ground next to him. “Nonsense. There’re loads of mythological creatures still roaming the earth, and most of them are congregating right here in Los Angeles. It’s a dangerous world. None of us can afford to be complacent.”

  I folded my arms and pouted. “I wasn’t being complacent. I was just having a little fun.”

  “A little fun?” Hope interjected. “You smell like a brewery.”

  Ty and I ignored her. “No one’s telling you not to have fun,” the old man said. “You deserve some fun after all the crazy goings-on last month but do it smart. If you wanna go out and paint the town, get a babysitter for Hope. You can call me. Just Hope and I would be fun. Making popcorn… Sitting up… Watching old spy movies.”

  Hope cooed. Ty had hit a sweet spot for her. She adored spy movies.

  I sighed and dropped my arms. “Okay, okay. The next time I want to go out and get blasted, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Please do,” he replied. “But I have to ask… Why do you want to go out and get blasted? It sounds like such an empty experience. Wouldn’t you rather go out with a friend and talk some meaningful talk? Wouldn’t you like to make some connections?”

  I folded my arms again. He was suddenly reminding me of a huffy Italian girl. “What’re you talking about, old man?”

  “Shall I get to the meat of why I’m here?”

  “I wish you would.”

  The old Greek nodded. “Like I said before, it’s been almost a month since the Kraken Affair. Between that and your prior adventure with Medea, I thought you were making real strides getting-out-of-your-shell-wise. Then, bam! Nothing. You go right back into your old pattern—only now, if anything, it’s worse. You sit in this trailer, nobody hears from you. Did you know that Elijah’s got Keri in rehab? You knew that, right? I mean El did call you like a million times. Then again you never called him back.”

  I demurred, lowering my chin. “How’s she doing?”

  “Not good. It’s a difficult thing. Although it might’ve been easier for her if you’d honored your commitment.”

  A flash of shame and panic went across my face. He couldn’t see it, but knowing Ty, he could probably feel it somehow. I decided to play dumb. “What commitment?”

  “Did you not tell Elijah you’d go to rehab with Keri?”

  Damn. El must’ve told him I said that. “I… did. But that was something I volunteered for. He didn’t ask me.”

  “Which makes it a doubly nice gesture. Not to mention the fact it would’ve been good for her to have the support, and good for you since you need treatment as much as Keri.”

  I leaned back and dropped my arms to my sides, palms up. I suddenly felt very drained. “Yeah, well, I thought about that, and I decided it wasn’t for me. I mean Keri’s not even my kid and I wouldn’t know how to live if I got straight. I don’t think I’m the social butterfly type.”

  Tiresias smiled. “Nobody’s saying you have to be the social butterfly type. You can be whatever type you want just as long as it’s a healthy type. And it doesn’t take that much work to maintain relationships. You could get yourself a couple of gal pals. You could come with me and the fellas to the brony events.”

  He was just pushing my buttons. “We both know that could will ever happen.”

  He shrugged his shoulders in mock disappointment. “Let me know if you reconsider. I think you’d look darling dressed as Honey Horse.”

  He’d come for a pep talk. While I appreciated the thought behind it, I wasn’t especially keen to observe the ritual. “What’s in the case?” I said.

  “Ah,” he said, his face brightening. “What’s in the case is for you. A little token of my esteem.” He picked up the black container and handed it to a point in space right next to me.

  I slid over on the couch to accommodate his lack of sight. I took the case and laid it down on my lap. “What is it?”

  From the desk, Hope said, “Why do people do that? Why do they say, ‘What is it?’ when, if they opened it, they would know. It’s going to take longer for him to say, ‘Open it and find out’ than it would to just open it and see for yourself.”

  Ty’s smile grew wider and he said, “Open it and find out.”

  The case had two latches. I flipped them up and raised the lid. Inside the case was a Cort Style Axe Bass Guitar—the kind played by Gene Simmons of KISS. I’d noticed the instrument hanging in Ty’s pawnshop a little over a month ago and fallen in love with it. “Wow,” I said with reverential awe. “Is this for me?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Think of it as a ‘thank you’ for all the amazing things you did. And as a sign of my affection.”

  I gave him a coy look. “Why, Ty, are you hitting on me?”

  “Please. I’m more man than you could ever handle.”

  “I believe it.” I took the bass out of the case and put the case down on the floor. Then I laid the instrument across my knees. “God, Ty, I don’t know what to say. This is like the most awesome thing anyone’s ever given me.”

  He made a tsk. “Further proof you need to get out more.”

  I began plucking at the strings. I had no idea how to play the bass and no intention of learning, but I loved the look and the feel of the thing. “I’ve been out recently. In the way that most people mean when they say, ‘You need to get out more’. It’s overrated.”

  “You mean your night of debauchery?”

  “No, no. Before that.”

  “Play something,” he said. “Play me a selection from the KISS songbook.”

  I grinned at him sheepishly. “I don’t know how to play the bass.”

  “Then why did you want it?” he asked, stymied.

  “Because it’s super-cool,” I replied. “I’m gonna hang it on the wall next to a picture of Gene Simmons spitting up blood.”

  “Gene Simmons is ill?”

  “No, no. It’s part of his act.”

  “Oh. Alright. You know I’m not hip to all the kids’ jive these days. I’m a Cole Porter man.”

  “I am too but you can’t hang a piano on the wall.”

  “True. Would you allow me to be frank with you?”

  “As opposed to Charlie?”

  “Can the Abbott and Costello for a minute. I’m being serious.”

  “Okay.” As a sign of respect, I stopped noodling on my new axe-shaped toy and propped it against the couch next to me.

  “These are all sore spots… The things I’m about to mention… I’m bringing them up only by way of discussion; not to make you feel badly. I want to be very, very clear about that.”

  I believed him, but we were sliding back into pep talk territory and my spine stiffened. Clearly, the bass was designed as the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down—and he wasn’t going to leave until I took the medicine.

  Ty sat for a moment, composing his thoughts. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “I’ve talked to a few folks since you came to visit me in my shop—and since BronyKonfab. I know you spent a whole lot of time holed-up in this trailer. I also have an idea what the catalyst was for that. Then you got drug out, kicking and screaming, into the whole Orpheus and Medea thing. Then, without even a moment to catch your breath, there was the Adrestia and Kraken thing. Along the way, you lost some people, you had to confront some old feelings. It’s been a crazy time. I just want to tell you something: Don’t always listen to your brain.”

  “What? Don’t always listen to my brain?”

  “That’s right. Don’t always listen to your brain. I told Perseus before he went off to face the Kraken all those millennia ago to lean on his noggin. That a good brain was the only weapon the gods’d given us against a nutso world. I still believe that. But I also believe our brains’re too good. They’re always active and, when they get bored and turn inward, they become dangerous. Suddenly, you’ve got that amazing weapon trained on yourself an
d, Wow! What a shock! you end up hurting yourself with it. Would you mind if I told you a little story?”

  I told him I didn’t mind.

  Again, he hesitated, composing what he wanted to say. “After the Golden Age… After the gods had all gone to wherever it is gods go when their own brains turn inward… I was in Sicily. I lived there for many years, loving the land and the people. There was one person I loved above all others. A beautiful peasant girl with a deep soul and a questing mind. A real forerunner to the strong women we have today.”

  “We’ve always had strong women,” I interjected. “They were hiding in plain sight.”

  The old man nodded. “I don’t doubt that,” he said. “Men can be blind. Anyway, there was this girl. There was me and this girl. This girl, my love, wasn’t just beautiful and kind, she was… She was everything. She was what I needed and, I’d like to think, I was what she needed.”

  I leaned forward, rapt. “What happened?” I asked.

  Tiresias sighed. “My brain looked inward.”

  “What did it see?”

  “It saw that my love was mortal, and I was not.”

  “And?”

  “And… It made me lash out. Do and say terrible things. Ultimately, it made me turn away without ever offering the girl an explanation. All she knew was that my love had soured, and she assumed it was her fault. But it wasn’t her fault. It was my fault. Because I was a coward.”

  “You were a coward?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I couldn’t face the idea of my love growing old and dying. I couldn’t imagine her growing sick and dying. I left Sicily and the girl—my love—never married and died alone.”

  Quiet hung over us for a long moment like a weight. Finally, I said. “Well, Ty, I really wanna thank you for coming over here and cheering me up.”

  He smiled but it held little humor. “You know the moral of the story, right?”

  “Don’t fall in love with Sicilian girls?”

  “No! Fall in love with Sicilian girls if that’s what your heart tells you to do. My heart told me to love that girl and to stay with her, but my brain won out. Since then, not a day has gone by without me thinking of that time, that place and that girl. Not a single day.”

  Again with the silence. Finally, Ty pushed back his chair and stood. I walked him out. “Enjoy the bass,” he said.

  After he left, I sat on the couch, staring into space, until Amanda Venables arrived for coffee.

  At 9AM sharp Amanda knocked on the door. I got up mechanically and let her in. “Don’t look so happy to see me,” she said. She looked very much the way she did when I’d first met her. Pretty but not working hard to accentuate the fact. One thing was different and only I would know it—she was disguised. In her role as Mistress of the Underworld, she wore an unadorned iron crown. It was her badge of office and it conferred her powers onto her. She couldn’t take it off, not even in the surface world. That’s why—via the power of godly magic—she was disguised as a person not wearing a crown even though she was totally still wearing a crown. Gods and goddesses go to weird lengths to blend in with mortal folk.

  “I haven’t slept yet,” I replied. “And my blood is mostly alcohol.”

  The former lawyer folded her arms in front of her chest. “You’ve been on a bender and you didn’t invite me?”

  “I would have but it was a special occasion. An ex-girlfriend wanted to talk me out of the funk I’m in. It didn’t go well. She kicked me in the pussy.”

  “Huh. Can’t say as I’ve ever been kicked in the pussy. What’s that like?”

  “You want I should show you?”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Take my word for it: There are a million things you’d rather try.”

  She opened the door and ushered me out. “I’ll drive,” she said. “I don’t trust you with all that booze in your system.”

  “It’s not just booze,” I said. “It’s also mushrooms. A little grass. Some kinda blue pill.” I shut the door and locked it behind me. Then I brushed past the Pontiac and headed toward her lime green Smart car.

  Amanda started to follow but stopped after she’d only gone a couple of steps. “Wait. Are you just gonna leave Hope here by herself?”

  I rolled my eyes and looked back at her. “Yeah. Why?”

  “Remember that whole thing where Hope got stolen and we had track her down in Hades and, even though you got her back, your new best friend—AKA me—got hornswoggled into taking over as queen of the dead? Bad things happen when you leave Hope unattended.”

  “You guys keep saying that to me. What do you think? I take her absolutely everywhere? I used to go out without her all the time. To the grocery. To the dispensary. To the liquor store. You lose one jug under dubious circumstances and you’re stamped a serial jug-loser.”

  “Okay, okay,” Venables said, raising her hands and resuming her walk toward the driver’s side of her roller-skate-sized vehicle. “I’m sure you know what you’re doing. But if Hope gets stolen and I have to take over for any other AWOL deities, you and me’re gonna tangle.”

  On the drive to the nearest Starbucks, Amanda wanted to know the details of my Long Beach to Malibu adventure. From our adventure together against Medea and Orpheus, I knew her to be a bit of a hellraiser. Being cooped up in the Underworld all the time with Constantine Constantinides had to be taking its toll. I would’ve advised her to bail on that situation but bailing as Queen of Hell would’ve turned her into an instant inmate rather than Grand Poobah. The circumstances around her ascent to goddess-hood had been complicated. Anyway, I promised I’d talk to her about her difficulties adjusting and, even though I wasn’t in the proper mindset for moral support, I felt obligated to do so. When we parked and got out of the car, I told my rebel brain to be nice. My rebel brain said, “I’ll think about it.”

  Once we had our drinks and were seated outside, I said, “So… How’re things?”

  Amanda scrunched her nose. “That can wait,” she said. “I wanna ask you something and I don’t know if we’re good enough friends yet.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  She took a deep breath and said, “What’s wrong with you? What happened?”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Three pep talks in less than twelve hours was over my limit. At least that’s where I thought she was heading. Before I came out swinging, I wanted to at least check. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean at the end of our adventure you seemed like you were doing pretty good. You’d been a recluse for years and years and maybe you were ready to shake it off. Then I hear—through the grapevine—you had a run-in with an ex- and now you’re all Hermie Hermit again. Only you’re Hermie Hermit with a mean streak. What happened? Why the backslide?”

  I rubbed my temples and counted to ten. I gave her the most honest answer I could without taking a deep dive. “I don’t know. That’s the absolute truth. It’s the sum of several parts. Like when somebody cooks something, and they mix together a bunch of different things and you don’t know how they did it but it’s delicious. A bunch of things happened, and they weren’t especially anything on their own, but they came together into a funky broth.”

  “Okay, fine. Let’s see if we can reverse engineer the broth.”

  I had no interest in reverse engineering the broth. “You can’t reverse engineer a broth. It loses its intrinsic brothiness.”

  “Of course, you can,” Venables replied. “You just said somebody mixes together a bunch of ingredients. That’s called a recipe. All I wanna know is, what were the ingredients in your broth of mean-spirited reclusiveness.”

  “What would be the goal of that? An easy-to-follow guide for depression and self-pity? Do we want to make it, so others can stew in my same broth?”

  “No. Now you’re just being belligerent. If we break it down, maybe we can make it stop happening. To you. C’mon, let’s get into it.”

  “I don’t wanna get into it. Maybe if you’d caught me pre-bend
er, I would’ve been game, but right now, I’m not. Let’s do your thing.”

  My friend sighed. “You’re no fun. Alright, let’s do me. But I wanna come back and do you at a later date. Figure out a day when you won’t be blotto the night before.”

  “That’ll be tricky.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You know, there’s a fine line between being the genuine article and just cultivating a persona.”

  “Now I’m cultivating a persona? My… current state is a put-on? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m just making an observation.”

  My brain was having a lot of trouble keeping Mean Dora in check. I wanted to get the focus off of me as quickly as possible. “Can we just cut to the Connie bashing? I’m getting a headache.”

  “Connie bashing? Who said I was gonna Connie bash?”

  “Nobody. They didn’t have to. I saw you for half an hour last month; all you did was complain about him.”

  “You agreed with me! You saw him… being himself.”

  I took a drink. Until then, I’d forgotten what I’d ordered. It ended up being some kind of peach iced tea thing. It was too sweet. “How well did you know Connie before you slept with him?”

  She smiled. Not a smile of mirth but one of, Oh. I think I see where this is going. “You know how long I knew him. You were there.”

  “You’re right. I was there. I had at least a Cliff’s Notes idea of who each of you were—and, I admit, it might’ve been nuance-free. Still, I had the broad strokes. Here’s my point: People are who they are. If you’re interacting with adults, they’re fully-formed by the time you get to them. They don’t change. Not in substantive ways. Unless you want to date children, get used to not having a lot of impact on how people think and act.”

  “So, you’re saying I should’ve waited to find out whether Connie was a doofus before I gave up the goods?”

  I jutted my chin forward and blinked my eyes dramatically. A gesture meant to convey, Duh!

  “Okay, well, maybe you’re right about that. You can’t tell me you planned on staying with every little fling you had. I don’t know that I had any long-term plans with Connie. He was nice, and I liked his whole Josh Groban vibe. I didn’t know I’d end up getting stuck with him.”