by Jeffrey Ford
The story of mine he’s been sitting on like a hen all of these years, “Giant Land,” had been one that I started writing about fifteen years ago. Over that period, I’d take it out every now and then and fiddle around with it. I remember how I came by it originally. I was in one of those slumps where I just smoke butts and stare at the blank screen. So one night I decided to write anything that came into my head, and the beginnings of the story slowly crawled out onto the screen. It’s interesting that one aspect of the story is about the passage of time, that it took so long to write, and that it took so long to be published after it was sold. Things move slowly in Giant Land, but when they actually happen, watch out. Unlike his sizeable fiction output, as a publisher, Irvine works slowly, like the San Andreas Fault. I have faith the anthology will eventually appear and predict it will be great.
Coffins on the River
Barney and I are getting long in the tooth. We’ve got bad knees, bad backs, bad eyes, and bad breath. We’ve got wives and kids and mortgages and car loans, and if that isn’t enough to elicit your sympathy, we’re both artists of a sort.
Barney’s a painter, self-taught over decades. He turns out some very fine landscapes of his local area in deep South Jersey along the Delaware River, where the neighbors still eat muskrat and late June brings so many green flies that yawning becomes a repast, itself. He makes most of his income on scenes of meadows and giant oaks, white heron skimming along the estuaries in violet twilight, but his heart is really in his more expressionistic work—for instance, his series, Coffins on the River.
The theme plays itself out in a hundred canvases that show super heroes laid to rest in pine boxes. The viewer sees them from above as they glide in the flow—dark, turbulent waters churning to either side, occasionally a fish breaking the surface in an arc, a bit of the bank, a beer bottle on its way to the ocean. The coffins are missing their lids, and the fallen heroes are sometimes wrapped in colorful capes like winding sheets, or donned in spandex uniforms displaying chest emblems of, say, an hourglass, a vibrator, a thimble …
They are no super heroes you might know, but ones solely from the planets of his imagination, with powers never tested as they were created to lie in state. He has a little notebook with their names—Qua Num, The Ineffable, Biscuit Boy, Six Figures—a brief list of their powers, and how they met their respective ends. One carries a little doll by the neck, one, a ray gun, one, a cell phone, and all of their faces are like beautiful landscapes of frozen anguish or melted wonder.
Most people didn’t grok Coffins, but nothing could stop him from making more of them. When he couldn’t afford canvas, he used the sides of refrigerator boxes, pieces of discarded plywood, half a ping-pong table, panes of glass. At times, he was jazzed on them, at times he was depressed by them, and when he had done the last of them he told me, “They are their own worst enemies.”
Whereas Barney might measure his life in brush strokes, I had pecked mine away at a keyboard, writing fiction of a speculative nature. My most recent novel, which you might have seen last year, was called Deluge, wherein the Earth is struck by a cosmic gamma ray from a relatively nearby exploding star, and pieces of reality are changed through a partial disturbance of the inherent nature of matter.
A great deluge sweeps the Earth, and a particular hundred-year-old apartment building made of wood cracks off its foundation in the onslaught of catastrophic flooding and is swept away containing its inhabitants. They sail the newly made world in the bobbing structure, searching for dry land and other survivors. Perno Shell, a previously quiet, bookish man, becomes the captain of the odd vessel and takes upon himself the task of bringing all of his neighbors to safety. The seas teem with mutated monsters, barges of blind pirates returned from the dead, sentient islands, as the unlikely adventurers search for the secret of how, through the manipulation of Time, to remake the world in its previous image.
It tanked like a lead doughnut. For all my hard work and sterling reviews, only two hundred people bought copies, and I got notice from my agent and publisher that I was on thin ice. That same day, at the bookstore, I found a tall stack of Deluge on the three-dollar bargain table—a Babel that reached to the bottom of my chin. For a moment, I rested my head atop it while standing upright.
Rough times for true artists, but Barney and I, we had a little ace in the hole. As old and cranky and screwed up as we were, we still puffed the weed from time to time whenever we needed to get the back legs of that creative beast twitching again. We were old potheads, warhorses from way back, who had thoroughly traversed the highways and byways of the world of weed. We were as familiar with the filthy, light headache engendered by a bolus toke of Coney Island Green as we were with the subtle, slowly dawning revelations of Thai Stick, the suped up crap chronic of the latter years of the twentieth century, the illusive but hallucinatory magic of high altitude, Northern California Red Hair. We’d smoked it out of bongs, pipes, cored apples, beer cans, power hitters, skins, and one-toke smokeless spy jobs.
Now, save your lectures about bad health and moral turpitude. Save your religion for the faint of heart and your jurisprudence for hardened criminals. You’ll get no argument from us that a steady diet of rope is going to brutally eat your brain and turn your soul to mist. We know guys who are zombified from decades of waking and baking—the blank stare, the sighs, the drool. We’ve been through it, gone in one end of that joint, come out the other as nothing but smoke, and then had to reconstitute the corporeality of our lives.
On the other hand, when you’re a true artist, there’s nothing that will goose the muse like a strategic hit or two. All it takes sometimes is half a bone to crack the alabaster vault, and then the treasure comes spilling out—handfuls of vision, truckloads of inspiration. Do I wish it didn’t have to be that way? Sure. I want to be wealthy and good looking too, but when the reservoir has gone dry, you’ll do anything to get back in Athena’s good graces. Why do you think so many artists cash in early, taking the gas pipe or swinging from the end of a rope?
Anyway, once every couple of months I’d drive south to Barney’s home and visit with him in the studio out back, past the magnolia that hides the outhouse and just before that wall of cattails throughout which runs a swampy maze of a path that eventually leads to the estuary. We sit out there at night, in the glow of a storm lantern, amidst the thick, hair-raising scent of turpentine and oil paint, have a few beers, smoke a number, and bullshit for a while. We’ve known each other since college days, so there’s always a lot to talk over—old times, how brilliant and ball-busting our kids are, how fed up our wives are with us, who’s in the hospital, and who’s in the ground. Not until we’d smoke up would we talk about the work, the glimmers of notions. Then the conversation would increase in speed and intensity and the ideas would fly like bats at sundown, like phone calls from our creditors.
We worked that pot jump-start for years, throughout our thirties and well into our forties, and it always served its purpose. Then, last November, after Barney had capped the paint on Coffins on the River and was searching around unsuccessfully for a new direction, and I had to come up with a blockbuster to follow Deluge and save my ass from the midlist chopping block, we met and puffed the weed. We were both empty as dried gourds and were hoping to bust things open and get back to work as quickly as possible, but when we left the studio that night, we were the same blank slates as when we had entered. We lit up, we smoked, and then we just sat there with nothing to say. My head was filled with fog, and Barney said, “Christ, if I strain any harder for an idea, I’m likely to crap myself.”
So there it was. I went home and stewed for another week, smoking butts and staring at an empty computer screen. Then I called Barney. The phone was busy, because as it turns out, he was calling me. When we finally connected, we decided not to wait another month, but this time to get the good stuff and give it another go. Back I drove to South Jersey, over an hour trip. When I arrived, we hung out in his kitchen for a while, talking to
his wife and little girl, but with the first lull in the conversation, we excused ourselves and repaired to the studio.
We couldn’t light up right away, because we had to wait for Stick, our connection. He was also a painter, a young guy, incredibly talented and prolific. He did these brightly colored portraits—the hues of the flesh the most outlandish shades of violet and green and yellow, awe inspiring, two-hair brush, minute detail, and three-dimensional to boot. At his art shows, he laid out a dozen pairs of these spectacles, and when you put them on and turned to the work, those leering party heads looked like they were floating in midair with all the weight and mass of holiday hams. The kid had more talent than both of us ever had, and when we’d mention being stuck or burnt out, he’d laugh at us and call us old men.
His contempt was mitigated, though, by the fact that Barney and I knew a lot of stuff and didn’t mind talking about it. If anything, over the years, we had become consummate gasbags. We had read widely and had eclectic tastes. Like my wife often said, “You’ve read all of Jules Verne, but you can’t fix the fucking sink.” And it was true. But Stick liked the conversation, so sometimes he hung out with us and just listened.
In addition to this kid being a great painter, he was also a can-do kind of guy. He could fix the sink, score the best weed in three states, work on a car, and play a mean bass. Somebody stole the stereo system out of his truck. He went to the local police, but when he could see they didn’t care and told him to forget it, he bought a handgun and hunted the guy down. By canvassing local bars, buying a few drinks for seedy characters, he got a line on who the culprit might be. He traced the guy to an abandoned factory out in Shell Pile, found his stereo components and the thief, made a citizen’s arrest, and turned the guy over to the police.
Out in the studio, Barney moved a couple of Coffins on the River so we could get to our chairs. I set the beer down between us and lit a cigarette. There was no heat in the studio and the autumn wind came in through a hole in the window, keeping the room cool, and whining as it squeezed through the jagged opening. From outside we could hear the fallen leaves rolling across the field next to his house. We sat there surrounded by dead heroes and he told me that: his cat had cat AIDS, a bar in town had become a meeting place for the Klan, his porch roof was in danger of collapsing, a young girl who went to his daughter’s school had been abducted, his wife needed expensive dental work, a guy down the street had lit his own house on fire, he hadn’t sold a painting in weeks. I let him vent, knowing that when the work wasn’t flowing, the world in general was a uniquely frightening place.
Stick popped his shaved head in the door just when I’d had about enough of Barney’s list of grievances. As always, the kid had the weed. Barney handed over his half of the cash and I did the same. A minute didn’t pass before my old friend was rolling a fat number. He licked it, sealed it, and then held that blunt, white mummy up for inspection. I made like the Pope and shot a two-fingered sign of the cross at it. Stick found a chair and I handed him a beer while Barney fired up.
Barney had a weak right eye, and whenever he smoked, that eye would close and he’d squint on one side like Popeye. He tapped the ashes onto his jeans and rubbed them in a circle, exhaled, took another deep one, and then passed it on. The weed made the rounds, we drank, and I told Stick his portraits reminded me of the portrait of beef that Soutine had painted.
“Who’s Soutine?” he asked.
“French painter, originally from Lithuania, early twentieth century, Paris. He did this painting, I guess it would be a still life, of a side of beef. He went out to the stockyard, bought a side of beef, and hung it up in his apartment.”
“I like the sound of that,” said Stick.
Barney took another hit and jumped in, “Soutine had a friend who worked for the department of health, and the guy would come around to his place every few days and inject the meat with something, probably formaldehyde, to keep it from rotting. It took him weeks to paint that beef.”
“Must’ve stunk like hell by the time he was done,” I said.
“I saw that painting somewhere,” said Barney, “and all I remember is translucent pink and blue.”
Stick put his beer down and took a pad and pen from the inside pocket of his leather jacket. “I gotta give that a try,” he said, writing.
“Sure,” said Barney, “you don’t need a whole side of beef. Just get yourself like a London broil or something and string it up with fishing line.”
“I was thinking along the lines of poultry. Maybe a twenty-pound butterball,” said Stick.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“In 3-D,” said Stick.
“Why the fuck not?” I said.
“Make it a series,” said Barney. “Meat on the River.”
By the time the night had drawn to a close, Stick had three pages of ideas, and Barney and I were sitting there holding our own, still uninspired.
“What’s next, trepanning?” said Barney.
“I had a couple of ideas that crawled out of the muck and fainted from embarrassment,” I said.
“Well,” said Stick, “you guys are dicking around with this pot. You need something more cosmic. You need to get in touch with your totem spirits and so forth.”
“What are you talking?” asked Barney. “Meth, ecstasy, acid?”
“Last time I did LSD,” I said, “about twenty years ago, an ambulance pulled up outside of my apartment, Saint Francis of Assisi got out, knocked on the front door, and handed me a slip of paper. On it was written the word OVERDOSE.”
“Yeah,” said Barney, “we’ve got kids, we can’t be tripping.”
“No, no, no,” said Stick, shaking his head. “Have you ever heard of ayahuasca? I’m telling you, one session with this stuff and you’ll be good to go for a couple of years.”
“Tell me more,” said Barney.
“You see the quality and output I have?” he asked. “Pot’s okay for watching television with the sound off and the stereo on or talking to you guys, but if you want to get in touch with the cosmic energy, you gotta have the Amazon jungle juice.”
“Dangerous?” I asked.
“Don’t worry, I’ll watch out for you guys.”
“What are the side effects?” asked Barney.
“A little dizziness, maybe some nausea, diarrhea.”
“Sounds like a normal day,” said Barney.
We asked for more details, but Stick said he had to be going. He jotted down the titles of a couple of books on a piece of notepad paper and then copied them again. He handed each of us a list and said, “Read these books, especially the first one, and then let me know if you want to take a shot at it. I swear, you’ll see a story in every fallen leaf. Images’ll tap your back and give you a phone number.”
The next morning at home, sitting at the computer was like a restaurant with bad service. I looked out the window and watched those last few autumn leaves fall. Stick’s promise came back to me: a story in every fallen leaf. Life was no longer whispering its secrets to me, and I was turning my back on it. My wife wanted to visit some friends, but I couldn’t possibly get up the energy to be social. My sons wanted me to throw the football, take them to a movie, but I dared not stray from the office in case some trifle flitted across the desert of my imagination. I was a prisoner in that bleak November.
I drove to the local bookstore in search of the books on the scrap of notepad paper, still in my pocket from the night before. What were the chances Barnes & Noble would be carrying Stick’s greatest hits of screwball drug writing? To my amazement they had one of the two volumes. The book he pointed to as being the most important, The Cosmic Serpent, by one Jeremy Narby, I was able to purchase. The second was by a fellow named Terrence McKenna.
When I got home, I made a pot of coffee, and then taking a cup, sat in my corner of the living room couch with The Cosmic Serpent. Just from the cover, it looked like some kind of New Age dither—Cosmic, dude. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, though, so I cra
cked the back and started reading. From the very first page, I was into it. My concentration had been like a leaf on the wind for the past few months, but even when the kids came in, played Eminem at top volume and wrestled with the dog, I didn’t look up.
