Salvage King, Ya!

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  Our game: we lost our game 9-1 after the airport crash; the coach about to be fired, didn’t need this but he didn’t fight it. The team was in shock. I like flying but there are heights and hard golden mountains I’ve feared; I stare at them for hints of intent. It makes me nervous to hang over them in a light suit, a suit of lights, a suit of rivets. Some fear flying but it’s the ground, not the sky; the ground is the danger. It’s a little like my career: it’s not the rise that’s the problem, it’s the fall, the return to reality. Who expects Waitress X to dump you over and over? Who expects your team to dump you? Who expects your plane to hold another like a lover and try to kill you against a building?

  I worry about finding work after this is over, after my “career” is over. My dreams go inexplicably back to my grey warehouse job, the fork lift, the infinite afternoon shift, dust suspended in shafts of light in the loading doors, dust over the itchy cardboard boxes, dust over the neon and glass taverns across the avenue, waiting, like loansharks. You never lose those brain cells.

  Part of my brain makes the connection, but another part sees the plane’s portholes as a TV screen, a show. Tonight: Mothers who toss children onto tarmac. They must be doubles, stunt-men. I wanted to see, jamming my face to the tiny porthole, the opening.

  When I’m sleeping, and the telephone rings at 2:00 A.M. I know it is Shirt Is Blue and he’s drinking again. He always calls late, holed up in a cow-calf operation in central Alberta, a few too many from Big Bob’s Bloody Mary Mix. Cattle prices crashed right after he bought high, bought a herd.

  “Make it to that rodeo you wanted to register in?” I ask.

  “Oh yeah, hooked up with that, Whitecourt, didn’t make any money, drew some bad steers.”

  I laugh. Bum steers.

  “They were. Not my fault,” he insists. As usual. The rope hits the ground, another truck hits an Alberta ditch. He called me when I was in New York State and I had to ask, Say cuz, do you understand how these time zone thingies work?

  His phone bill is always in dispute. “Two hours? That can’t be right,” he protests. He starts putting an alarm clock beside the phone when he calls anyone. He has a few more drinks, sleeps two or three hours, starts drinking warm Labatt’s Blue on his tailgate at 8:30 A.M. Later another impaired charge, another claim of innocence, another protest. The judge calls him a liar.

  Shirt Is Blue’s pissed off: “Not my fault.”

  The telephone rings at 2 :00 A.M.

  Hang up, says the Intended, it’s the middle of the night, just hang up. But I have to listen. I’ve known him since day one.

  My Intended is dangerous with a remote control, an average of 3.5 seconds on each channel; this channel surfing drives me into palsy. Some days I wonder why the Intended and I are together, if indeed we are together; some days she is unbelievably affectionate and some days she seems terminally pissed off at me, my late hours, my jittery drinking. We supply each other with our forty miles of bad road, but I suppose this is something we have together, something real we can depend on in a hallucinatory world. I don’t know how long it can last. I wasn’t meant for making ends meet, scratching backs, getting to the church on time, weeping and wooing, cakes and cream, tidings of comfort and joy.

  Then other times I know it’ll work out just fine; we’re related, linked, blood, we know each other on some monochrome level that doesn’t show up on a graph. We’re in love. And we like the other. We agree on pertinent details.

  “I hate frills on watches.”

  “Me too,” agrees the Intended. “I mean, what’s it supposed to do, take out your eye? Monitor OPEC?”

  I see watches going for thousands and we need a working washing machine for a few hundred. You present your clothes to a shuddering machine. You need each other.

  She says, “We’re so afraid of being poor.”

  We’re listening to really fine Mexican music, downing guacamole with lemon and searing Pace Picante.

  “I hate waiting for my period. I want my period! Men don’t have anything like this. I hate men.”

  She pauses. “Let’s go have sex.” Her back: a cello shape. I know her back, know it better than her. The pale ends of a body, white as a scallop. A pillow under her.

  The milk-blue TV light has somehow entered her, as I have.

  Later I think of Waitress X and old Mr. Keats, “drowsed with the fume of poppies....” What a good line. What a world. That lucky old sun. What stays on the guilty retina? This: A steel bridge and sun on leaves the colour of fine cigars. Painted cliffs. Crossing a smoky river in her Mustang, Waitress X’s long body under ribbed clouds, her body laid across a province. This stays on the retina. And new lambs from the hills, ravens, her navel like a dark bullet hole, a tongue remembered, a cough held and waiting like fleece in amber cathedrals of winter light.

  “Did you cough?” My Intended wakes me in the middle of the night. “I thought I heard my mother cough,” she says. She is upset and lies on top of me half asleep, spooked.

  I dreamed my lady came and found me dead—I revived and was an emperor, a king. You know the rest.

  Everyone wants to be like someone else and they’re willing to pay through the nose. I don’t want to be a god, an emperor, I just want to be like I was. Now I wear glasses, my hair falling out and going silver, poisonous weight on my face. In the middle of the night I think I’ll never again have a Waitress X, she is a peak and a nadir of sorts. The things which I have seen I now can see no more. Everything is possession, it seems, everything is pornographic, even Romeo and Juliet, even Walt Disney, even the obsessive voice of the surf.

  I tag along on another player’s thiry-eight foot fishing boat looking for swordfish and thrasher but he catches some huge fucking shark in a gill net just eleven kilometres off a packed beach, a surfing beach. He’s caught sharks before but this thrashing shark is the size of a pickup truck; it has gills I could slide my head into. How many minutes would it take the shark to swim to that beach, to hit on someone’s son or daughter? This shark makes me very edgy: I want to stare and I want to back away. It has placoid scales and a big mouth like a whale, teeth like an assembly line rolling you over a few rows of razors. Those tiers of teeth will make you think twice before you dangle your ankle in the water or put on a wet suit and look like a seal, the shark’s favourite menu item. It’s not supposed to be working around here but then neither are a lot of people. It doesn’t need a green card, a damage deposit, or H-l visa. We climb a hall of heaving ocean and the props flail out of water briefly. You can smell diesel. We have eleven iced bottles of Mexican pilsner, cashews like tiny claws. I fall trying to carry up sandwiches from below. They keep a nickel-plated gun on board, mushroom shells. The other player shoots the dun and blue shark in the brain, shoots out that weird evil eye and fills our sneakers with warm blood.

  CHAPTER 40

  Connecting the Dots

  I had a beer with the ambitious assistant coach: “I’m tired of just blowing a whistle,” he said, “I’m tired of picking up pucks.” He’s looking discreetly for other positions.

  In 3-on -I drills I wipe and bang my knee hard. A lump that night. Why always my knee? I can’t sleep and limp around with a cold Lowenbrau, Ritz and Oka cheddar on a breadboard, watch Brett Hull shrug and smirk at David Letterman.

  “What’s for breakfast?” My Intended asks several hours later.

  “Dry roasted peanuts, mmm-mm.” She’s happy Her period has started. I can’t sleep and bring her tea and the paper. Our team is getting better, winning some tight games, winning the ones we once gave away.

  Trailing smoke, flimsy struts and wings tilting each way, Shirt Is Blue touches down his Fokker at John Wayne Airport, leapfrogging down from Canada to visit us and check on his 7-Eleven. I don’t know how he makes it over the mountains: his drunken plane looks ready to break. The prop is visible as it turns, the body like cheesecloth, and the wheels dangle, seeming to belong on a child’s wagon. I’m still a little nervous about the planes burning at
LAX. Shirt Is Blue seems on some hyper sugar rush. He goes to bed and then leaps out as if on fire. He won’t sleep and he won’t stop drinking. He’s yelling and knocking glasses over, shouting into the telephone at 3:00 A.M., slamming cupboards, refusing sleep.

  “Do you have to be so loud?”

  “Yeah, everyone says that.”

  “Well maybe you should listen.”

  I feel hypocritical saying anything because I’m drinking too but finally with some regret I tell him to leave. I like Shirt Is Blue’s company but we can’t deal with this.

  A string of stick infractions: too big a blade, too big a curve, too big a goalie stick, etc.

  The coach starts yelling: These penalties are costing us games, may cost us a playoff spot. A lot of jobs and money are at stake.

  Finally Coach hides all the blowtorches, makes us all play one game with straight blades.

  “That was good enough in my day,” he claims.

  We’re like addicts. Please! Just a teensy bit of a curve!?

  Oh yeah, I love hockey, I tell the American friend; this friend used to run numbers in New Jersey.

  I’m surprised, he says. How can you justify the violence?

  You call that violence? An American taking me to task over violence? I’m still getting over Disneyland’s shootout, bullet holes punched in my car, psycho drivers with sidearms, drivebys, flaming pyres at the airport.

  Last seconds of the last game; we’re down one, and have pulled our goalie. They’re bottled up in their own end, I know we’re going to score, put it into O.T. Some idiot on their team flips the puck right up into my face trying to clear the zone. He cuts my eyebrow; blood spots the ice as the clock runs out. Stop the clock, I’m yelling, stop the clock! The referee, Mr. Potato Head, puts something on my cut.

  “Hey, what is that?”

  “A tampon.”

  “A tampon? You put a tampon on my face?”

  “Sure, they’re efficient at soaking up blood; any First Aid course will tell you that.”

  Logical or not, I don’t like a tampon on me. I was reminded of John Lennon in L.A. with Harry Nilsson. Lennon had split up with Yoko Ono. Lennon was misbehaving. The waitress said to Lennon, “Sure I know who you are, you’re an asshole with a tampon on your head.”

  Don’t celebs know how ignorant they sound? Just like Wayne Gretzky at Harpo’s: “Don’t you know who I am?” The jock millionaire trying to save a $3 cover charge. The democratic bouncer made Gretz pay like everyone else.

  They did not stop the clock. We did not put it into O.T. Finally we put together a good streak, the happy underdogs winning, and we actually finish second on a roll, but then a fourth place team knocks us out. They just ran us and it seemed over in a minute. We couldn’t buy a goal. We collapsed, went into shock. We thought we were the underdogs who would smear the unsuspecting #1 club, the fatcats. But we hadn’t counted on the under-underdogs smoking us before we got there. We choked. What a crappy, frustrating way to end what seemed a decent season, to end what seemed easy, what should have been.

  Also, two goals against me on one shift: This eats at me. Our goalie let both in from the wide side, he should have stopped them, but if I’d checked the guy there’d be no shot, bad angle or not. I play three good games sick. I get better and have a rotten game. The worst part is we had a real chance versus the number one team. We could take them. This flukey fourth place bunch will get slaughtered. And I don’t have many seasons left.

  Our club’s GM says to the reporters: “We’re looking for some young mobile defencemen.”

  That doesn’t sound like me. I can take a hint. Europe may be next: better ales at least. The wild colonial boys spinning back to haunt them, to rattle a few bones and mangle their verbs.

  Neon phones next.

  “You could pick up a small boatload,” he says. “Easy,” he says, “no risk. Absolutely.” The bright angels of avarice.

  “Neon. I want nothing to do with it, O.K.? Nothing to do with me. I’m a dumb jock, an amateur deckhand, understood?”

  “Hey no problem, Drinkwater, just don’t come crying to me later when I’m flush and you’re out in the rhubarb. Just don’t look a gift bird in the mouth.”

  “Rhubarb? Bird in the mouth? What the hell are you talking about? Are the cops after you?”

  “The cops? The cops are probably in on it. One of them OD-ed in a parking lot by the Royal. Some of them don’t get out of bed without a little something, a little juice, a little pick-me-up.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way. That French guy and his partner. Mr. Shakedown? Thumbs in the pie.”

  “Gotta go. Up early tomorrow.”

  “Think about it, O.K. old sport?”

  “O.K. I gotta go though. O.K. Sure. O.K.”

  From a distance the line of white surf seems frozen, lace trim around the whole continent. Wash, dress, be brief in prayers, for we fish at dawn for insane Yellowfin tuna—Wahoos, they call them. One guy tosses a beercan and the crazy fish play volleyball with it—Bop, Bop, Bop—three different yellow fin hitting the can, keeping the gold and silver can between sky and sea. Finally they miss but none of us believe what we’ve seen, this wild talent to juggle our flotsam, our shining discards, this ability to connect.

  Later in the day the sky and water push more light than the pierced human eye can hope to possess. The light is beautiful and painful. I need zinc on my burning nose. I think of my father, not wanting the doctors’ help, their radiation, their machined light.

  Gulls touch base with us, patient, wheeling in light, hoping for entrails and a chance to scream. The tide’s ancient noise. The tides are strong and our lines so thin. And I’m catching nothing, I’m not pulling my weight in the loaves and fishes department.

  My Intended snags a big seagoing bass, divining the hook just in front of the streamlined flesh, the compact body and mouth. She connects the dots and she is rewarded with the desired pairing; that much is simple. One swims away while another wants the hook. No random meeting is without its consequences, its altering of innocent cells. Why seek a lesson? The fish’s silver skin shakes and alters in our hands. Waitress X has an African ring. My Intended’s fingers have no rings, but tiny scales from the bass place themselves like jewels on her singlet, on her shoulders. We’re out in a radiant sea and it won’t stop moving. A challenge is near. That last fortune cookie ... I test my porous memory. In whose hands was it broken?

  CHAPTER 41

  Surfer Joe Among the Fishes

  Seas cross as our fishing boats slide off long piers out of Point Loma, out of Port Hueneme. The Intended flew back to Canada after we kissed at the frosted partitions. Things were up in the air. She had to get back to work. I’ll see you soon, we said. Are all exits a mix of grief and elation?

  My team was bumped quickly from the playoffs so I hired on with a Panamanian crew I knew, out mashing waves with the sharpies and draggers and charters, out with the luna moths.

  I rented a wooden shack right on the pier and I nailed up flower boxes, driving the car over dead beams and planks, a Mexican woman gazing down at the backwash water visible between the wood. A long way from Canada, from my lake.

  After the blessing of the fleet I balanced on the flying bridge, so close to the hum and breath of the Interstate, hard against the border and the navy ghost ships. Out there the swimmers, surfers with boogie boards roped to their ankles or wrists. After the blessing of the fleet I helped three tuna fishermen with Louisville Sluggers kill porpoises stuck in the nets. A strange sound: like whacking a vinyl recliner.

  I picked up a little Portuguese and Spanish but I packed it in when the big wind ripped our boat from anchorage A8 and the Coast Guard ship capsized right in front of us. I felt like I was riding one of those inflatable clowns you punch over and it pops right back up. Another crew sank with a load of dogfish. Their bodies washed up on Tugboat Island. Like me, it was the deckhand’s first trip out. The water was too white for surfers, which was too bad. Wicke
d waves.

  All morning they are burning cars in Tijuana. I cross an iron bridge and see seven swans in a line. I look in the morning for Waitress X’s shadow; I move tragically like dirt through a Persian rug. The drunk captain, shooting at sea lions with a pistol, blows part of his own arm muscle away. Far from shore, nose full of salt, nose out of joint, nose broken from pitching into a doorway, stomach sick, swearing never to go out on the lustral water again, I spy a dark skua blown off course juddering its wings over the wrong ocean. I miss the Intended.

  So I quit. On solid land again I wander up 1-5 to the Del Mar track. I feel lucky after getting through the gale. Hey, there’s Desi Arnaz’ deco hacienda on the beach. Sharp place. We borrow coats and ties to get in the Del Mar clubhouse.

  “There’s Burt Bacharach. Hey buddy. Hey . . . .”

  He doesn’t want to talk but I put $200 on the same horse as him and placed. Quinella is a nice word, like some tasty Spanish snack, except they don’t have a quinella at Del Mar. The sign above the sink says LAVESE LAS MANOS! O.K. I wash my hands. On the boulevard surfers are brawling over territory, slashing each other’s tires, Aryan surf punks screaming My beach, my wave! They glue bits of razor blade to their boards, aim it at a stranger’s face in the plangent water.

  Big boards or little boards in now? I ask a day glo freak.

  He says: “Anything Mr. Man, I can catch a wave on anything, dude. Amateur hour out there.” He points. “Guys can’t surf dick. One old hippie, snap, wave breaks his leg. Know what I’m saying? Know what I’m saying?”

  I understand. Sure.

  Now I’m out in the surf like a seal, with They The People and monster wave action. A local teen wiping out bonks me upside the head with a shark face board. Her Catalina top rips half off and I’m staring close at one breast bare with water foaming, our three nipples hard in the cool.