The Porcupine of Truth

by Bill Konigsberg

  “Why’d you let me sleep?” Aisha sits up and stretches her arms above her head.

  “I actually fell asleep,” I lie, and she gives me an admonishing look.

  “Well, we survived, so that’s good,” she says. “We need about a hundred and fifty bucks to get my car, or we have about sixteen hours to figure out how to avoid sleeping in the park again.”

  I shoot her a thumbs-up. Got it covered. Overnight, I came up with a plan. It may work, it may not, but we have at least a chance to make some of the money we need to get out of this mess.

  I share my idea with Aisha. At first, she balks. When she can’t come up with a better idea, she decides to give it a try.

  “Remember,” I say, as we take a bus to our destination. “The first rule is never deny my reality. And whatever you say, I won’t deny yours either.”

  She raises one eyebrow. “We’re in Reno. We’re on a bus. Hard to deny that reality.”

  We head for the Truckee River corridor — a shiny, recently renovated promenade overlooking the Truckee River. This is the best location for my plan, according to a site I found online. The sun is not fully up yet when we arrive, and the air is slightly chilly right off the river. To our right, a woman missing her right ear sells Native American jewelry off a red-and-blue blanket. To our left, a guy with a shaved head and huge cartoon sunglasses has set up an easel and starts hanging up caricatures he’s drawn in the past. We mark our space with the canvas bag, the Porcupine of Truth, and the satin pillow, and I find an aluminum tin lying behind a garbage can to use as a tip jar. I look over to show Aisha, but she’s fiddling with her phone. She must be looking for a response from her dad.

  “Nothing?” I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Yup.”

  I wish there was something I could do to make Aisha’s life as awesome as it should be. If I could, I would. I give her a moment, and then I ask, “You ready for this?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither,” I say.

  The temperature warms up, and a bunch of people come strolling down the street. I get myself ready. I wait for a couple of people to be near our area, and I start.

  “Okay, okay,” I shout. “We are the improv comedy duo Cars-Isha. Can anyone please call out two professions?”

  The two people who had been standing closest slip away.

  “Tough crowd,” I mumble. “Two professions,” I repeat, louder.

  People just walk by, ignoring me.

  “Anyone? This is not rocket science. Just need two professions.”

  “Shut up, fool,” someone yells, and when a few people laugh, my throat gets tight.

  I shrug. “Something about your mom,” I yell back, and Aisha laughs behind me.

  “Something about how she’s like a washing machine,” Aisha yells. “Except when I drop a load in a washing machine, it don’t follow me around for two weeks.”

  I look back at her in amazement. Someone in the crowd whistles in appreciation. Some people have stopped in front of our little area.

  “Something about how your mom is like a Putt-Putt course,” I say, and then I realize I have no punch line. So I play that up. “Um … something something driver?”

  More whistles, and Aisha grabs my hand and lifts it over our heads. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are Cars-Isha,” she calls. “Half of our made-up-on-the-spot insults are great. Half not so much.”

  I see that something’s happening. People are wandering over. I clap my hands together and jump out toward the front of our little area.

  “Okay, so as I said before I was called a fool by the gentleman whose mom is a something of a whore, I need two jobs, please.”

  “Prostitute,” says this caramel-skinned girl, college-aged, who has stopped to watch. Her accent sounds Latina. “Zombie killer.”

  “Blow job,” some idiot guy in a suit yells out.

  I riff back. “Now why is a blow job considered a job? A hand job — why is that considered work? Why is there no fuck job?” People are laughing now, and I feel the adrenaline pump into the backs of my knees.

  “I know that’s work you ain’t ever gonna get,” Aisha says.

  “Don’t I know it?” I say back. “Let’s just say I’m underemployed, ladies. Way underemployed.”

  The Latina girl is smiling at me in this flirtatious way, and I have to look away so as to avoid boner town, population one.

  “Okay, okay,” I say, feeling like a game show host. “I need a possible title of a book.”

  “Hunger Games,” the Latina girl’s friend says.

  “Oh-kay …” I say. “That’s like an actual book title. But I guess we can work with that. Can I get a genre? Like a movie genre?”

  “Documentary,” a guy straddling a bicycle yells out. We’re beginning to attract a crowd.

  I nod a few times, letting it sink in. For a moment I worry that Aisha won’t be able to do this. Then I realize I shouldn’t underestimate my friend. “All right,” I say. “Without further ado, I present to you a staged reading of the new movie, The Hunger Games: The Documentary. Performed by …” and I look at Aisha.

  “Aisha Stinson, zombie killer,” she says, her voice deep and foreboding.

  “Oh, come on,” I say, putting my hands on my hips and looking at her. “Isn’t it enough that I am completely undersexed in real life? Now I have to play a male hooker too?” Some of the audience laughs. I exaggeratedly roll my eyes. “Fine. Hi, my name is Carson, and I’m a male prostitute.”

  We dive in, like we’ve done this a million times, even though we’ve never done it even once. Aisha sets up something about hungry zombies whose car breaks down in Reno, and they are desperate for human brains, and they need to figure out how to pay for a good brain meal before they starve to death. I dramatize the role of a naive male prostitute who happens to work the corner near where the zombies’ car broke down, and Aisha explains how the prostitute teams up with a zombie killer, because some of the prostitute’s clients have in the past turned out to be zombies. The story tosses and turns and soon it’s like a good song we’re creating, and I’m barely aware of the audience except that they’re there. We start by dramatizing the two roles, and soon we’re just telling a story with more characters and slipping in and out of our roles. We both choose the same funny parts for repetition as if it’s a chorus, and somehow Aisha circles back to the car breakdown. In the end, Aisha the zombie killer hides under the car at a service station and culls the zombies, using me the prostitute as bait. She cuts off a zombie’s head while he’s busy getting ready to chow down on me.

  “Mmm … zombie brain,” Aisha says while chewing, turning her zombie killer into an actual zombie cannibal by using a deep, funny voice, and it’s as good a time as any.

  “And scene!” I yell from the ground where I’m lying. I leap up, and we turn and bow. There are about fifty people watching. Some of them applaud. A lot of them don’t. Many just walk away. A few of the applauders approach the tin can and throw in change. A few even give dollar bills. We thank everyone and soon everyone is done giving.

  We count our money. $22.74. We worked our asses off for $22.74. That’s not even close to enough to pay for the car repair.

  “Shit,” I say.

  Aisha has a better attitude. “Hey. We do that eight times today, we have ourselves a car and a little bit of money for food.”

  She’s right. Yeah. We can make this work.

  We go again, and we start to fine-tune our skills. Aisha finds certain characters she can do really well — a domineering, hypocritical man of God who keeps making up stuff in the Bible, for one — and I work on a falsetto I use for a baby character who believes everything that is said to him. The baby accepts all the made-up stuff, and then adds insane details to the man of God’s crazy claims, saying, “It’s in the Bible.”

  The money starts to roll in, and each show we do better than the last one. About the fourth time we do the scene, I re
member we have the Porcupine of Truth just sitting there. I grab her and we start this improv where Aisha goes up to heaven and I’m the gatekeeper — the Porcupine of Truth. I make the porcupine male and give him a game show host’s voice, and I ask Aisha embarrassing questions. Then we riff on the audience, who we pretend are former child stars who are now dead. I point at random people and call them Michael Jackson and River Phoenix and things like that. People just eat it up, and after that show, we change our name to The Porcupines of Truth.

  I keep a count of our cash, and by the time we’ve done our fifth show, we have enough money to get the Neon. But it’s only noon, and we can make more. And truly, we could use more money. So I ask Aisha if it’s okay if we keep going, and she’s game.

  We’re both on an adrenaline high when we finish up our fifteenth and final performance of the day around six p.m. We count up our money.

  Holy crap balls, Reno. We’ve made $467. I count it several times because I am so amazed. I take two hundred and put it in my pocket, and I give Aisha the rest, knowing she’ll have to pay for the car. She fans her face with the cash.

  We find out how to get to the auto repair shop by bus, and when we get there, our car is ready. As Aisha pays the man, I’m glowing. I feel like a new person. From the extra bounce in Aisha’s step, I can tell she feels the same.

  IT’S A THREE-AND-A-HALF-HOUR drive to San Francisco, so we spend the night in a trailer at the end of a goat path, thanks to Javy Sanchez and his girlfriend, Jenny Yang — twentysomethings who take us in through surfingsofas.com. They’re cool, but we’re exhausted, so we go to bed early.

  The next morning, we’re back in the car, and we know we’re officially in California when we see actual trees. A smattering of pines are a welcome sight after so much brown in Nevada, and soon the hills are illuminated, golden. I think, Golden State. Yes.

  There’s this palpable feeling of victory in the car. I think some of it is because we’re almost at our destination, and some of it is because we figured out how to solve a major problem and pay for car repairs on our own. It’s like I’ve just found out that I can take care of me, after seventeen years of wishing someone else would. And some of it is because, let’s face it: After barren Nevada, California looks so insanely beautiful.

  Aisha must be enjoying the beauty too, because she says, “There’s a line in The Color Purple by Alice Walker that says, ‘I think it pisses God off if you walk past the color purple in a field somewhere without noticing it.’ ”

  I snort. “Far be it for me to want to piss the Big Man in the Sky off.”

  Aisha shrugs, and we go back to listening to Haley Reinhart on the stereo.

  “You think it’s possible that there actually is a God?” she asks.

  I laugh. “I think agnostic dyslexics lie awake at night, wondering if there is a dog.”

  She laughs a little. Something about the way she asked the question makes me think about how far we’ve come since Montana. Because that isn’t even a possibility one of us would have considered four states ago. It takes me awhile to come up with a real answer rather than a snarky one.

  “I don’t know, but if there is, I don’t think it’s a man in the sky or anything,” I say finally. “That doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t make sense that he knows all. I mean, how could God or whatever know all the data about each one of us, all seven billion humans on the planet?”

  “True,” Aisha says. “But … I mean, I know I get pissed about religion and all. But it’s hard to imagine that everything comes down to chance. Like, if I didn’t meet you in the zoo that day — and how random was that — I wouldn’t be here.”

  “So God decreed it? That we meet at the zoo?”

  “I’m just saying,” she says. “Can you imagine your life if we didn’t meet?”

  I pull my leg hair, hard. “No,” I say. “I can’t.”

  We’re cruising through California toward the coast, possibly about to find my long-lost grandfather, who was barely on my radar two weeks ago. There’s no way I’m here if my mom didn’t take me to the zoo, if I didn’t say just the right thing to get Aisha’s attention. My mom had never, ever taken me to the zoo in New York. Why that day? I had never, ever managed to say an intelligent thing to a beautiful girl before. So what are the odds of all that?

  And if I’m not here? Where would I be if I was not here? I shiver. It’s unimaginable. Being here with Aisha is everything.

  “So? You think it’s possible? There actually is a God? Not like the judgmental one from the Bible. But — something?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I mean. I really, really don’t know.”

  “Maybe people can’t know,” Aisha says after a lengthy silence.

  I have to stop thinking about this, because it makes my brain hurt. “I guess I’d say it’s hard to know what’s true,” I say. “It’s complicated. But I still put my faith in the Porcupine of Truth.”

  Aisha accelerates around a truck that is in the right lane, its blinkers on. “I’m no longer feeling the porcupine,” she says.

  I say, “That sentence has never been said before, ever.”

  Sacramento whizzes by, and soon we’re surrounded by more cars than we’ve seen in the entirety of our road trip. We stop for a pee break in Richmond, and I call my dad. It takes everything I have not to tell him where I am, and how close I am to finding his dad. And then it gets harder, because without me even bringing the topic up, for the first time ever he starts talking about his father.

  “I hate the fucker so much, but I miss him too, you know?” he says.

  “Uh, yeah. I get that,” I reply, but Dad misses the irony. Shocker.

  “It’s like you’re missing a part of your body, and you get used to it until you don’t even notice not having it. I tell you what. I notice it now. It sucks something terrible,” he says.

  “I can’t even imagine what that would have been like,” I deadpan.

  “Nope. You can’t. That’s why I got all crazy on you, bud,” he says, still not getting me. “Sorry about that. That day you came up and told me about whatever that letter thing was…. I just … It’s like, I wanted to know but I didn’t want to know.”

  “Sure.”

  “He was my dad. You know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I just wish, like, one time, you know … Before I, you know. I wish I could see him again.”

  God, I hope so. “Yeah.”

  He is quiet for a while. “Would you tell me?”

  My heart pounds. “Tell you what?”

  His voice gets soft and weak. “The letter you showed me. Is there more? You said there was more.”

  I want to tell him everything. But I’m afraid I’ll say the wrong thing. I feel like a part of my body was missing too, and now I have it back and I want it to stay. Also, I don’t want to lead him on. If I give my dad hope and then we never find his dad, I’d never be able to forgive myself.

  “There were more letters, but they were unreadable. What do you want to know?”

  He is quiet again. “Why didn’t Mom tell me?” he asks, almost to himself.

  At first I think he means my mom, but then I realize he means his. “I have no idea.”

  “And they got divorced.”

  “Yup.”

  “Jesus. You think it’s possible that he’s still —”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I really don’t.”

  “Come home soon, okay? I can’t talk to your mom about this shit. I can talk to you.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  “Don’t wait too long. Really.”

  A chill passes through me. “Okay.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Love you, son.”

  “Love you, Dad.”

  The conversation makes it all the more clear to me: I have to find Grandpa in California. Before it’s too late. I have to. If I don’t, I don’t know what I’ll do.

  We get back on the road, we
scoot through Berkeley, and finally, majestic San Francisco appears before us.

  The finish line. We’ve made it to the finish line.

  The skyline shimmers ahead of us and to the right as we cross the Bay Bridge. A crisp cityscape of confident high-rises stares at us from the horizon, and off in the distance, the Golden Gate Bridge sparkles like a fancy red earring on the city’s left ear.

  As we enter the city, I struggle not to reveal the surprise I have for Aisha. Something I looked up on my phone. I tell her I’ll lead her where we’re going, and she seems dubious but finally relents and follows my directions. We park a block from Dolores Park, which is not that far from Turk’s place. Aisha says, “Where the hell are you taking me?” as we enter the park.

  “A treat for the lady,” I say.

  “Woman,” she says.

  The game won’t start until four and it’s about three when we arrive. We quickly come across a group of adults practicing Tai Chi in unison. We watch from the back, and I’m amazed at the beauty of the scene, the San Francisco skyline in the distance, a row of pastel-colored Victorians behind the park, and right in front of us a slow, choreographed dance of Tai Chi done by many different kinds of bodies, people of infinite different colors and shapes.

  “This, by the way, is not the treat. Not yet,” I say.

  Aisha and I step into the back of the line and start doing what everyone else is doing. The moves look like slow-motion karate, with lots of chops and poses.

  We lie down in the grass after Tai Chi. It’s a little chilly out, which surprises me. I figured since we were in California, it would be really warm, but when the wind picks up, I wish I was wearing more than a T-shirt.

  Soon, I see a volleyball net being set up in the distance, and I ask Aisha to follow me. We approach a bunch of kids, all different skin tones, stretching and shaking out their legs and arms and greeting one another with hugs.

  Aisha looks at me, raising an eyebrow. “Is this the treat?”

  I nod. I found an LGBTQ youth pickup volleyball game on meetup.com. I figured it would make Aisha smile as widely as I’ve ever seen. But as we stand there, I feel a little bit like a father on the first day of kindergarten with my very shy daughter.