Shedding Skin

by Robert Ward

  “I am from Saint Louis originally,” he says, wiping his forehead off again, puffing smoke from his nostrils.

  I tell him that I was recently there. This excites him very much, and he asks me if I saw the new stadium.

  “It goes around on tracks,” he says.

  I take several more puffs from the joint and try to figure out what he is telling me. I look at Mal. Her eyes have gotten very sleepy and she is smiling at our host.

  “Sir,” she says, “do you mean to say that the stadium goes around on tracks while the team is playing?”

  “That sounds like fun,” I say.

  “No,” says Kevin Balso, laughing. “I mean …”

  But Mal is onto her own fantasy.

  “Can’t you see it, Mr. Balso?” she says. “Someone kicking a field goal with three minutes to play, and his team down by two points, and the ball is sailing right and true, when suddenly, the whole thing goes around on tracks, and the ball continues on its flight, but straight through the other team’s crossbar, so without knowing it, you who kicked the ball have unwittingly aided and abetted the opposing team in scoring a crucial three-point play which spells destruction for your side.”

  “Gee,” says Kevin Balso, biting his lower lip.

  As I lie back and stare at the road, I see a winery advertisement.

  SAN MATEO WINE—STOP AND SAMPLE OUR LUSCIOUS PRODUCT

  “Hey,” I say. “Look at that.”

  “I will tell you one thing,” says Kevin Balso, lifting his eighth glass of Hawaiian Delight wine. “This would sure make a great story to tell old Fred Carr back at the Hotpoint office.”

  Mal takes his hands and asks him why it would make a good story, and Kevin rubs his cheek against her fingers and stares out the wire-covered windows with a sad expression on his face.

  “I can’t tell anyone about this,” he says. “It’s not good business to pick people up in the first place, and if they knew I was out getting lushed with some hippies …”

  He shakes his head at the mere thought of it.

  Then Mal hands him another glass. I am sticking to Red Mountain wine myself. It’s cheap and what we are used to drinking.

  “What the hell,” says Kevin suddenly. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

  His eyes are wild and terrified.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean this,” he says, slamming the glass down on the oak table. “I mean I am thirty-four years old and I am making ten thousand a year, and I want to know what the hell I’m going to do.”

  Several tourists are looking at us now. Kevin’s eyes are popping, and his Adam’s apple is jumping up and down like the guy who used to be in the old “Behind the Eight Ball” comedies.

  “I mean what the hell is the use of this crap? I know the electric range business like I know the back of my hand, but what the hell is the use?”

  Mal is holding his hand and I am staring at him completely whacked out and all of a sudden I am seeing Glenn there in front of me. This is a young Glenn, and then I understand that there is something very wrong here, not only with Glenn, don’t you see, but very wrong with all of it, that every one of us is facing this thing, all of us will have the “electric range despair,” and this flash makes me shudder, brings me down with a terrible crash.

  But Mal is amazing. She is leading Kevin Balso, who is actually weeping now, weeping as we walk past a little old lady in a Swiss Winemaker’s Costume with genuine imitation wood shoes on, and too much rouge so she looks like a wooden doll, and Mal is saying in this sweet, controlled and loving voice, “It’s all right, Kevin. It’s all right. We love you. We really do love you.”

  And then we are out in the parking lot, sitting in the front seat of his car, and Kevin Balso has his head on the back of the front seat, and Mal is rubbing her hands through his hair, and chanting to him over and over, “It’s really all right, Kevin. You’re gonna make it.”

  Then Kevin does a strange thing. As quickly as he broke down, he has himself back together.

  “Hey,” he says, his eyes still dripping with tears. “That stuff you were saying about the tracks. That was pretty funny. You two are all right.”

  Mal is still rubbing his head, and I am getting nervous. I have seen this before, and am waiting for him to start feeling embarrassed about his crackup. When that happens, the hostility begins.

  But because of Mal it doesn’t happen. Because she is staring directly into him, and rubbing his head, and she is lighting up a joint and telling him in the smoothest voice in the world to take deep breaths and hold it as long as he can, and incredibly he is saying “O.K., O.K., I trust you. I like you, Mal.”

  Then, right here on the parking lot of the San Mateo Winery, where there are whole families with stone gray American faces, a Hotpoint salesman is taking deep breaths and hugging Mal. Then I am in the middle of them both somehow, a joint stuck in my mouth, and the sun is burning, the cars whizzing by steaming, speeding steel, and we are hugging each other, and laughing, and somewhere out of all this sweat and flesh comes a new, hysterical voice saying, “Oh yeah, I see, it goes around on tracks.”

  XXXIV.

  At Taurus—In Which I Realize Some Laws of the Universe

  Mal shades her eyes with her hand and stares down the long green slopes to the Pacific Ocean.

  “It may have gone commercial like everyone says, Bobby, but it’s still beautiful here.”

  I smile at her and sit down on the bumper of the Head’s pickup truck. He is inside the Coastline Restaurant and I am worried. The reason I am worried is the big sign on the front of the place:

  A HIPPIE IS JUST A RAT WHO IS AFRAID TO JOIN THE RACE

  “Do you suppose Head’ll have any trouble?”

  She comes back and pats me patronizingly on the arm.

  “Some people might. If you or one of the other people from the farm came here, it would be very shaky; but with Head … well, it’s different. I know what you think about vibes and all that … I mean, you agree with the Phantom, but … well, you’ve met Head now. Can’t you see what I mean?”

  I shrug my shoulders, but there is no use pretending. Head is a highly impressive person; and since the Kevin Balso incident on the way down here, I have become very excited. The old feelings again. Like the Taco maybe, but cleaner, and certainly not as hot. Warren is whispering to me, that impudent fruit, that Head’s muttonchops, brown-blond hair, white robes knitted by South American Indians, and red bellbottoms are pure decadence; but I see no reason to hang a man for looking his best. Still, it is not the visual appeal of Head that has knocked me out. It is the effortless way he makes you feel at home, the undeniable physical grace in his every movement, the low, almost shy tone of voice he uses, as if the wisdom he has learned while traveling in India must not be contaminated by boasting or ego games.

  “Head will feel mystical in heaven after this red-necked tavern owner puts a dumdum in his belly,” hisses Warren.

  “Buzz off,” I say.

  No sooner have we made that banal exchange than Head comes out of the doorway with a package of ice. The bartender is patting him on the back and Head is handing him something. I watch him walk toward us. He sees me and waves. Mal turns to me, smiling.

  “Head is too much,” I say.

  I feel a great warmth and imagine myself helping Kevin Balsos everywhere. If only Head will give up his secrets. Mal hands me a joint and we watch Head walk like a cat. Behind him is a Ford with a man and a woman inside. They are not watching Head (they probably don’t even know him), but are staring at something out the passenger’s window. I look up and see a sea gull sailing over the clouds. In his beak is a live, flapping fish. Head turns to look also. So does the driver of the car. I am horrified. The car is going right into Head’s path, and I am the only one who knows what is going to happen. Head will lie crushed in ice. But for some reason (what?), I cannot yell. And as I watch them point their brown fingers out the window at the gull, I realize why people in Cl
eveland stood around the body. They were participating in the only way they knew how, and that is to watch. What confused them (and now Head is close to death, and now the wife is smiling big white smiles with her idiot teeth) is what is confusing me. That is, this play they (and not I) were watching was not surrounded by a frame. They knew somehow that this play was different from the plays they watched every night in their comfortable chairs, but they were not certain how it was different. I am certain that they sang with the Phantom because it was their way of supplying theme music to the play. And so, as Head steps along unknowingly, and as the husband’s mouth opens and his eyes see Head, I hum a little tune and put my hands around my eyes, in the shape of a box, and it works. It works perfectly. This is television and I am the director.

  But, apparently, there is a part of me that does not believe that this is only a play, and I find myself screaming “Look out, Head,” which he does. The car, then, is the only thing left in the play; and it slams into the rear of a blue Sprite. But I am no longer interested in the drama, for I am thinking that never before the last month have I been involved in a car wreck, but suddenly I am involved in three of them. I think of this as some kind of cosmic coincidence, for all the wrecks have shown me something about the world. This insight brings about a chemical change in my body, and I begin to feel as though I have the energy of Superman. Still standing very still, I know that I am giving off electric impulses to Head, and that he is receiving them, and that somehow, through dumb luck, I have hit upon a magical law of the Universe, and that is: Everything happens to you, and you have no way of stopping it, but if you just go with it, you will see that you controlled it all along, and if you didn’t control it, then what difference does it make?

  I reach into my pocket, pull out a stubby pencil and write these thoughts down on a crushed-up match pack which features an advertisement from George Pectoralis. The ad shows a skinny runt of a kid with a cowlick and a look of deep malaise on his face. Then there is a totally different kid standing next to him, who I am supposed to believe is the same kid after reading and doing the exercises in a book called Big Body. This phrase strikes me like one of the hammers on the old Anacin commercials. For it brings to mind something which I had nearly forgotten, and which makes instant sense if examined under my newly found Principle of the Universe. What I remember is my father’s fascination with weights. I see him down our dark cellar, sitting on his red vinyl weight lifter’s bench, his neck muscles bulging as he tries to do curls with black steel dumbbells. I am sitting on the cellar steps and he is telling me that the body does not take care of itself, and that a man must do these exercises if he does not want to suffer from hanging stomach and flabby, puffed-up arms. I watch him, sitting there with his knobby knees shivering beneath the swinging bare bulb, and I watch the shadows on the gray cement and my father’s nose getting redder and redder, and I ask him quite innocently if he is Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. My father does not take this lightly. He pulls me down into the dungeon with him and makes me try to lift the weights, but I cannot. I ask him if I can go upstairs, but he is furious and says, “C’mon, smart guy, lemme see if you can put your money where your mouth is.” And I strain and strain, using two hands, but it is no use. I cannot budge it from the floor. I try to run away but he is in front of me, laughing a Dracula laugh, and pointing back down at the weights. When I refuse, he picks me up and lays me on the bench. Then he takes the big barbell and lays it across my neck. When I try to lift up, I see the words “York Barbell Company” on the steel. I curse and cry, but he has gone upstairs to the bathroom, and I am forced to lie on the cold plastic bench until Freda gets home from Social Club.

  And as all these images come back to me, I understand that my father never made it because he did not understand the simplest premise of things. He thought he could wrench himself free of his mortality through weights, through action, but this is not so. It is all happening to us and we must go with it. The thought strikes me as pure revelation and I am amazed that it has taken me so long to realize it. I do not realize that I have been laughing at these same ideas when they were written up in the papers by Head. I do not realize that I have been fighting everything that has been thrown my way since I was old enough to think. All I can feel is the illumination I am getting, the energy and electric impulse I am getting, and I am flattened by the simplicity of it, the wonder of the simplicity. And then, whap! comes another revelation, and that is about Head. He has been sent to me with an offering. Just as the Stumps, and the Phantom, and the Aces (who are all thrown into relief like cardboard cutouts in my children’s books, who are towering figures, prophets who have helped me reach this undeniable moment of truth) were sent to me. I race over and help Head pick up the spilled ice. It runs through my hands but I pay no attention to it. I must aid my Teacher.

  “The ice …” I say.

  “Do not worry,” he says to me, stroking his mustache and looking disinterestedly at the mothers and the babies who are shaking their heads at their ripped-up fenders.

  “Ice is easy to come by,” he says, “but life isn’t. I should have known they were behind me. It reveals a failure in my concentration.”

  Yes, I think. Your mind must have been somewhere else. Your mind must have been on the icy planet Jupiter. You were high atop some craggy, glacial peak. You were holding your hands high above your head, and you were gazing into the infinite stars and knowing exactly what they knew, and you were in such a blissful state that no mother and her pudgy, sticky-fingered kid could ever reach you. And if they had hit you, it would have made no difference, because … because in the state of mind you were in, the metal of the car would have passed right through you, and it was lucky for those mothers that they did not hit you because it would have been they who suffered the shock, not you. The experience would have fractured them, for they would have known, finally known, that they had lived a lie for all these years, that spiritually they were deep within the bottom of a huge canal, while all along there were other people (only a few) who were swimming in the vast, psychedelic ocean, free, free of all the hang-ups and ego games, and keeping up with the Joneses, and Cougars, and barbecue pits, and Little League. (And now suddenly I remember that I never made the Little League team, that every time I went out for the Waverly Indians I would become fractured by fear and pain, and after the first practice they would stick me way out in right field where no one ever hit the ball…. I see myself out there, knowing they are going to have a “cut” today, and I must do well, I have to make the team, Jesus, what if I don’t, what if I can’t play, and the ball is hit to me, I see it coming on a slice, in the sun, and I am digging digging for it knowing that I am going to drop it, knowing that the fat cigar-smoking manager who works at a steel plant and hates me because I am the wise guy

  on the team will put his arm around me and say with a patronizing voice, “son, only so many can make the squad, and it’s a hell of a thing to hafta tell you, but …”) But nothing, nothing, for now I know why I dropped the ball, and understand that I did what I really wanted to do, and that is not play at all, not play the game, not dress in the hot flannel suit and play on the crabgrass field, that I wanted to do nothing, only I didn’t know that I wanted to do nothing, which is why I got so fucked up. Yes, Head, but you do know, I can see it in your eyes, feel it on the little curled ends of your mustache, and I too know now, so let’s go back to Taurus and begin working on what’s really real.

  And now we are speeding along, and I am feeling a confidence and a realness that have never before existed. Head has opened up a bit and is telling me about his past, how he is from Montana, and how his father is still in Montana drinking himself to death, but now that he is onto Krishna Consciousness he doesn’t give a good shit about that.

  “I really wanna learn it,” I say.

  “Perhaps you will,” he says, “but it takes time.”

  And I nod and laugh to myself because if there’s one thing I got it’s time, for what is time bu
t some manmade concept to induce people to get to work on time. And who is going to work, who is going to be trapped by time, live inside time’s barren yard, when there are moonlight and stars and the warmth of the sun?

  I sit on an Indian rug in the center of the living room and I meet so many beautiful people that I cannot remember their names, and do not care if I do, for one of them has hit me with an important idea. Names do not matter; what matters is essence. If I am called Bob or Doggie, there is no difference. I hear the words, as if they come barreling down a long tunnel, a fast freight that is running straight into my brain and heart.

  “Yeah, I see,” I say, astonished. For this bit of information is in exact correspondence with my insight out on the parking lot, the insight of everything happening. After smoking five joints of Acapulco Gold and listening silently (for there is sound even in silence, as Head and Mal have told me) to the music of the Grateful Dead, I tell (in a low, reverent voice, the voice of a man who has been humbled beneath the importance of the Ultimate) the gathering of my amazing car wreck experiences.

  “And what do you get from that, man?” says Head, as he leans on his lacy elbows, smoking another joint.

  I stare at Mal, afraid to speak. She smiles and speaks for me:

  “You were going to say that you felt the Universe is trying to tell you something.”

  I am dumbfounded.

  “Yes,” I say, “that is exactly what I had in mind. The universe … beautiful.”

  This is the first time I have ever used the word “beautiful” without feeling self-conscious. I suddenly see that these people are my brothers. They are on the same path as myself. Head hands me amphetamine and a needle, and I do not hesitate in letting Mal tie me up. I smile as she tightens her Navajo headband around my bulging veins. When the needle goes into my arm, I do not faint, but enjoy the blood as it is being drawn back into the syringe. And immediately the word “enjoy” takes on a new connotation.