Machine

by Peter Adolphsen

  At dawn, after resting, he got back on the saddle and made his way down the mountains into Iran. The skies began to clear as he approached a town which he, with his superficial knowledge of the Persian seriffed Arabic alphabet, could decipher as ‘Ardabil’. Sheltered by the sign, he took a break, changed his clothes, ate, drank and loosened up his muscles before getting back onto his bike, and he did not get off it until he reached Teheran eighteen hours later. The exultation and the lack of sleep induced in him a sensation of being the perfect cycling machine: the pumping action of his lungs and thigh muscles, his eyes and brain reading the road, his thorax muscle contracting rhythmically as he clenched the handlebars.

  The embassy staff in Teheran, personified by a 32-year-old secretary with the remarkable name of James Stewart, was obliging almost to the point of embarrassment; the fact that Djamolidine was in possession of a domestic Soviet passport plus written evidence of participation in an elite sport, together with his stated wish to seek political asylum, meant that Section 19 of the Immigration Act applied, and Djamolidine was issued with F1-type personal papers. Hurrah.

  Outside the embassy gates Djamolidine had reeled off three homemade sentences in English: ‘I name Djamolidine Hasanov. I from Baku, Union of Soviets. I look to political asylum in States of America.’ Taking this as his starting point he began learning the English language with an almost insatiable enthusiasm. His future would unfold in this language; he must transform himself into an American as quickly as possible – a resolution in which James Stewart was only too pleased to assist. James found him a textbook with the ambiguous title This Way – American English for Foreigners and changed, at Djamolidine’s request, the name on the F1 papers to ‘Jimmy Nash’. From now on he was Jimmy, Jimmy Nash with an extended, yankee-drawling ‘a’, and would never let anyone call him anything else.

  A week later he was on the morning flight to Washington. He registered no special feeling when stepping on to American soil for the first time, probably because he had in effect already arrived on US territory when they let him through the gates of the embassy in Teheran.

  Upon his arrival he was housed in an ‘economy’ motel situated by one of Washington’s southern approach roads, where he spent a month watching television, teaching himself English from his textbook, and eavesdropping on people’s conversations in the motel restaurant, as well as going for long walks in the anti-pedestrian shambles of the city’s arterial roads. Eventually, the winter weather and a feeling of wanderlust prompted him to call James Stewart, who was delighted to ‘pull a few strings’ and bring about the following arrangement: Jimmy got a second-hand car – a 1964 Pontiac Strato Chief – $500 and a job contract which stipulated that two months later, on the 1st of March 1971, he would start work as a tapper at an oil well in Utah. From that date onwards he would be regarded as having been settled in America. He was free to pick his own route to Utah and, having thought about it and having been persuaded by the glittering leaflets from the US Department of Tourism, he chose to drive to Los Angeles via New Orleans, up to San Francisco and back into the country to Utah.

  Fourteen days later he checked into a motel outside Charlotte, North Carolina. He stuck his key into a ball-shaped door handle and opened up the door. A wave of stale air poured out, so he crossed the small room to open a window. A piece of chocolate on the pillow appeared in his peripheral field of vision and caused a smile twinned with a tinge of tristesse to flicker across his face.

  ‘I love America,’ he whispered to himself, as he pulled out a wad of notes from his pocket and sat down on the bed. He had $200 stitched into his jacket and another $200 hidden underneath the front seat of his car and $27 in total in his hand. The chocolate on his pillow was a Hershey Bar.

  Perhaps the two most striking aspects about Americans were, first, their relationship with money and branded products, and how brands were expressed pictorially, which was what advertising ultimately was. Billboards were the most prominent features of the urban environment or along the wide Interstate Highways, like this one, number 85, that he had been following for 241 miles. This forest of billboards seemed never-ending to him. The Soviet Union, too, had her propaganda signs along the lines of: ‘Socialist Nations of the World March Together Towards a Marxist-Leninist Victory!’, but the American slogans had rather more catchy appeal. Jimmy had amused himself by pairing off the billboards, for instance when Betty Crocker Cookies were followed by Monsieur Jorgen Diet Pills, or when Carrier Bonds Home Loans preceded U-Haul Moving Trucks.

  Next to the billboards, poverty was the second most striking aspect. He had spotted early on that the presence of homeless and severely impoverished people was greatest in the city centres. However, the vast majority of the country’s population lived in infinitely replicating suburban squares known as ‘the grid’, where the areas ranged from opulent to shabby, but each plot was sizeable compared to accommodation in Azerbaijan and invariably there was a car in the drive.

  The number of overweight people was conspicuous too. If you followed the billboards’ advice a little too uncritically, Jimmy thought, you would end up weighing more than two hundred pounds. He was consciously making an effort to switch to American measuring units: even in his mind he thought in ounces, gallons, inches, yards, miles etc. However, it was with considerable difficulty that he let go of the somewhat more logical systems of the old world and he never managed it completely. In unguarded moments and in dreams he still used metre and kilo.

  The following day he picked up a hitchhiker: a hippie guy in his twenties, a fast-talking type as a result of which Jimmy only caught fragments of what he was saying; however, he eventually managed to piece the man’s story together. His name was Butch Pozzi, he came from Rhode Island where he had worked for a while in a chocolate factory after finishing high school before being drafted to Vietnam, where he was lucky enough to do duty as a driver in the supply troops. Since then he had hung out mostly, but had recently spent six months in Europe, some of it in London, but mainly Amsterdam. His time abroad had clearly influenced his perception of himself, in particular his meeting with a certain Bart Hughes. The word ‘trepanation’ cropped up several times in connection with this Hughes character and Jimmy eventually had to interrupt Butch’s flow of words to ask him what it meant.

  ‘Drilling a hole in your head, man,’ Butch replied, miming holding a screw auger to his forehead. The reason for performing such a bizarre procedure was apparently to create subpressure inside the skull and thus increase the flow of blood to the brain, which would result in a permanent ‘high’, similar to the sensation you experience after a headstand. It was all in the book which Butch pulled out of his rucksack, written by Bart Hughes himself in 1962: Homo Sapiens Correctus (the mechanism of brainbloodvolume). The hippie leafed through the book for some time, while he expanded on why gravity is our enemy. Back in ancient times, when our ancestors got up to walk on two legs, we began to experience a shortage of blood to our brains. Consequently we only use ten per cent of our brain capacity because the brain does not receive enough blood – that is, nourishment. Butch did headstands every morning and was considering opting for trepanation himself, but it was just totally impossible to find the right surgeon and he didn’t dare do it himself, plus it was expensive and hard to track down the right equipment. Some day maybe.

  During his monologue Butch had pulled out a small bag of dried plant material and asked for permission to roll a joint, which he now lit and passed on to Jimmy.

  ‘Great zootie, eh?’ Butch asked and Jimmy, his lungs filling with smoke, nodded without understanding the actual word which, in any case, undoubtedly referred to the joint. Drug-user slang had to be one of the most changeable linguistic phenomena, he thought. Zootie.

  Butch was only going as far as Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he knew some acid heads on a houseboat. Jimmy continued onwards on his own. He listened to jazz in New Orleans, gambled in a Las Vegas casino, strolled down the Los Angeles boulevards and smoked pot in a
San Francisco park. And so on until he arrived at Jensen, Utah, on the 28th of February 1971.

  Utah is characterised by two things: a range of crude oil and gas industries with their associated boom–bust cycles and the continuing presence of Mormons since proselytes of this apocalyptic variant of Protestantism founded the state capital, Salt Lake City, in 1847. Today the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as they are known, has approximately ten million members and acts in every respect as a multinational corporation. The church was founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith Jr., the 25-year-old son of a poor man from Palmyra, New York. Shortly afterwards he published The Book of Mormon, a dense work based on a fable, which enjoyed widespread popular appeal in nineteenth-century America and which claimed that the continent was originally populated by immigrant Jews. At the beginning of the book a ‘Testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith’ is given, wherein he narrates how these holy writings, engraved on a series of gold tablets, were given to him by a luminous angel who entrusted him with the translation of the ‘Reformed Egyptian’ language of the text into English. For this task the angel gave him a pair of silver spectacles with two jewels for lenses. The texts, which in style and appearance are reminiscent of biblical ones, tell the story of two Jewish tribes, the Jaredites and the Nefites, their exodus from Palestine to America, the evolution of their civilisation etc., and culminate with Jesus, no less, who, after his resurrection, appears to the Nefites to found God’s Kingdom on earth, before ascending to Heaven for good. Once the translation had been completed, the angel came back for the gold tablets and the spectacles, as a result of which Smith, in the absence of any physical evidence, found himself forced to add statements from eleven individuals in total, all of whom were his family or close friends, who in the name of God and Jesus confirmed that they had personally seen the gold tablets with the cryptic characters. A number of contemporary sources for The Book of Mormon are easily identified: the King James Bible, whose vocabulary can be found everywhere; Ethan Smith’s 1825 novel View of the Hebrews, with the subtitle: Designed to prove among other things that the Aborigines of America are descended from the Ten Tribes of Israel; Josiah Priest’s The Wonder of Nature and Providence (also 1825) and an unpublished script of a novel from 1809 by Solomon Spaulding, which we know Joseph Smith had access to.

  The second feature of Utah is the aforementioned underground content of valuable metals, hydrocarbons etc., and people’s enthusiasm for digging them up. In the beginning Brigham Young, who succeeded Joseph Smith as prophet and head of the Mormon church with its associated access to continuous revelations, forbade his followers to search for riches in the earth and the rivers because a gold rush would attract non-Mormons or gentiles and all the sinful behaviour they would bring with them – and anyway, it was their holy duty to cultivate the desert. However, there was no stopping progress, nor could the contents of the mountains be spirited away, and the Mormons – who have always displayed a sound, capitalist pragmatism – adapted, and controlled at the turn of the century the majority of the Utah mining activities, which included the extraction of gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc and coal. There was even a rush for dinosaur bones in 1909. Later, uranium and military industries would prove to be important sources of income in addition to oil.

  Needless to say, the oil was not discovered for a very long time, even though scattered signs, such as seepage from the rocks by the salt lake and along the San Juan River and the Green River, gave promise of future findings. Apart from minor isolated wells – the result of countless test drills – oil extraction in Utah did not reach a commercial scale until the 18th of September 1948 when the local Equity Oil Company in Ashley Valley in the Uinta Basin hit a stratum that yielded around three hundred barrels a day. The following years many of the big players in the industry – Standard Oil, Continental, Gulf, Carter, Exxon, Union Oil and others – opened the oil complexes Greater Altamont/Bluebell and Greater Red Wash. The job contract in the glove compartment of Jimmy’s Pontiac was between him and a certain Carl Hartfield, managing director at the Walker Hollow oil field in the northern end of the Red Wash area.

  The oil deposits in this area, the Green River (Eocene) Formation as it is known, are found in disc-shaped pockets in places where the folds are gentle and the faults almost non-existent. The slate layers are thoroughly compressed. Together these conditions indicate limited migration from source layer to reservoir layer. The product of the metamorphosis of a tiny horse’s heart had lain almost completely undisturbed for fifty-five million years.

  Jimmy quickly settled into the routine at Walker Hollow: work from 8 a.m. till 6 p.m. every day for three weeks followed by one week’s holiday, which he mainly spent binge drinking in Jensen, Roosevelt, Duchesne or Provo. The small towns and their bars all looked the same. The clientele always consisted of the same four clearly defined groups: oil workers like himself, soldiers and other staff from Dugway Proving Ground, Native American Indians from the Ouray Reservation and locals who had dropped out but never managed to leave the area. The still faithful Mormons were rarely seen.

  Workday evenings he spent on his own in his cabin-like room where he worked his way through This Way 2 and its accompanying exercise booklet. In addition he also read comics about superheroes and detective stories in instalments, as well as working his way through popular novelists such as Harold Robbins, Grace Metalious and Leon Uris. The reading material was supplied by Exxon Oil Library Service, whose somewhat peculiar content made up his literary horizon. His evening reading also included two porn magazines whose overexposed photos of moist and shiny genitalia in full action aroused in him lust mixed with a tantalising undercurrent of revulsion, though it was a way of passing the time.

  Working on the pump was also an effective way to kill time. He was just 24-years-old, and the days were only too numerous. The Uinta Mountains in the horizon reminded him vaguely of the Caucasus of his youth. Several times a day he would contemplate their eroded profile.

  In time he began spending his weeks off with a Ute Indian by the name of Sam Talltree. They would drive aimlessly around the mountain roads in the still-working but spluttering Pontiac, find a nice spot and drink beer, smoke pot and listen to the radio with the car door open. Sam made his living growing hemp, but nobody, including Jimmy, ever got to see his fields.

  ‘Even the word, American, is a sign of US chauvinism,’ Sam burst out one day in the middle of a Kenny Rogers song. ‘I mean, Americans are people born anywhere from Canada to Argentina, but oh no, in their, and therefore our, understanding of the word it means a person from the United States of America. What kind of bullshit is that? Am I American? Are you?’

  ‘No,’ Jimmy replied, choosing to ignore the rhetorical nature of the questions, ‘officially I’m a citizen of the Soviet Union, which is also a misnomer. My family is Kumyk, a small offshoot on the Turkish language tree, but I prefer using geography rather than language to determine origin. I’m from Baku and that makes me a Bakunian.’

  ‘Yes, or merely an Asian the same way I’m an American,’ Sam stated.

  ‘Yep, Asian, or Caucasian or Azerbaijani. You’re a thousand-generation American, a Utah from the reservation more precisely,’ Jimmy went on, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the dry plains of the Indians.

  ‘My people were deported here one hundred years ago, but fuck that; I’m still not a real American. I’m a Native American Indian.’

  After a short period of silence Jimmy responded to Sam’s musings with a Hollywood style war cry, then ventured, ‘You rolling another one?’

  One day he literally tripped over an edition of the collected poems of Emily Dickinson. A neighbour in the oil workers’ residential block had used the small, fat, hardcover book as a doorstopper; Jimmy had skidded on it, and his fall had loosened its cover. Still wincing with pain, he found a scrap of duct tape to repair the book because, in spite of the circumstances, this was too cruel a fate, even for poetry, which he had always considered to be either the anaemic
outpourings of navel-gazing weaklings, or vacuous, excessive praise of nature or people in power, but when he glanced at the raw stanzas of this Amherst spinster something strange happened. That same evening he read all 1,775 poems and repeated this the following week. During his second reading he viewed the poems through the lens of death, and, as a consequence, often had to swallow twice, for instance at poem no. 80:

  Our lives are Swiss

  So still – so Cool –

  Till some odd afternoon

  The Alps neglect their Curtains

  And we look farther on!

  Italy stands the other side!

  While like a guard between –

  The solemn Alps –

  The siren Alps

  Forever intervene!

  I want to be able to write like that, Jimmy thought and grabbed a pen, only to suffer an instant attack of writer’s block. I need to read more, he decided, and ordered most of what the library service offered by way of ‘poetry’. On going through the two small piles he realised that most of it was hogwash. However, a few writers caught his attention, for example Brother Antonius, Gregory Corso and Diane Di Prima, but he was especially moved by the poetry of the Far East as it presented itself to him in two volumes by Kenneth Rexroth: One hundred poems from the Chinese (1959) and One hundred poems from the Japanese (1964).

  Jimmy’s interest was also kindled by a book with the simple title Poems, composed by one Seymour Glass. The photo on the inside of the jacket showed a man with a large nose, meaty ears and kind eyes. The only information below the photo was the dates 1917–1948.

  The poems, numbered 1 to 184, were all a type of double haiku – that is, six lines of verse with thirty-four syllables in total, often, but not always, divided into two stanzas of three lines with the following number of syllables 5–7–5/5–7–5. Glass’s slender stanzas were immensely elegant in a very Japanese-Chinese way, but yet radically twentieth-century American.