Free Spirit

by Joshua Safran

  “Your little friend wanted some pie.”

  Bob turned to me: “Joshua! I told you we don’t have money for dessert no more!”

  What the hell!? He’d told me to order it!

  “But…” I protested.

  The waitress rescued me: “It’s OK, it’s on me.”

  Bob brightened. “Are you sure? You won’t get into trouble?”

  “Nah, no trouble. It’s the least I can do.”

  “Bless your heart, dear,” Bob called after her. And then to me: “Good job, buddy. Dig in.”

  I reluctantly sunk a fork into the gelatinous flesh of the pie and drew it back to my mouth.

  “Good, isn’t it, buddy?”

  Damn! It was good. Even the ice cream Uncle Tony sometimes bought for me when Claudia wasn’t around couldn’t compare to this delightful confection. I went in for bite after bite, happy for the first time that my mother wasn’t awake and with us. She would have never allowed me to have something so full of sugar. Whatever Bob’s annoying eccentricities, I had to admit that he could deliver when it came to the dessert department.

  Bob checked the bill and laid down a couple of bills and a small pile of coins. “Look at that, buddy. It’s a win-win. She still gets ten percent tip.”

  “Uncle Tony says with tips you’re supposed to triple the tax.”

  Bob conjured a toothpick from inside his jacket and began picking his teeth. “You know, Josh. There’s a lotta things you don’t know. Did you know that different states have different taxes?” I didn’t know that. “We’re in Nevada now, buddy. That’s totally different from California. So if I went around pulling California tricks in Nevada, we’d be in a lotta trouble. Your Uncle Tony probably never thought of that.”

  We reemerged into the eerie, grainy brightness of the truck stop and skirted a wall back toward the blue van. I could feel the sugar gnawing at my teeth.

  “We did pretty good in there, buddy,” Bob declared. “We got coffee, water, a salad, fresh toast for you, and pie, for guess how much? Guess, Josh.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Negative ten cents. We got all that and we made ten cents, buddy. Food for free and we’re a dime richer. Now that’s what I call a good deal. And look at this.” Bob opened his jacket to show me a mass of whiteness. “I scored a whole bunch of toilet paper from the bathroom.”

  We spent the next few days in the mountains, and when Bob had pilfered all he could from off-season ski resorts, we slipped back into the desert like a rowboat pushing off into the high seas. We were just a funky blue speck of metal and tape floating in an ocean of sand and scrub. Under the limitless heavens, I realized I’d never really looked at the sky before. By day I was awestruck by the vastness of the blue expanse. And at night I watched with wonder as the horizon’s riots of color retreated before the fullness of the cosmos. The Milky Way and a billion stars reminded me I was just a small part of some colossal greatness.

  Claudia liked the stars too, but didn’t like the oppressive heat. Bob’s appreciation of the stars seemed to rise and fall based on how many paper towels we’d managed to pilfer from the gas station restroom or how many forgotten odds and ends we’d collected from the last rest stop. But his favorite activity remained the restaurant leftovers trick. Sliding into the right table at just the right moment, Bob believed, was a proud art, not only rendering free food, but making an important politico-spiritual statement.

  “Claudia, this salad’s for you. And, buddy, mm-mm, look at these scrambled eggs. Not even touched.”

  “But, it’s like stealing.”

  “No, bud, it’s not like stealing. In fact, it’s the opposite of stealing. We are taking something that nobody wants and wanting it. Society is all about consumption—just buy, buy, buy. And then throw away, throw away, throw away, so they can buy some more. We’ve gotta be like the Indians. You know what they used to do when they killed a buffalo?”

  “American bison,” I corrected him.

  “No, when they killed a buffalo they ate all of it. Not just the steaks. The whole thing. The heart, the eyes, the nose. And then they used the skin for clothes and they even made the hoofs into glue. We’re like the Indians. And, like them, I believe in karma. You know what that is, buddy?”

  “It’s when you’re reincarnated…”

  “No, it’s if you open yourself up to the Universe and you’ve got an open heart and you say: ‘OK, Universe, I’m ready to receive.’ Then you’ll be given everything you need.”

  Claudia looked up from her Ursula Le Guin novel and nodded. “You have to open your heart, Joshey.”

  Walking out of the restaurant, Bob picked his teeth triumphantly and announced: “I’m stuffed. All that for a buck twenty-five.” He was always keeping score: “Free picnic cooler! Second one this trip.” “That meal came to a grand total of zero dollars!” I came to think that he was keeping a tally so that he could have his lifetime freeloading statistics etched onto his tombstone. It would read: HERE LIES BOB DINARDO. HE SCORED: 425 PAIRS OF USED SHOES; 1 BILLION LINEAR FEET OF TOILET PAPER; AND, 7,000 PIECES OF PIE. Bob truly, honestly thought we were pulling one over on society by bathing in the filthy sinks of stinking truck stop bathrooms, scavenging through the garbage, and sleeping in a van parked in abandoned rock quarries and KMart parking lots.

  Playing a fife in the New Mexico desert.

  From Utah over to Colorado, down to New Mexico, and through Arizona back to Utah, Bob DiNardo’s van spun great freeloading circles around the Southwest. But we were never truly aimless. Bob was keeping his eye on that $3,000 potentially waiting for us in my grandmother’s bank account. One morning, when the energy seemed just right, we suddenly swooped south toward Tucson. As we pulled up to Grandma Harriette’s little house, I noticed that Bob was not only wearing a shirt—which was in and of itself a big deal—but that he was wearing a button-down shirt. And it was tucked in. Claudia was anxiously rubbing her upper lip. Based on my mother’s descriptions of her, I fully expected my grandmother to start punching people in the face once she’d figured out how to get her complicated screen door open. But she was totally nonviolent, wearing a tight little smile on her made-up face.

  “Well hello, Claudey.” She gave Claudia a hug. “And Joshua, how much you’ve grown.” She gave me a hug too. “And you must be Bob.”

  Bob took a step back, opened his arms like a bald eagle preparing to leap from its arboreal perch, and dived forward into a hug, emitting a loud sigh of “Mom!” He wrapped his arms around Grandma Harriette and rocked her gently from side to side, groaning with pleasure. When my grandmother extricated herself from the hug she was still smiling.

  “As we say in the Old Country,” she said, “ve iz mir!”

  “Vase beer!” Bob greeted her back with an ethnic hand flourish.

  I’d met my grandmother once before when she’d come to visit us in San Francisco. She was as I remembered her. Her long, woolly, black-and-white hair pulled back tightly from her face. Her porcelain features and Levantine angles—like her otherworldly Yiddish-Boston accent and her tiny, immaculate house full of antiques—were a throwback to some other time and place. Her potential energy was palpable to me, polite demeanor papering over a frothing forcefulness.

  “Look here, I’ve made beds for you in the living room,” Grandma Harriette instructed.

  “Oh, Mom,” said Bob, “we can stay in the van. It’s not too bad, and we’re used to it.”

  “Nonsense! You’ll stay here.”

  “Really? Thank you, Mom! We’d like to take you out to dinner. What’s your favorite place?”

  Bob took us all out to Grandma Harriette’s favorite Chinese restaurant, but they didn’t accept checks, so Grandma had to pay since she was the only one with enough cash. Then we walked down to a Denny’s restaurant to have pie.

  “Did you have pie back when you were growing up, Mom?” asked Bob.

  “Did we have pie?” She turned to me with the smile still on her face. “He wants to kn
ow if we had pie. We had all kinds of pie. Meat pie, vegetable pie, fruit pie, noodle pie, Boston cream pie.”

  Bob looked dreamily off into space. “That’s a lotta pie, Mom.”

  “Well, pie is anything you put in a pie shell.”

  “Ha! That’s a good one. You know what I think, Mom? I’ve been listening to how you speak and the ideas you come up with, and I think you’re a very well-educated mother.”

  My grandmother’s face contorted into a contemptuous snarl for a nanosecond, and I expected her to start strangling Bob at any moment. But she restrained herself admirably. Bob went on being obsequiously unbearable, and she kept up the same strained little smile that failed to extend to her eyes.

  The next day Claudia was excited to explore some of the Native American heritage sites. Bob thought he might be able to finagle free admission, since he was friends with a real Indian chief. I had no desire to watch Bob say “How!” to stunned Natives all day so I stayed behind with Grandma Harriette. We played Chinese checkers and I Spy. She showed me family photographs and told me about the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of Stalingrad.

  “What am I supposed to do?” she asked me once Zhukov had finished encircling the German Sixth Army.

  “With what?”

  She lit a cigarette. “With this. She comes home with this Baab character.” She spit the name out again: “Baab!” This was a new epithetic version of his name, connoting “contempt,” which I liked almost as much as “Bahb!” connoting “exasperation.” “What’s he after, kissing my ass all the time?”

  I sat very still, eyes wide open trying not to see that image in my mind.

  “What does this Baab character want? Money, I guess. At first I thought he was a straight goniff. But with his song and dance, he must be a shyster, waiting to pitch something. What do you think he is, Joshua?”

  “I like that first thing you called him yesterday. A Hendrix?”

  “What? Oh, a schmendrick?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, he’s still a schmendrick. The question is whether he’s a schmendrick of a shyster or just a schmendrick of a nebbish with shit for brains.” She was silent. Then she spit out “Baab!” again. “That’s not even a name, Bob.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. Bob’s not a name at all. It’s a verb.”

  “What’s a verb?”

  “It’s supposed to be an action word. To bob is to float up and down with the waves. Something that has no direction of its own. No weight, no intensity. It just bobs up and down in the water, subject to the whims of the elements.”

  “Do you like him, Grandma?”

  “Do I like him? There’s nobody there to like or not like.”

  The following day was overcast but punishingly hot, and the grunting of some large animal rubbing itself against the back of the air conditioner pulled me from my dreams. The summer rains had withheld their blessings, and the javelinas were left to lick up the evaporating discharge from leaking air conditioners. The arroyos conveyed nothing but dust.

  We holed up inside and, toward evening, Bob declared that he was taking us all out for a proper dinner. The diner was too crowded, so he took us to a sandwich place. In the middle of the meal, Bob became unusually serious and leaned across the table toward my grandmother.

  “Mom. Your daughter and I have a new business opportunity, and we want to ask you to invest in us. As you know, I’m a certified schoolteacher, and we have an opportunity to start a new school and a new community, really, up in Tehama County, California. Now, to make that happen, we need to move both of our homes up there and get a new place, together. I don’t have to tell you how expensive getting a place can be. But we’ve come up with a way of both moving and living with one investment. An associate of mine named Mr. James has made a mobile home available to us for the very reasonable price of three thousand dollars. That’s all we need. Now, I know it’s a lot, Mom, but this is the loan we need to get settled down and to get started on our future.”

  Bob concluded with a proud paternal nod toward me.

  Although I could tell her jaw was clenched while Bob made his pitch, Grandma Harriette never lost her little smile.

  “Well, that’s a very interesting proposal, Bob. Why don’t you let me think on it.”

  The next morning my grandmother handed Claudia a check for $3,000. “This is what you want, yes?” said Grandma Harriette. “It’s a loan, not a gift. And it’s for you, to use as you see fit. Shumesh gezunt.” Claudia pocketed the check sheepishly. My grandmother turned and gave Bob her polite smile. “Well, Bob, it was very nice to meet you.” She extended her hand.

  Bob shook his head in amused adoration. “Mom!” he laughed. “Come here!” Bob wrapped her in a long, deep embrace and kissed her on the top of her head. “Good times, Mom!” he said.

  With Grandma Harriette when she visited me in San Francisco.

  Grandma Harriette bent down and held my head to hers. “Now we know,” she whispered into my ear: “Shyster!” She nodded at me knowingly and winked. The doorway of the van narrowed into darkness.

  As we cruised down Speedway Boulevard out of Tucson, Bob punched the ceiling of the van. “We got it! Claudia! Three large!” If stealing toilet paper was a major score for him, the $3,000 from Grandma must have been the score of a lifetime. Bob carried this ebullience with him for the rest of our wanderings in the desert.

  When we reached open desert again, the steel sky finally broke and the long awaited rains plunged salvation into the broken Sonoran. The saguaros shivered and stood straight again. The javelinas grunted with delight, wallowing in the soothing mud. And the arroyos rumbled with the brown waters of new life.

  Bob ran outside to dance in the rain. He loved the rain and got naked in it as often as possible. When the drops would start pasting the windshield, Bob would swerve the van into the open desert, strip his clothes off, and run out into the fresh sandy mud with a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo. “It’s a free shower!” he’d whoop. Claudia loved these spontaneous celebrations of nature and would join him as fast as she could, stumbling in the back of the van to undress without losing her glasses. They’d call at me like cheerleaders: “Come on, Josh! Come join the free shower! You can do it!” I would sullenly and reluctantly strip down, hoping that the free shower would shut off before I got out. But once I was out, I prayed that the celestial management would keep the free shower water pressure high so that I wouldn’t get caught with soap in my eyes or shampoo in my hair.

  The outdoor bathing concept became so popular with Bob and Claudia that we started screeching the van to a halt at the first signs of standing water. We were soon bathing in lakes, streams, and pools of brackish effluent. Watching them frolic in the water before me, I detected something familiar in their playfulness.

  They were acting like children. Which was weird because I felt like an adult.

  When we weren’t bathing, we were scouring the desert for obscene rock formations. “There’s one, Bob. Out there. Pull over!” We walked out to the rounded rock cleft in twain.

  “It’s a butt!” snorted Bob. “Look, buddy. Butt Rock!”

  We discovered and photographed Butt Rock, Vagina Rock, Cock Rock, and Toilet Rock. And then we discovered newer and better butts and vaginas in other parts of the desert until it seemed that geology itself had a dirty mind. A billion years of sedimentation and erosion culminated in a perverted series of rock art.

  In the eastern Mojave Desert, the earth started sprouting cacti—a hundred varietals, each more alien than the last. The van swerved into the desert at once, and Bob and Claudia emerged like mostly naked astronauts eager for first contact. “Come on, buddy!” Bob called after me.

  “No. It’s too dangerous,” I said to the empty van.

  The appearance and variety of the cacti were impressive: teddy bear, prickly pear, hedgehog, foxtail, barrel. But I refused to leave the safety of the van, based on my personal belief that sharp spikes were nature’
s way of saying DO NOT TOUCH. Bob and Claudia did not subscribe to this theory of evolution and were soon all over the cacti.

  “Look at this one, Bob. The barbs look like fish hooks.”

  “Ouch. This one has long dusty prickers that look like bones.”

  “This one’s like a hairbrush. Ow! A really sharp hairbrush.”

  “We should try to grow those in our new bus and sell ’em,” he said. They looked at each other and then raced to the back of the van and began rummaging through the milk crates. A moment later they were skipping back toward the perilous cactus with a bread knife and an empty plastic yogurt container. They returned triumphantly with the stubby severed arm of a cactus protruding from the container.

  “You have to water it,” said Bob. Claudia dumped some water into the container and placed it on the broad black dashboard in front of her.

  “That’s not a good idea,” I said.

  The van jerked forward and the cactus tumbled onto my mother’s lap.

  “Aaah!” she yelled.

  I watched with detached curiosity as Bob worked his grungy pocketknife tweezers to pull the crescent slivers out of my mother’s thighs. Having seen the inevitable unfold, I felt a puzzling and ironic sense of satisfaction. It was perhaps my first I told you so moment.

  When Bob was finished, Claudia put what was left of the cactus back on the dashboard. Bob scotch-taped the container in place and declared: “There!”

  A few miles later we came upon an even more resplendent patch of cactus. They were out of the van again in a flash, cavorting through the cacti like children at a petting zoo. “Hey, buddy! We found one that shoots its prickers at you before you even touch it.” To my continued surprise, they began hacking at the dart-shooting cactus with the breadknife and replanted a hunk of it inside an empty tahini jar. They soon landscaped a little cactus garden on the dashboard, relying on the power of scotch tape for protection. “That’s not a good idea,” I said again.

  Later that day, we stopped for lunch at a truck stop. After Bob had fished some perfectly good day-old or days-old bread out of the dumpster, we took off again. The van lurched forward out of the parking lot and the entire cactus garden jumped onto my mother’s lap, and another piercing scream rang out.