Random

by Lesley Choyce

  Opening the lid of that box takes me an almost superhuman effort. I continue to sweat, even though it is not very warm here. My eyes still have a hard time focusing. But I am looking at old manila folders with Henry’s song lyrics. I recognize his handwriting. I lift them gently and set them down on the floor. Beneath them are old books. Poetry. Novels. A couple of old textbooks from university—psychology, education, history. And then this. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. By Joseph Campbell. I lift it ever so slowly out of the box and run my hand over the cover.

  I open the book and, on the first blank page, I see my father’s handwriting:

  For Celia, with all my love,

  Henry

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Another day on Planet Earth. And now I know that I am either the namesake of one of the founders of Campbell Soup or a man who believed all religions were fundamentally the same. I have to assume the latter. I don’t think I ever heard my mother actually come out and say I was named this way. But it must be true. I am holding that book right now. I am smelling the dusty smell of it. In its introduction, the author quotes someone with the unlikely name of Rig Vedic. “Ekam Sat Vipra Bahuda Vadanthi.” Fortunately, there is a translation: “Truth is one. The sages speak of it by many names.” Do you see what I’m up against here?

  What do you suppose my parents expected of me? Was I to be a seeker of truth? A unifier of religions? A hero with a thousand faces? It’s all a bit too much.

  Instead, I am a boy. A confused boy. In search of what?

  I smell the book again and I am taken back to a quiet evening. I am alone with my mother this time. And she is reading. Perhaps this was the book she was reading. Perhaps something else. I am trying to remember why my father is not there that night and I remember that, for a while, he had a part-time job in the evenings working at a 7-Eleven. They needed the extra money to help pay the mortgage.

  So there were quiet evenings like this. Seal and me. She read books. I read comic books. I had boxes of them. But they are all gone. I did not bring them with me. After the accident, I never read a comic book again. And I never went to one single movie based on any superhero. In fact, I’ve only gone to a very few movie theaters in my life. And on those times when I did, I felt nauseous and sometimes had to leave early.

  I started reading Joseph Campbell but then I set him aside. It was tough sledding. Suffice it to say, he seemed to have dedicated his life to finding patterns, similarities in world religions, themes. Meaning. Clearly, he was still highly thought of, long after his death, October 30, 1987, at the age of 83 in Honolulu. He must have liked warm weather and palm trees. From his photo on the back of the book—still a young man here—he looked remarkably average. Like somebody’s father who is manager of a doughnut shop. That’s what he looked like to me.

  During spring break, I worked at my father’s store the whole week, helping out with inventory. The kava kava was running low. Echinacea was as popular as ever. Customers ask a lot of questions of you while you are doing inventory. My father encouraged me to take long breaks and study some of the books he had about vitamins, herbs, and nutrition. I learned that kava kava is derived from an herbal drink—actually an alcoholic drink that Tahitians use to get very stoned and have visions. I wonder if J.C. ever partook of such rituals. He most certainly must have had a few of his own vision quests.

  I also read about milk thistle. An old English herbalist said it was, “the best remedy that grows against all melancholy diseases.” The silymarin in the thistle heals the liver and is chock full of antioxidants. And in most parts of the world, the thistle is considered a nasty, prickly weed—except in Scotland where it is the national flower. I read about quinine and coltsfoot and comfrey and coconut oil and coenzyme Q-10 and glucosamine and beta-carotene and garlic. God. You’d think you could save the world if you could only get everyone to eat enough garlic.

  It wasn’t until a slow Wednesday afternoon that the most obvious thing popped into my head. It all came from plants. Maybe some of it worked, maybe some of it didn’t. But it all came from plants. The pills and the capsules and the soft gels and all the liquids and tinctures—the stuff that worked in them all—were derived from some plant that grew out of the ground. And if you studied long and hard enough, rooting around into the chemical makeup of the plant and the chemical makeup of a human being, there was an explanation as to why Echinacea helped prevent you from getting a cold or the flu, why kava kava calmed you down, why glucosamine helped your aching joints, and why horny goat weed made you horny as a goat.

  From bilberry to cohosh to ginseng and green tea extract, from aloe vera to wild yam root and yohimbe—they all came from plants and they all had the potential to improve your health. It was in that quiet time on that Wednesday that the pieces of this one puzzle started to fit together, causing a most blasphemous idea to take root in my brain. It was as if there was some grand design. It was as if everything we needed—for sustenance and health, at least—was right here already, growing somewhere on the planet. Quite possibly, right beneath our feet in the form of what today we’d call a weed—chamomile, chickweed, dock, dandelion, angelica. Need I go on?

  I realized that on more than one occasion, Will had tried to get me interested in all this. His lectures had fallen on deaf ears. But it was my week off from school. Did you ever realize that on a week off from school, you actually end up learning much more than a week when you are in school? Is this not ironic?

  So for much of the week, I stocked shelves, I took many breaks, and I read. As long as I had a book or a magazine in my hands, my father did not say a word. Imagine how strange it must have seemed to him—me sitting quietly in the upholstered chair in the corner in the back where customers were allowed to read from his small library of health books, right there by the amino acids, the rose hip extracts, the barley grass supplements, and the pumpkin seed oil. Me. Reading.

  There was this one time when I heard the little bell ring as a customer entered the store. It had annoyed me early on in the week but now I barely noticed it. I was thinking that I should go back to my inventory work or maybe help my father with the cash register. I’d do that from time to time to give him a break. But sometimes I screwed up and had to go get him to set things right.

  When I stood up, I was shocked but more than a little thrilled to see Gloria. But she wasn’t alone. Dean was with her. That was totally weird.

  “I thought you had gone away to your grandmother’s again,” I said to Gloria. She’d been incommunicado again for days and I’d given up trying to get in touch.

  “I was starting to hate it. My mom does nothing but bad-mouth my father. So I came back. I’m staying with my dad. But it’s not much better.”

  “Dean, good to see you, too, dude.” I said. Truth was I’d been trying to avoid Dean. I hadn’t returned his phone calls, was getting a little weary of his identity dilemma.

  “Nice outfit,” was all he said. He was referring to the rather official-looking green smock I wore. Dad said I didn’t have to wear it if I didn’t want to but he wore one. It did add an air of professionalism, even to a sixteen-year-old, and the customers seemed to treat you with more respect—like a doctor, I suppose. Or a health food guru. Or a shaman.

  I was still a little confused. Dean and Gloria together. Tracking me down here at work. “What’s up?” I asked.

  “We were worried about you,” Dean said.

  I looked at Gloria. She nodded. My jaw dropped. I wanted to say, You were worried about me? out loud, but I stifled it.

  Gloria looked more like Gloria, I realized. The old Gloria. Maybe the meds had kicked in. Or maybe she’d stopped taking them. Their visit had been her idea. Dean was the sidekick. Dean would always be the sidekick. “I told Dean about Charlene,” she said.

  “The bitch,” Dean said.

  “But I’m okay. I’m over that.”

  “But you went back to Riverside and you didn’t really find anything you were looking for.”

&nbs
p; My dad saw us now as he was leading an elderly woman down an aisle toward the organic toothpastes. He seemed mildly surprised but just smiled and waved. Good old Will.

  “I don’t know what I was looking for. It was a stupid idea and I felt worse after going.”

  “I know what you were looking for,” Dean said.

  “Yeah, me too,” Gloria said.

  “Guess that makes two out of three of us,” I said, even more puzzled now.

  “Can you take off from work?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now,” Gloria said, her eyes intent.

  “Sure,” I said.

  We were rather quiet on the bus, the three of us. I asked Gloria about her parents but she said she was sick of thinking about them and didn’t want to talk about it. And I decided not to open up the identity thing with Dean on the bus. He seemed pretty relaxed about himself right then. He had teamed up with Gloria to do this thing—for me. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do it.

  And then we were in Riverside.

  “Where do you want to get off? Near the high school again?” Gloria asked.

  I shook my head. “There’d be no point. No one would be there. Besides, I don’t want to find Charlene again. Been there. Done that.”

  “Where then?”

  “There’s another park, about eight more blocks. My parents used to take me there.”

  Suddenly Gloria was not so certain this was a good idea. “Are you sure?”

  “No,” I said. “But we’re here. You guys brought me here. We need to do something.”

  So we got off at the park. It was mostly empty. The grass was green and there were puddles in the playground area. We sat down on the swings—my dad used to give me a push and send me high up into the air. I pushed off and felt that familiar motion—the freedom of flight, even if it was just a few feet up into the air. I hadn’t been on a swing since I’d left. I realized there were a lot of things I just stopped doing after that day long ago.

  I wasn’t sure this was a good idea. Maybe it was a very bad idea.

  I jumped off the swing and walked over to the slide. It had seemed so big before. Now it was nothing. I took one rung at a time and went to the top. I remembered being here at this pinnacle as a small boy, maybe just six. I remember being scared. I made the slow descent to the bottom. Not much to it really, but long ago it had seemed thrilling. Dean followed after me as Gloria watched.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked her, suddenly feeling both confused and angry. How could they possibly think they knew anything—anything at all—about what I had gone through and what I needed?

  I was about to say we should leave and get the hell out of this town when I spotted something else. That spinning platform, a kind of merry-go-round thing that you powered by running and jumping on it. That had always been my favorite. I’d hang on for dear life as my father would run beside it, making the world go blurry, and I’d feel the centrifugal force trying to make me fly off into space. Then my dad would jump on, too, and he’d hang onto to me so I wouldn’t fall. And my mom would be there—a blur, standing and smiling in the sun with each revolution, coming into and out of frame. And when you got off, the world was wobbling for a good solid minute until it settled itself down. And then we’d get our bearings and do it again and again.

  I walked over to it and grabbed the metal handhold. I began to walk slowly beside it and then began to run. Gloria and Dean hung back and watched. I hopped on and made several slow revolutions. Then I jumped off and began to run beside it, holding on, making it go faster and faster, and finally I jumped on again and watched as the world began to blur around me. For a brief second, I was back there.

  My father’s arms were holding me in place. I looked straight forward, waiting for my mother to come into frame, but I couldn’t find her. And then I let go, and the centrifugal spin threw me off so I landed hard on my butt and fell backwards onto the new grass. I lay there looking up at the blue spring sky and waited again for the world to stop spinning. “Gotta hold on, dude,” Dean said.

  “You all right?” Gloria asked.

  “Yeah.” Nothing really hurt. I just didn’t feel like getting up. Dean sat down near me and Gloria lay down right alongside me and took my face in her hands, turned my head, and put her face up very close to mine so I could smell her warm, sweet breath. “You’re not supposed to let go,” she said. “Sometimes you have to hold on.”

  I wanted to kiss her but I felt self-conscious with Dean there. I also thought it might break the magic of whatever was happening here—the three of us as friends. Each of us with our own set of mysteries, our own problems, our own uncertainties.

  I sat up. “Let’s walk,” I said. “I need to walk.”

  We left the park and I bought them both a coffee at a nearby Tim Hortons. We sat rather quietly and watched the older crowd in there—some sad, some happy. Some sitting alone with their thoughts, sipping from a cup. Something was forming in my head. I wondered why I’d been holding back. I wondered if Gloria and Dean were waiting for this.

  When we finished, I said, “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Where?” Dean asked.

  But Gloria understood. She just nodded.

  The house looked different from what I remembered. It was still a story and a half, a small house on a tidy piece of property. But the color of the house was blue now. It had been a kind of green when I was growing up. The shade of green of the spring grass in the park. Like everything else in town, it looked smaller as well.

  “I’m going to knock on the door and see if they’ll let me in,” I said.

  Dean looked shocked but Gloria understood. They hung back as I walked up my old driveway and along the short sidewalk leading to the front door. I kept all my emotions locked away deep within me right then. Otherwise, I could not have taken a single step. But I was here. I wanted to see what would happen.

  I knocked on the door but there was no answer. I tried four times. No one was home. There was no car in the driveway.

  But I felt like I had traveled a long, long journey to get here.

  I had never even driven past here since I moved away. I’d never come back to visit. I had just put it all behind me in the past. But now I felt different. I was aching to see the inside of the house. I opened the storm door and tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked.

  I turned the handle and opened the door.

  And then I walked in.

  The living room was to the left. I walked into it and it now seemed very familiar. I was in a safe, warm place. The furniture was different, as were the pictures on the wall, but the fireplace was still there. And I could almost see my mother reading in a pool of light. I could almost see the Stratocaster in its guitar stand by the corner. The shades were drawn so it was very dim inside. I did not turn on a light. I sat down on the carpet in the middle of the living room and took a deep breath. I closed my eyes and went back there.

  It was night—maybe a month before the accident. My father had not yet quit his nighttime job at the 7-Eleven. My mother had let me stay up late and wait for him to come home. The house was quiet. So very quiet. I was sitting on the floor with a pile of comic books, reading one of my favorites for maybe the eighth time. And then my father came home. Henry walked in, kissed Seal, and handed her some ice cream he brought home for her and for me. I remember the book Seal was reading fell to the floor. I was truly back there. And at that point in my life everything—everything— was fine.

  I don’t know how long I sat there like that. I eventually heard the storm door open and Dean and Gloria both walked in.

  “Joe, you gotta get out of here, man,” Dean said.

  I guess I didn’t move or say anything because, after a minute, both Dean and Gloria were beside me. “Let me stay here for just a couple more minutes,” I said.

  Dean and Gloria looked at each other but said nothing more. Then they sat down on the floor beside me.

  And that’s what the owner of the hou
se saw when he walked in his own front door—the three of us sitting in the middle of his living room floor. I opened my eyes when I heard the voice. “What the hell is this?” he shouted.

  He was about forty, a bit heavy. He had on clothes that suggested he worked on a construction site. In his arms was a bag of groceries.

  “Drugs, right?” he said. “I’m calling the police.”

  But as he walked toward the kitchen to use the phone, we quickly vacated the premises.

  When he noticed we were leaving, he ran out the front door after us but we had a good lead. And we had all three become like the wind. We ran until we could run no further. And if we hadn’t started to laugh so hard, I might not have ended up crying. But cry I did.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Dean e-mails me more from the Dean’s list of famous gay people. Alexander the Great—the tyrant. Francis Bacon—the philosopher. Lord Byron and Walt Whitman—poets. Herman Melville, who wrote Moby Dick. Eleanor Roosevelt, who was married to a U.S. president. Tchaikovsky—the Russian composer. Martina Navratilova—the tennis star. Even Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Julius Caesar.

  I don’t know what his sources for this are. But somebody has him convinced all the above were gay. I believe it’s possible. I just wonder what the evidence is. What is exactly recorded in history about Alexander the Great, for example, that lets us know he was homosexual? Did someone write it on the wall in an ancient outhouse? Did Alex announce it to his troops one day? I mean, if an author writes something autobiographical about his or her sexual persuasion, that makes sense. But history is a funny place. So I just don’t know.

  Now, before anyone starts calling me homophobic, I’m just trying to remind you I hold a healthy skepticism about everything. Everything.