by Don Bajema
He had been there, and the guilt was branded in the beginning of any thoughts of himself. Any voice giving his life a meaning would be invalid. A declaration of love would be a tragic mistake. A long trail leading toward sudden euphoria and plunges into misery. He’d forever worship at an altar of his own making, in celebration of who he was and what that meant. The guilt was here to stay. Every time his fist closed, his hand would be empty.
BLUE
I back into a dark room, surrounded in a hot enclosure of fog. Her eyes are feline; the soles of her shoes embedded with little hard-earned diamonds of broken glass from broken streets, reminders that you can leave but something comes with you.
Her mouth is on mine. She brings tears to my eyes when she bites here for a second, letting up to give a second’s relief, the pain reverberating and then gone. Like a message about the events of what is before us, what lingers, what passes. She’s always immediate, like storms, prides, packs, tribes. She is insistent, demanding. Why does this make me think of forgiveness, of solitude, of a state of grace?
Androids watch us from another room. Shafts of light give their features razor angles, lending any expression an amplification. A smile is the baring of teeth. Repose is a judgmental stare, a long look, a century to come. Past caring. Travelers beyond our time. They turn in unison. One throws open a window and begins to sing a dirge over the cracked and bleeding streets.
She wants to get me off, to put me someplace safe, someplace I have been in collected seconds over my past decades — a place I belong. She pushes me further into the room, into the deeper shadow. Her laced boot, with a galaxy glinting in her soul, kicks the door closed. Her hand gripped tight and me thinking,
“I’ve never let anyone jerk me off.”
Never had a hand on me, and her grip remains the gravest and most hopeful coming death and sacred send-off. I look at my hand stretched out before me catching the light. I see through the skin. Cables pull at muscle. Blood rushes in, presses out, rushes in. I put my hand over my eyes.
I’ll never come. Her mouth breathes hot, and in her chest, a groan rises like lava up the vent of a volcano, bringing the message and another burning bite. I wonder if this is coming . . . if this is coming . . . if this is coming, while her hips rock and her grip tightens. My cheek is between her teeth and her warm spit splatters on my face timed with groans that can only mean, to my amazement, that getting me off will get this sweet girl off.
And I can’t think anymore, something takes over. Is this coming . . . is this coming . . . is this coming, and I give it up. I go blind. I leave all things behind, and Baby Girl who can cut you in, or cut you out, opens her soft eyes and I’m not making sense saying:
“Red tide. Sticky when you get out. Most people don’t like it. Glows in the dark.”
And she asks, “Glows in the dark? Really? Never heard of it.” The Androids lean against the door, their weight creaking the floorboards.
And I say, “Yeah, glows in the dark. Really beautiful.”
I’m glistening under a streetlamp, shining like a smeared star. Blue like the lonely moon.
WEAK
I was in withdrawals. The sound of sixty thousand people celebrating a catch that you weren’t sure you could pull off is a rush that is hard to duplicate. Waiting under the lights for a kickoff to drop out of the sky in the clear cold night, the adrenaline coursing through your legs as you run on instinct, making a cut here and dodging a flying assassin there, is an experience that every young man ought to have. The beauty of it is that so few do.
Walking into the stadium before a game, high on a handful of bennies, headphones raging “Exile on Main Street.” Anticipating a night where anything is possible. Abject failure and injury or the pinnacle of accomplishment. The come-from-behind victory. Circus catches and the party afterwards. The women getting you a beer, the guys hanging around laughing and coming down with a few joints. Driving out to the beach with Diane, feeling the aches begin as the adrenaline wears off. Listening to the radio, hearing the news broadcast announcing the touchdowns you scored and the smile you just couldn’t hide. An ego thing that you have no choice but to give in to because it is just too cool. And you want more. You want it to go on forever. Keeping it going at the big relay meets in the spring. Running down someone with a lead like they are standing still and the crowd on the fence screaming their heads off.
You can’t stop. It’s a life so full of camaraderie, challenge and adrenal/ego rushes that it’s hopeless to consider quitting. You just keep going until they say you can’t play anymore or you just aren’t fast enough.
The echoes of roaring stadiums still haunted me. But it was gone. I fed the memory like an addict. I couldn’t let it go. But I wasn’t playing anymore, and the next step up was the pros or the Olympics. I was a husband and a father, splitting time between trying to be a man and wanting to be a boy again. I was living in the past, certain that I could still pull it off if I had taken the chance, if I’d believed in myself just a little more. Getting high enough to fantasize victory at one more Olympic trial, or walking into pro camp and fighting my way in. Getting it worked out in my mind, rolling another joint.
I was living in Los Angeles. Rubbing elbows with hipsters fresh from the Rolling Thunder Revue. Hanging out with movie stars, hard-time fallers, ascenders, heroes, saints, whores, gypsies. All of them dying piece by piece. All of them tough enough to laugh it off.
I was just hanging out, carrying what I thought was my own weight. Included in the tribe of dervish angels. Invited to the party, in on the shit in the back room. Watching the big dice roll and the bloody knuckle closing the nostril over some of the most beautiful smiles in the world. Around sundown on a porch overlooking the private beaches of Malibu, celebrating a friend’s Academy Award. Watching the pelicans coasting and sliding the troughs of breakers, the sun dropping like Icarus into the blue horizon. Cocktails clinking, faces all over the place competing for the funniest line, the coolest vibe, looking for the best sex. Everybody hallucinating on fame, wealth, power and every drug you can name. The sweet, sticky taste of marijuana still on my teeth, another joint between my fingers.
Getting all the mileage I could from my athletic past. Not knowing that it is part of the mystery and bullshit of Angelenos to make each other larger than life. I believed it, never guessing that no one paid any attention to what anyone said. It was just a huge mutual adoration society. The echoes of the past making it all seem so much like the reality of the stadium. I’d done the impossible with my body; there was no need to suspect that I hadn’t earned the acceptance and backslapping exclusivity of Hollywood too. I knew I had a right to anything Movieland had to offer, that the doorman at the gates to Olympus would recognize me and usher me right through.
There was a big league pitcher hanging out with the hipster underground. Everybody knew his name. Everybody talked about his eccentric tendency to drop a couple hits of acid, go out to the mound and retire the side for a few innings until a laughing fit brought the manager out to point the direction to the dugout. On this afternoon, he was standing next to me listening intently. He wanted to know my story. Wanted to know what had become of me, what had happened, why I had dropped out of sight.
I explained. I told him about the war and how I couldn’t stand to compete in front of those masses of Americans wanting me to run down their racist white hope dreams for them. How they wanted me in the big stadium, the biggest game. The Games. Representing apple pie, Mom, and the goose step. How I couldn’t keep time with the mindless lemmings jack-booting through suburbia. I pretended an acceptable level of modesty, smiled when he suggested I’d have undoubtedly made it to Montreal. After that, the pros would be almost automatic. I mentioned that the scouts for Dallas, Oakland, and Green Bay had all shown interest. He mentioned the names of my old teammates who were working in the pros now. How I could have done it. Yeah, it was in the
bag. I sighed with a kind of weighted resignation. But the war, and the stands full of Nixon backers, and the higher moral ground was so elevated that the events on the field just didn’t really justify coming back down. I was just so . . . illuminated up there beyond the clouds that shade those mortals beneath us who just couldn’t understand the pressures and the hopes pinned on us by the fans. I had a responsibility to reject and to live beyond the definitions of competition. I was in it for the art and not for the winning or losing. That competition is a metaphor for warfare, and with Vietnam raging, I felt used. I wanted to create great races. I was into transcendence, not out to see who was the better man.
I rolled another joint. I had more to say. The pitcher smoked it with me and I went on. He asked me more questions and I went deeper into my logic. I found new levels of brilliant insight into why I was better than the production of my abilities, beyond the crass expression of my god-given talent. I finished.
He looked at me and said, “That’s so weak.” And he walked away.
SLIDE
I’m so spaced in the early morning sun that the question is not where am I, but where will I puke next.
Right here.
My stomach contracts in a single spasm. It’s mostly spit. I see a lawn sprinkler and follow the green snake to the spigot, turn it on and return to the splashing puddle in the dirt. The cold water uses my stomach as a trampoline and flies up and out of my mouth. I breathe a little air, then what’s left in my stomach blasts out of my nose. Alright, I’ll wait.
I circle around like a dog and pass out, curled on my side in the hot sun. I hear voices, tiny and deep from within a cave somewhere in Africa. But when I open my eyes, there are tips of roughout boots in front of my nose. The voices are discussing what to do about me. They’re what pass as friends. Big guys who try, and succeed, at making people shit themselves. Last image I can think of is a shotgun in some fuckup’s mouth as he gets the time and date straight for his last chance.
We’re supposed to be planning the details of setting up a black funk soulster superstar who has a tendency to go off behind cocaine. The object, of course, is to get the funkster’s coke and money without getting caught, which would mean getting killed. I had a plan to use two sure things: greed and ego. Get him to overextend himself and then get him irrational when he tries to cover his embarrassment. But before I could work out the cast of characters, I got drunk.
So far, the plan calls for me to deliver a pound and hang around in the front room, waiting for someone to get back from somewhere with a lot of money, and then stall until my friends come in and take us all off. The pretext is women and some problem with airline tickets.
Then my job is not to freak out while all these psychos strut around and try to fuck with me. It’s a delicate balance between knowing how much to take and where to draw the line. My bit is stupidity. I am the butt of jokes, conversations going on around me that I shouldn’t be hearing, gleaning this, figuring that, then doing something off the wall. It’s worked in Mexicali, Juarez, El Centro, San Ysidro, El Cajon and Santee. Now we’re gonna give it a try in Malibu.
I’m getting to my feet, listening to my friends argue about my condition. Standing up blinds me for a second. The top of my head comes to their chests. They must weigh two hundred and fifty pounds apiece.
“I’m ready.”
I expect the laughs. Here they are. Laughing, then silence. One guy is about to utter a challenge. I can tell because he’s from the South, and he telegraphs his hostility by curling his lip — Elvis damage. I interrupt him.
“I’m more effective when I’m underestimated.”
He’s about to say something devastating to my interests. I edit the movie playing in my head, which stars him in an amazing scene of beating me to a humiliated pulp. The estimates of his weight are ignored behind the central thing in my mind, which is hit him real hard and real fast. Then as he recoils, swarm him. When those thoughts get strong enough, the imagined action follows. Guys are pulling me off and I am praying my target is unconscious. Hit him twice and no one saw the punches. Believe me, if you have the choice between size and speed, take speed. He’s doing a little half turn. His upper body is out before his knees know it. He’s buckling backward with his knees still trying to hold him up. Finally his heels flick out in the dirt and his back thuds.
I start to walk toward the car saying, “Let’s stop for breakfast.” We cram ourselves into a Valiant and drive off.
Beautiful Malibu flying past the open windows, a joint fired and passed around. Going up to Trancas to rip off a superstar. This is the life. Except the radio . . . that seventies music — weird, imitative, overproduced stuff. Right now, the eagles are flying or something, and then someone is running down the road trying to loosen something with women on his mind.
Driving through empty Malibu, up carless Pacific Coast Highway on a hot spring Wednesday makes you feel like you’re getting away with something. There’s the ease of residential opulence; the only faces you see are locals, and most of the locals are stars, near-stars, were-stars, know-stars, want-to-be stars, think-they-are stars, sexual-partners-to stars, suppliers-of-vice-to stars, parasitic-servants-to stars. And on the road blasting past, you almost think you’re rich and famous. Actually you think you’re too cool to be famous. Especially if you have Phoenix Program washouts riding with you who manage to kill a couple people a year.
Killers suck the air out of the room, but you have to look close to notice. Intense implies some kind of action or energy. What these guys have is a complete absence of energy, which they try to cover up with an act. Like the funny wheezy guy in Pacific Beach, the sharp-dressing Romeo hair-combing guy from San Ysidro, the four-eyed schoolteacher who always reads the dictionary to improve his vocabulary, and dumbshit losers carrying piano wire, plumber’s wrenches and hammers like the ones I’m riding with. Their guns are inside the spare tire in the trunk.
The guy driving changes channels looking for Willie on the country station. These guys will damn near cry if they hear Willie singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” That’s almost as scary as the weird scratching habits and teeth-sucking sounds they’re always making.
The highway is dead. Everything is going on behind the walls that line a five-mile stretch of PCH. You can grab a glimpse of beach between a restaurant and a gas station. Other than that, it’s a rolling line of walls to the west. Behind each one, somebody famous getting sucked by somebody who wants to be. OK, that’s jaded, cynical. Every other wall.
Eventually the Spanish tile is left behind. Pass the hidden gates of the Colony, home to huge money and temporary power. The whole place is paranoid. Neighbors never speak except in hails called across the street. Everybody busy with the effects of the latest hit, or big deal, or heavy meeting, or this or that. Usually just pantomimed cool.
“Yeah, bitchin. Thank you, thank you. We are all stars together here. Isn’t it just wonderful in the cool terrace and tile hallways in this I’m-scared-to-death-to-get-older-smaller-less-powerful-land? Yes, yes, no autographs here. We are all stars.”
All said in waving hands, cool shade tilts, and casual hundred-thousand-dollar-car-door openings. The scared-to-death part reserved for shrinks, or as confessionals to appear human enough to get somebody’s pants down. Out here on the narrow Colony streets, it’s strictly the celebrity benediction, neither one believing the other. Some remnant of the papal wrist-swinging acknowledgment of access to the high and fucking mighty.
Breakfast is on me. The waitress is in worse shape than we are. She’s cranky and nauseated with a healing rope burn on her wrist, nose ring, blond hair, cigarette dangling, eyes patrician and smug, body dreamed up by a fuckbook artist before the age of surgery. See-through cotton dress. Her girlfriend arrives, sits on the inside of her ankle, leans over the counter. Twists the counter stool, left beaver shot, right, left beaver shot, right. Blin
ding me like a lighthouse beam. Hard to concentrate. Anticipation for the next twist, attempting to keep from being busted. As if she doesn’t know. As if she fucking cares.
I’ll take half a dozen scrambled eggs. Steroids need that extra protein. I rattle three little blue pills out of a plastic brown bottle — Dianabol — discovered by farmboys who wanted to make the team out in Texas and found out the meat their daddies put on a steer could be the meat they put on themselves for the Cotton Bowl. People will tell you steroids create a feeling of invincibility. I’ll tell you, a couple months on a steroid cycle, and if a cop car gets too close, you’ll rip its door off. Makes you horny, too.
Up on my feet heading for the lighthouse. Big smile. No response. Under-my-breath request for a couple of lines. Girl never looks at me. I take the little envelope that materializes out of her hip pocket. My Frye boots galump toward the bathroom. Her voice sounds like Jodie Foster accepting the Deepest Voice in America Award.
“Sixty bucks.”
I’m still thudding my heels toward the men’s room, slow and steady like a gunfighter. Sometimes I act like that if a woman blows me off and makes me disgusted at myself. I should just tell her I want attention.
“Hey, I said sixty bucks.”
She’s used to being paid attention to. This is a contest of wills. I’m in the men’s room. She’s in the men’s room. I lock the stall door behind me. She’s coming over the top of the stall. She’s pissed, yelling this amazing shit at me. I say, “Go ahead,” to all her threats, throwing in, “I hope you do,” to a couple of her suggestions. Envelope is open; she’s pulling my hair above the toilet tank. One of my friends is laughing a beery, bluster-boy haw haw. She’s getting tired and isn’t yelling. She’s hissing, “son-of-a-bitch-mother-fucker” at me. Fingernails in my scalp. Alright already.
