by Don Bajema
We’d been trying to make as casual an exit as possible for the last minute or two, but the rapidly accumulating insults and jeers were making it clear that there was a penalty charged against us, and our sentences were going to be worked out informally. But severely.
Chris had his hands stuffed in his pockets as he rocked back and forth on his heels, trying to seem calm, while the expression on his face was telling Robert and me, “I told you guys to just buy a record; you didn’t have to mainline your ethnic fix.”
Robert got jostled from behind and fell into a large and humorless man with a recently shaved head. His scalp, crisscrossed with old scars, was flaky with scabs and had a crucifix tattoo over one side. He had tattooed tears running from one eye and had lost an ear someplace. The man turned and thumped Robert hard on the chest. Robert backed up, slowly shaking his lowered head as he tossed his hands in the air, saying, “Qué pasa?”
“Qué pasa?” mimicked a girl who had been quite friendly to us in the minutes before we pulled out the blow. In that instant, the entire room had frozen. Here we’d been, the three of us, sitting on the couch with the stupid smiles melting on our faces. Our eightball in its zippered baggie slumped on the coffee table. Twenty cold and disgusted faces staring at the bag, then at each other and then at us with a collective menace that was, as I said before, pretty scary.
I put my hand inside my jacket as though I were carrying a gun, thinking at the time, “This is stupid, they’ll think you’re going for your badge.” They knew we weren’t armed; I don’t know how. I felt like a fraternity boy whose car had broken down in a “bad” section of town. We rose to our feet in unison. No one else in the room budged, except to raise their heads as their eyes followed us to our full height. Robert reached down, snapped the baggie off the table and put it into his jacket pocket. I almost said, “Welp, I guess we’ll be going then, . . .” but before I could get it out of my mouth, the guy with the tattooed tears was introducing himself to Robert.
Everyone was on their feet; the weight of the crowd was pressing in on us. The room began to stink with the smell of fight or flight. I glanced at Chris, who managed another tight-lipped smile as he rolled his eyes heavenward, finally focusing on Robert, who was by now on the other side of the room. Robert’s dance partner was trying to break his ribs with frequent and devastating explosions.
No one spoke loudly. There were just the sounds of sarcastic muttering and a rigid mocking attitude combining with the thuds on Robert’s chest every five or six seconds. In silence our captors began shifting positions, cutting off any chance for escape and separating us from each other. One guy I knew didn’t like me even before the room turned ugly, and a particularly beautiful and belligerent girl, worked their way behind me.
I had picked her out the second I walked in the door. We exchanged smiles before I realized that the pair of eyes I felt pinning me from her left belonged to her boyfriend. Under normal circumstances things would have been cool as long as I never looked at the girl again, and avoided any chance encounters in hallways or bedrooms, or at the refrigerator. She was fairly small, in tight black jeans, wearing cowboy boots. She had on a light-blue cowboy shirt with snap buttons. Her breasts were putting those buttons to the test and the first four from the top had already given up. She had large white teeth and a lovely mouth which smiled in a way that stunned me. It was an entirely sexual smile, a knowing smile. Now her eyes were not smiling; her eyes were cold analysts that missed nothing, and found very little in me to appreciate. She and her boyfriend were on the same wavelength. I had clearly fucked up. The girl poked me in the ribs under my armpit a few times, hissing, “Hey, fock you, man. Hey, fock you, asshole. Hey, fock you, man,” in an odd sort of rhythmic chant. The guy was a classic “vato loco”: compact, durable, tough, with no nervous system to speak of. He didn’t say anything; he was pressing his weight against me so I’d lose my balance and he could use my sudden movement as an excuse to attack. I figured I had much less than a minute. I couldn’t think of a thing to do or a thing to say.
Then the lights went out. Somebody grabbed the collar of my jacket. I tucked my chin down firm on my neck to take the blade across my chin and jaw instead of my throat. My mouth suddenly got warm and I swallowed a mouthful of blood. I grabbed the girl and bearhugged her in front of me. She was reaching back over her head, pulling my hair and filling her fingernails with skin she tore off my face. The guy who was cutting me couldn’t find the place he was looking for. The girl started howling in Spanish. Her body jumped and twisted in my arms as she absorbed the impact of the knife targeted for my stomach and chest.
I heard Chris shouting instructions to Robert, urging him to get over to the window in the corner of the room. I heard the sound of the windowpane breaking. I was too far away. If I followed I’d be certain to be caught up in the pursuit of my friend. I started to back up, offering no resistance to the bodies shoving past me toward the sound of the breaking glass.
The boyfriend was muttering something to the girl in my arms, but she wasn’t responding coherently. While he tried to figure out what was wrong, I kept backing up. The far side of the black room grew quiet. It contained a confusing sound of grunts, thuds and expelled breath. I was sure they had Chris and Robert on the floor. I kept backing up.
Finally all the bodies behind me were gone and I lost my balance with the sudden release of pressure from the moving wall of people. I stumbled backward into the kitchen. The voice of the guy with the knife revealed that he knew something was real wrong, but that voice was going to sound a lot worse when he found out for sure. I held the girl as tightly as I could to prevent her from inhaling enough air to find words. Somehow she managed to get my hand between her teeth as I twisted her head back and sideways. She got loose for a second and inhaled before I rammed the palm of my hand under her chin and twisted her head again. I felt and heard a deep pop in her shoulder, and her body dropped heavily into shock. I let go of her with one hand, propped her up for a second and hit her as hard as I could in the face, pushing her against the doorjamb we had just fallen through.
The kitchen was empty except for the sound of two men breathing hard. I could hear them coming closer and tried to place the sound of their shuffling feet. I was frantically feeling the walls for a door or a window. I thought the thin cool handle might be to the refrigerator, but in my panic I yanked on it before I could stop myself.
The refrigerator light threw a dim rectangle, revealing for a second the red girl in the fetal position in the doorway and two guys blinking at me.
I glimpsed another door in the corner and jumped for it. I pushed with all my strength, but it opened to the inside. Then I pulled on it before I turned the knob. The men started screaming for their friends. As the door finally opened, one of the guys climbed on my back, wrapping his arms around my head. The other guy slid along the floor, hanging on to one of my legs; I kicked backward and dented his forehead with the sharp edge of my boot. I turned sideways and tried to scrape the other man, who should have been a jockey, off on the doorjamb. I tried to finish the man on the floor with one final kick, but my foot swung wide and glanced the side of his face. I lost my balance and rose into the air, and then began falling onto my back, with the guy still clamped around my shoulders. I landed hard and felt the air leave his body, as my weight deflated his chest. I could see his eyes bug out and hear his desperate gasps for air as we lay on the floor. He was tough as hell and his fingers still felt like steel talons on my neck; I began twisting his thumb and fingers in all the directions they weren’t suppposed to go, and broke free.
I rolled out the kitchen door, got to my feet and fell down the concrete porch onto the sidewalk. I jumped up, slipped on the wet lawn and made it away from the house by crawling, running on all fours and staggering to a fence. I half-jumped, half-climbed over the chain links, dropping flat on my back into someone’s yard. A couple of large pit bulls c
ame streaking at me, barking and growling.
JUMPER
He rolled the car window down with one hand, drove the car with the other. The sound of the hissing tires on the wet asphalt invigorated him. Being invigorated was not beneficial. Invigorated only meant amplified, and this was the last thing he wanted or needed.
He’d been in an emotional state for months, perhaps years, a state in which slivers of occurrences or actions that remained incomplete would erupt very disconnected feelings in him. The confusion and exhaustion made him feel utterly useless and lost.
These sensations were common; they were the central part of his life, except for a dull, muted sense of panic during increasing anxiety or fatigue. The panic was muted because he had grown accustomed to its clockwork regularity — at intervals three times per night as he slept, and again at dawn. It occurred repeatedly each time throughout the day when he saw a familiar face. It occurred each time his daughter or his wife initiated a conversation with him.
The fear always precipitated a strange series of impressions, some of which were so odd that for a moment they would hold his interest. He would want to construct something out of these images, visions, theories — but being without a sense of who he was, he could not.
He’d made the mistake of trying to communicate these impressions, but for the past few days he had given up. He chose instead to be silent, or he would try to read, in an attempt to arrange the feelings and thoughts into some logical sequence by simply following the writer’s sentences across the page. He hoped this would make his struggle less apparent to others.
His wife and daughter began to comment that he seemed remote — “not there.” He could not explain. He simply shrugged, hoping that it might pass as a denial.
In past attempts to communicate, he had often felt physically ill. As he watched his wife or daughter trying to make sense of his statements, he would be overwhelmed with sadness. He would nod his head in agreement with the rational sense of their views. It was impossible for him to point to the emotional confusion and desperation with which each of their observations struck him. He felt like a short kid riding a huge pretend horse in blinding circles, grabbing for an impossible ring.
He was ashamed as he observed them losing their time and energy in efforts to translate his words and impressions into something that had meaning. He watched them working at finding bogus meanings that offered hope or made simple sense, offered an object lesson or gave some insight. Minutes became hours as he watched one or the other trying to point to a path that might offer relief. He knew there was no relief.
The sound of the hissing tires, the predawn fog, the bridge he was driving over and the cyclone fence above the sidewalk on the outside edge of the rail brought a hallucination.
In front of his eyes he could see the rings of a tree like those at the end of a sawed log. He knew immediately what the image meant. It referred to ego, the core of something real, an ego with surrounding enclosed rings. Each ring represented the time that has surrounded that ego and each ring further from the core was another period of survival. It seemed so pointless.
He pulled his car over and set the emergency brake. He felt mean. He became furious. He thought he would turn out the lights in an attempt to cause a pile-up on the narrow lane. He wanted to add the message of anger to his passing. Feeling that his daughter would have a hard enough time coping with his coming action, he decided that it would prove he loved her if he turned the blinking lights on.
He realized he would have to move fast. He pounced on the cyclone fence, feeling the weight of his body pulling his fingers in the wire diamonds. His feet slipped. He remembered the many times he had hit a fence on a dead run, agile and quick, climbing to the top and dropping off to the other side, into another place where he did not belong. He slipped again. His heart sank. Bungling and awkward, he felt humiliated. He kept climbing, determined to do this, once and for all. He began to blame his slipping and his clumsy effort on the wetness of the fence, his years out of practice, but he was not convinced. Dispirited, he slid down the face of the fence, catching his wedding ring behind the wire, and tearing skin loose from one knuckle. As he sprawled on the concrete at the foot of the fence, he laughed until he cried.
He watched a couple of cars changing lanes as they approached his parked car. He walked in front of his own headlights as they blazed impersonally against his thighs. He swung open the car door, got into the car, and with his heart pounding hard, drove across the bridge.
A helicopter was streaking toward the bridge from the Coast Guard Station a mile away. As the crew saw the car pulling off they radioed up to a Highway Patrol car, “Looks like the jumper has changed his mind. Why don’t you guys pull him over and see how he’s doing?” The car radioed back, “Will do, thanks, fellas.” “No problem.”
NEAR THE EQUINOX
The floor of the room must have been made of dry ice. I wondered how powerful the light had to be in order to illuminate it from below. Something down there was burning hot. This dark room filled with ankle-high mist, suggesting hell, seemed like a place I had been before and, worse, like a place I belonged. The cold mists rising in thundering red flashes looked like the stage effect from a production at the Old Globe Theatre near the bell tower in Balboa Park. With that thought, my lips began to form a smile, as another black-out seized me.
I shielded my eyes against the silver glare of an old house trailer. As I moved out of the direct glare, a boy backed down the metal stairs. He was unwinding a steel measuring tape attached to the kitchen faucet inside. He backed up slowly, counting his steps as he went. He ran into the trailer and came out with an old camera. He took close-up shots of every footprint he’d made beside the tape. The camera clicked in the dark nine times. A voice said, “What goes on up there, is determined by what happens down here.” Sawdust blew over the footprints, and I blacked out again.
A voice with the confidence and the certainty of adolescence demanded my attention. I couldn’t concentrate. A blinding headache moaned slowly and stretched a brutal hand downward into nausea. A face in a pilot’s helmet searched the dark water below, his voice was drowned in the sound of the blades beating in the dark. A kid’s voice rose above the noise as the copter banked off to the left, shutting off its searchlight. I attempted some kind of denial. The voice wouldn’t let me finish. He was saying, “No, you won’t. I’ll never let you. How high do you think you’ll get off your knees like that?”
Dry ice again. The girls and boys were dancing in a slow shuffle, stirring those mists into silent, scorching cyclones which rose to the level of their hips. I heard my own voice: “Where am I?” Warm women’s voices mixed laughing, “Oklahoma,” “It must be yours,” and “Time heals all wounds.” I blacked out again.
She always wore those black pumps. Her hips were enveloped in a tight dress. With me in tan corduroy Levi’s and a pair of old shoes, the kind with the basset hound in the heel, we wound clockwise in a tight, hot circle. A saxophone rumbled a melody that sounded like the initial moments of sex. Her foot planted between my feet, our weight rocking left and right, back and forth. My heart ached deeper and harder, breathing became impossible. The pain climbed until I feared a nocturnal heart attack. It was soul, not body. Before the images faded, something brushed my lips lightly; I smelled her sweat and skin. Her lipstick tasted vague. My erection began its silent pounding. She whispered, “You didn’t keep your promise.” I blacked out.
A cat started yeowling in an empty metal storage house. This set off the dogs barking furiously. As the sound grew beyond what the cavernous room could contain, I tried to shut off the hose, thinking it was the source of my nightmare. Outside in the wind-whipped, tall rustling grass, a huge cat coughed a warning. The dogs and everything else alive accelerated into a hysterical retreat. Razor talons pulled down a huge ghost. The grass spun crazily in the wind. The legs of the ghost kicked frantical
ly in the dust before me. The narrator had a boy’s voice: “This is not me. This is what I have become.” One cat eye stared at me until everything was cold and black again.
My face was hot, my lips salty. The kid who had been speaking was finally revealed leaning against a camper, picking at a bit of athletic tape he had wrapped around one finger. He slouched on his hip, implying an androgyny. He stared up angrily at that thought, then relaxed into an amused sneer. He spat through his teeth and warned, “Don’t get me wrong.” I knew the look, having used it every minute of my life. He was insolent, standing in the hot sunlight treating a severe sunburn as a matter of course, as though the hot red skin and swollen eyelids had nothing to do with anything.
I was impressed with his self-possession. He’d been dealt a strong hand, or at least had the confident manner that implied he had access to one. He had an attitude of expectation that followed an adherence to some type of code. I couldn’t remember it. He stared at me for what seemed like years. During those decades it became apparent that he was locked in a struggle, completely misplaced in the bowels of my own prison. He told me I had introduced his torturers as my guests. I tried to apologize. He laughed and said, “Save it. You’ll need it later.” He stood there mocking what I had become, while he inhaled honor and exhaled humility. He told me I hadn’t listened to anyone but the voices planted in my own head by my own disrespect: “Ya turned on me.” At the precise instant I tried to use him as something to envy, continuing to poison what remained of my soul, he interrupted me with a wave of his hand. He turned his head suddenly as though he had heard a summons. I blacked out.
