by Jim Harrison
I had promised myself I’d be polite and return the calls to Marybelle, Robert, and Vivian at breakfast time (dry sausage patty, pale underfed eggs, but good fried new potatoes). I chose the easiest first, Robert, who didn’t answer but I said I’d arrive by tomorrow afternoon which would give me the leisure to collect myself, and also drive west and see the Pacific Ocean. Viv sounded played out and melancholy. She didn’t want to explain the need for my power of attorney and said the information was contained in an email she had sent in care of Robert. Marybelle was a dissonant mudbath which was half-expected. She was back home in Morris and claimed that an old lover had showed up and had taken advantage of her sexually after she drank too much on a hot night. I didn’t want to hear the details. She cried because the husband of her friend with the mental “crack-up” had forbid her to see his wife in the private asylum. When could she see me in San Francisco and when would I make sure that she got a ticket? I said “four days” wanting a little time alone with Robert.
Once more I had forgotten to throw away a puzzle piece and stopped near Little Cow Creek northwest of Redding, dropping Oregon in the water without emotion. I noted that California was known as the Golden State and the bird was the California Valley Quail, the motto Eureka (I have found it) and the flower the Golden Poppy. Except for the flower and bird it all seemed too much connected to money.
CALIFORNIA II
I cut due west out of Redding heading for the ocean through an area called Whiskeytown and observing that without Marybelle’s presence I had dropped down to one drink a day and that to blunt my road frazzles. During the last week of our marriage when Viv was still present in the house we both drank too much. I’d say Viv drank at least a half a fifth of butterscotch schnapps every evening and I’d do that amount of Canadian whiskey. It was real hard on Lola who since she was a pup could never bear a cross or raucous voice. Lola would head for a darkened back corner of the pump shed and stay there until we fell asleep. Once when Viv was carrying in groceries she had left her car door open and Lola got in there and ate the last five of Viv’s package of powdered doughnuts. Viv screeched and Lola headed for the barn for three whole days and nights. My friend Ad told me that people who gain a lot of weight fast always have a semi-secret food vice and Viv’s was powdered donuts and various kinds of soda pop.
We hit bottom the next to the last evening together when she said, “You just don’t turn me on like Fred. You used to, Cliff, but you don’t anymore.” I saw red and threw a heavy oak chair through our picture window and then, since it was a cold windy night, I had to use duct tape and cardboard to patch the window. Viv helped hold the cardboard while I was taping and we actually laughed. The next day we were civil and hearing no human barking Lola emerged. This last day was especially hard because Viv was not a liberal democrat like myself and made no attempt at fairness while she was splitting up our mutual possessions. She even took a beautiful antique clock my mother’s rich employers had given her and I had inherited. She said “You’ll never set this clock” which was true. During summer heat waves when we were sprinkling the yard so it wouldn’t turn brown Viv made no attempt when moving the sprinkler to make sure each patch of yard got its fair share of water. Liberal democrats, like me, are careful about such things. When you’re throwing out cracked corn to chickens and one is late arriving you throw an extra handful her way. When slopping the pigs I always made sure I carried my walking stick to do some gut poking to allow the runt to get a goodly share.
I had forgotten to turn off the phone and it rang from the backseat, five times to be exact. I wasn’t tempted to slow down and grab for it. All of my life I have been willing to answer the phone but no longer. I had lost about half of my day-to-day ordinary mind with the divorce, and now the other half appeared to be slipping away. For instance, the idea of changing the names of states and birds had become very appealing. I also began to think about God in particular ways. My mom had hauled me off to the Lutheran church early every Sunday morning when I wanted desperately to go fishing or even chop firewood with my dad, or go visit a farmer friend of his who owned a champion team of Belgian draft horses that always won the pulling contest at the county fair. Dad said that these horses were “the gods of their world.” I wasn’t sure what that meant but it sounded grand. I loved to touch their huge soft noses.
I stopped in Willow Creek for gas and made a halting move toward the cell phone sitting there on the backseat, cute as a fish liver. Marybelle said, “Cliff, will you ever learn to answer the phone? The phone isn’t a phone when you don’t answer it. Cliff, we don’t have a future. I’ll still come to San Francisco. It would be nice to have a first class ticket because I’ve been claustrophobic and out of sorts. The president of a prominent American university once sent me a first class ticket from New York City to Miami. Anyway, I’ve been brooding about our age difference…” the message time ended and she called again. “Seventeen years is quite a gap, Cliff. In ten years you’ll be seventy and I’ll have moved from forty-three to fifty-three. I have to doubt that you’ll be sexually active…” End of message again. The third was simple, “Cliff, just answer the fucking phone!”
I wasn’t all that attentive because I was looking at a motel across the road from the gas station. The magic was that the motel advertised kitchenettes as many motels do but it occurred to me that I might settle down in one for a few days and cook my own dinner. What I most sorely missed on the road was home cooked food. Viv had been a passable cook before real estate overtook her life at which point I took over cooking dinner because she often wouldn’t come home until seven. Frankly, I didn’t start well but then saved my ass by following recipes to the letter at least the first time out of the chutes. Now I terribly missed my chicken pot pie, which was one of the dishes Robert had requested I cook in San Francisco along with meatloaf, spaghetti and meatballs, green chili stew, and a recipe for Southern fried chicken my friend Ad had given me after a trip to Louisiana for what he called “sexual therapy.” Viv always liked food with hot chile peppers because she had grown up in northern Michigan at a time when the fruit crops demanded thousands of Mexican pickers and many of our local families had taken to Mexican food. Now with mechanical cherry pickers the Mexicans are largely gone and I miss them. When I was thirteen and picking cherries for money in July I saw a pretty Mexican girl emerging from a hedge row pulling up her trousers after taking a pee. I instantly became so full of desire on seeing her little triangle of black hair I came close to fainting. Suddenly I’m not so sure that the Minneapolis prostitute was being truthful about Ad. I’ve never known him to wear a hat except an orange stocking knit hat when deer hunting. Why would she make up such a story? I suspected prostitutes see some pretty weird behavior in our manly population. But peeing in hats? Such a request would be outlandish.
I was feeling pretty good as I neared Eureka on the coast. Here I was at age sixty and I was finally going to see the Pacific Ocean on a clear hot day. It came to me suddenly then that California should be called Pacifica and the lowly, common Robin should be re-named a Reubens in honor of its fat round breast. I recalled that forty years before in a literature class my professor had as a guest his mentor from Harvard who had said, “In the realm of absolute imagination we remain young late in life.” None of us youthful smartasses put much stock in the statement at the time but I had hopes that here in the present it was true. The hugeness of the project boggled me. True, there were only fifty states that needed work, and I had forgotten how many kinds of birds we had in the U.S. but I seemed to remember it was around seven hundred. Rather than being merely adrift this was something I could get my teeth into. I could borrow Western bird books from Robert or buy new ones. The states were easy what with my jigsaw puzzle in the backseat. I knew there was a trace of silliness in my intentions but my heart now felt airy with new oxygen rather than sodden with my difficulties.
The Pacific Ocean was more than I bargained for. At first I thought I might have a heart attack. Lord B
yron said, “Roll on through deep and dark blue ocean, roll.” Well, of course. I spent the next day and half between Eureka and San Francisco hugging the coast as closely as I could and stopping a couple of dozen times for yet another look. The ocean became the best smell of my life. I was generally astounded because nothing I had known or read prepared me for the Pacific Ocean. The tide pools among the rocks especially fascinated me. Thousands of wiggly-squigglies swimming around marooned by the tide. I began to think of the human race swimming around in an immense, cosmic tide pool. It was all a non-specific religious experience. I sat on numerous beaches and stared at the ocean until it was ocean inside of my head. The experience was a world away from the American idea of God as someone who drove around in a dump truck full of figurative candy to toss to deserving people if you beckoned him properly. The ocean was a god unknown, galactic, and in her own quiet way maybe enjoyed the moon as much as we did, what with the way the ocean gets pushed around by the moon and her tidal energies.
I stopped at a motel for the night near Ft. Bragg, a town that owned the tackiness of any locale with an armed service base but the difference was that Ft. Bragg had the Pacific Ocean. I had a bang up Mexican dinner which added happy sweat to my euphoria. Of course I knew I had become batty, perhaps deranged, but then I meant no harm to anyone or to myself. Ad had said about my divorce, “The world is taking you to the cleaners and you don’t seem to know it.” That might be true but then I wasn’t mentally equipped to stand and fight. Running for it turned out to be more pleasant. After the divorce was final in mid-winter Robert had asked on the phone, “Would you ever take mom back?” And I said, “Probably.” Viv had never cared a hoot for big ideas, the life of the mind, or good literature, but then she was so much in the here and now she could draw me out of my deep streak of melancholy. In the past year since the ill-fated high school class reunion, life had utterly lost its predictability but then maybe predictability causes melancholia?
I was a little woozy from the three pokes of tequila, and two Pacifico beers, my first Pacifico but what other beer could I order? I checked the cellular back in the room and then drove a few miles south to a place called Cabrillo Point to say goodnight to the ocean. The messages from Robert and Marybelle had expressed concern for my mental well-being and I wondered how this had all got started? Not since breaking my left arm in childhood had people needed to be concerned for me. I couldn’t figure out what it meant other than human mischief originating with Marybelle though Robert has always needed something or someone to worry about. Marybelle had also made the slightest apology for her concern about our age differences and said, “There are miracle drugs that can keep a man active until he’s a hundred.” While looking at the Pacific I laughed imagining myself a wizened flying squirrel hurling myself on unsuspecting women while aiming my boner before I leapt.
When the sunset headed toward China I drove back to the room with a glad heart. I paused at a stop light to toss a folded up five dollar bill to a scraggly young man holding a sign that said, “Will work for food.” At base it seems that’s what we all do. At dinner my ears had reddened watching a pretty Mexican waitress float across the room with her trays of food. There was Mexican music on the jukebox and I felt like I was in a foreign land, Mexico to be exact. The music and the ocean stayed with me all night when I awoke a dozen times still feeling good as Lola did when we did the morning chores. She’d prance half-sideways in a fancy gait on the way out to the barn.
CALIFORNIA III
I reached Sausalito at 4:00 p.m. figuring that I’d call Robert and then have a quick hamburger because Robert never has dinner until eight in the evening by which time I’d be half-batty with hunger. In between stints of driving I had been walking beaches and had forgotten lunch within the thrall of the sea. My longest hike had been at Pt. Reyes where I had watched a group of evidently young seals keeping an eye on me. I had dozed against a boulder during which they had approached quite close. I said, “Hello” softly wondering if seal thinking and dreaming wouldn’t be totally absorbed in the oceanic rhythms I found to be so soothing. I had read that sharks eat seals but that wouldn’t be all that bad compared to a prolonged stay in an oncology ward.
I had just pulled off the freeway in Sausalito and was near the former home of my boyhood hero Jack London when Ron died. Ron is the private name of my thirteen year old Ford Taurus with just short of two hundred and fifty thousand miles on it. The actual Ron was a high school friend who died when his tractor (a John Deere) tipped over backwards on top of him while pulling a stump. Ron was impetuous and had a heavy foot on the gas. He couldn’t wait to graduate from high school and join the Marines. He wanted to go to Viet Nam and fight for our “freedom.” By naming my Taurus after Ron I was honoring his hopelessly swaggering memory. At his funeral at the Methodist Church Ron’s uncle, also named Ron and an ex-Marine said that Ron would have made a great Marine whatever that might mean.
Anyway, I coasted into a parking lot with a smoking Ron. Luckily a Mexican fellow was sitting on a phone truck drinking coffee and trotted over with a fire extinguisher. When I popped the hood the smoke billowed out. I had blown a head gasket covering the whole engine with oil. The wiring had begun to burn and the Mexican hosed the engine down with foam before the flames could reach the carburetor which would have started a gas fire.
“Your car is shitcanned,” the Mexican said. There was the name “Fred” on his shirt pocket.
“Thanks, Fred. I think my car has gone to heaven.”
He laughed and walked back to his truck. This Fred made me think of Vivian’s Fred but only for moments. I called Robert with the bad news and he said, “Good riddance” to Ron’s demise, and then told me to walk a few blocks down the street to the No Name Bar. Robert had a scheduled conference call with “Glitzville” and would send someone to pick me up.
At the bar I had a whiskey and a wonderful ham and swiss sandwich. One thing that has gone wrong in America is the general acceptance of bad ham. The bartender wasn’t busy and we talked about Jack London. He was curious about my strange accent and then said Jack London was still real popular in Russia. I told him I had once started a camp fire under a snow laden fir tree and sure enough the snow fell off and doused the fire. It was a literary experiment. The bartender was pleased with the story and said literature can be dangerous and that when he was at Berkeley reading Dostoevsky it sent him into a long depression. I told him that my friend Doctor Ad insisted that certain books should have a product safety label pasted on their cover. Ad teases me that my early addiction to Emerson, Thoreau, and Thomas Jefferson, has made me too susceptible to contemporary bruising.
When I came out of the toilet the bartender said, “Your driver is here, sir,” and pointed at a young man in a black suit near the front door. Vivian always loved movies about the high life where folks in fine clothes are whisked here and there in a limousine by a chauffeur who wears a jaunty cap. My driver’s name was Ed and when we walked out of the bar he pressed a button on his key chain that started the big black shiny car, a BMW. While we fetched my gear from the dead Taurus I found out that Ed hailed from a farm town near Springfield, Missouri, and had come west because he was interested in the theatre. It turned out my son Robert had gotten Ed the job as a driver and that he frequently drove Robert to the airport. I naturally asked why Robert couldn’t drive himself to the airport and Ed laughed in surprise saying that Robert sometimes dictated thirty emails to this secretary on the way to the airport and might also field a dozen or more cellular calls. I was thinking about this when a wrecker turned up to tow away my car, also summoned by Robert. I signed over the title and patted old Ron on the hood in goodbye. Naturally a car can’t remember anything but it contained some fine memories. I stood there drifting away with a vision of Marybelle with her feet up on the dashboard revealing the wonderful undersides of her thighs and her possibly divine muffin. The Greeks had the Delphic Oracle but I forget what it said.
Robert’s condo was way too
spiffy for comfort. While Ed the driver put my stuff in a bedroom Robert waved lamely from the den where he was chattering on the phone. The whole place reminded me of a photo in one of Viv’s House and Garden type magazines. I selected three of Robert’s bird books from a shelf and sat down on a sofa so soft that I feared I’d never be able to get up. I fell asleep looking at Orioles. Was it fair that the west had more different Orioles than east of the Mississippi?
“Poor old dad, you look beat up,” Robert said, waking me up.
“O bullshit. I’m fit as a fiddle.” I didn’t take offense because I had had a pleasant dream of Lola sitting beside me on the John Deere.
“Dad I was on the PHONE for three fucking hours. I’m going to have a BIG martini. Do you want one?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Robert was dressed as spiffy as his living quarters and shook the martinis and ice over his shoulder like they did in old movies. I went down the hall to the toilet and on the wall there was a photo of a black man with a big wanger by a photographer with the nice name of Mapplethorpe. To tell the truth I looked played out in the mirror but then I had driven about 2,500 miles in Ron before he died not to speak of my aerobics with Marybelle.
Robert made us dinner on a stove about ten feet long. The food was so good I became a little teary. Despite what they say about the food revolution in America I saw little proof on the road. He grilled a veal chop, and made some spaghetti with just olive oil, garlic, and parmesan, and a salad of dark bitter greens. I poured extra olive oil on my noodles because it was so tasty and reflected that the olive oil was from Italy and the wine from France and they must have cost an arm and a leg but then Robert was forever a bachelor and didn’t need to save up to put kids through college.
