Sea Monkeys

by Kris Saknussemm

  I had a one-night stand with a witch who lived in Underground Seattle. She lived on salmon heads and fresh testicles she’d wok-fry in scalding sesame oil. And who could forget sweet Jane? Gifted with the firmest, shapeliest breasts I’ve ever fondled, but a complete and utter loon, who later tried to commit suicide, knowing that I was coming over—and so I had to break down her door in Ravenna and drive her to the University Hospital emergency room to get her stomach pumped.

  There were countless other little frolics. Barely remembered gropes and pokes at parties. Pulling the wings off nurses. Holding hands in Queen Anne. Anal sex in Ballard (there’s a title for you). Midnight drives down Aurora Avenue, with its ghoulish cocktail lounges and repossessed appliances, gun shops, car lots, and hotbox motels. Who can remember it all? Blow jobs. Bergman films. Big plans. I sank dick into pussy like burying fish to grow corn, as my Nez Perce friend Trey would say. I could ejaculate phosphorescent jellyfish in those days. Milky-wet sturgeon thrashing on the floor. I was so distraught by the loss of love from the woman I lived with, I did anything I could to get back at her—but even at my most insane, I could never keep up with her betrayals.

  The real estate agent who was handling the mansion the demon girlfriend and I were caretaking once caught me sunbathing naked on the sprawling back lawn, reading a book. She was the bitchiest agent of them all, too—a flabby Cadillac arrest widow former prom queen turned lush, and there I was lying on the grass with a hard-on when she showed up unannounced. She looked down on it with an expression of pure disgust, then she hiked up her dress, whipped off her panties and sat down on it as if the world was coming to an end. Not one intelligible word. A fifty-five-year-old woman clawing me so that I had to wear a heavy T-shirt to bed for almost two weeks to hide the marks. She got so wet it was like trying to paddle a kayak up a waterfall. I never saw her again except in dreams.

  Just as I never saw the Norwegian plasterer again. I had to call him after a pipe burst in one of the guest bathrooms. He would’ve been about thirty-five, but he had a Nordic baby face that made him look much younger. I was sun-baking out on the roof, reading The Odyssey , covered in Johnson’s Baby Oil, when he appeared in the window. I hadn’t even heard his truck pull in. I don’t how it happened. How does anything like that happen? He had a thick, doughy cock that became as hard as a marble rolling pin. He went slowly at first, like a big boy in wooden shoes learning to waltz, but at the end I thought we both might go tumbling off the roof into the rose garden, his giant slab hands on my shoulders, me crying out when I came, a hundred white sailboats flecked across the blue lake beyond.

  The shame and strangeness of it. The uncomfortable satisfaction. I took a long hot bath after, and drank half a bottle of brandy, then slept for three hours. That night I fucked my girlfriend five times, ramming and reaming her until I thought the intensity of her orgasms might rupture her very being—a continuous explosion of ectoplasm and honey. “Christ!” she wheezed in the dark of early morning, “What got into you?”

  Fortunately for the sake of my sanity and my academic standing, I had friends like Mark, a fellow graduate student and instructor, a Canadian who’d worked his way through UBC driving logging trucks. He had a deep radio-guru voice honed by Export A cigarettes, black coffee, and French fries bleeding catsup, which he could suddenly make appear out of his briefcase as if by magic. Mark liked beer and bourbon, I liked Scotch—and we both liked dope. He’d been married, but his wife, a speech therapist who once gave him great backrubs and brought him vodka tonics in the bathtub, got the itch for some Indian restaurant-gangster and took their little son and moved back to Vancouver.

  Mark lived in the Central District and managed an apartment building full of black people. I think he might’ve been the only white person on that street. He seemed to feel no awkwardness in his position. I was there several times when things got awkward—like the night when the man everyone called Peebo tried to set his wife on fire, and Mark calmly talked him out of it. Or when all 275 pounds of Good Gal Lois would waddle down the concrete stairs and offer Mark a head job in return for some more slack on her rent (an offer which to my knowledge he always politely declined). Or all the visits warranted or uncalled-for by the Seattle Police. Mark took it all in stride and not only openly talked about what he was studying and reading, and how he made his living, but also taught remedial English at some community center in South Seattle—he’d actually recite Milton with great conviction.

  This wasn’t an audience predisposed to appreciating the English classics, but Mark never modified himself in any way to suit other people’s expectations. It was difficult not to admire him, for he was always so very much himself. Single, lonely, living in this marginally acceptable cinderblock apartment, which he was given by virtue of his management position, driving back and forth to Vancouver to see his young son, coping with his ex-wife’s flip-outs, grading term papers, and preparing lectures while people shot up heroin and yelled obscenities, then driving in the rain in his old Datsun to some blank municipal building to explain colloquial expressions to recently arrived speakers of Cantonese, all the while studying German to pass his Ph.D. language exam, finishing up his graduate classes, and chipping away at the outline of a monster dissertation—he did it all with a kind of crazy Miltonic lumberjack sense of mission and possibility.

  The thought that that he’d never get a proper academic position at a decent university—and that he might be teaching Asians how to ask where the bathroom is for the rest of his working life—never occurred to him. He remains the only person I’ve ever known who could quote from memory “To His Coy Mistress” while eating deep-dish Mexicana pizza, and then jump effortlessly to discussing the starting lineup for the next Seattle Seahawks game.

  One night after we’d smoked some dope, he led me to this rib joint down the street—some sort of Mississippi Delta mirage in the middle of black Seattle. We ordered what seemed like a fifty-five-gallon drum of fatback ribs smothered in smoky barbecue sauce and rolled it back to Mark’s apartment, sat down like animals, and started gnawing and belching like animals. Then this neighborhood coke fiend named Tiny comes pounding on Mark’s door with a Beretta, and Mark looks up, his eyes almost swollen shut, mouth full of pig meat, and says, “We’re eating ribs, Tiny, come back later.” I’ll be damned if Tiny didn’t go away and come back with two six-packs of Michelob, and we sat around picking at the bones, drinking beer, and watching Sabu in The Elephant Boy on TV.

  Today, no one knows or cares what a good forklift driver I once was, or what a lousy janitor, or that I worked in the rail yards in Massachusetts, ripping through a pair of work gloves a day, slugging down the glassiest sledgehammer homemade vodka you’ve ever not tasted from a Bionic Woman plastic thermos with a group of mad Russians, who could fix absolutely anything—except their own questionable visa status, and so as engineers they were forced to work as laborers and factory hands. We ranted about Dostoyevsky, chess, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, huddled around drums of coal fires in the roundtable sheds where these demented young Irishmen from Revere would fight bare fisted, sweating like horses, while money changed hands and their blood splattered on the concrete. And after the fight, you could go out and break off an icicle and hit fungoes with snowballs into the dark, with the smell of steamed cabbage and diesel thick in the air.

  Mark understood all this perfectly. He’d done time in logging camps and canneries. He’d lost a brother on an Alaskan fishing boat.

  John understood too. His office was next to mine—a quiet eighteenth-century scholar who played the harpsichord and had a deaf child by an earlier marriage. Outside his teaching, he worked at a liquor store and had been robbed twice at gunpoint. Ramona, his girlfriend, was an outrageous Latina getting a degree in rhetoric and composition. She’d been a stand-up comic, run a taco stand outside Warner Bros., operated a mobile dog-washing service, worked for a bail bondsman and trained as a dental technician.

  Such innocence then. Such inspired depravity. Roa
sting whole giraffes and setting off fireworks. Big, painterly fits of pasta and red wine. Pubic readings. All sorts of black silk stocking laudanum séances with Byron by candlelight.

  But mainly they were days of hope and longing, of idealism and unexpected intimacies. To lie in bed after sex and discuss Roland Barthes. To sit on the rail of the Ferry Terminal with a newspaper of boiled prawns and thick lemon wedges and listen to a thirty-four-year-old woman with the breasts of an eighteen-year-old tell how she accidentally set fire to her house when she was six—and how her father chased her down the street with a hatchet when he found out.

  I listened to many confessions and private theories then. And I read great books. I read Moby Dick in my canoe or lying on the boat dock on Lake Washington. The night I finished the novel by flashlight, under a full moon, I went up to the house, opened all the windows, and put on a tape of whale songs. I turned the stereo up as high as it would go, to hear those immense mammals singing with the moonlight flooding in. Until the neighbors called the cops. (Just as had happened to Jim Briggs way back in New Hampshire, and so saved him from hanging himself, as it turned out.)

  I met Raymond Carver when he came to read. He wasn’t a good reader, but he was very funny afterwards, when we went to a professor’s house for a party. He was the only one who didn’t drink. I had a long and involved conversation with poet-laureate-to-be Mark Strand over warm white wine. He complained about the absence of acceptable prosciutto in Salt Lake City, and with a straight face, proclaimed himself to be the city’s most significant cultural attraction outside the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And I smoked marijuana with Stanley Elkin in his motel room, both of us breaking out in spasms of weeping laughter. He’d come out from St. Louis for a writer’s conference and I was his driver, assistant and dope connection. “I’m old enough to be your mother,” he quipped. He told me about a fight he got into at a diner outside Chicago when he was just a squirt. Some guy called him “Ikey” and Stanley threw him across a table. He said it was the best moment in his life.

  I never met Richard Hugo, who may have died unshaven for all I know. “What endures is what we have neglected,” he wrote, although I feel as if I heard him say that in a bar—to me.

  All these years later, I’m still wondering what it means, and what became of those lost colleagues and lovers of mine. All those breaths shared and lives not led. Those unsolved mysteries. Did Jane eventually kill herself? Or is she alive and sane—maybe even happy? Where’s Mark teaching? Did he remarry? Whatever did happen to that squirrel?

  FAITH AND LIGHTNING

  When I was growing up, everyone was experimenting. Not just scientists and the military—the Garibaldis, the Crawfords, my parents. Formerly stable, circumspect people started literally blowing up their personal laboratories on a daily basis. At times it was reckless, sure. But there was also an innocence and an exuberance to it—and an insistence on finding out for oneself. “I know it may look like we’re lazing away this lovely afternoon, but we’re really experimenting with ginatonics.” And it went on from there.

  On an ordinary Wednesday night, my father might spontaneously drink a Rusty Nail or two, slip out the back door, and drive to the Elwood Theater for a late show of Soldier in the Rain, starring Steve McQueen, Jackie Gleason, and Tuesday Weld. And then pop into the International House of Pancakes for blueberry waffles on the way home.

  My mother wore a beehive hairdo and talked about existentialism. She listened to Van Cliburn and Leontyne Price while painting her fingernails fire engine red (my father preferred Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow and, when he was preaching, experimented with having some of these country-western songs included in the choir’s program).

  You could go to Larry Blake’s on Telegraph Avenue and overhear a man in a turtleneck sweater with a Van Dyke beard discussing Marxism in terms of Thousand Island dressing. There were rathskellers and coffeehouses. And big seafood restaurants. They served goldfish crackers in the clam chowder and had bad oil paintings of shipwrecks on the walls and a suave light-skinned black man with a bow tie at the piano, playing “Ebb Tide.” Sometimes there was a pirate’s treasure chest, where kids could take bamboo poles and “fish” for prizes. People today talk about “family restaurants” as if they were just invented. I remember when restaurants had high chairs and bongo drums and everyone made use of both. Happy Hour in the Outrigger Room never ended. Parents drank martinis, kids drank Shirley Temples, and everyone played games with straws in the ashtrays. Sometimes we’d go a different way home and almost get lost. Nowadays, I never have time to try a new route, and I hate getting lost. It’s dangerous—when it’s not frustrating.

  My parents did a lot of dangerous things. Like entertaining. Sometimes we had luaus. My mother and sister would demonstrate the hula, Dad would perform with fire, and I’d smash coconuts with my junior geologist’s hammer. Other times Mom would wear a snakeskin pantsuit. People talked about Edgar Cayce and Margaret Mead. And they experimented with cocktails: Screwdrivers, Harvey Wallbangers, Black Russians, and Pink Squirrels. A tray would go around with pigs-in-a-blanket, or Ritz crackers sprayed with Snack Mate cheddar cheese spread. Someone would put on Trini Lopez Live at PJ’s or Sergio Mendes and the Brazil 66. Games were played—like passing a potato around under your chin.

  Once, on her second mai tai, in the middle of a sentence that brought together Audrey Hepburn and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, my mother dropped a monkeypod bowl loaded with radishes and cherry tomatoes into a swimming pool and I had to dive for them (pretending to reenact the escape scene from Captain Nemo and the Underwater City). Then everyone started diving for them, clothes or not. What a game that was, particularly when there was nothing left to find. Later, I’d be told to get into my pajamas but I’d just fall asleep behind the couch, with the dog hair, the bobby pins, and the old Life Savers, and in the morning I’d find that I was in my bed. Magic. Every party an adventure.

  My father got me driving before I could even reach the pedals—in traffic. After the third police warning, he’d take me in our blue Impala out to Golden Gate Fields and I’d herd seagulls around the puddles of rainwater in the vast empty parking lots—or at the School for the Deaf behind the Albany Bowl, where the pro was a hunchback and wore a bright magenta bowling shirt with his name stitched over his heart. STEVE . . . from Akron. It didn’t seem like the right sort of name for a hunchback. But, boy, could he bowl—207 average, even though he’d quit the circuit. One Christmas, Dad gave me bowling lessons with Steve the hunchback. You see? Experimentation. Discovery. Risk.

  It could be whiteout conditions on the top of the Gun Barrel at Heavenly Valley and my father couldn’t have been happier. There he’d be, on his 240-centimeter wooden skis that looked like they’d come off the wall above a fireplace in some Canadian hunting lodge, yodeling for God’s sake in case anyone as mad as he was would come swooping down the slope and wipe us out. And down we’d come, my mother singing, perhaps some Puccini—unless she was chastising my father for putting us all at risk. Sometimes, in really scary situations, where no one but the ski patrol had any business being (and only then to rescue fools like us), my mother could sing and criticize Dad all at once. It was some secret breathing technique she’d taught herself. My father would ski with me between his legs—mind over mogul, following the fall line, down out of the storm. “A blizzard? You call this a blizzard?”

  When I turned five, my parents decided they’d run a summer camp. Neither had any experience running a camp. Neither had any capital. They had never dealt with big insurance policies, or the bulk-buying of powdered eggs and vats of peaches and blackberry jam. No matter. They rented an old Army Corps of Engineers Camp in Glen Alpine above Fallen Leaf Lake in Tahoe, from a man who was rumored to have been in prison once in Carson City. Dad hired a 300-pound woman from Turlock and her three daughters (feral girls she frequently spanked bare-assed with the flat of her giant butcher knife) to do the cooking. Then we spent two weeks sweeping and scrubbing out the rough timber cabin
s full of spiders and raccoon shit. Mom ran the music and drama programs; Dad ran the sports. They had twenty-eight paying kids from the Bay Area, one official staff member, and a local boy who’d been kicked in the head by a horse, to do the heavy lifting.

  My mother and her students put on plays and scenes in little halls around Lake Tahoe and for the many other camps around Fallen Leaf. The Winslow Boy; My 51st Dragon; Sorry, Wrong Number; Hoosier School Master (which I always thought was a question).

  Blazing aspen-leaf afternoons . . . the last light on the mountains, particularly Tallac, with its perpetual cross of snow, the light my father called Alpenglow. The chattering of kids in makeup and funny clothes—a big cardboard dragon tail. The old monster Chevy truck, which Dad bought in Truckee from a man missing three fingers, on the punishing dirt road down to Fallen Leaf Lodge for icecream sandwiches. Smell of maple syrup and sausages . . . the bear Dad blinded with his flashbulb.

  The old man taught the older kids how to rock climb and fly-fish, while I caught ladybugs in the skunk cabbage and got the blacksmith to make me a horseshoe nail ring that turned my finger green. Every night, there’d be a performance around Fallen Leaf Lake or Lake Tahoe.

  The highlight of the summer was a packhorse expedition into Desolation Valley, which wasn’t swarming with backpackers then. The water was clean to drink. You could catch your limit of eastern brook trout in Lake Aloha and not meet another soul. You could sing around the campfire and watch shooting stars. Thinking you could count them.