“And then what?”
“Roam free.” I laughed.
“You’re a moron.”
“Maybe I’ll come visit you.”
“You should,” she said. And then, leaning in, “Hey Joe, I met someone. We might get married.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s very, very rich.”
“So what?”
“You should see our life.”
“How old is he?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“And I’m the moron?”
“Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”
“Why not?”
“Just don’t, okay?”
“Thirty-eight, Claire?”
“Who cares? Come visit. You’ll see.”
“Maybe I will,” I said. “And maybe I’ll put a bullet in his head.”
She smiled and looked so far away and so much older than I would ever be.
Driving back I wanted to tell her about the tar. I wanted to ask if it was in her, or even if she knew what it was, but I couldn’t muster the courage.
She hated being delivered to her expensive hotel in my truck, so I made sure to pull in slow, rev the engine, tap the horn.
It was the only power any of us ever had over my sister: our ability to humiliate her. The valets, irritated by the honking, waved me forward, but I stopped in the middle of the drive, made us a spectacle, got out and walked around to her side.
“You’re such an asshole,” she said. “My sweet bartending graduate.”
I wrapped my arms around her and said, “I’ll see you in London, you little snob.”
But I never saw Claire again.
8.
A few weeks later I loaded my truck, drove west along Sunset Boulevard to the ocean, and turned north. Then it was as if I’d never lived in that city at all.
Cut and run. Just like Claire. Just like my mother.
The cardboard boxes were fitted neatly into the bed of the truck. My father’s old Army duffel. A blue plastic tarp covering it all, strapped down with a crisscross of orange bungee cords.
I’m in the empty apartment, all evidence of my former life erased.
“The past is dead,” my mother once loved to say. “Sink or swim, kids. Fight or die.”
I drove up PCH toward the future. My mother again. “Toward the future, Claire. Toward the future, Joey.” Another way of keeping her children moving, never, not for an instant, glancing back.
“Joey” from a song her long-dead father once loved to sing. Not Joseph, not Joe. “Joey, Joey, Joe,” she said and sang to me for so many years. “You’ve been too long in one place.” Whispered as a lullaby and sung at great volume on so many car trips to the coast. Said it like some kind of prophecy.
“Joey, Joey, Joe. You’ve been too long in one place. And now it’s time to go.”
But it was my sister who got the message.
Me, I prefer to stay where I am.
9.
When we were young, we had the fortune of a secure and constant life.
My parents worked. Claire and I went to school. In the evenings we ate as a family around a rectangular table beneath a yellow light. If we made mistakes we were punished for them reasonably, with consideration. Those mistakes were insignificant. An occasional fight (me), a few incidents involving drugs (both of us), academic probation (me), vandalism (Claire), violations of curfew (Claire). None of it was irreversible. None of it destroyed us, or caused our parents any real worry. Both of them had grown up rough, as they often liked to remind us. Both had been poor, both just scraping by with parents of their own who had, in one way or another, abandoned them.
My father left for Vietnam three weeks after he finished high school. His mother had died in childbirth, and when he returned from war, his father, too was dead.
My mother left home at seventeen and never saw her parents again.
“Sink or swim,” she said whenever we got into trouble. “Sink or swim,” she said when she was angry or, much worse, disappointed. “Sink or swim, kid,” when our mistakes amused her.
And sometimes, “Fight or die, buddy,” when she was in a darker frame of mind.
This the guiding principle of her life.
My father probably worried more than my mother did, but as we grew up both of them looked on with cheerful bemusement and maintained as their general parenting strategy a kind of benevolent ambivalence. I think they could barely believe that Claire and I were theirs, that they’d provided us such safe and steady lives.
With all of our comforts, our regular meals and individual bedrooms, we were strange and privileged creatures who would never sink, but always swim.
10.
My father was a carpenter who worked out of our garage, and on-site for various contractors around Seattle. My mother, Anne-Marie March, whose name you may know, was a nurse at Harborview. Depending on the year, my father was more or less often in his workshop, but she was always at the hospital, where she’d worked since graduating nursing school. Despite so many other options, she stayed in the ER where she began, and where she felt most at home.
What else of those very early years? After school there was the distant sound of my father working the band saw. The workshop smell of fresh-cut wood and orange oil. There he is standing in the kitchen dressing a cut index finger, bleeding calmly into the white sink, asking us about our homework, our friends, our teachers, our troubles. Our father surprising us with wooden knights and faeries, dragons and princesses beneath our pillows.
And my mother coming backwards through the front door with a low stack of pizza boxes. The exhilaration and relief of our reunited family in the evenings after school.
Maybe I overstate all this happiness of youth. Claire would probably say so. But I’m not so sure.
Whatever the case, ours was never a sentimental family. However happy we were, our parents always took a brutal attitude toward time.
“What’s gone is gone. What’s done is done. What’s dead is dead,” my father said when we came home crying after some injury, slight or failure.
“And who,” my mother would add.
The two of them faced us in those moments like soldiers returned from a war neither of us could fathom.
“For better or for worse,” he said dealing pizza slices onto our plates.
“Mostly for the better,” my mother said.
I am nine years old. I have a black eye. My mother is walking me home through the neighborhood.
“Don’t be blue, Joey Boy. It is difficult, but you are strong. It is difficult, but you are strong and next time you’ll fight harder.”
There is golden sawdust caught in the hair of my father’s forearms. Clear safety goggles perched on his head.
“There is nothing you can’t do, Joe. Nothing in the world,” he says, pouring oil onto a rag.
“Fly? Be invisible? Become a lion?”
“Even those, kiddo. Even those.”
Then I’m wearing the goggles, too big for my face, his eyes through the scratched plastic lenses, he’s lifting me up and I’m flying, arms outspread, and we’re no longer in the workshop, but on the back lawn gliding to the roar of jets, the smell of his coffee breath.
I’m trying here to find some kind of order.
I want to do now what my father did in his later life. I want to see the world, our history, with peaceful clarity, find in it some pristine logic. Or no, maybe what he really did was give up on all that entirely. Maybe what he did best of all was surrender.
11.
The drive to Big Sur must have been exquisite, but what I see from here are only stock photographs. That famous bridge. The ocean crashing into craggy rocks. The highway winding along at terrifying heights, the tall pines, dramatic headlands. These are not memories of experience, but of magaz
ines.
Still, I’m certain I drove that road, and found my friends at a campground down by a good beach. I can no longer see their faces, but I was happy to find them there, happy to be drawn out of my mind.
We waded into the cold water, tore mussels from a looming black rock and collected them in our T-shirts. Arranged them on a damp plank of driftwood, and laid it on the fire. They are sputtering and snapping open as the wood smokes and blackens at the edges. We used their shells as knives to cut the flesh free, and as spoons to eat them. The most delicious food I’d ever tasted. Full of smoke and ocean. Someone had a guitar. We sang around a bonfire. We pulled cans of beer from an enormous white cooler full of ice. We sat with cold night air at our backs and firelight on our faces. I am standing at the ocean with a blond girl, our feet in the water and she is kissing me. I remember her warm mouth and the wind coming up and she’s holding me to her with such force. She’s touching my neck with her cool hand and then the two of us on the mattress in the back of my truck covered in a grey and white striped blanket. We’re on our sides looking out at the ocean, and she’s saying, “I love you, I love you,” and I remember thinking, yes, why not, said, “I love you, too,” and the way my saying “I love you, too” closed whatever space was left between us and she pushed back and I could feel her tight and so warm and the ocean was out there and everything would be fine and I was swimming not sinking, swimming not sinking. I was slow, kept my lips to her neck, whispered who knows what, pressed my hand between her legs. She was so wet then and embarrassed.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m sorry.”
And I said, “For what? Why are you sorry?”
She didn’t answer, but pushed me deeper and I kept whispering into her neck and watching the waves.
There were days and days of this. I remember her, but not her name, and her face is only a wash of color. But I know just how she felt in my arms at the fire, and the way she put my head in her lap and stroked my hair. How I wanted to tell her about the bird and the tar, but didn’t have the language, or the courage. The way the mussels tasted and the beer and someone singing who could really sing and not a single day of rain. Someone with a laugh so high it seemed invented though it wasn’t.
One of us running naked into the cold ocean.
A girl gone missing and that thrill and spike of fear, and her being found just before the police were called. Then a lightning storm and loud thunder and rain for days and whatever had been was over and we left our camp and dissolved into our lives in various vehicles going on to various places.
Is it possible that the blond girl came with me? That we continued up the coast together? I can see her sitting shotgun. Her bare feet on the dash, toenails painted blue. But that may have been only for a ride to buy more beer, or someone else entirely, from another time, another place. I can see her running across a different beach, a vast beach that looks more like Oregon than California.
But perhaps not. Perhaps that too is stock art stolen from some postcard. I did love her though, on that beach, by the fire, in the back of my truck, in the cool mornings. That didn’t feel anything at all like a lie.
All love being borrowed anyway.
Whatever the case, with her or without her, I drove on from Big Sur out of the storm.
Surely I’d return to all of those people again.
I must have left with that warm feeling of shared experience and friendships deepened, our years in Los Angeles together somehow confirmed and authenticated by our days in Big Sur. Not only in Los Angeles, but there too in the land of Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller we were friends.
And so we would be forever.
From my table here I watch the water on the glass, and the wipers snapping back and forth, cutting the rain to infields, and maybe that windshield was mine, and that rain was the rain coming down as I left, but maybe not.
12.
The next evening I drove into Cannon Beach in the rain. And because it was raining, or because I was tired of camping, or because it was getting dark, I paid for a room at a motel. It was too much money—thirty-five dollars a night or whatever it was—but worth it for the shower, the neatly wrapped soap, the cup sealed in plastic, and the fresh towels, and the clean sheets.
Then, naked beneath the spray of hot water: an abrupt and inexplicable detonation.
A switch thrown. I was overcome by pleasure, by a sense of overwhelming power. Rapid rise. Sudden swelling euphoria. Savage ecstasy. My heart huge. I was absent all fear. I was standing on the bed. I was dressing. The clean shirt like some kind of wonder fabric, making my skin hum, and I left that room pulsing with mysterious rapture, qualities I’d never known, and outside by the Coke machines I broke the shell and withdrew my body until there was no separation between it and myself, it and the night sky. I put my head down and flew like a fish. All my muscles fast twitch. My bones pure black oil. My blood made of gasoline. There was no cold. There was nothing I could not control. I stretched my arms and legs. Arched my liquid back and sailed. I was a traveler, a man. I had weight and fire. I found a bar and walked inside like some kind of Clint Eastwood cowboy, some fearless hero soldier on leave. I see all of it. From the hot water to the do-not-disturb sign to the wet street to the bar door. The way I began to swing upwards from happiness into something else again and then again, higher with my eyes all clear, and my body humming and my heart ever-expanding. Something like I’d never felt in my life. No drug had ever come close. Eyes huge, I saw every detail of every surface of every object. The place was full of people, but I glided past them. I was a skier, a dancer, a skater. I ordered a drink I’d never ordered in my life.
“Beam, rocks,” I said.
I don’t know where it came from, whether I was conjuring some actor, or some guy who used to come to Chez Jay, or what. I’d never much liked bourbon, but I was going to like it now. It was still coming on that thing whatever it was, whatever it is, and then I was the sudden scorching center of that place, the very marrow of it. I looked around and I waited and on it flowed into my blood. And when you feel it, when you’ve got it in you, and your eyes are like that, and your skin is humming and your heart is deadly, there is no memory, there is nothing but the present world, which pours in and pours in and all you want is more of it. You want everything and the room was full of women and it was as if they moved together in some unified rhythm, as if it were some code, some bodily language that only I could read. My heart firing, my eyes so sharp I could kill with my vision. I had perfect control of the room. I saw every inch of it rolling into me through my eyes and skin and I waited and waited and then I crossed the floor for that one woman who was something else, who was not part of the heaving mass. I wove through to her as if I were a person accustomed to crossing rooms that way, yet I know that was the first time in my life. I looked her in the eyes and said, “My name is Joey I find you extraordinary I’d like to buy you a drink and talk for a while if that would be all right,” and when she looked at me as if I were a lunatic and her friends gaped, I said, “I’m not crazy by the way, I’m not dangerous, it’s just that I find you so graceful and so I’d like for us to have a drink together would that be all right? Would that be okay?” She gave me her hand and laughed and curtsied and said, “Why, yes, sir, it would be just fine, just fine indeed,” mocking me, putting on a bad southern accent. Her friends teased her and disappeared as if I had dissolved them myself with a flick of a finger. We drank and danced and drank and danced and I saw everything. I saw her face as whole and I saw it disassemble. I saw her tongue move over her teeth, saw her green eyes, her throat, her lips, her small breasts, her narrow hips, her bare shoulders, her big feet. I saw her turn to water. She was everywhere. All of her falling through me, her lemon smell, her liquid skin, her soft wrists, her heat, and when I found the sweat at the back of her neck hidden beneath her hair, I trailed my tongue across it, she leaned back against me, and I said into her ear, idiot child tha
t I was, “I might die of you.” “What? What did you say?” She was turning and then looking at me as if she’d seen a thing she didn’t like, and right then something splintered. In my chest, behind my eyes, in the air.
“What did you say?” she asked again.
“I might die of you,” I said, but it was no longer joyous, no longer drunken, no longer light. It was something else. I had lost the elixir. It was running out of me. I could feel it subsiding. She looked and looked and I thought she would leave me there. My eyes were shrinking. I was losing my sight. I was falling. All the edges were softening, but still I tried to see. Before it was too late, before it was gone, I tried to see, and then after a moment of the two of us standing still, while all those other people warped and buckled, she took my hand in her strong fingers and she pulled us from the bar.
We were changed in the air.
Or I was.
We came to a stop out on the empty street pulling our coats on with the door closing to dampen the music. Though I tried with real concentration, I couldn’t get her face into focus.
I was running out of sentences.
“What did you say in there?”
I didn’t want to say it again. It felt as if it had been years ago. The whole night was fading. I couldn’t remember where I was. I’d forgotten the name of my motel.
She said, “What does that mean? What does that mean you could die of me?”
I shrugged again. I didn’t know what it meant. I was having trouble reconciling this woman in the street with the woman in the bar.
Christ, I’d been alive barely twenty-one years.
She shook her head. She seemed angry and I was afraid that she’d leave, which I did not want. I did not want to speak and I did not want her to leave.
“You’ve lost all your charm,” she said. “What happened to that? Where’d it go?”
“I don’t know,” I told her.
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