OMYGAWD!! she yells in Iowaspeak and grabs me, nearly drowning me in rubbery flesh and undertow. To stay up with oxygen in our open mouths, in my broken nose. The rich in the restaurant of washed hands peer down upon our nakedness. The illegal aliens gaze on; they are always fully dressed in the big heat. The coyotes charging twenty-four bucks to lead the bewildered chickens over the border, they look on our nakedness. Half the population looks on, California über alles, a neoprene nightmare. My head hurts a lot where her board hit me. Guns or firecrackers start farther up the beach, blood and stitches and computer-generated graphics dancing in around my cranium: a halo. I slide us to the shallows, GET ME A T-SHIRT!! she cries at the edge, hunched modestly in hunkering wavelets. Pinwheels and rockets’ red glare, bombs bursting in air, You may already be a winner, etc. etc. I find her the Sid Vicious T-shirt I won from the college radio station.
Can I take you out to dinner sometime? I ask.
No you cannot.
Fireworks hang now under the sky in the lame posture of jellyfish tendrils; ice, coke, stars, pieces of light grinding away, an ancient Hollywood reel wearing itself out on the same inane sprockets.
Once, on the opposite coast, I was enjoying dinner with a Japanese woman, a sculptor who had just been at Yaddo and lived in NYC. She knew Yoko Ono. Her words slow, pausing as she searched for the words in English, her accent pleasing. She said, “There is something wrong, something sexually wrong with America. I believe it is the chicken hormones. Or what they place in beef.” Within a year I read, quite by accident, that she was dead. No details, just her name on some bland list and then the word “deceased” in parentheses. Shadows look different at this latitude.
Neon calls again: “Just a tiny favour. Harmless.”
A young surfer drowns in my sight, under breakers and brown pelicans, his naked foot leashed to the board. He wipes badly and never comes up again. His strap is caught on a crab pot, holding him at the bottom; he can’t get the velcro loose. It is not quiet underwater watching your own air bubbles exit your lips and rush in bass notes into your own nostrils. A roof of water surges overhead like distant clouds and he’s inside them in noise and ear pressure and three-quarter time chaos. He sees the sun twelve inches away but cannot rise to the ceiling of his translucent chamber, cannot thrash his head through the gnashing surf.
Minutes earlier the Surfer had a purple Studebaker tooling down the freeway, fins up in sun and exhaust; minutes earlier he had been reading the ocean for a good set, riding the pipe, hanging on a good shoulder. He was stoked, no doubt. Now he sees yellow sparkles, he’s blacking out with fire-coloured birds under tons of force. Surfer Joe is with the fishes under wild sun and bubbles. There is light and shadow on the wide bottom, light right around him but black in any distance, a dim raucous gymnasium.
Up above we run from the slanting beach in slo-mo; we smash our heads under to finally free the strap, clear mucus streaming to my chin; we drag him from the surf as if from a car wreck. There is no strength in his neck, his head flops back loose. Otherwise it’s the same man that stepped on the board, on the pipeline. Neil Young’s song is on a boombox: “Here’s a story ‘bout Surfer Joe, caught the big one but he let it go . . .” Surfer Joe’s arms drop down, his fingers rubbing on my leg. Salt water drips from his hands and feet and nose. I fall on the beach spitting. The sun is no colour, the sand so warm.
Four men work Surfer Joe over, taking turns pinching his nose, mouth to mouth. His young girlfriend watches, holding his sunglasses. Her eyes. It’s hard to look like the grieving widow in this particular bikini: tiny triangles of neon cloth suspended over what the more articulate perverts call impossible breasts; on her ass but a string. For some reason I think of Jackie Kennedy crawling the trunk in the motorcade. I think of the parking lots of adultery. I think of Baywatch. The white-shirted surf brings in the drowned man’s psychedelic board, waves walking in as horses, plodding on and on, resigned. There are kettle drums farther out. Hiss and dissonance in a sustained note that says something and cuts short: silence.
The Mexican woman from the pier says in Spanish, “The dead ones come up in their white shirts.” I think of my grandfather drowning in an Irish canal, leaving my grandmother to raise eleven children, my cranky clutch of uncles and aunts. I think of the Spanish sign in the restaurant. Lavese las manos.
On the late news I see myself and a dripping beach towel. I exist. The airbrushed pattern on the surfboard looks like a Ukrainian Easter egg you see painted in northern Alberta. The L.A. newscaster is Canadian. The talk show host. The quiz show host. Everyone is Canadian. The invisible frost-backs have snuck in. “And now this,” the Canuck newscaster says. Traffic pulled over checking for green cards. La migra. A chase, a step-van overturns and a Mexican baby inside is no longer alive.
The woman next door is shouting, “You think that’s hot?! That’s not hot.”
Our walls leave something to be desired. I have a green card, an H-l visa. Faked, they go for $50 to $1,000. Also there’s a market in bogus utility bills and rent receipts to establish residency.
I write a letter to my ex-wife, forgiving her for loathing me. I am blaming Surfer Joe for a self-imposed sleep deprivation experiment. Surfer Joe has murdered sleep. His planets glow like big vegetables. The ocean fog goes pink early in the A.M. and the car phones start chirping, trilling like clarinets in the driveways of the republic.
Trucks of orchids waver on Encinitas Boulevard. When I walk, the police slow and stare—why is he walking? In California this is considered wildly suspicious. In Encinitas there is some tangible fragrance in the air. Pepper trees? Raw flowers? White trash perfume? I don’t know the local plants. I can smell the sea. The landlady frets the salt air is killing her Zen garden. After the death of the surfer in the crab pot line, I am obsessed with the surf. A mile inland I dwell on it, wash rolling over everything, susurrant, sly, hollow. Surfer Joe under it for a moment. A tan meant nothing inside that weird throat, inches out of our sight. We were nearly asleep on the sand while his new ceiling shifted up and down, bubbles of oxygen by his mouth, teasing him. His eyes were open when I found him, still staring at something out there, his neck gone careless. Porpoises planed in the same swell, thirty feet away. Diners ate nimbly along the highway, tourists massaging the fake syllables; a fork here—alive. A fork later—no. Horns and gunplay in cardiac traffic, green Naturalization vans riding herd. A little farther the spouts of baleen whales, fifty feet long, devil fish to the old whalers, Eschrichtius robustus. Nothing to Surfer Joe, eyes gone red like spawning salmon, lungs gone back to gills, coughed inside out. Now I have two obsessions. I can count myself lucky.
Out in the pastel suburbs we are eating words. A bit of quiet. That’s all we want really. And a bit of noise. The fat woman circles her car. Where are the keys, the children ask. Mom, Mom, where are the keys? Do me a favour, she says to me, Put a bullet through my brain. Behind the town there are strange Mojave mountains like heroin heaps, stockpiled. Detox vans circle and I am washing my hands in the perfect pool; watching dark stripes and restless geometry on the pool floor. Waitress X dives in. Aliens leap the fence at night to launder their workshirts and underwear in the heaving Jacuzzi. The Spanish woman waits at the pier after the drowning, Waitress X waits for me to get over it, the landlady waits for her garden to croak. Kathy is probably hanging out with Neon. I am kicked out of a $7 room as Stevie Nicks’ cauterized nose enters the Betty Ford clinic, enters the tabloids as poor little rich girl. They are freebasing the planet, taking a blowtorch to parts of the brain they don’t want. Will Stevie Nicks ever make a video without that stupid fan blowing on her?
Sun hits the rocks and sea and Waitress X is sleepy, near naked in some mermaid dress. Cigarette boats flutter about the harbour light, flags shaking, yachts crisscrossing an exact point, bows plunging and burying, mother ocean cranking it up. The stinkpot I was deckhand on tacks crazily on its way back out to the ghost nets. On a stone point where meat-grey rocks run down to the surf a de
siccated Christmas tree is torched, blazes instantly. Another year done like dinner. Her eyes the colour of whatever is around her. Gold light on her belly and gold light along her ass. She’s so relaxed: Will she ever have children? Lose her composure? She quit smoking so easily I am amazed. She waits patiently under the fake Jesuit bell tower, under the campanile, reading my copy of Lolita, reading her weekend edition of the San Diego Union.
“What on earth are you doing?” she asks.
“Pretending to be a killer whale.”
“You’re a goof,” she laughs.
In this motel pool the exact tint of Windex I practise, force myself to stay under water longer and longer. Waitress X reads and I stay under, broken nose hurting, until I see the same fire-coloured birds young Surfer Joe came to know. To know. Stepping into a bathing suit you don’t think about this. I wish to be an interpreter, a sculptor, a mammal conjuring surf. This perfect turquoise rectangle quivers beneath the diving board. I’m practicing. Red birds and butterflies move blindly up from Mexico and everything floats. There is the clean still surface. There is the form hiding beneath.
CHAPTER 42
The Land of No Odometers
I roar past my funhouse reflection in the silver line of snaking Airstream trailers, my testy car pulling me from East L.A. to southern Alberta, to Jawbone Lake. There is something in deserts I respect: punk roadrunners with lizards dangling from beaks, doves in cactus calling coo-coo, coo-coo, and that impressive collection of junked refrigerators and slot machines. I met my Intended in a salt-brush desert. Now, in the lingering last light of a Nevada sunset I spy tiny monsters hurtling toward my head, looping, barreling over ugly scrub and cliffs: jets protecting us in the desert. I see them well before the shrieking arrives, sense the change in our air as these metal blackbirds sweep over the unearthly lit green highway signs, streak the level desert floor, spooking the few wild horses we haven’t yet hunted down. My Volvo runs amazingly well now, this dry heat warming my car’s obscure bones, arid desert air pushing easily through twin carbs. I pass every car on the road while the sun beats behind weird cloud cover, and mad prehistoric birds rocket past the same way the racing sun seems to, visible then not visible in the crowd of clouds.
Young crewcut pilots hang upside down in their modified suits, their pale calibrated brains aimed down at earth as they cross Hebrew-looking mountains, and I imagine arks sailing calmly over these test ranges and desert rats. I am ageing quickly and I have no sanctioned profession. God has not yet given me word to build a boat, but there’s still time. I possess one suit and one RRSP; I’m a one-trick pony, amusement for the cigar smokers, the wax-cup beer drinkers, I’m a rubber chicken circuit jester who travels and drinks. But what the hell! I had fun and I knew what I was getting into. Now if only I had enough pro games for some kind of real pension. Or even get reimbursed for all my moving expenses.
The lovely desert fills with mirages: water, sanity, coins in a shower of gold from a machine. Las Vegas billboards loom like giants, larger, jets like gnats circling my shorn head. My engine’s valves tap into Hollywood mufflers under the Air Force’s impressive alloy plumage. On the long climb east several cars pull off, over-heating, hoods open like mouths. Bats feed at rare blossoms as aged tourists scratch their heads and beg for water. Two Snowbirds argue whether Nevada is the Silver State or the Sagebrush State. They commence clepping each other with canes. Cacti throw shadows of demented dancers, prone hills look like sleeping wives and a drunk young cowboy does soft-shoe in the sand and rabbit brush. He’s in an old-fashioned white flat-brim Tom Mix hat, tux and tails, pants tucked inside his cowboy boots; his snakeskin boots point down like a ballet dancer and his arms are held way up, snapping his fingers. His hat tilts down, putting his gaunt scarred face in shadow. There is something in the desert he loves. He must have been immaculate the night before in his tux. I see he is blind, he has lost his eyes somewhere. (The dark and vicious place where thee he got cost him his eyes.) Just what do they do with eyes at the hospital? Into the dumpster out back, like shucked oysters? Out vile jelly. Those in science may disagree but surely an eye is more than a simple lens; it’s a miniature mind, its own powers and peeves, did love you once, was the more deceived, etc. You can’t just toss an organ like that into a plastic bucket on the floor, pretend it’s a tennis ball that’s lost its fervour. While the blind cowboy soft-shoes, his outside women cruise the malls, just looking, thank you.
I ask if he wants a ride but the blind cowboy says no. I give him half a lime, that beautiful fruit, and one freezing can of beer. A purple hearse weaves past us going way too fast. The hearse veers into the desert toward Joshua Tree, trailing a plume of dust while the Byrds’ “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” plays on my tape deck; pedal steel guitar soars: “You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” they drawl. There’s a horse’s skull nailed to a miner’s cabin, a chalky relict. Just as the Byrds tape finishes I pull into Las Vegas, pull into Circus Circus for free drinks and 25¢ slots. My sweaty soul hits a wall of air conditioning and neon mayhem and a man who looks like Jesus in a bad toupée buttonholes me, begs of me please mister, money for food.
Now why should I give you money, I ask sensibly. We’re in Las Vegas, you’ll just gamble it away.
Oh no, he says in an amiable tenor, clearing up any confusion, I have gambling money.
In landscape this dry I think of my young pal Surfer Joe pinned under all that water: riding one last zipper, a growler, a right side ripple, then inside the hooks in the land of no odometers, the land of lost apostles. Surfer Joe used to fly a 6’4” squashtail right under the black piers, a jet, a blinking shadow flicking through the pilings and sharp barnacles and deadheads. He was a goofy-footer, he didn’t go for the regular stance and now he is killed on the Pipeline, a run he made known. Shredding breaks, mushy reform waves, slop, all the way past the crooked pier and then he slides under and an unfamiliar hand grabs his foot and holds him there awhile. Just long enough. His eyes staring at me. I closed his eyes. I placed Philadelphia subway tokens on his eyes. I close my eyes, I go under into intoxicated motel sleep. And each motel morning I shall be lifted (under new management) at the white crack of noon. Check out time is eleven. No lifeguard on duty at the pool. The white wooden tower is empty. Something is telling me that Waitress X is a cul-de-sac. In the car I climb to sudden startling views, brief meadows, then down to clanging pointless railroad crossings. I am crossing mountains of slavish taverns where the taxed hulking jukebox plays only Sinatra, Dorsey and Hüsker Du and that’s all right by me.
I am inside our motel pool; under pepper trees, under cayenne trees; I am underwater rising from the bottom toward the blue above the water. I see my hands reaching, rather I see their reflection while I’m underwater. It’s not a hallucination; I try it again and can see a perfect mirror image of my hands, a religious image, two hands open and pointing to heaven, rising. Of course I dwell on drowned Surfer Joe: this was his last vision. For some reason I cannot do the same trick with my face, only my hands. This is in a village in a crook of mountains, dark evergreens rising right of the highway, a snowfield above to the left, a brilliant river in a curve around us, some blue of the sky living as well in the snow, the motel pool bright as liquid metal. I am inside it, the liquid metal, inside the pool.
The landscape turns and hides from me as I drive around obstacles, cliffs, through the spoked valleys. I lose direction and seem to hold the wheel in a turn of 360 degrees churning dizzyingly downhill. The wheel bends the driver. My fan belt breaks and the heat gauge goes off the map. I park under a tree and heal the fan belt with hockey tape. This delivers me to a gas station, will deliver me to my Intended again. The grease monkeys, busy betting on a cockfight in one of the bays, won’t help; they make me sort through a heap of fan belts for my number. I find my number.
I drank freezing ginger ale across the Mormon state, floating past smoking islands of Dickensian steel mills while keeping an eye out for Marie Osmond. I never associated Utah with steel. Utah is
named the Beehive State: It’s refreshing, the first time I’ve been somewhere named after a hair-do.
Cops ignored my speeding in this indigo paradise or else the Volvo was invisible to Latter Day Saints. How can you be in California one day, Idaho the next? It’s pretty, running just moments ahead of spring. Orchards run wild to the bank, snow still hovering in the hills, river still moving inside winter.
Deer are dying of black tongue disease, carried by gnats, bucks dead up in the aspens around the ugly hotel, tiny details dragging them down. I like this spacious country, these lost peaks and pillars of salt, these expansive valleys and tank towns: I can tell I’m closer to home. I’m pedal to the metal. I can sniff it across the border. I’m declaring nothing. I’m there.
CHAPTER 43
Arthropod Summer
At my Salvage King Ya! junkyard I am ringing my modest borders with swift growing willow, so as not to offend la turista, Luddites, etc. Also wild roses, patio lanterns, golden birds overhead. I am a King of Junk, king of something. I have empire, I have magnesium wheels and rare metal parts, but skip-tracers are on me like ugly on a pig.
Previous I was middle management, a bit of a con, an attendant lord swelling whatever. A grinder, a plumber, skin of teeth in a hair-trigger republic. Now a hunter and collector, an antiquarian with fabulous auto limbs and glass bug-eyes for sneaky sports cars. Coyotes come every night to sniff my friend Neon’s life-size papier maché dinosaur, paying homage to other ancient kings. A red rooster crows, saying, Bring your bullet nose Studebakers and three-wheeled Messerschmitts, your Power Glides, hot rod Lincolns and Morris Minors. Your Borgwards from Mexico. Your Simcas. Your DeSotos. Your ex-jocks. Your dinosaurs. Your hearts and fenders.
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