“Is Leopoldo coming with us?” I asked when we’d returned to Janicki Road to throw our belongings into cardboard boxes. I knew he was, but asked the question anyway, wanting some assurance that things would somehow be better when we were squatting in the woods out on the island.
“Of course he is, Joshey. He’s going to build us a pyramid to live in, like in ancient Egypt. And you are going to have your own room. But, in exchange, you’re going to have to be more responsible when we get there. You know how your friend Eli is always volunteering to help out, to clean up? Well, you’re going to have to be more like Eli.”
The day before we moved to Camano, I wandered down to Eli’s house one last time to say good-bye. His house was empty and windswept. A few articles of clothing and some kitchen utensils littered the floor, but the place was abandoned. Their neighbor told me they had evacuated in a panic a few nights back, just ahead of a DEA raid. The doors were open, and I found a family of raccoons squatting in my friend’s room. Everything was wet and hopeless. Out back was a little warehouse where Richard had kept a flock of sticky green pot plants, striving to reach blinding grow-lights above. It was abandoned now, nothing but empty shelves and a layer of crackling glass on the floor. I began rummaging through a set of little drawers, looking for some clue that would explain why everything was falling apart. Instead I found dozens of tiny plastic bags. All empty, save one. This one held a pair of shriveled stems. I didn’t know why, but I knew they were shrooms. I couldn’t remember whether they were poisonous or psychedelic or both. But it didn’t matter. I chewed both of them. Bitter, soapy. But nothing happened.
I made it halfway up the trail toward home before the shrooms hit. Then I felt compelled to lie down in a mud puddle and further examine two white rocks glittering in the gravel. They were like Stonehenge, only more ancient. And here I was to be a part of this important place. I rearranged the sparkling white obelisks, and they were joined on all sides by a dozen more shiny white standing stones, piling themselves up into cairns and henges. Memorials for the dead, monuments for the living. I orchestrated the construction of a great primitive temple where all were free to pray to the Sun and Moon, the Stars and the Heavens. This was to be the last ceremony of the peoples and then we would all be drowned and gone. I rolled onto my back, and the oval green leaves above shimmered and flashed, tinkling with a thousand bells, capturing all that was beautiful, all that was fragile, before the nuclear winter enveloped us all. And I slept. And I woke, shivering, soaked through with muddy water and nauseated. I staggered up to the cabin and slept in my little loft one last time.
THIRTEEN
The Fall of Carthage
My blade flashed back and forth in the shadows, biting at the darkness with decreasing enthusiasm. “My machete arm’s sore,” I complained.
“Don’t think of it as work, Josh,” Claudia encouraged me. “Think of it as an adventure.”
“But my arm still hurts.”
“Think of it as founding a new community.”
Claudia and I spent the whole day hacking a passable trail into the untamed land on Camano Island. Leopoldo couldn’t join us because he was hitchhiking into Stanwood, on the mainland, to buy handsaws, nails, beer, and the other things he would need to build us a pyramid. At nightfall, we sat down in the wet moss, panting and sweaty. The machetes were smeared with green slime and dinged up. We’d cleared a path maybe twenty feet into the forest. A thousand more feet waited for us. Then we could begin felling trees to create a clearing on which we could construct a shelter. After a few days of this, my right arm was numb, and I was plagued with mosquito bites.
On my first trip into Stanwood my feet led me directly to the pay phone outside of Safeway to call Uncle Tony collect. It was my only way out. He agreed to pay for my Greyhound bus ticket down to San Francisco for a visit, but he wouldn’t agree to let me live with him. Claudia saw me off at the Greyhound station in Mount Vernon and, after I spent a couple of days sitting next to a narcoleptic Korean War veteran, the bus rolled into San Francisco.
Tony’s apartment above the bar was unchanged. The white crown molding I had gazed up at as a little kid, worrying about nuclear war, was still crumbling above me. The green chair in the corner hadn’t moved an inch, and Tony’s prayer book still lay open to the Gayatri Mantra. The apartment was an island in time, the only constancy and certainty left in my world.
Tony made chorizo for himself and quesadillas for me.
“Why can’t I live with you?” I asked again.
“Because Claudey sent you down for a visit, not to stay.”
“She won’t mind. And Leopoldo would be happy. He says I’m lazy and just in the way all the time.”
“Let’s call Claudey.”
“We don’t have a phone, remember? We don’t even have an address anymore.”
“Well, I have a month of vacation saved, so let’s enjoy the rest of our two weeks in the City and then we’ll go up to Expo ’86 in Vancouver like we planned, OK?”
“Or, we could just stay here and not go back to Washington.”
“Where would you stay, Mr. Josh?”
“Here, with you.”
“I have to work.”
“Big deal. I’d just wait for you to get home. I’m used to taking care of myself.”
“All night, every night while I’m mopping up the State building, you’d be here by yourself in the apartment?”
“Sure.”
“What about school?”
“What about it? I’m not even going to school now.”
“No, Josh. It can’t be that bad.”
“It is.”
The next day we went out to see Monty Python’s Life of Brian at the Red Vic, a repertory theater with couches and tofu burgers. The comedy distracted me from my impending return to the barbarian north.
All evening I did impressions of the farcical Judean zealots complaining about all the good things the Romans had done for them. “It’s funny on two levels,” explained Uncle Tony, “because of the irony of their discontent, but also because it was true. That’s really what the Romans would do. They’d come in first under a white flag. As simple merchants wanting to trade. Then they brought in roads, then settlers, then public works and temples, then armies for protection. The next thing you knew, you had to pay them taxes, bow down before their gods, and sacrifice all the freedoms that made your people special. That’s what they called the Roman Peace. It was peace as long as you did everything they told you to do.”
“The Romans were like Leopoldo,” I decided. “He came to us as a refugee, all innocent. Then he moved in. The next thing you know he makes Claudia drop out of school. She loses her Welfare and her job, and now we don’t even have a house.”
“I know,” said Tony.
“And, he threw out my painting of the train after Claudia said it captured the spirit of the railroad. He was jealous that she liked it.”
“Really?”
“Yes, and then he took my guitar. And he even renamed Benji.”
“Your dog?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he name her?”
“Chisquiarisquistisquis.”
“What? Chorizo?”
“Chisquiarisquistisquis.”
“That,” said Tony solemnly, “may be his greatest mistake.”
We both laughed. In the familiar apartment, above the bar on Sixteenth and Sanchez, the things I was complaining about seemed impossible and far away.
After a couple of weeks, my brief furlough in Tony’s city of refuge had come to an end. Tony was taking me back to the field of battle. But first we had a week planned at the World’s Fair in Vancouver, British Columbia.
At the Douglas Border Crossing, two uniformed Canada Customs agents boarded our idling Greyhound bus. The dark interior enveloped them in a pall of diesel fumes, cigarette smoke, and sour human breath. The agents grimaced and removed their reflective sunglasses, blinking in the unnatural darkness. Scanning from side to si
de, they made their way down the aisle, surveying the rows of would-be border crossers. It was the standard collection of American tourists coming north for the World’s Fair with a few seasonal berry pickers thrown into the mix. But near the back of the bus, the agents stopped to scrutinize something out of the ordinary.
They considered the big brown fellow and the little white boy a suspicious duo. The big fellow had long black hair and wore steel-toed black boots and a black bomber jacket. He didn’t have a passport or a driver’s license. He was trying to get over the border with some sort of California identity card that bore the name Antonio Rodriguez. But despite the Spanish name and the incongruous long black beard, he looked like an Indian to them. A Nez Perce or an Okanagan, maybe. The little white boy with the curly brown hair and blue eyes didn’t have any ID at all. The two agents looked at each other. This wasn’t going to happen. Not on their watch.
They pulled Uncle Tony and me off the bus like a couple of wanted fugitives. We were hustled through a vacant parking lot toward a cluster of buildings. By the time we were ushered into the lobby of the customs building we were completely enveloped in a sea of khakied figures. The current of the crowd veered me to the left, and suddenly Uncle Tony was no longer beside me.
“Hey!” I stopped. “Tony!?” I called out, pushing against the tide of bustling agents.
“Ja-ash!?” I heard Tony calling back to me from around the corner, a touch of concern in his voice. A hand pushed down against my shoulder and a strange meaty face topped with a crew cut filled my field of vision: “Sir, we need…”
I interrupted him: “Get out of my face.” I twisted out of his grasp and snaked my way back through the eddy of moving khaki figures. Out of the swirl of motion, Tony loomed ahead, fixed in place like an immovable pillar clad in black. His long black hair and black beard guarded his round brown face. I ran to his side. Tony bent to one knee and brought me in for a hug.
“What the hell’s going on?” I asked.
One of the agents from the bus leaned down to me: “Sir, please come with us.”
“No way.”
The agent joined our huddle on one knee. In a gentler, almost pleading tone: “Sir, we’d like to just ask ya a couple a questions. OK?” His singsong Canadian accent was detectable and silly enough to make him seem less menacing. “Just around here, OK?” he said, pointing down the hall. “Then, we’ll bring ya right back to your big friend here, okeydoke?”
Tony looked me in the eyes and nodded: “Mr. Josh, you will be fine. I will be right here waiting for you.”
“OK,” I agreed. The agent put his hand on my shoulder again. “Don’t touch me,” I said. He stepped ahead of me, and I followed his military gait down the hall to a bare room inhabited only by a small metal table and three black chairs. At the doorway we were joined by another agent. They sat me down on one side of the table and then seated themselves across from me. I felt like the suspect in a detective movie. Who do they think I am? I asked myself. Some perpetrator running cocaine and Chinese prostitutes over the border? I’m a ten-year-old kid, jackasses.
The meaty-faced one began asking me questions while his pudgy, pasty-faced partner appeared to be filling out a form of some kind.
“Sir, what’s your name?”
“Me?” No one had ever called me “sir” before.
“Yes.”
“Josh.”
“What’s your full name?”
“Joshua.”
“What’s your family name?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Ya don’t have a family name?”
“No.”
“You’re just called Joshua?”
“No, I have a last name.”
“Yes, sir, that’s what we’re looking for.”
“Reed. But that’s not a family name.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“I mean I’m the only one who has that name.”
“What’s your father’s name?”
“Claude Palmer, but he’s not legally my father.”
“Um, OK. Who’s legally your father?”
“No one.”
“Uh, OK, sir. What’s your mother’s name?”
“Claudia… Suárez, now.”
“Suárez?”
“Yeah. That’s her husband’s name.”
“OK, and sir, what was her name before that? Reed?”
“No, it was Rhys.”
“Rhys?”
“Yeah, but that was the name of her husband from before I was born. He was a Black Panther, but he kind of wasn’t black. He was half Carib Indian and half Jewish.”
“Wait, sir. So her maiden name was Reed?”
“No, she was Domas, but that was shortened from Domashevitsky.”
“Sir, where did Reed come from?”
“That was her pen name at this poetry workshop in the 1970s. It was after this Communist writer, John Reed, who wrote about the Russian Revolution and a line in this book called the Talmud that says it’s better to be like a reed than a tree.”
There was a long silence, and the two men stared at me, both blinking in confusion.
“Look, sir. We’re going round and round here. Do you know Antonio Rodriguez, your traveling companion—the big fellow with the long black hair and the like?”
“Yeah, that’s Tony.”
“So do ya know him, sir?”
“Yeah, that’s what I just said.”
“Well, ya didn’t say that, sir. Ya said, ‘That’s Tony,’ not that you knew him.”
“Yeah, I know him.”
“I see. Now we’re getting somewhere. And how do you know him, sir?”
“He’s my uncle.”
This was very surprising to the customs agents. “Really? So, is he your mother’s brother?”
“No.”
“Your father’s brother?”
“No.”
“Is he married to one of your aunties?”
“My aunties? No, he’s not married to anyone.”
“So how are you related to him then?”
“He’s my uncle.”
“Sir, you’ve just admitted he’s not your uncle.”
“I didn’t admit anything. I just said he’s my uncle.”
“Sir, look here, now. We know he’s not related to you. That’s clear enough. Not by blood. Not by marriage. So he’s not your uncle.”
Holy crap! I thought. One of my mother’s prophecies was finally coming true. I really was being harassed by the police. She’d always prepared me for the day they’d come for me. The FBI, the CIA, the System. They would detain and arrest and beat me for being different, for being a subversive. But it was all wrong. I was being interrogated by the Canadians! Canada was supposed to be the place you escaped to. The land beneath the North Star, where fugitive slaves and draft dodgers went to be free. But it was the Canadians who were treating me like a criminal for being different. And then I felt something new and strange. A guilty pride in my own country. My mother had raised me to hate America, but I was feeling what could only be described as patriotism.
I spoke now with the stars and stripes at my back. “He is my uncle. I’m from America, see? It’s a free country. In America you can have whoever the fuck you want as your uncle.”
“Sir, language!”
“I can talk however I want.”
“Sir, did Rodriguez tell you to say that?”
“What?”
“Did Rodriguez tell you to say he was your ‘uncle’? Did he threaten you? Or your family? Did he hurt you? Your mother doesn’t know where you are, does she?”
I finally got it. They weren’t after me. They were after Tony. They thought Uncle Tony was kidnapping me. It took me a while to process this because I couldn’t imagine a face, a person more familiar to me than Tony. He was such a fixture in my life that I’d always assumed we looked related somehow. And then panic overcame me. Tony was all I had left, and now they were trying to take him away from me.
; “Do you guys think I’m being kidnapped!? I’m not being kidnapped!”
“Well, sir, that’s your word, not ours.”
“Well I’m not being kidnapped. Can I go now?”
“No, sir.”
“You know what, you guys are idiots.”
“Sir!?”
“No, let me tell you, sir. This is really totally fucking ironic. Tony—that guy out there—was the one who was actually kidnapped as a kid. Tony. And now, he’s like the most responsible person I’ve got. He’s basically like my father. Now, it would be real nice, I’m sure, to just call my mother to straighten this out. But we can’t because we don’t have a phone because she and her husband, Leopoldo, are in the forest building a pyramid. Yeah, like ancient Egypt. And I don’t have to be stripping bark or hacking branches right now because this is supposed to be my one fun thing this summer. To go with Uncle Tony to Expo ’86 in Vancouver. Tony came all the way up from San Francisco to take me. He spent all his money on tickets and everything, and now you’re asking me retarded questions in some closet like I’m a criminal. I didn’t do anything wrong. Tony didn’t do anything wrong. Just let us go!” I crossed my arms and started to cry as I imagined leaping across the table and tearing into them.
They walked me back down the hall. I could sense them quivering in their khaki uniforms with indignation and frustration. Tony was sitting where I’d left him, reading a book. On the coffee table in front of him were piled high his volumes of Heidegger, Schopenhauer, and the Bhagavad Gita. It was his subtle way of telling them that they could detain him for another three months for all he cared. He’d have plenty to read. Amid glares and stiff “sirs,” I was formally released back to Tony’s custody. We walked out into the sunlight, and Tony looked down at me and smiled. “Now wasn’t that easy?” He always said that. Because it was never easy.
The Customs agents didn’t have the mettle to arrest us, but that didn’t mean they had to let us over the border. We were formally denied entry into the country, and ejected onto a traffic island in the netherworld between nation states. Tony’s nonrefundable Expo tickets were now totally worthless and his Greyhound bus tickets led to nowhere.
Free Spirit Page 23
