by Dan Kennedy
“Been meaning to come over and say hi all week, but I’ve been fucking around with firewood and getting this thing running again for when my son comes up.”
“Oh, okay, well. That’s all right, stranger,” this comes from Matthew’s mouth in surprise even to Matthew.
Stranger? But that’s how people talk in the mountains, right?
“I don’t know who you’ve met, but you’ve got great neighbors here on both sides.”
“Who is it? Who’s the neighbor?” Matthew asks with the urgency of a man still half hoping he’s landed next door to a holed-up rural Bowie.
“Well, you’ve got Hank just down the trail on the left; that next big cabin you can probably see the roof of when you’re on your back deck.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“And if you drop in around five or six, we’ve usually got a good fire going out back there and the cocktails are flowing,” he says this with a flourish of the hand that’s a cross between a drink being raised to his lips and a mimed dove or pigeon fluttering its way into his mouth for some reason, or a trumpet that has a thumb for a mouthpiece and four human fingers waving about frantically. So far, judging from this small-talk exchange, Steve’s two main passions seem to be dirt bike motorcycles, a size or two smaller than his frame requires, and booze. Which, oddly, make him a much more inviting social prospect than the college souvenirs he dresses himself in would lead you to believe.
“Oh, okay, maybe I’ll come over and say hi. It’s nice… you know, having a drink with friends, getting out of my head… I usually drink alone; in my car or whatever.”
Woopsie, bad form, indeed. But Steve plows through, not leaving any time for the conversational D Minor 7th note to hang in the air and create suspicion or sadness. Viva Steve, then!
“We had the big bear over there last night; you seen that big male around your back deck yet?”
“No, what?”
“Yeah, he’s been coming around. Big male.”
“I’ve been really good about trash and stuff.”
“Hank throws sweet corn all over the back for the deer, so we’ll sit out there making margaritas and throwing corn all over the hill, and last night that big fucker comes down and, of course, I’m a little buzzed, so I start goofing around with him, trying to get him to come down to the deck and stuff, we were laughing our asses off.”
Holy Christ! Matthew is disposing of dinner trash like it’s medical waste and biohazard and all the while there’s a neighbor whose idea of happy hour is chumming up savage mammals! And now they’ve got a taste for corn! So now, thanks to Hank, no matter how careful one is with dinner trash, all it would take is making some popcorn or stepping outside for a cigarette after some tortilla chips and wham!
“Oh, okay, well…”
“I got him to come right down from the back hill there. I tried to get him to stand up on his hind legs, but he just stood there staring at us!” And with this, Steve’s laughter explodes like a hearty cough and takes an eternity of minutes to fade off.
“Yeah, okay, he was probably… yeah…,” Matthew tries to say.
Jesus, can you imagine? This bear staring down at Steve standing there with his arms stretched heavenward, refusing to put down his margarita for the sake of the charade, probably pumping a boyish growl through the plump frame, hearing the basso as tenor in his heart. The bear must’ve been thinking: The prey is volunteering himself, he is presumably slow in stride, being so thick in the middle and all wrapped in ill-fitting, aged college-bookstore souvenir sweatpants. What’s the fucking catch? Where’s the trap? Fuck it, I’m walking back up into the tree line, I didn’t get this big by falling for shit like this.
“You here all week?”
“I rented it for a couple nights, so, but maybe, you know, the owner said it’s not booked till the fifteenth, so I can just leave money if I want to stay the weekend, too.”
“Burning some sick days, huh?”
“Uh, well, more or less. They’re kind of all sick days now, Steve.”
“I hear that, brother. I’ve been on disability, so I moved up here in, what, ninety-nine. I still do consulting, but I’m up here full-time. I don’t know, you know, you spend the first half of your life trying to live up to something, trying to prove everything to everybody and yourself, and then you realize every single person you were living your life for is gonna be gone someday, just like you’re gonna be gone someday, and that’s when things get interesting.”
The head cheers: If only everything Steve just said could be typed up fast by Matthew and sent off to himself on the small email thing; if only everything Steve just said could fit on a mug! The heart reels: If Steve had breasts—well, he does—but the point is, if he were an attractive woman, Matthew would be face-to-face with the woman he’s been waiting to hear something like this from for a lifetime.
“I agree! Okay, yeah! Yes! This… finally… somebody, yeah, when we die there’s…”
Matthew’s stammering fanfare and poor paraphrasing leaves Steve staring and confused, and he’s looking at Matthew probably exactly the same way the bear was looking at him last night.
21
Station to Station
NIGHT FALLS AS IT DOES up here, at the pace of the bankruptcy in that book by Hemingway, first gradually and then very suddenly. The sky is black and smacked with more stars than one thinks there are, and you can almost feel the signals coming through like ghosts spotting a crack in the door. Over on the desk of another era, the old radio’s thick telescoping antenna seems to silently bristle and stretch an extra inch into the corner of the cabin in hopes of picking up something; the dusty little nineteen eighties Sony television aches to let a night of phantom stations from Tokyo and Taipei come rushing through. At night in these mountains, it’s hard not to feel like a receiver—hard not to long for whispering or typing the heart’s every secret to satellites and servers. The sky has opened, the signals have strengthened, and Matthew’s phone chimes to indicate that a message has come in; chimes to indicate that the giant night sky has allowed it to awaken from another daylong silence.
Matthew walks over and grabs the phone from its lifeline, from its charger cable anchored into yesteryear’s wall socket. A text. From Tatiana! And the heart thinks: Under these skies, something beautiful and strange is able to happen! And the head rolls the kind of weary eyes that come from having too much experience, screaming: There is nothing good that can come from this. I can list twenty reasons in a flash why you should not get near someone. And Tatiana’s message falls somewhere dead center between the two sentiments offered up by the guts and ticking gears of Matthew’s biological container:
hope it’s ok that I got yr # from Hernan. still in LA. known you a nite, missed you for weeks on end. Sound a tad desperate, desn’t it? :)
With the abbreviations, arrhythmia, and misspellings of the way people are communicating, it’s a wonder some days that anyone on earth is still falling in love; hard to believe anyone is still taken aback by somebody. How, in this century, does one maintain the memory of a dashing and dangerous night of magic unexplained? Suddenly in the head, the graceful and gorgeous woman from an evening hurled down from heaven without explanation is reduced by tiny keyboards to a bumpkin; standing in Los Angeles, wearing a barrel and suspenders, chewing a sprig of dried grass, and bleating through tobacco-browned lips: Sound a tad desperate, desn’t it? Matthew says a prayer to God or The Great Spirit.
In front to the plaque of the Indian or Native American, Matthew asks the sky that life stay fast like this, and that his heart learn to come up to speed with it. In the next breath he’s asking anyone or anything up there bored enough to be listening that it all goes back to the way it was for him. There are moments in days like these, they come rushing in when one least expects it and they remind a person, in what one thought was one’s strongest hour, that it wasn’t always like this. The thoughts cry out like a kid in silent tantrum, a sudden reminder that there were years and years of order
; of living right, of living like they say one should at this age. Sure the marriage thing had become a ghost, but it was a ghost here on earth somewhere at every moment, one could take comfort that it wasn’t someone gone to heaven. Sure the job was probably sitting there just waiting to feel the crush of these times; waiting to make yesterday’s news of deadwood like Matthew; of jobs and offices and salaries that made sense only years ago when things were fat—so who cares that Matthew beat these times to the punch by urinating all over his office?
The point is, for a decade and a year there was work until six, there was a commute until north of seven. And for years there were dinners to cook up and make the house smell like chicken and spices and smell like a home that had people in it instead of a house making boarders out of the hearts of lost kids. There was an annual ski trip, there was watching romantic comedies on the couch with pillows clutched to chests for comfort in making heads or tails of the feelings from it, there were photo albums of the new house and vacations, and even the nights spent on the living room floor making them. There was staying home together on New Year’s Eve because it felt better than being out there in the fray of mania of love being thrown around like party favors or cheap sentiment. There was the silly, dumb old-fashioned thrill of a fun thing for dessert that one of the two had brought home. There were simple little things like deciding together to splurge on a pay-per-view movie and of sitting on the couch for it, having showered early and gotten into clothes that were comfortable and dumb, clothes that neither of you would ever be seen in; sitting there showered and pj’d with a special dessert treat and feeling like one was circling back and getting some of the fun of being a kid again; of being a kid for the first time, really. There were simple little things like two feet touching in bed after a long day in the city working; the top of one pressing into the arch of the other, and it always felt like there must be no better feeling on earth. There was simple, sweet excitement about deciding Friday night to sleep late together on Saturday morning and then do something good for breakfast.
It wasn’t always parking lot longing and better living through chemicals; it wasn’t always guns and unscheduled sex that came on like a summer storm that nobody predicted. Then again, there’s something just fine with days like that, too. But they leave one reeling, don’t they, these days, they’re nothing that can be sustained, or are they? To wonder what the answer is, and live one’s life as if only half alive, is torture. How many years can one spend sitting still waiting for the world outside to come wandering in? At a certain point it becomes important to seek it out, to go wherever one might find the truth—it seems like the woman in the book about eating and praying and loving knew this. But is this smart thinking? Haven’t people made a pretty compelling argument for succeeding through routine living, sensible actions, and levelheaded thinking?
These are all great questions to address. But not now, not while texting back and forth feverishly with a relative stranger and using a phone’s tiny Web browser to cash in frequent-flier miles for plane tickets while night skies permit the connection. Not while packing up at a vacation rental cabin and rushing to aim a long, dark, lonely car three hours south toward an airport’s long-term parking. No, these are probably not the times one questions whether or not one should be living like this. The heart shoves this line up from the chest and it comes right out of the mouth in a whisper for nobody in particular: “Jesus, enough, just go see her.”
22
The City of Angels Bleeding and Peeing
SO, THIS IS WHAT THEY mean by flying economy. But who is blowing ninety thousand miles to sit up front, certainly not Matthew, not even with half a million miles amassed during gainful employ, all waiting to be spent. Traveling is quite different when it’s not on the dime of a media conglomerate, that much is certain. Still, the routine is comforting, like prison. Sit down, belt up, shut up, here comes your cup of hydration, we’ll tell you when you can use your electronic gadgets and when you can’t, and it’s for your own good, damnit. Make your little cup of water or coffee last, make a pillow out of your sweatshirt, make perfect order of your trash to be collected, make a dream about driving down dirt roads from the way the window rattles you back here when you lean your big dumb head against it. Save your tiny bag of peanuts like it’s something you can trade for a cigarette or protection once the beautiful screws aren’t looking; a general sense of surrender and you-can-make-this-easy-or-you-can-make-this-difficult logic wafts through the cabin.
And it turns out, way back here behind the wings, the plane rocks and bounces like mother swaying child. God, if only someone would key the intercom during the maternal sway of it and say that everything was going to be all right forever; remind one that even if things don’t go well with the woman in Los Angeles that they’re rocketing toward at 549 miles an hour, one could visit their failed Wall Street friend who is living in a park in Wyoming or Montana or something.
In the amniotic calm of discount commercial aviation comes the moment when one understands why career criminals get a taste of freedom and then violate parole to rush their way right back into the penal system. The authority figures sitting in the very front of this thing have flung the steel tube up over Long Island and banked it hard right to head west where more temporary living awaits. With the cabin lights dimmed, one gets to feeling like part of a silhouetted troupe dedicated to the mission of going to any length to find another one of life’s magic moments that make all the other days worth it.
In Los Angeles, Matthew checks in at The Standard downtown, far away from the Four Seasons on Doheny and even farther from the Mondrian and Chateau Marmont. The lobby is a late-night gaggle of twenty-somethings dressed poorly in a way that only youth permits. If you’re young and beautiful enough, you can wear something terrible and ridiculous as if to say, See, even in this ridiculous shit that looks like it was stolen from retarded teen runaways and even with my hair like this, cut in chunks so randomly it looks like I was the victim of a perverse crime, I am beautiful and most likely living longer than you. They undulate under lights like half-blind bioluminescent sea life; they gush over a DJ for subjecting them to one endless dirge of house music. This is one of the rare moments when Matthew realizes there are dear prices to pay for youth and its vitality; comforting to think that it’s better to be carving one’s way through their forties than to be standing around hearing this so-called house music, ears trying to find one measure that sounds like it might be leading to the bridge or a big finish.
Upstairs, the room is physically modern and sparse and emotionally very similar to the lonely pornography that comes from this side of the nation; which is to say that after one walks past the glass wall to the room’s shower and imagines the ghosts of travelers past, after the small baggage hits the bed, one simply sits in a hard, plastic urbane chair in front of a long, skinny bureau staring out at downtown Los Angeles, feeling equal parts aroused and ready to be drained and instantly done with the experience. And so Matthew sits; a lonely man in a sparsely furnished temporary den, wondering if this is really all there is to travel and leisure. He walks to the little refrigerator in the corner and silently hovers over a small wicker tray of snack items and scans the prices on the laminated card that accompanies them. The clock radio is playing a thin ribbon of community radio jazz that the maids must be instructed to tune in after they clean and abandon the room for a new check-in.
He switches on the television and stares at a handful of channels; flicks through them with a remote even though he sits within arm’s reach of the television. All reality shows; one about sixteen-year-olds with wealthy parents, and the kids are dealing with the rigors of being rich in America and trying to have a better birthday party than their friends. One about a pawnshop where desperados sell what little they have left for a fraction of what they paid for it—wasn’t there a time when television was an escape from reality, not a lonely hotel room overdose of it? It’s easy to start thinking that this is not what one is supposed to
be doing as a tourist in sunny Southern California. It’s hard for Matthew to imagine a brochure about the region that boasts a big color photograph of a man sitting in a sleek plastic chair a few feet from a television, with a lump in the throat and eyes brimful with salty tears waiting for surface tension to break and permit their ocular exit. But there’s hope for the wayward man here in the lonely little room, there is the hotel restaurant that’s open all night and mostly empty at an hour when the jam-packed lobby has no interest in food.
Tatiana shows up at the restaurant like she texted she would. There are hugs, kisses, that way people kiss on each cheek, but not with actual kissing. Matthew is dragged through this choreography like a grandmother unsure of what to do; or an undercover cop trying to participate in the secret handshake of a gang member and figuring it out as he goes. Tatiana ducks and weaves gracefully through this intercontinental ritual and Matthew follows the cues like a fourth-grader learning to square dance, or like a forty-five-year-old man from Connecticut in over his head again. But the thing about modern love and modern living is this: You can be slow and old-fashioned, but if you look the part—if your hair is going long in unemployment, if you’re prone to wearing the kind of clothes you learned about and were given for free at the magazines you created marketing plans for, if your legs and trunk are long and skinny from a diet of heartache and financial uncertainty—the initiated will drag you into modern love and fast living, no matter how square and slow you are on the inside. This is a dangerous situation for all parties, really. If you don’t look the part, count yourself among the lucky, take comfort in loving someone, and take comfort in your home and watching movies and living correctly; go to sleep next to each other assured that you are missing nothing.
