by Chris Rush
In the inexhaustible light, I was changing. My hair had turned white and wild, my blue eyes eerie against a dark tan. More than once a driver told me, “I had to pick you up—you looked like an angel.” I’d bow my head and get in.
That day in the Mohave, west of Needles, a small pickup finally pulled over. An older guy with rough hands and worn-out boots. He said he had a house near Barstow with his wife.
“Do you need a place to sleep?”
I tried to read his face. I’d gotten pretty good at it. “Okay,” I said, with a fake deep voice.
The house was small but very neat, on a scrappy hill above town. With my backpack, I could barely fit in the door. The man’s wife showed no surprise to see a blond giant standing there. Her name was June. She said dinner was in fifteen. She showed me to my room.
I had not slept indoors in weeks, maybe months. Putting down my pack, I sat on the bed, on the blue plaid cover. Around me: model cars, schoolbooks, the World Book Encyclopedia. Everything in perfect order.
When we all sat down to dinner, the husband seemed tired, but his wife was all smiles.
“Tom says you’re from New Jersey.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you a runaway?”
“No, ma’am. I call home every week.”
“Well, I hope you’re hungry.”
I was. As I ate seconds, Tom asked me, “So where you headed?”
“I’m going to Sequoia. To camp out.”
“Then?”
“Oh, I never know.”
After dessert, I watched TV with them. Looking away from the screen, I saw the picture of their son on the mantel, a blond boy around ten years old, in a cowboy shirt. Between a younger version of June and Tom, the boy smiled.
He was dead. I knew instantly. I excused myself.
June said, “I put fresh towels in the bathroom for you.”
“Thank you for dinner, ma’am. It was really good.”
After a shower, I ducked back into the boy’s room, wrapped in a towel, my long hair dripping on the floor. It felt strange to be standing there naked, looking at some kid’s toys and teddy bears. Inside a notebook, I found his name: Stanley, Sixth Grade.
I leafed through the pages. The writing stopped in May of 1968.
The boy’s bed was too small for me. I slept a bit and then left the house before dawn, without making a sound.
For a few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about Stanley. Said his name like he was there with me in Sequoia National Park.
Stanley, look, man—the biggest trees on Earth!
* * *
I’D BEEN WANDERING for months. On return trips to Tucson, sometimes there’d be a letter from Julie or my sister at the post office. Never any from Sean. In one of Julie’s she wrote, I wish it had worked out. My sister wrote something similar.
I received a measured reply from Gabriel Green, typed on Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America stationery, suggesting that I find a spiritual teacher more qualified than himself. Until then, he encouraged me to “watch the skies and ask for God’s help.” It was a nice way of telling me to get lost. I was crestfallen. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had always been ready to hitch back to L.A. and offer my services to Gabriel.
I’m not sure what those services could have been. After so much time alone, I was barely equipped to have a conversation. I’d lost hold of normal life. I could take drugs, and on a good day sell a bag or two. But I was in a kind of mystic haze, wandering the worn-out hills. And I knew what I was becoming.
Sometimes, like shadows, other drifters would pass by. Men with only the clothes on their backs, maybe a bedroll across their shoulders. They moved lightly across the land, always flickering just out of frame. Like me, they waited for rides on the on-ramps.
One rainy day, a truck picked me up, and then a drifter just down the road—an old man in a ragged dinner jacket. The geezer sat up front with the driver and me, saying nothing, just rolling cigarettes and smoking. His face was a worn wooden mask, like nothing I’d ever seen. It frightened me. I could feel the cold on him, the tremor. It was like he’d been outside forever. After an hour or so the rain stopped and he asked the driver to pull over.
The old man got out and stood on the shoulder of the road. Facing me, he bowed deeply, reverently—storm light flashing in the distance. The image was burned into my heart, and the message that came with it: Once a boy, now a beggar.
33.
Brief Landings on the Earth’s Surface
THERE WERE GLORIOUS MORNINGS in Tucson—the sky washed to absolute crystal, the valley new with sun. Still, the sadness would hit me now and then, and I would fly back up the mountain. I would lose weeks. Sometimes Walter would come to find me. He always smelled good, like a box of crayons.
“You should come down,” he often said. I knew he meant from the mountain—that I should get a place in town. But I felt that God was with me on the mountain—and I was afraid to abandon Him.
I looked for signs, searched the caves and canyons.
In my notebooks, I wrote phrases I do not understand now:
Into the keyhole, a yellow bird.
* * *
ONE DAY, I came back from an early morning hike to find my tent shredded by a bear—my remaining food splattered like a crime scene.
Maybe it was time to live among humans again.
In Tucson, I found a rental.
After so long without a roof, the Covered Wagon Trailer Park didn’t seem so bad. Strategically placed between a sewage treatment plant and a cemetery, some days it smelled like flowers, other days like poo. But the trailer I rented was cheap—thirty bucks a month, no deposit, no lease.
The other residents of Covered Wagon were working-class retirees, warming their bones in the desert heat. I was the only kid on the premises. My landlady, Geraldine, lived in one of the better trailers, with a patch of Astroturf and a birdbath filled with pebbles. She had African violets on her windowsills and photos of delicate grandkids—but Geraldine was all brass. Husband dead, muumuu slipping, she was a midday fright. Rouge, red lips, eyebrows painted in like big black frowns, she stayed close to her afternoon soaps, beer in hand. She reminded me of Loey.
Right off, Geraldine asked me if I was some kind of he-she, adding that I should take no offense to her question. “You pay your rent on time—don’t matter to me if you kiss a cow.”
After the mountain, the trailer was disorienting. With each step, the capsule rocked from side to side. The toilet was in the shower. The windows were portholes. The view was nil. It was a crashed spaceship.
* * *
UNEXPECTEDLY, I RECEIVED a letter from Sean. He’d graduated from high school; was thinking of moving to San Francisco—but maybe he could stop in Tucson first? He apologized for his “tardy reply” to my letters, and said more than once how much he missed me. But what moved me most of all was that he’d begun the letter Dear Poopinita—a nickname he’d given me years before in New Jersey. I read the letter and wrote him back in a rush of emotion: You are welcome here. Whatever I have is yours.
As if I had anything to offer.
* * *
A MONTH LATER, when Sean arrived at the trailer, he was shocked. “Is this how you’ve been living?”
I gave him the bed-sized bedroom. I crashed on the kitchen floor.
During the day, I dragged Sean to my favorite spots in the mountains, though I think he would have preferred to drink beer in the trailer. We walked and talked—and though it was good to see him, we seemed to bring out a weird mania in each other. Often we had long conversations, the two of us talking about completely different things—Sean about music in San Francisco, me the mountain and the road.
At the trailer, sometimes it was hard to talk at all because of the racket from next door: an old couple howling in torment. For weeks, I’d assumed they were in pain—but when Sean informed me that Grandma and Grandpa were having sex, I realized he was right. The old woman’s orgasms were particula
rly disturbing, not unlike the screech of tires before a crash. Sean would turn up his transistor radio as loud as he could. “We need to get laid, man. And not like that!”
Sadly, Sean and I could never sleep with each other. We were too similar—both of us on the edge, barely hanging on. No matter how much we tried to hide it, we could see each other’s madness.
* * *
ONE WEEKEND we decided to camp in one of the canyons. We found a deep pool and swam. The water was freezing, but the sun was glorious. We ate tangerines and smoked hashish.
Then, in the afternoon light, I saw something glitter in the scrub.
I said, “Sean, look. What is it?”
Walking over, we found a kid’s bicycle, chained to a tree. It had obviously been there a long time—tires shredded, padlock corroded into an awful red fist.
Why would someone carry a bicycle into the mountains and just leave it there? And where was the kid? We were miles from a trail, miles from civilization.
Sean shook his head and laughed. We went back to the stream and lay naked together on a rock. The rest of the day, we were completely silent. Drowsing in the sun, I listened to Sean breathe. It was the law between us that we would never talk about the terrible things that had happened to us—about the men who’d carried us away.
The scars on Sean’s neck like crossed-out words.
* * *
SEAN TOOK PICTURES with his Instamatic.
I still have a few from that time, the two of us smiling as best we can, sunburned kids with big square mountains behind us. In one picture—taken by whom?—we’re naked in a mountain stream, standing side by side, like soldiers. Sean is handsome as the Sphinx. The water is icy, but we are stoic. I remember perfectly the clear water, the golden pebbles shimmering beneath our feet. When I look at this image, forty years later, I wish I could move my arm and put it around Sean’s shoulders.
* * *
SOMETIMES HE WENT BLANK. A fog would overtake him and he’d stare off, distant and unhappy. I’d see his mind working, his mouth moving in some secret conversation. I knew that, soon, he’d start screaming.
One night, the two of us were sitting beside a small fire pit outside our trailer, and Sean began to rant. I could only understand some of it: “This isn’t what I want. This is shit!” He took the sunglasses from the top of his head and threw them in the fire.
I said, “Okay, Sean, calm down—whatever you need. I promise, I’ll help you.”
I pulled his sunglasses from the flames, but they were already shattered.
The next morning, Geraldine came by to say, “I can’t have the two of you making a ruckus.”
“Us?” screamed Sean. “What about the fucking howler monkeys next door?”
I told Geraldine I was sorry, we’d keep it down.
Sean glared at me. “Why are you apologizing to her?”
* * *
IT WASN’T JUST Sean who was losing it. I, too, had trouble living with another person. The trailer was stifling; without the sky overhead, I was growing anxious. When Sean fell asleep, I’d leave the trailer and walk the dry riverbed of the Rillito, talking to the stars.
Not long after Sean’s outburst, he informed me that he’d gotten a job as a waiter, and that he’d found another place to rent. He said he wanted to give Tucson a go. And then he told me I should call my family—ask for help. He was probably right, but all I said to him was: “You owe me ten dollars for the pot.”
After he left, I got wasted for days.
* * *
I DIDN’T CALL home, but I decided to try for a job. I filled out a few applications, made up answers about experience and the length of time at past residences.
Finally, I got work not far from the trailer, as a dishwasher at the Miracle Motel.
There was no miracle. The neon sputtered. The plants were plastic. The manager’s office smelled like Ben-Gay and BO.
On the way home, past hookers and bums, I’d buy a quart of Coors—sixty-nine cents. Sitting on the steps of the trailer, I thought of my father and raised a toast to him.
Thanks for nothing.
As I lay on my lumpy mattress, I knew I should find someone to share it with. I longed for Owen and hated myself for missing him. Every day, I trudged home from work with a cold beer—my reward for being an adult.
* * *
SOON I STARTED to stray, started to miss work.
After a few months, I finally quit my job and left the trailer. I went back to the perfect pleasure of owning only a backpack. I could feel my mind expanding. This was not always good, as I slipped easily into mania. One day, returning from a ragged trip north, I wrote to my sister.
How can I find the words for all the things I’m feeling? I’ve experienced such beautiful places: the Badlands, Devils Tower, and the Bighorns. In Yellowstone, I woke up to an inch of snow and a giant moose! I was in Tucson with Sean Carney but we’re not together now. I want to get a job and a house. I worry about stuff but try to trust in God. I’d rather believe in too much than in nothing at all. I think Sean has problems, though. I think he’s brain damaged. Did you know that when he was little he was abducted?
As I wrote, Sean morphed into me. I recounted what had happened in Albuquerque. Putting it down in words was frightening. Still, I kept writing.
I escaped before they could do anything. Mom doesn’t like me to talk about it, but it wasn’t my fault. Probably Mom and Dad think something did happen, like what happened to Sean. Is that why Dad hates me? I know you tried to protect me, Donna.
I don’t mean to be negative, but why do people want to kill us?
I kept the letter for a long time and read it often. Even now, I can pretty much recite it by heart. When the cold came, I burned it along with lots of other things, including, finally, the Gospel—a gray paperback of the New Testament ridiculously titled Good News! I watched the flames turn the pages.
* * *
DURING THE WORST of winter, I crashed at a hippie hideout on the edge of town. The place was a jumble of apartments—lots of stoners sitting around, getting wasted. At first, it was all very friendly, but then I noticed people watching me. I didn’t realize how feral I’d become. I tore through everyone’s food and smoked all their dope—the whole time going on and on about the sacred mountain and the Holy Spirit.
Eventually, they asked me to leave.
* * *
IN THE BACKCOUNTRY of Sabino Canyon, I set up camp on the edge of a cliff.
Lost and lonely, I wrote letters to my brothers Michael and Steven. The prose was maniacally cheerful—I called them my little bunnies. On all borders, there were drawings of the desert, spaceships, and oversized stars. Pretty much every word was a breathless exaggeration: I swim every day under huge snowcaps, there are rainbows everywhere. Please come visit me. I’m carving a hobbit-hole in a cliff!
Instead of selling my drugs in Tucson, I began mailing packages to my brothers, as Donna had once done for me. In return, they sent me enough money to live.
There are UFOs, I wrote, like crowns in the sky.
* * *
ONE DAY, when I was thumbing to the co-op, a yellow Camaro pulled over—red pinstriping, chrome hubs. It was Dino, a friend of Walter’s who’d scored from me a couple of times. Dino was a rich kid, a lawyer’s son. Dressed like a greaser, in short hair and tight pants, he rolled down his window and smiled. “Small town, small town, get in, get in”—he liked to repeat things at least two or three times.
I told him I was headed to the co-op, but he said, “No, no, no. Come with me.”
Dino was cute and I wondered if this was a sex thing. But then he said, “My buddy and I are moving a fair amount of product—speed mostly, mostly speed—but we’d like to branch out. I know you’ve got good connections. Really good connections. Maybe you could set us up?”
He said he’d be very appreciative. Twice.
He shook my hand, sealing the deal before I’d said a single word.
Dino’s partner was a k
id named C. Carl Duclane, who came from a rich ranching family. He was bald and pudgy—the first person I ever met who shaved his head. When I walked in the door he shook my hand—way too hard. Like Dino, he spoke so fast it was almost a foreign language. Sowhatarewedoing?
Everything in their apartment was big—big stereo, big bong, big pistol on the table. While I sat on the couch, Dino and Carl conferred in the next room. I could hear them chattering like chipmunks. When they returned, Dino said, “Okay, okay, so we decided that you should stay here—you wana stay here? You could sleep in the dining room. There’s room under the table. That could be, like, your spot.”
Was I their new pet?
I didn’t care—I was ready for air-conditioning and a cold beer.
The next morning, still in my sleeping bag, I woke to C. Carl sitting in a chair—staring at me. Obviously, he’d been up all night speeding. He was now cleaning his nails with a very large knife. “Don’t forget,” he said. “The only reason you are here is to score drugs for me, cheap.”
I was silent.
“So get up and get out,” he barked. “Find me something tasty.”
He was an asshole. But if I knew anything, it was how to do a drug deal.
Within two days, I brokered the sale of five thousand hits of white acid from Valentine to Carl and Dino. Sensing shade, Valentine had refused to meet the partners, so the deal was done with only me, in Valentine’s van in a parking lot.
He was curious, though. “How much cash do your guys have on hand?”
“Maybe twenty, thirty grand.”
“Then we should move more product.”
I may have looked less than thrilled.
“Is there a problem?”
“They’re sort of rednecks.”
