Randy’s not tall, 5’6” or so. His left shoulder was badly hurt in an incident and is hunched forward and sits lower than his right shoulder causing him to lead with his left when he walks, like a boxer, the good shoulder back and cocked like he’s about to throw a haymaker. One side of his face is swollen and pocked and port-wine purple. A birth defect, sometimes he covers the stain with makeup; in conversation, he talks with one eye, turning his face away to hide the color. This spring, he had brain surgery for cancer and wears a net bandage over his head, tufts of his white hair poking through the gauze.
Randy owns and manages The Mineral Springs Motel, a rundown twenty-three-room motel in Webster Springs, West Virginia, population seven hundred. He bought the motel on a contract-for-deed in 1978, he was 24 years old. He was elected mayor of Webster Springs then to the West Virginia House of Delegates then to the State Senate. He was defeated by a Republican in 2011. He was the first openly gay elected official in West Virginia.
He’s divorced and has a twenty-seven-year-old son, Clark; blond and multi-colored hair, millennial wardrobe, fair skin. Clark was bullied in high school because of his dad’s figurement and identity. He works at the motel and lives in Randy’s house on the other side of town. Randy lives at the motel. Their love and resentments are obvious in their tones and silences.
At the motel, Randy lives in a two-story apartment. The upper story had been a bar, the dance floor is now his bedroom. The bar is his kitchen. Randy closed the bar after a few years because of the drinking and the fighting; his shoulder he’d crushed chasing a customer down the stairs, he and the customer both drunk. The bar and bar sink are still there and on the wall above the sink, rows of glass shelves and part-empty liquor bottles fuzzy with dust.
In the corner of his dance-floor bedroom, there’s a flat screen tv mounted to the wall; a recliner and a stool face the tv. The floor around the chairs is covered with paint tubes and brushes and stretched and rolled canvases and paint pots and an easel and pebbles and big pebbles and works in progress and all manner of art detritus with only small spaces in front of the chairs for his feet. In the room, not just the floor, every flat surface is covered with painted and partially painted pebbles, unhung paintings, paintings in progress, junk mail, important mail, IRS mail, screwdrivers, hammers, pliers, empty pop cans, pizza boxes and all the rest. His paintings, framed and unframed, hang on the walls. On both pebbles and canvas, his art is good enough that selling it helped him through the pandemic. He gave me a painted rock although what I really wanted was one of his canvases. I hinted but he didn’t offer.
The stools are still under the bar. I’d bought hamburger, tomatoes, buns and beer; we grilled the burgers outside and he heated up cheese dip in the old bar oven and we sat at the bar and pushed pebbles and mail aside and ate burgers and chips and dip and drank beer and smoked weed and talked until past two in the morning.
Randy does the landscaping. The motel sits on two acres of tall, shady sycamores, close cut grass, and island gardens filled with lilies and hardy lilies and phlox and small evergreens dammed out of the grass by rings of pebbles. In a rectangular garden spaded into the lawn, he grows sunflowers; last year he came within five inches of having the tallest sunflower in West Virginia, twenty-three feet and change. A pebbly trout stream, a branch of the Elk River, runs along one side of the property. He’s placed metal chairs and benches along the bank; at dusk, as the shadowy dark crawls over the Appalachian Mountains and the soft, cool air settles on the back of the neck and bare arms, the sensuousness, the perfection of the moment is overwhelming.
For decades, Randy has allowed indigent people passing through Webster Springs to spend nights in his motel for free. James and George are HIV positive; James was diagnosed in 1991, George was diagnosed in 2001. James has a Parkinson’s-like tremor in his jaw and hands from the HIV drugs and has blackouts, dropped conversations and a straight-ahead stare that lasts many seconds until he blinks and shakes his head and says, “Sorry, sorry.” George has osteoporosis and arthritis from his treatments, the pain is constant. His doctor tells him that one day the bones in his legs will collapse from his body weight. He doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds and walks with a cane.
James and George were born in 1964. James went to West Virginia Tech where he joined a fraternity and had a first boyfriend and dropped out of school. He worked in retail, as a model (he went to modeling school), and as a writer and editor for the “leather press” (who knew?). George worked as a florist. His dad was killed in a coal mine. He and James have been together for 16 years. They live on disability. George told me that they used to drink a liter of vodka a day, they’ve switched to wine because it’s healthier, they have their first glass for breakfast. George smokes cigarettes and James, who dislikes the smell, walks across the parking lot for an ashtray and lays it in George’s hand with a gentleness and intimacy that catches the attention.
For several years, they’ve been living in Webster Springs with James’ sister, Loretta. The history’s messy; James had a fling with Loretta’s now-deceased husband, it happened forty years ago when Loretta was first married but the betrayal’s still raw, that’s what James said. She’d thrown them out for a reason they don’t describe, they’d been staying at the Mineral Springs Motel for a few days when I got there. Randy had been negotiating a reconciliation; it sounded like he and Loretta had arrived at an agreement and that James and George were going home. A relief for them, they have three older cats and miss them terribly. And they’d been wearing the same clothes for a week.
James and George don’t own a car. The morning I left, they were sitting outside their room waiting for Loretta to pick them up. As I was hauling my gear downstairs and packing the bike, James poured me a glass of wine, a chardonnay. It was a water glass from their room and he filled it to the brim.
We’d walked barefoot along the tracks, balancing on the sun-scorched rails and cooling our feet on the sharp stone ballast every few steps until we were above the Eleventh Street beach and then sat side-by-side on the sandstone cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, shoulders touching, arms wrapped around our bare shins, and watched surfers carve the blown-out late-afternoon sets and talked about her new Tom Jones 45, I Can’t Stop Loving You, and the Archies and Sugar Sugar and skating under the limbo stick at the Tri-City rink in Solana Beach and her mother’s morning Old Fashioned in a tall glass with maraschino cherries and a Lucky Strike and how she hated school and Wednesday night mass. We didn’t talk about the Kadett or where she was going.
We were quiet for some minutes. She turned to me then, her sea-deep blue eyes locked into mine, the bridge of her nose swollen and purple, wavy blond tresses on her tan bare shoulders, a pink pimple on her chin and she smiled and her teeth were white and perfect and she leaned into me and our lips touched. There is only one first kiss; the warm, chamois-soft press, the smells of young woman sweat and Herbal Essence shampoo, of seaweed and saltwater and warm sandstone, of bourbon and cigarettes, scents that even still bring back that moment.
“You’re a better kisser than David,” she said.
* * * *
Except Spanks, everybody called David Lip. Indeed, Lip’s lips were what you first noticed about him; plump, moist, the color of raw meat and highlighted by Latin eyes and a coppertone complexion. They stuck out from his face and lay one on top of the other in a way that looked pouty, rich, and magazine pretty. His mouth molded itself to his attitude of the moment so that his mood was always on his face. It was the deep corners, the feminine curves to his upper labium and the soft crease to the lower that gave him away; the corners twitching independently of each other, the parting and pressing of the fleshy pretties, the silvery braces, the enthusiasm of his tongue that together created a billboard to his mind. But we didn’t call him Lip because of that, we called him Lip because he never shut up.
We met in third grade and had been best friends ever since. He was adopted and built model airplanes and was a loud spoken and argumentative expert on most things. On his back patio just outside the lanai, there was a rock-lined pond with a three-foot bronze statue of a naked boy standing on an island in the middle. The statue was connected to a pump so that the arcing stream from his verdigris penis aerated the water for the fish. After school we’d ride our bikes to his house and dive bomb the fish with one of his model airplanes, squirting the fuselage and star-spangled wings with lighter fluid, lighting it with wood matches and buzzing the fish until molten globs of black plastic dropped and sizzled into the water and we burned our fingers and the low-flying aircraft crashed into the sea. Then we’d go inside and eat Pop-tarts and watch Hogan’s Heroes while the koi examined the wreckage. During the war years, no fish were harmed.
Lip and I were the same height, same skinny, young-boy build, same uncombable surf dreads, his wavy and brunette, mine blond and straight. He had braces, my two front teeth were jagged and broken and braces don’t fix that. Most nights during the summer, we slept at each other’s houses; he had his own room with a king-size waterbed and a new Motorola color TV in a wood cabinet and a bookshelf above his bed filled with car and airplane models, Robert Heinlein sci-fi novels and Cycle World magazines. In the stacks of motorcycle rags, he stashed old copies of Playboy he’d dug out of his father’s trash. I shared a room with my brother and had a rust-orange corduroy sofa bed that used to be in the living room and a 12” black and white Westinghouse TV with rabbit ears wrapped in tinfoil. I didn’t have money for magazine subscriptions. Mostly we slept at his house.
When I was ten, my parents bought me a surfboard for Christmas; a used 7’2” Hansen, too long to be cool but cheap. Lip got a board that year, too, a new 5’6” white Hobie with redwood stringers, hard rails, and three skegs. While it was still dark, we’d grab our sticks out of his garage, balance them on our heads and walk barefoot to the Eleventh Street beach wearing nothing but our suits, Lip in Hawaiian board shorts with big flowers, me in cutoff jeans. We’d trot down Van Dyke, that was the street Lip lived on, dart across Highway 101, dodging truck traffic even at that hour, walk down the Eleventh Street hill, hop across the tracks, scramble down the sandstone cliffs, and paddle out, the cool morning air against our upper bodies and the water against our legs as we straddled our boards exactly the same temperature; the orange glow of the sun rising over the cliffs behind us turning the black water blue and warming our backs as we looked out to sea for the next set.
Del Mar doesn’t have big surf; a four-foot day is a good day. But a lot of summer mornings, the water’s glassy and the waves are well-formed and tubed. In 1967, the Eleventh Street beach was mostly deserted in the early morning; there was better surf up the coast for people who could drive. On any morning there was never more than half-a-dozen guys waiting for waves at the Eleventh Street beach, a lot of mornings it was just Lip and me.
The bigger waves come in sets, rising out of the ocean until they tower over you and block the horizon and you spin your board to face the beach and lie on your chest and paddle hard until the water lifts the board from behind and takes the power from your arms and suddenly you’re looking straight down, a four foot wave has an eight foot face, and the board tips forward and accelerates down the nearly vertical water and you grab the rails and lunge to your feet and if you didn’t fall off or pearl (dig the nose of the board into the water and get launched), you race down the face, dig a rail into the water for the bottom turn, left or right depending on the break, then work the pocket just ahead of the barrel, legs and torso crouched for power, arms waving and punching for balance, feet working the waxed fiberglass to stay in the glassy water as it curls and crests and the break is at your shoulder as the wave crashes behind and the wind from the speed and the spray press cool against your body, and the joy is existential and the world that’s not blue and white foam doesn’t exist, even when your ten. And then the wave closes out or you kick out or you fall off. And you paddle out and do it again.
Lip and I would surf until eight or nine when the wind would blow out the waves and whip up chop and we’d climb back up the cliffs and go back to his house and shower off the sand and saltwater in his parents’ walk-in pink-tile shower, naked and tan except our white butts and hairless boy-bits. We showered together, muscly and lean and wrestling under the hot water and soaping each other up and rinsing the salt and sand out of each other’s hair and laughing and fucking around until the hot water ran out. His mother one day overheard us through the open bathroom window and put a stop to it. That was about the same time pubic hair and girls started happening.
Lip’s mom shopped at the Big Bear grocery store on Fifteenth Street; Pop-Tarts, Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, Skippy, Welches, Wonder Bread and Oreos in the cupboards; Blue Bonnet in a plastic tub and whole milk in cardboard cartons in her green Sears Coldspot. When we were done showering, we’d toast strawberry Pop-Tarts in the Toastmaster, eat a box of cereal with a half-gallon of milk and make half a loaf of bread into PB&J sandwiches and eat them, too.
Lip’s father was a world-famous physics professor at UCSD and raised red roses in wood beds for competition at the San Diego County Fair. In the summer before the fair, their backyard smelled like farm shit. A lot of years he won first prize. In Lip’s parents’ bedroom, there was a green classroom-size chalkboard and after we got out of the shower, while we were still taking showers, I’d stand on the raked white shag naked and dripping and try to puzzle out the lines and lines of chalk symbols and numbers of some problem he was working on. He was blond and going bald and chain-smoked Camel Straights and wasn’t home much.
* * * *
Spanks was a liar, a drunk and a thief. She lied to her parents, she lied to her teachers, she lied to her friends, she stole from me. We accepted her unwillingness to prioritize truth as an oddity in the same way you might accept a friend with a stutter or a limp. If she said “It’s raining,” we just looked outside to make sure. We brought no judgement and we weren’t surprised when what she told us wasn’t true.
She crafted a reality that amused her so that when she told us that a school priest took her into his office and spanked her along with the details of him pulling her school uniform over her head and sliding her underwear over her scuffed Mary Janes and pulling up his cassock and arranging her across his bare thighs so he could slap her butt, letting his hand caress her cheeks between blows and breathing hard with his efforts and saying always the same prayer when he was finished, “Oro pro te, filia mea. I hope you learned something this time,” we heard a story. That was all. We didn’t take it home, we didn’t tell our parents, we kept it to ourselves and joked and teased her about it and called her Spanks, and she’d laugh and light a cigarette or take a drink and a month or two later tell the story again.
It was always the same priest: silver cross hanging on his chest, thick glasses that he laid on his desk, stained and crooked teeth, the sour stinks of sweat, red wine and lunch meat that filled the room when he lifted his robe, scratchy black belly hairs. A big painting of Jesus, downcast eyes, blond hair and beard holding a white lamb in his arms hung above the priest’s desk; she said she like felt Jesus was watching as she lay stiff and silent on the priest’s lap wearing just her shoes and received her punishment. Each time she told the story, she described that picture of Jesus and the sheep. She told it to us over and over until she went to high school. The details didn’t change much.
Being a girl, babysitting was Spanks’ job. It paid fifty-cents an hour. The fact that she thought babies were disgusting was unimportant; her mother had been a volunteer at the Catholic school for years and bragged about her daughter at gatherings of young moms from up and down the coast and Spanks worked most Friday and Saturday nights. Oddly, very oddly, she had a good reputation, mostly it seems from her mom being her mom and not burning down a house or dropping a baby. She chewed pink Dubble Bubble, the gum snapping and popping was who adults thought she was, and it covered up the reek of stolen booze. She handled her liquor well and could mostly walk fine to the dad’s car for the ride home; if she stumbled over her feet or her words, it was because she was young and sleepy.
Spanks’ favorite whiskey was Jack, but she’d drink most any brand, Jimmy, Johnnie, Wild Turkey, whatever. When she could, she chose her jobs because of the liquor cabinet; if all the parents kept was gin, she wouldn’t take their job unless she needed a drink and then she’d force herself to manage their kids while she grimaced and gulped down their Gordon’s and filled her flask. She refused to babysit a second time for people who didn’t have a liquor cabinet.
Whiskey wasn’t all she stole. She rummaged through dresser drawers, suit pockets and purses looking for what she could find; change, dollar bills and once in a while a five, even a ten. If there was a cigarette smoker in the house, she’d find the carton in the freezer and take two or three packs. She liked menthol. She took earrings, necklaces, watches. Sometimes she’d take a house or car key just because she could. She wasn’t careful in what she stole, she took what she wanted. As a Catholic school girl, assumptions about her were biblical. Even so, some couples didn’t call her back.
Most Friday nights, she babysat for a family in town and Lip and I would ride over and hang out. Walking in, she’d be sitting on the sofa watching Johnny Carson and bouncing the fussy baby on her lap, a cigarette between her fingers, an ashtray and a glass of whiskey on the table beside her, “You’re an ugly little whore, aren’t you?” The kid would think she was bragging about her and would quit fussing and gurgle and wave. She’d hand us her glass as greeting and we’d pass it around. I didn’t like bourbon much and I could see Lip taking little sips, too, but we’d keep at it until the three of us were laughing drunk and the baby was asleep on the couch beside her. If a diaper stunk, she’d complain but wouldn’t change it; I never saw her change one, anyway.
In a school bathroom one day, Spanks watched in the mirror as her sixth-grade teacher slipped a silver flask from a pocket in her habit, unscrew the cap and take her late-morning fortification. A few days later, a friend distracted Sister Judith as she was walking out the classroom door for recess, “Sister, why was Noah drunk and naked in Genesis?” she giggled. The nun pursed her lips, “That is not a discussion for today,” she snapped. As expected, she blocked the doorway for a moment with her annoyance so that Spanks walking just behind had to squeeze between her bony butt and the doorjamb, “Excuse me, Sister,” she said as she slipped a hand into the pocket of the nun’s habit and pinched the half-empty flask of holy water and tucked it behind the bible she held in her arms for the purpose. “For God’s sake, Mary,” the nun said as she stalked down the hall without her flask.
The flask was oval-shaped and heavy with a screw lid and a cork gasket attached with a silver chain. Christ, naked and hanging from nails on a pretty cross, his head canted to one side, his beatific smile, his flowing silver mane neatly combed and resting on his shoulder was cast into one side; the words “Vinum Meum Est Deus Meus” were scratched into the tarnished and dented silver on the other side of Jesus. The letters were crude and uneven like somebody’d scraped them in with a screwdriver but the words were clear. Spanks kept the flask in a beaded-wood purse with a beaded-wood chain. She kept her cigarettes and Dubble Bubble in the purse with it.
* * * *
My mother dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley when she got pregnant; I was born spring semester 1956. She was a junior, a chemical engineering major; my father was a sophomore, a mechanical engineering student and ROTC cadet. After my dad graduated, we moved to Fort Ord and lived on post. He was a combat engineer and spent two years building sewers and roads. When he got out of the Army, he got a job with Westinghouse and bought a used 1962 Opel Kadett, a red two-door car faded dull-pink by the California sun. It had a 46-horsepower, 4-cylinder engine, a 4-speed manual transmission with a long, skinny black shift lever and a chrome am radio with no pushbuttons set in a shiny-red steel dash.
He drove the country in that car, living in motels for months at a time while he managed the installation of “big iron” mainframe computers in paper mills across the south. He told us stories of brass spittoons on the shiny white floors of Texas offices, changing a flat tire on the Mississippi delta in July, civil rights strikes and protests and kids splashing in the algae-green water and floating cigarette butts at the motel pool in Birmingham, the motel manager’s wife refusing to talk to him because he was from “the north”, a man yelling “room service” at two in the morning and robbing guests who opened their doors (my father didn’t open his door); driving through a blizzard in west Texas with winds so strong he had the front wheels turned to the steering stop to keep from being blown off the road. He drove the Opel until the clutch wore out.
When the clutch wore out that summer, my father bought a ‘65 Mustang, forest green, inline six-cylinder engine, automatic transmission, manual steering and windows, black vinyl seats, pushbutton am radio; the pink Kadett was dead and my father’s road stories were about to become used parts and scrap metal. I reasoned, argued, pleaded that he let me have it, let me fix it, let me figure it out, until finally he said “Maybe you’ll learn something,” his tone confident that he was only postponing his call for a tow truck.
In early June of that summer, the summer of 1970, in the shade of the Torrey Pine at the end of our dirt driveway, Spanks and I stood next to the Kadett with the engine idling, radio knob turned all the way to the right, the doors open and the hood up and studied the problem. When the cigarette commercials stopped, “You’ve come a long way, Baby,” and a new song, tinny and loud, came splashing out of the open doors, she would sway with the bourbon while she soaked up the beat. When she figured out the song, she would start to shuffle her bare feet on the dirt driveway. Drunk as she was, she had a grace and easy balance that moved from her feet into her ankles and knees, her hips in short cutoffs, her abs and ribs, shoulders, arms and hands, left and right, all tan and bare except the thin straps that held her crop-top top over her boy chest and left her belly button exposed, and into her neck and head and face, so that by the second stanza, her whole body flowed with the music, her movements quick and effortless, her timing just on rhythm, her eyes closed, her lips pursed and kissy and mouthing the lyrics.
“I have to pull the motor out of the car.”
“I love the Supremes!”
“No way not to.”
“Let’s go to my house. My mom’s not home. We can turn up the stereo.”
“If I don’t fix it, my dad’s going to junk it.”
* * * *
Briggs & Stratton taught me what makes the world go. The rewind spring in our Craftsman lawnmower broke — the spring that yanks the rope back when you pull-start a gas mower — and I unbolted the shroud with a combination wrench from my father’s toolbox and found the broken spring and after several tries and a jagged, greasy cut to my finger, installed a new spring and when the mower started again, showed off the dirty band aid and the black grease crescents under my fingernails.
I spent that summer cutting neighbors’ grass with that mower and at the end of the summer, I bought a Taco 22 minibike from Beau Stevens for seventy dollars; Beau was the son of the Del Mar lifeguard and lived a few blocks away. The Taco had a 3-horse Briggs with a centrifugal clutch, a pipe steel frame, a scrub brake on the rear tire and no front brake, pipe steel forks with springs and no dampers, a torn scrap of blue vinyl stapled over a pad of foam rubber for a seat. It was geared too high for Del Mar hills so I’d have to run alongside and push it up the steep bits. It left a trail of gray smoke and when I tried to pop a wheelie, the front wheel fell off; the scabs and bruises healed but I never did get the forks straight.
After I’d ridden the Taco for a couple of weeks and most of my friends had ridden it and we’d argued its numerous shortcomings, I unbolted the engine from the frame, put it on the workbench in the garage and unbolted the carburetor, the muffler, the rewind shroud, the flywheel, the oil sump, the cylinder head, the camshaft, the connecting rod and piston, and all the rest until I held the crankshaft in my hands, its weight shocking for its size.
Crankshafts power the world. Cars, motorcycles, trucks, tractors, ships, locomotives, airplanes (except jets), generators, weed whips and chainsaws, lawnmowers, minibikes and most everything else that runs on gas or diesel all have at their core a painstakingly engineered, cast, machined, balanced and assembled, an astonishingly heavy length of grey iron and shiny steel: the crankshaft.
What the crankshaft does is convert the linear motion of the piston, powered by the expansion of burning fuel (gas or diesel plus air), into the rotational motion that turns clutches, gears, sprockets, belts, chains and wheels. Once all the bolts, nuts, springs, washers, seals, gaskets, and shiny black oil have been unscrewed, scraped and cleaned away, what’s left is the essential beauty of human endeavor; its pins and journals machined to a 0.0010” tolerance, its screw threads fine and delicately cut, its keyways and oil galleries polished to a mirror finish, its cast iron counterweights a delicate grey against the shiny journals and shafts; what’s left is the invention that makes modern life go.
I put the engine back together, oiling the cylinder walls and compressing the piston rings with my fingers to fit the piston into the bore, aligning the timing marks on the cam gear and crank, torquing the connecting rod bolts to 180 inch-pounds and the head bolts to 168 inch-pounds, put it back in the frame and after a few tugs at the starter cord and a splash of gas in the carburetor, it started and ran just as smoky and gutless as before.
* * * *
As we stood beside the idling car, Spanks grooving to the radio, Lip, Luci and Iggy rode up. They had Fogi with them. Word had gotten out that I had a car. “My dad’s Spyder would eat that piece of shit’s lunch,” Lip said. His dad drove a white Corvair convertible with red seats and a red dashboard, a six-cylinder turbocharged engine, a 4-speed transmission and an AM/FM radio.
“Eat my fucking laundry,” I said.
“Let’s get some waves.” Lip’s lips were firm and confident.
Luci and Iggy were twins. Curly black hair cut Navy-short, barefoot, Levi cutoffs, no shirts, “Got any weed,” they said it in one voice like they’d been rehearsing. Their solution to most problems was to cop a buzz and not think about it. Nobody volunteered weed and Spanks didn’t offer her flask and we stared at the Kadett and listened to the AM radio tin-bang top-forty and Spanks danced.
The twins’ father had been killed that spring. He’d been a nuclear physicist in the Navy until he was blackballed by McCarthy and discharged. The Navy rehired him as a contractor and Sunday and Friday nights, he drove between the Naval Air Facility in El Centro and their house in Del Mar, three hours each way. Late on a Friday night, he rolled his International Travelall off a mountain road driving home through the Peninsular Range; he was passing on a blind curve, that’s what the cop report said.
A 1959 truck, the Travelall had a Black Diamond six-cylinder engine, four-wheel drive, four-speed manual transmission and manual everything else. Saturday afternoons, their dad would drive us to Baskin-Robbins in La Jolla, Luci, Iggy, Lip, Spanks, me and whoever was hanging around the house. He’d crank down the rear window and drop the tailgate and we’d climb into the steel-bed. He was a fast driver and we’d brace our bare feet against the wheel wells for his hard turns and quick stops. We didn’t have to hold on accelerating away from a stop sign; it was a heavy truck and it took a while for the little six to get it up to speed. He’d buy each of us a single-scoop in a wafer cone and we’d climb back into the Travelall and try not to dribble ice cream on our bare legs and stomachs as he raced us home.
Their mother was from Argentina and had an accent and drove a yellow Checker, a retired taxicab her dead husband had bought cheap. The car had an 80-horsepower Continental inline six-cylinder engine, three-on-the-column transmission (without first-gear synchromesh), grey vinyl seats that stuck to your legs if you were wearing shorts, screw holes in the dash where the meter and the two-way radio used to mount and no AM radio. She was less than five feet tall and looked through the top of the steering wheel to drive. Luci and Iggy called her The Bag and so we did, too.
The Bag was thin and gray; gray lips, gray hair, gray dresses, black eyes, black shoes with clunky heels. Until her husband died, we’d hang out at their house and she’d make us cream cheese and watercress sandwiches with the crust cut off. After he died, she quit making lunch and started screaming; I don’t think I ever heard her talk in a normal voice again. She screamed at Luci and Iggy and she screamed at the rest of us, too. When she screamed in English, her accent was so strong only her sons could understand her. The rest of the time she screamed in Spanish; “Ignacio, Luciano, sweep the driveway, clean the garage, lava los platos, limpia tu cuarto, no amigos en la casa, no vas a salir de esta casa.” She’d gotten a job as a receptionist at a doctor’s office in Encinitas. During the work day, she screamed at them over the phone so when the phone rang, we’d all go quiet while Iggy or Luci explained that no friends were standing around him in the kitchen laughing and passing a joint or a bottle of Strawberry Hill and shushing each other up.
Fogi was a couple of years younger than the rest of us. Chubby with a pink complexion, thin blond hair going bald, he wore khaki shorts his mother ironed and white t-shirts, he carried a knitted green blanket and sucked his thumb; rumor was he still peed the bed. His father was a Navy pilot who’d flown combat missions in Viet Nam and now flew for the Blue Angels out of Miramar Naval Air Station a few miles up the road. Fogi had three or four of his old flight helmets, drop-down sun visors, speakers, microphone, comm wires dangling out the back, the scratches and sweat-stink of hot piloting. His callsign, Fogi, was hand-painted on the back of all of them. When we were younger, we’d flown all over town wearing those helmets.
“Why are there three pedals?”
“Fogi, throw that nasty fucking blanket away.” Lip curled his upper lip in disgust.
“Clutch.”
“It’s so you can shift gears.”
“It’s nasty.”
“My dad’s car just has two pedals.”
“His Chevelle’s got an automatic. Automatics do the shifting for you.”
“Two-eighty-three, that Chevelle ain’t shit. Let’s get some waves.” Lip’s parted lips showed his distain for the little V8 until his confidence pressed them together again.
“When I get a car, I’m going to get one with an automatic.”
“When can we go for a ride?”
“Got any whiskey?”
“Stick’s more fun to drive.”
“I babysit tomorrow night, I’ll get some Jimmy.”
“I’ve got to put a clutch in it.”
“It sounds good to me.”
“It’s not going anywhere without a clutch.”
“How long will that take?”
“My mom’s not home. Want to come over and listen to music?”
“I’ve got to do this.”
“We gotta get back to the casa, Bag’ll be home in few.”
“I’ll come over and dance,” Lip’s lips were red and wet, curled up at the ends and open slightly so I could see the silver glint from his braces.
“Fuck you, Lip.” My tone surprised me.
In all the years I’d known Spanks, I’d never really thought of her as a girl. We’d built rafts and floated on the sloughs on both ends of town and fallen in the viscous green and waded to shore through the weeds, saltwater and mud reeking of rot and dead fish, had dirt clod fights in the newly framed houses in Del Mar Heights, hiked Snake Lady’s Wall, the steep eight-foot stucco wall that circled the acres and burned mansion at the top of Del Mar (rumor was it was built to keep snakes out; it didn’t work, we saw rattlers on both sides), climbed the fence and snuck into the county fair, watched the trainers work the horses at the racetrack (if it was harness racing they were training for, we’d stand at the rail and wave hitchhiker thumbs at the drivers and sometimes get a fast ride around the track balanced on the sulky axle and holding on hard), eaten ham sandwiches with potato salad on paper plates handed down from the dining car by the laughing black porters in white livery working the shiny four-car train that brought rich people from Los Angeles to Del Mar to bet on the ponies, snuck out at night and laid on the beach and drank whiskey and smoked weed and stepped on dead jellyfish and stung our feet, and a thousand other stories. There were things she didn’t do with us. She didn’t surf, she didn’t have a minibike, she didn’t spend the night at our houses, her mom wouldn’t let her. When we took turns lying on The Bag’s bed with the plug-in vibrator she kept in a dresser drawer for her shoulders, Spanks would stay in the kitchen or go home. But until that day standing next to my broken Kadett, she’d just been another kid I did stuff with, maybe braver than the others. And, sure, we roller-skated and listened to records on her parent’s stereo.
“Seriously, man, fuck you.” I didn’t know where the rage was coming from. There was something about the eagerness in his tone, the long stares, the parting and pressing of his mouth as he watched her dance that I hadn’t noticed before. Spanks heard it too because after he said it, she shifted her feet so that they pointed just at him.
“Man, didn’t eat your Wheaties this morning?”
Now they were all looking at me and I was really pissed and without thinking about it I said, “Six hundred and sixty-seven days, motherfucker. This car’s my ride out of here.”
“What happens in six hundred days?”
“He gets his license. That’s how many days until his birthday”
“Cool.”
“This piece of shit’s dead. You ain’t going anywhere.”
Spanks said, “I’m going with you.”
“I’ve got to pull the motor and change out the fucking clutch, Michael Jackson ain’t going to help.” It was piss talk, I could hear it in my voice and I knew they could, too, but I couldn’t stop it.
Spanks looked at me like she did sometimes, a hard, blue-eyed stare through her drunken half-lids like she wanted me to say something and when I didn’t, she turned her head away, “Let’s go, David.”
Luci laughed, “Lip’s going after your girl, man.”
“Fuck Lip. Fuck Spanks. Fuck you.
Fogi and I looked at the Kadett and the Jackson 5 finished their song.
* * * *
It was mostly Fogi and me that pulled the engine out of the Kadett and replaced the clutch. It took us a couple of afternoons to take off the hood and the air cleaner, disconnect the electrical leads, the fuel line and carburetor linkages, undo the clamps and pull the radiator hoses and drain the cooling system onto the driveway, pullout the radiator and the fan, unbolt the exhaust from the manifold, unbolt the transmission from the bellhousing, unbolt the motor mounts, and hoist the motor out with block and tackle, tied it off to the tree trunk and let it dangle. Once it was hanging in the air high enough to clear the grill, we rolled the car out from under it, much lighter without the engine, and unbolted the bellhousing and the pressure plate and finally I had the clutch in my hand, the rivets holding the asbestos friction material to the steel disc chrome-shiny from the metal-on-metal scrubbing.
Fogi didn’t know anything about mechanics but he liked doing it. When I asked him to unbolt the exhaust and showed him what he needed to do, he tied his blanket around his head and crawled under the Opel and lay on his back in the mud from the coolant in his ironed khaki shorts and white t-shirt. I reached over the fender and handed him the ratchet, an extension and a socket and he grunted and strained and unscrewed the two nuts connecting the exhaust pipe to the manifold while rust fell in his face. After he crawled out from under the car and took off his turban, he put his thumb back in his mouth so his lips and cheeks were covered with coolant-green sludge. He asked me what I wanted him to do next and I handed him a screwdriver and pointed at the clamps on the heater hoses.
The parts and machining were fifty bucks and had to be ordered; the auto parts store wanted their money up front. I’d gotten out of the lawncare business the year before; my allowance was seventy-five cents a week and I had to sweep the front patio to get it. I asked Lip and he lied and said he didn’t have it. I didn’t bother to ask the twins or Fogi; the twins were poor and Fogi was Fogi. Lip told Spanks I didn’t have the money and she called me and said, “I’ll buy your clutch.”
“You’ve got that much money?”
“Money is not the problem.”
* * * *
It took two months for the parts to come in and a day for Fogi and me to install the clutch and put the engine back in the car. When it was done, I got my dad to drive me to the the Del Mar airport to test drive it, the airport was built for Navy blimps and abandoned after the war and we did laps on the runways. The clutch worked just like before.
Spanks came by after it was done, she wanted me to show her how to drive it.
“I’ll do the driving,” I said.
“Show me. I just want to know how.”
“I don’t want it wrecked.”
“It’s my clutch.”
She sat in the driver’s seat and I went over it with her, the key, the gas, the choke, the brakes, the clutch, the transmission, headlights, turn indicators, even the windshield wipers and the AM radio; I showed her how it all worked. She turned the key and pushed the gas and brake pedals and ran through the four gears with the clutch, easing it out in first and reverse until the car moved to get the feel of it, dialed the radio to Boss Radio 1360, and blinked the blinkers and pushed dust around on the windshield with the wipers.
“I can do this,” she said.
“We’ll take it out to Black Mountain. You can practice out there.” Black Mountain in those days was scrub ranch land east of town with dirt roads that went for miles with no traffic and no cops. We’d ridden our minibikes out there for years.
“I’ve got to babysit tomorrow night.”
“Saturday?”
“Twelve?”
Midnight Sunday morning, I snuck out my bedroom window; Spanks was going to meet me in the driveway. She wasn’t there. Neither was the Kadett.
She made it almost as far as Escondido before she rolled the car off Del Dios Road. Driving drunk in the dark, she didn’t stand a chance on that twisty little highway. Her dad owned a business in Solana Beach, he designed and built custom camera equipment for the Navy and had once been the mayor of Del Mar; he talked with the police and she was never charged. He talked with my dad and offered to pay for the car and my dad told him it was junk anyway. I never saw it again. I don’t know when the girl who stole my first kiss stole my keys.
Spanks died a few years ago. This story’s for her.
I’d joined the Army. It was February 1975, I was eighteen and I was hitchhiking from Solana Beach, California to Minneapolis to visit my mother before riding the big dog to Fort Knox for Basic Training. It was evening and dark, six or seven o’clock. I didn’t own a watch. I was standing on a ranch access onramp to Interstate 15 some miles east of Mesquite, Nevada, the country around me was desert. A guy in a ’55 Chevy 3100 stepside pickup, Trademaster V8, 3-speed transmission with a column shift; a twenty-year-old ranch truck, the meadow-green paint faded and the fenders, box and doors wrinkled and banged from the work, had left me there.
Harlan, the guy driving it, a hard-lived fifty or so, cowboy lean, saddle-leather complexion, sun-chapped lips and broken, whiskey-colored teeth, his sweat-stained Silverbelly Stetson on the seat between us, pulled regularly from a bottle of Jimmy Beam he held jammed between the thighs of his jeans. His left hand, a Camel Straight wedged between his nicotine-stained little and ring fingers, his middle finger amputated to a stub just above his palm, he draped over the wheel to steer the truck. His right hand he used to shift and raise the bottle. He’d picked me up just north of Las Vegas.
The level of the whiskey in the bottle had been dropping steadily as we rode the miles. It didn’t seem to have much effect on his driving, he kept the truck at forty-five miles-an-hour and mostly between the lines. He offered me a pull and I took it, seemed like the polite thing to do. When he reached to take the bottle back, he let his hand rest on my thigh for a moment before he took it. When we got off at the ranch exit, he invited me to spend the night in his trailer, said he lived alone and had a hot shower, more whiskey, burgers and beans in the fridge. Cowboys, I knew where that went; I’d once traded with a cowboy for my life. But that’s a different story.
I got out of Harlan’s truck at the bottom of the exit and watched as the red round taillights and the grumble from the little V8 disappeared into the dust of the gravel road toward the mountains on the north horizon. Cold, windy, hoary skies and getting dark, I stood on the on-ramp for maybe an hour and six or eight pickups and a long-nose Peterbilt hauling hay accelerated past my thumb. The warm from the whiskey gone, the chill was starting to dig in. I thought about Harlan’s invitation and wondered if I’d made the right choice, a burger, whiskey and a warm place to sleep sounded good. And maybe worth the swap. But that decision was made. I checked to make sure the zipper on my jacket was all the way up and stuffed my hands back in the pockets of my jeans.
Hitchhiking on the freeway is illegal, the law is posted on a black and white aluminum sign on every on-ramp in America; violating that law risks you a ticket and maybe an overnight in the local constabulary on a vagrancy charge; I had almost ten bucks in my pocket. But it was dark and the cold was coming through the soles of my boots and I was shivering and I walked up the ramp and down the shoulder and kept walking, the muscle work taking some of the bite off the wind. The freeway was almost empty and I’d walked a couple of miles when a Cadillac a few years from new, gold paint, gold vinyl top, ski racks and skis, braked hard onto the shoulder.
The passenger side window rolled down and a woman’s voice yelled at me from the driver’s side.
I couldn’t hear her, “Ma’am?” I said.
A guy my age sitting in the passenger seat exhaled warm cigarette smoke in my face, “She wants to know if you can drive in snow.”
“Yes, Ma’am. I’ve driven through Minnesota winters.”
“We’re from Bel Air. We’re going to Salt Lake City. Do you have a drivers’ license?”
“Yes Ma’am.”
“Can I see it?”
It was dark and I was cold and I pulled out my wallet and handed the card through the window. She clicked on the dome light and held up my Minnesota license as she considered my face and my facts. I looked over the car; a four-door Sedan de Ville, glossy dark wood trim on the dash, gold brocade seats with brocade buttons. The idle had the deep, quiet lope of GM’s 472 cubic-inch big-block. They were young, the guy wore a Hansen surfboard’s t-shirt (my first stick had been a Hansen), shades, shorts, blond beach dreads, baby smooth skin, cigarette pinched between his fingers, his flip flops braced against the dash, a box of Marlboros and a Zippo between them. The woman wore a filmy gold blouse with no bra and white culottes. Her hair was long and straight, the same blond as her passenger’s maybe with a little color, her skin under the dome light almost the same baby smooth. She gave me a long look through the open window as she handed me my license, “If the snow gets bad, I need you to drive.”
“Happy to do it.”
The back seat was the same gold fabric and buttons as the front seat, I threw in my bedroll and closed the door and she chirped the tires and accelerated hard up to eighty-five miles-an-hour, I watched the speedometer over her shoulder. The speed limit was fifty-five.
“This is Norman. I’m Esther. We’re going to Salt Lake City.”
“People call me Luck.”
“That’s not the name on your license.”
“It’s what my mother calls me.”
“Luck. That’s fine. We’re going to need all the luck we can get tonight; there’s a blizzard coming, that’s what the radio’s been saying.”
“Good skiing,” I said from the backseat, not knowing shit about skiing.
“I’ve never driven in snow.”
“I can drive,” Norman said, his voice pouty.
“No. Absolutely no. No more lawyers, no more judges, no more POs. No, you’re not driving.”
“Rollers ain’t out here.”
“’Aren’t,’ Norman, please. Texaco next exit.”
The canopy at the Texaco was brightly lit, three pumps underneath; two red pumps for regular, a silver Sky Chief pump between them for ethel. There was a faded red Studebaker Commander parked on one side of the pumps, two flat tires on the driver’s side. Parked on the other side with the hood up was a mist green Ford F250, most of the paint baked off by the desert sun, orange rust climbing from the running boards up the doors and fenders, mid-fifties truck, heavy-treaded tires, a flatbed made from steel plate and angle iron with wood two-by-eights bolted down for a bed. The steel work was rough like somebody’d fabbed it up in a hurry with a cutting torch and a buzz-box. They’d used a lot of 6010 welding rod to do it, I recognized the spatter. The welds weren’t pretty but they were straight and the penetration was deep; that bed was going to last a lot longer than the truck. A guy wearing a straw cowboy hat, flat-soled farmer boots and faded jeans, and the Texaco mechanic in his army-green bus-driver hat and uniform, the back of his jacket and the butt of his pants caked with oily dust, leaned on the V-grill and a round fender and fiddled and studied under the hood.
Esther pulled the Cadillac in behind the Ford. Both the red pumps had cardboard taped over the glass, “Out” hand-lettered in black marker. Norman slammed the door and angled for the men’s room at the back of the building. I got out and followed him.
The floor was grey-black concrete, puddles under the urinals, the stool stained with shit spray. The mirror was broken and the beige walls were covered with names, pictures and commentary done in colored markers, spray paint and ballpoint pen, a lot of it sloppy or stylized and unreadable. There were comments about Nixon, McGovern, Viet Nam, women’s names and proclivities, n****rs, sand n****rs and OPEC, hearts and arrows, swastikas, the Hells Angels’ logo, red and white banner above the skull and feathers, a blue pen calling somebody’s mother a whore, hippies with locks and beards and hairy armpits, enormous dicks, tongues, and dangling ballbags, lady crotches, people sucking, licking and screwing in ways that defied gravity and the human body, all painted with varying amounts of creativity, talent and color. The piss stink made my eyes water.
The Texaco mechanics used the sink to wash up, an open tin of Goop mechanic’s soap, mostly empty of its creamy goo and smeared black with grease, sat balanced on the edge of the sink. Norman unzipped at the urinal, I stood next to him. There were no partitions. Above the urinals sprayed in swooping letters in red paint over the words and pictures drawn before was a message, “Sometimes, luck is all you need.” I thought about that, about how much our lives depend on which side the lady takes in the flop of a spinning coin.
“Stay away from my mother, Luck.”
“What?”
“I said stay the fuck away from my mother.”
“Who?”
“Esther. My mother.”
“She’s your mother?”
“Don’t talk to her.”
“What do I say when she talks to me?”
“Fuck you,” he said, shaking it off and zipping up and not bothering to pull the handle. While I was still pissing, he pulled a mirror and a folded paper packet out of the pocket of his shorts, razored out a couple of lines, horned them straight off the glass, a line into each nostril, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
As we came around the corner of the building and into the canopy light, Straw Hat slammed the hood and climbed into the Ford. The starter cranked slow and hard; the guy had the door open and I could see him toeing the starter button with his left boot, his heel on the clutch, and working the gas pedal with his right, and yanking the choke knob in and out until a brown-grey cloud of raw gas and burned oil coughed out the tailpipe and the engine caught and hacked itself into a rough idle, an inline six by the sound of it. Straw Hat revved it a few times to clear the idle and let out the clutch and pulled away from the pump. The wind had picked up and snow had started to fall and swirled in the truck’s wake as it disappeared into the dark. Esther pulled forward and got out. Her culottes were lacey and thin and whipped around her legs. She was wearing flip flops, too.
“Normie, come pump the gas.”
“Make Luck do it. He’s your driver.”
I said, “Glad to,” As I walked around the back bumper, the Texaco man stepped in front of me, “I’ll do it, kid. What’ll it be, Ma’am?” he asked her as he cranked Straw Hat’s gallons and dollars back to zero and lifted the handle. He had the red Texaco star stitched above the brass-zippered breast pocket, his name, Lemuel, embroidered below the zipper in the same red thread. He wore black-rimmed glasses and had the scrawny build, leathery skln and big hands of an old man who’d spent his life working outside.
“Fill it up, please.”
“We’re about out. All we’ve got left is ethel. Should be enough to get you on your way. We’re supposed to get a delivery in the morning if the snow holds off. Check under the hood?”
“Please.”
I glanced at the motor as he was pulling the dipstick, the 472, just like I’d heard.
An hour later, we were back on the freeway and the snow was blowing sideways, heavy enough that it reflected the headlight beams back into the windshield and the road ahead was hazy grey against the swirling white and I had to squint to judge our place on the lane. Esther was driving sixty-five, Norman was dialing the radio knob through the AM stations, the only sound in the car was the slap slap slap of the wipers and preachers preaching about sacred taxation, Brigham Young’s beard, the holy wrong of criticizing church leaders, how black folks represent Satan and white folks represent Jesus; station after station, mile after mile. There weren’t many stations that time of night in that part of Utah, preachers on all of them, their voices rising and falling all with the same sexy rhythm; a just-you-and-me whisper rising in urgency and volume to a final fevered, “Jesus!” then falling back to pillow talk, the same voice, the same erotic tempo, every station, over and over, for miles. I stretched out sideways on the brocade and tried to fall asleep. I used my bedroll for a pillow.
I wasn’t sleeping when Esther said, “I think he’s asleep.”
“I can’t stand that fucker.”
“Honey, stop it.”
“Let’s drop him at the next exit. Fuck, let’s drop him here. Right now. What’s he going to do?”
“Your language. And no, I’m not dropping him off, I might need him to drive.”
“You’re driving’s fine. Let’s get rid of him.”
“Why don’t you like him?”
“I don’t like the way you look at him.”
“Honey.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Honey, no.”
“Fucking forget it.”
There were no exits and the blowing snow was fingering onto the road and giving us a hard thump in the lower back as we sped over its digits. The wind was strong enough that it was pushing the car around and I could feel the tires losing traction then grabbing then losing it again. There was almost no traffic and no light except the glare of the headlights reflecting back through the windshield lighting the gold seats and leaving black shadows. We passed a semi on its side in the median, no cops or wreckers, and we kept going. We passed another semi rollover and then a car in the ditch and another and still no flashing lights, and still Esther didn’t slow down. What little traffic there was, stayed in the right lane. When we caught up with a car or truck, she’d merge into the left lane, the Cadillac slewing side-to-side as it wallowed through the deep snow, and once past, she’d merge back into the right lane, the car slipping back into the deep tracks that grabbed the wheels and steered us north.
Still driving sixty-five, we’d just passed a semi, when suddenly we were spinning, the car whirling counter-clockwise down the middle of the freeway so fast the force threw me against the passenger side door. Then we hit what must have been clear concrete and the tires hooked up and the Cadillac rolled up on the passenger side wheels so I was looking straight down through the window at the snowy road on the other side of the glass and I thought, “Oh, fuck.” And then the tires lost traction again and the car slammed back onto four wheels hard enough that the springs and shocks on the driver’s side hit bottom with a loud, steel-on-steel crunch that sounded like damage and I was thrown back across the seat to the driver’s-side door and we continued to spin.
I heard Norman scream, “Mommy!” as he was flung against the passenger door and then against her. She sat silent, both hands on the wheel, elbows locked, all four tires skidding. When finally we stopped, we were in the middle of the interstate the car facing backwards in the lane, Esther frozen at the wheel, Norman scrunched tight against her and quiet, both of them staring through the windshield into the brilliance. In the silence, the sound of the big motor idling too deep to hear, a pair of headlights blinked through the glare and the slow-moving semi with a box trailer we’d just passed eased silently onto the shoulder and motored around us and kept going.
From the backseat, I grabbed Esther’s shoulder and shook it, it was rigid in my hand and she didn’t move. I got out and opened her door and stood in the blowing snow and leaned in grabbed both her shoulders and shook her and still she didn’t move, her elbows still locked, her hands frozen on the wheel, her eyes wide and staring. One clenched finger at a time, I loosened her grip on the steering wheel all the while looking for headlights coming toward us. When her hands were free, I reached across her and gave Norman’s dreads a shove, he’d been staring into the glare while I pried Esther’s fingers free, he turned and looked at me like he was surprised I was there. “Give me a hand,” I said, “We’ve got to get the fuck out of here.”
He came around and stood next to me in the blowing snow in his flip flops and shorts and we pulled her out from behind the wheel. She dropped a flip flop as we muscled her into the backseat, I threw it on the floor by her feet. She moaned and turned her head side-to-side on the seatback until she saw Norman and whispered, “Normie, Normie. Are you okay? Are you okay, baby?” She held out her arms and Norman slid into the seat next to her and she hugged him with both arms. I shut the back door and got behind the wheel. She was short and I had to move the seat back, it was the first time I’d used a power seat.
I drove north at twenty-five miles-an-hour. The car pulled hard to the left like she’d bent a tie rod or maybe a control arm. The Cadillac had power steering and that made it easier to keep it in the ruts. The wind continued to blow the snow sideways across the windshield and the interstate remained a brilliant white and gray blur. In the rearview mirror, Esther and Norman sat close, Esther in the middle, Norman against the door behind me, his head on her shoulder, his eyes closed, his hand resting on the filmy fabric covering her right breast. She gripped his hair in the fist of her left hand, the other she laid on top of his hand cupping her breast, her eyes were closed, her head leaned back against the brocade seat.
It was 4:30 in the morning when I started seeing exits for Salt Lake City, the snow had stopped and the plow trucks were starting to catch up. I reached over the seat and woke up Esther and she gave me directions to the apartment.
It was a small one-bedroom apartment, second floor, neatly raked gold shag carpet, wood-frame couch with square gold and white stripped cushions and matching chairs opposite a coffee table. The rooms were painted a low-lustre gold; dozens of movie posters and photos of people, black and white and in color, with scrawled notes and signatures and framed in tarnished brass hung square and level throughout. Across the living room, as you walked in the door, hung a full-size poster for the movie Duel; a collage of sepia-tone photos, Dennis Weaver’s eyes open wide in panic above the long-nose Peterbilt semi-tractor, the star of the show, with its streaked and dirty windshield, glinting headlights and terrifying rusty train-rail front bumper, “The most bizarre murder weapon ever used!” The poster was signed by Steven Spielberg in Maybelline-red marker across the grill of the truck, “Thank you, Esther,” he’d written, his signature below illegible but for the two Ss.
“Normie,” she said, “you sleep here,” she patted the couch. “Luck, come in here.”
The bedroom had the same gold carpet as the living room, the curtains were a sheer white fabric with embroidered gold flowers, the bedspread and pillows were gold, the sheets were silky white. There was a brass incense burner and a box of incense on one of the nightstands. Esther lit a stick, I read the label while she was in the bathroom, sandalwood, patchouli, rose, bay and vanilla: Tapping into the powerful energy of the earth to attract abundance, healing, and overall well-being; Creating an environment perfect for manifesting desire; Drawing prosperity, good luck, success, and blessings; Removing blocks, setbacks, and obstacles preventing you from accomplishing goals. It smelled good, too.
Esther knew what she was doing and didn’t seem to care that Norman could hear her moans and loud-whispered commands, or that I hadn’t showered in a week. When she was done and her breathing was quiet and I thought she’d fallen asleep, she rolled suddenly on top of me, grabbed my hair in her fingers and pressed her palms into my temples and in the dim light stared into my eyes like she was trying to recognize me, her L’Oréal tresses covered my nose and mouth. She stared at me for many seconds, the pupils in her hazel eyes slowly shrinking and focusing, her lips pulling back into hard rails, her expression becoming one of rage. She rolled off me and turned her back and whispered over her shoulder, “Get out.” I was too awake to sleep, too tired to ask questions. Her tone left no room for conversation. I slid on my jeans and boots and grabbed my bedroll. As I walked out, I saw Norman still dressed in his shorts and Hansen t-shirt lying on the couch. In the morning light coming through the curtains, I could see his eyes following me. I didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t like me, either.
* * * *
It was morning rush hour when I got to an on-ramp to Interstate 80, the sky was deep-winter blue and clear and it was cold. Standing on the ramp with my thumb out, the second car, a faded dark green, two-door VW Squareback, air-cooled boxer engine, 4-speed transmission with a cue-ball shift knob, black leather-wrapped steering wheel, Nevada plates, picked me up. The car stunk like cigarette butts, coffee, burgers and sweat. Ziggy, the smiley guy at the wheel, early thirties, clean shave and getting bald, was a professional pool player on his way to New York for the Eastern United States Championship. When I was in high school, I hung out at the Pit & Paddock, a biker bar in St. Paul, and learned to play 8-ball. I’d never heard of 14.1 Continuous or 9-ball and so Ziggy explained the games and I tried not to fall asleep.
From Salt Lake, Ziggy and I headed up the interstate into the mountains and for a few hours the road was plowed and we were driving seventy on the flats, forty in third gear up the hills. We were climbing a steep curving grade in third gear when we caught up with the blizzard; as we drove past the apex, the freeway was suddenly covered with snow and the snow was blowing straight at the windshield and the road was invisible.
Ziggy screamed, “I can’t stop. I can’t stop. I can’t stop.” As he was screaming, he banged his chest and shoulders violently back and forth between the seat and the steering wheel all the while stomping the brake pedal hard enough so that I could feel it through the floor. For many seconds, I didn’t understand his panic, there was no reason. And then I saw what he was seeing, the snow blowing straight at the windshield and buffeting the car so it rocked on its springs made it seem to Ziggy’s senses that the car was racing backwards down the interstate. In that moment, Ziggy went from rational guy explaining the rules and strategies of 9-ball, to a man feverishly insane, his body bouncing uncontrollably between the seat and the steering wheel, his eyes bulging, his breathing fast and shallow, his mouth agape, his words, as he continued to scream, disintegrating into meaningless syllables.
His screams hurt my ears and I tried to calm him down, “Ziggy, we’re okay. We’re okay. It’s blowing snow. We’re fine.” When I put my hand on his shoulder, he flinched away from me, clicked open his door and rolled out of the car onto the snow-covered freeway and on his hands and knees crawled frantically toward the center median, screaming, crying, trying to stand up and run, slipping, falling back into the snow, trying again and falling again. As I watched through the open door, the car started rolling backwards on the grade and I yanked the emergency brake lever between the seats and the car stopped and idled quietly. Ziggy reached the shoulder, still on his hands and knees, and looked back at me, the blowing snow making his features hazy and gray.
The road was deserted and I got out and clumped through the snow across the lane to the shoulder, he was still on his hands and knees, “Ziggy, we can’t stay here. Your car’s going to get hit. We’ve got to get moving.”
“Luck, help me. Oh God, Luck, help me.”
I reached down and took his arm and he shook it off, “I don’t want to die out here.”
“We’re not going to die. Let’s get off the fucking freeway,” I grabbed his arm and he yanked it back again.
As we were arguing, a late sixties Chevy C20 pickup, four-by-four, fleetside, I couldn’t see its color in the dark, idled to a stop beside us. Because of the heavy snow and the howling wind, I hadn’t heard it coming, “You guys okay?”
“Oh my God. Oh my God, help us, please.”
“The blowing snow is fucking with his head. Give me a hand. Let’s get him in the car.”
“I’m not getting in the car. No. I’m not. No.”
Guy in his twenties, Carhart coveralls worn through at the knees, leather and beige Sorels, the laces untied and hanging loose, a beige knit cap, got out of the truck and the two of us grabbed Ziggy’s arms and pulled him to his feet. “No,” he screamed, “No.” In his panic, he swung his fists at us and I took a hard blow to my cheek, the Chevy guy took a punch, too, and cussed about it. Ziggy got away and fell in the snow and rolled away and we picked him up and he kept fighting and fell again and finally we wrestled him to the car and shoved him into the passenger seat and slammed the door. He opened it and I slammed it again and he didn’t move.
“Thanks for stopping,” I said.
“That guy’s fucking nuts, you better get him some help. Good luck.”
The Squareback is a light car but its engine is in the back, the weight directly over the rear wheels, giving it good traction in snow. As I drove us east further into the blizzard, the snow got deeper and dragged against the bottom of the car and the winds howled and raged around us and the gusts of snow blinded me so I couldn’t see the hood. The drifts were getting deeper and when we hit them, the snow would explode against the grill and the windshield and the wipers would take several swipes before they cleared it, and until I could see the ghostly profile of the road again, I was driving entirely by feel. I stayed in second gear and didn’t dare take my foot off the gas.
The wind buffeted the car but with the deep ruts from the invisible cars and trucks ahead of us and the steady push from the rear wheels, we stayed on the road. When we were ten miles or so out of Cheyenne, it was dark by then, a snowplow passed us, blazing headlights, flashing amber lights, loud scraping blade, the salt spreader pinging pellets off the side of the car. There were thirty or forty cars, pickups and semis stacked up behind the plow and we merged in at the back of the line. Ziggy was unconscious on the seat next to me.
* * * *
The plow led our convoy to Little America, a truck stop with a motel, a restaurant, a bar and a hundred and eighty gas pumps, that’s what the sign said. The motel lobby and restaurant were crowded with travelers led in by the plows. Truck drivers hauling diesel, lumber and laundry detergent, salesmen selling office supplies, farm equipment and helicopters, Viet Nam vets in their dress greens humping duffel bags and headed home, parents yelling at little kids playing hide and seek, people traveling alone and in couples and threes, people going skiing, people moving and starting new jobs, people going home.
Those days, Irving was the General Manager of Little America, beer gut, no wedding ring, acne scars, crewcut going bald, yellow-tinted glasses with polished brass frames, blue sport jacket over a beer-stained white shirt, no tie. He stood behind the receptionist gal holding a half-empty glass and watched us stomp the snow off our feet as we came through the doors. Rooms were sold-out for those who asked and Irving had to explain to people unaccustomed to sleeping on the floor that there were no beds, listen to their complaints and threats with sympathetic nods, then explain again, for the second, third and fourth time. The freeway was closed for three days, for three days Irving walked the hallways and venues of Little America with his bleary eyes and hospitality smile and begged us all for amity, and kept his shirt stains damp.
Ziggy and I walked into Little America together, he was stumbling and leaning heavily on my arm. People were staking out places to sleep, laying out jackets and suitcases against the walls to mark their spots. Ziggy and I claimed a piece of floor between a cowboy hauling horses to Bitter Creek and a couple of guys in jeans and ponchos with long hair and beards hitchhiking to San Francisco. Every person in the room of roughly legal age had a cigarette in their hand and the air was thick with smoke and loud conversations about the snow and the roads as we negotiated for places to sleep. I leaned my bedroll against the wall and held Ziggy’s hand as he slid down the wall next to it and I went back to the car for his suitcase. The leather case for his pool cues lay on top of the suitcase. I left it in the car. When I got back, Ziggy was sleeping; I set his suitcase down next to him and leaned against the wall and I fell asleep, too.
Outside, the wind blew the snow in swirls and eddies and the drifts piled up against the windows on the west side of the building and the windows were dark to the ceiling other than a faint blue light filtering through the snow from the wall pack lighting and the floods in the parking lot. The windows on the east side were clear, the pump islands blown clean by the wind except around the cars abandoned at odd angles and the drifts piled up in their lee until they were buried entirely. For three days, the flickering fluorescent ceiling lights in the lobby and the canopy lights glowing dim and gray through the blowing snow and the east windows offered no hint as to the hour asserted in roman numerals on the railroad clock above the reception desk.
When I woke up, the lobby was stirring awake. Ziggy sat leaned against the wall next to me with a cigarette looking out the east windows at the dark gray dawn and blowing snow. The hippies and the cowboy were still snoring on either side of us.
“Sleep okay?” I said.
“Good enough.”
“Hard day, yesterday.”
“What do you mean?”
“The snow?”
“What about it?”
“The blizzard, the car going backwards, the guy in the pickup, you don’t remember that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t either. Let me buy you breakfast.”
As he was talking, the cowboy sat up, rubbed his face and pulled on his boots, “Better feed and walk the horses, going to have to borrow a snow shovel just to get in the damn trailer. Owner wanted them two days ago. He’s going to be pissed. This storm ain’t letting up.”
Sitting in a booth with fake leather seats and a dark wood-grain Formica table top, a pile of pancakes in front of me, I said to Ziggy, “You sure you’re okay?”
“What are you’re talking about?”
“I was there. I pulled you out of the snow. I shoved you back in the car. I drove you here.”
“That never happened.”
“I was there, Ziggy.”
“So was I, Luck.”
I stared at him across the Formica then pointed to my face, “The bruise, the split lip, you did that.”
“We’re not having this conversation. You drove when I was tired, I fell asleep. That’s our story.”
When we were done with breakfast, we walked over to the bar. It was 7:30 according to the railroad clock above the reception desk. It was a big bar and it was getting crowded, bar stools and a bunch of high-tops already full. At one end, there was a 7-foot Valley pool table, a four-foot chandelier with fake leaded-glass light panels that said “Billiards” hanging above it. Two guys shooting, eight, ten guys holding drinks and talking about the blizzard and watching; a long line of quarters queued up under the cushion over the coin mechanism. Ziggy stopped and watched a few shots, walked over and slid two quarters into the queue then turned his back and went to the bar and I followed him, “The second quarter’s for you, thought we’d play a game. Rum and Coke?”
“Sure.”
“You play much?”
“Hung out at a biker bar when I was in high school, played some eight-ball.”
“Got a rating?”
“I won some beers.”
Sitting at the bar, we could see the table and we watched as Ziggy’s quarters inched up in the queue. At the same time, the line of quarters behind us was getting longer as people woke up and realized the freeway was closed and the blizzard was raging and they weren’t going anywhere and there was nothing to do but drink, sleep, argue and maybe play pool.
When Ziggy’s first quarter came up, he jostled and bumped his way through the crowd to the table and said hello to the guy who’d won the game, shook hands like they were old friends, and pulled a cue off the wall rack, glanced at the tip but didn’t bother to look for a weight or roll it on the table to check it for straight, put in his quarter and racked the balls and chalked the cue.
It was an ugly game. The other guy dry broke, Ziggy got up, open table, missed and sat back down. The other guy pocketed the ten and missed, Ziggy sank two balls and missed but hid the cue ball behind the eight. The guy tried to hit one of his balls with a bank but missed and fouled and gave Ziggy ball in hand. Ziggy ran two balls and hooked the guy again and he fouled and Ziggy ran the rest of his balls and won the game. Luck, that’s what I was seeing.
I was up next. Ziggy dry broke, I ran four little ones, Ziggy knocked in two but left me hooked and I gave him ball in hand. I won the game, anyway. And the next two. The third guy I played, Chuck, broke and ran and I was done. Chuck was a bald guy maybe thirty; he had a two-piece Palmer cue with a linen wrap and mother-of-pearl inlays. He talked a lot of shit, “Hope this kid’s ready for an ass whoppin’” he said to the crowd just before I broke. He shot hard, every ball hitting the pocket with a plastic crack and rattle you could hear across the bar. Chuck was drinking Jack straight up with a beer back. His wife was sitting on the floor in the lobby with a glass of bourbon on the carpet beside her. It wasn’t 10:00 yet.
Ziggy put up two more quarters and when he got up, Chuck still had the table. Ziggy won the game when Chuck scratched on the eight; Ziggy’d missed a shot and hung the eight on the lip of a side pocket and Chuck knocked it in to lose the game. When I got up, Ziggy said let’s put some money on it. I told him I had six dollars to my name and he said don’t worry about it and laid two fives on top of the chandelier. He told me I’d win and I did and he handed me the two fives. The next guy wanted to bet on the game and I put one of the fives back on top of the light and won the game and another five bucks. I lost the next game. But from then on, every game had money on it. And I had sixteen dollars in my pocket; I ate and drank for three days on that.
Interstate 80 was closed and for most of us marooned in Little America, it was a three-day drunk, there was nothing else to do. Except smoke cigarettes. By noon the first day, the smoke had overwhelmed the motel’s air handling equipment and a blue-grey cloud hung head-high from the ceiling. The staff was exhausted and Irving quit trying to keep up with the lobby ashtrays and by afternoon the first day, they were overflowing onto the carpet. The smoke and the stink made my eyes itch and my throat raw. We coughed constantly, all of us.
The first afternoon, a woman going home to her parents in Pittsburg and leaving her husband in Salt Lake City, stood in the middle of the lobby and told her story, the lost jobs, the foreclosure, the wrecked car, the lost friends, the bloody noses, the AA meetings, the being broke and the crappy apartments getting crappier. Tall, blond, heavyset, thirty-five, maybe forty, orange lipstick smeared around her mouth, she told us she wasn’t going to be married to the loser bastard any longer. Her words were slurred and hard to follow and she struggled to stand and not spill her Johnny Walker. When she was done, the crowd around her cheered and raised their glasses. She passed out in a corner by a window, her feet pulled up to her butt, her drink on the carpet beside her, her head leaned back against the snow-blue glass and the tears ran down her cheeks.
The afternoon of our second day, a guy sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, puked a frothy cream-colored puddle into his lap and passed out and sat with the puke in his lap for hours and the Bacardi stink surrounded him. A drunk woman spanked her screaming kid and the kid screamed louder and she dragged the kid to the door to shove her out into the blizzard. Another woman stopped her at the door, talked to her quietly, and sat in one of the lobby chairs with the kid in her lap until the kid fell asleep. A woman gave her boyfriend a blow job, her head in his lap under a jacket pretending to sleep and thinking nobody was watching.
As we got drunker, there were threats and shouted arguments and a couple of fist fights with haymakers and clumsy kicks and guys grappling and rolling on the floor with bloody noses. During the first fight, Irving called the cops. They told him they couldn’t get to us. That evening, the snow stopped.
Our third day, Ron and Terri got engaged, they were from Cambridge and driving to Pasadena for graduate school. The two of them stood on a table in the lobby to make their announcement. They were both drunk and after they announced and toasted and we all cheered, Terri fell backwards off the table. She was fine. It was Kristi’s birthday and the cooks made cakes and we sang Happy Birthday and she blew out the candles, there were six, and we all had a piece. Her father was there, her mother was sleeping in one of the lobby chairs.
All three days, Ziggy hung out in the bar and drank rum and cokes and played pool. After the first night, I don’t think he slept. A lot of cash got set on top of that light, four or five twenties on some of the games, and the pool table got to be the center of the carnival, drunks crowding the players and yelling at them for good shots and bad and throwing bills on the table and crowding around so players had to push the people back to take a shot. Ziggy kept shooting, winning a few games then losing one and cycling back through the line of quarters under the cushion. That third afternoon, the freeway was still closed but the rumor was that the plows had it almost clear and they were going to open it later that night.
Before they opened it, Ziggy played a final match with Chuck, eight-ball, race to five; the first person to win five games wins. It was a five-hundred-dollar game. Chuck had to take a leak and while we were waiting, Ziggy took me aside and gave me his keys and told me to put our luggage in the car, fill it with gas and park it by the door and to let him know when I was back. Most people were in the bar watching the games and only a tired-looking mom bouncing her kid on her knee saw me pick up our luggage and carry it outside.
The crowd was loud and drunk and they’d been waiting. They saw Chuck as the guy to beat; for three days, he’d won every game he’d played except the one the first morning against Ziggy and another one or two the next day. Ziggy’s wins were just luck, we all saw that. When I got back, I nodded to Ziggy. Chuck had just won the lag and got the break; the lag is where the two players both shoot from one end of the table, bounce the ball off the far rail and whichever ball ends up closer to the near rail wins. I had nothing riding on the match; all the same, I was disappointed but not surprised when Ziggy lost the first three games, Chuck pounding the balls into the pockets as though hitting them hard earned him extra points. He was on the eight-ball about to win his fourth game of five, Ziggy had three balls on the table and hadn’t won one when he said to Chuck, “Want to make it interesting?”
Chuck was drunk and didn’t see it coming, none of us did, “Fuck yeah, I’ll take your money. How much you got?” Ziggy pulled five neatly folded hundred-dollar bills out of his shirt pocket, counted them so Chuck could see them and set them on the light. Chuck waved his wife over, she was drunk, too; she turned her purse upside down and wadded bills, ones, fives, tens, twenties, spilled onto the table and Chuck smoothed them out and counted them and set the stack on top of the light next to Ziggy’s hundreds. Now it was a thousand-dollar game.
When Chuck fouled on the eight ball and Ziggy won his fifth game, he bellowed into the crowd, “Lousy, cheap fucking win” and demanded another match, double or nothing. Ziggy shrugged and Chuck’s wife dumped out her purse again. With all the ones counted, there were sixteen hundred dollars and change on the table. The truckers, ranchers, sales guys, vets, hippies, college students, moms, dads, me, all of us drunk and in need of a shower, stood packed so tight around the table it was hard to move. We all knew who was going to win; the side bets were running two-to-one. To make Chuck whole on the bet, one of the guys staked him the four-hundred, he was that sure. We were all that sure.
In the next five games, Ziggy missed shots twice, both times because he narrowly missed cue ball position for a following shot. In game two he was forced to shoot a long bank that he just missed, in game three he missed an impossible combination. Both times he missed, he didn’t leave Chuck a shot and when he got back up, he ran out both games. He was shooting with the bar stick. Chuck, sitting on a stool with his Palmer between his knees and a bunch of guys standing around him, didn’t sink a ball the entire match. In game five, the final game, as Ziggy trickled the eight-ball into a corner pocket on an easy final shot, Chuck crashed over his stool and lunged to his feet. He was drunk and since the second break he’d been cussing Ziggy to the crowd around him and getting steadily louder as he lost games. Now he’d lost the match and a couple of thousand bucks. “You son of a bitch. You sorry son of a bitch. You hustler motherfucker, I’m going to break your fucking neck.”
Ziggy grabbed the cash off the chandelier, caught my eye and I shoved through the crowd toward the door, Ziggy’s hand on my shoulder pushing me forward. The yelling and Chuck’s threats got louder behind us; a lot of people had lost money on that match. “You drive,” Ziggy said as he pushed me through the door. The big thermometer on the wall just outside the door said the temperature was six degrees.
I still had his keys and as the engine caught, I jammed the cue-ball shifter into reverse, stomped the gas and side-stepped the clutch. The tires spun in the snow as Chuck, roaring curses and swinging his cue stick, burst through the doors and the lobby light and the blue smoke and the yelling drunks spilled into the parking lot behind him. Chuck swung the butt of his cue at the hood of the car and missed and slipped in the snow and fell and dropped the stick and picked himself up and kept coming and about then the rear tires of the VW hooked up and I drove us the hell out of there.
“Jesus,” I said, “Where we going?”
“That Palmer’s an eight-hundred-dollar stick. He’s lucky he didn’t hit the car. Freeway’s open, been open for a couple of hours. The announcement’s at 10:00. Irving told me that’s when he kicks everybody out.”
We hadn’t gone fifty miles before we were out of the snow and the freeway was clear. I drove all night while Ziggy slept. We got gas in Ogallala, Grand Island and Omaha. We hit Des Moines at morning rush hour and stopped at Donut King. We sat at a booth and we both ordered coffee, black. I had a cake donut with sprinkles. We talked about Little America and our thrilling getaway and Irving tipping him off about the freeway (that tip had cost Ziggy five bucks). He pulled Chuck’s wadded bills out of his pocket, counted out ten twenties and handed them to me, “Luck happens sometimes.” he said. I’d never held that much money before.
“How much did you win?”
“A little over six.”
“Hundred?”
“Thousand.”
“Jesus Christ.” Ziggy dropped me at a ramp to northbound 35. That night I ate dinner at my mother’s house. And took a long shower.
September 1977, NATO Campaign Reforger, I was twenty-one years old and I hadn’t a shower in as many days. I sat in my Jeep in a cold rain, no doors, rainwater drizzling off the canvas top, a poncho over my lap and the engine running for heat. I was reading Critique of Pure Reason and trying to understand the nature of a priori knowledge. I’d read about Kant in a crappy novel and bought his book. It was a big read for a guy with a lousy high school education, no thoughts on rationalism or empiricism, and who’d never heard of Hume or Descartes. I was driving a Jeep for an umpire, Captain Sawyer, an M151A2 with its gutless four-cylinder engine, 4-speed manual transmission, knobbed tires, drum brakes, no seatbelts and no roll bar. Our mission, Captain Sawyer’s and mine, was to make sure nobody cheated at war.
Reforger was an annual NATO exercise spread out across the West German countryside commandeering roads, barns, farm fields, forests and small towns and leaving behind broken concrete, damaged crops, Germans cussing us in German, and an oily diesel-stink that hung in the air long after a unit had moved on. The Army hadn’t recovered from Viet Nam and moral, discipline and attitudes were poor. A favorite way for tankers to share their discontent was carving the letters FTA, “Fuck The Army”, into farm fields with their tracks, neat pivot steers at the intersecting lines of the squared letters so that the crops were ground into the soil and the letters stood out clear and neat against the field; the only people who could read them were the officers and crews chopping over us in Hueys. Lots of butt-chewing at the unit level about maneuver damage, but command ranks never knew which track commander and crew inscribed those notes in the German dirt. But we knew, we all did, and we fist-bumped the philosophers and scriveners for leaving our mark.
* * * *
I went through Basic and AIT at Fort Knox with Cal and God. Basic Training is where recruits get physically fit and learn the fundamentals of war-fighting: how to salute, make a bed, hot wax a floor, wash a pot, peel a potato, spit shine boots and low quarters, polish brass, stand at attention, march and run in formation. We also learned to use radios and the phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie…), shoot and clean various weapons, throw hand grenades (pro tip: don’t use your teeth to pull the pin), use a gas mask (training that included several long minutes in a concrete building filled with tear gas), bandage wounds, crawl through sand at night under concertina wire and red tracers shot from an M60 machine gun, and all the rest. Also, in Basic Training, I ran a 5:36 mile in fatigue pants and boots, maxed the PT test, two of us in the company did that, God and me, and shot Expert with an M16 rifle and M60 machine gun; the high moments in an otherwise unremarkable three-year military career.
AIT, Advanced Individual Training, is where we were trained in our Military Occupational Specialty, “MOS” in Army speak. Our MOS, Cal’s, God’s and mine, was 11D, Armor Reconnaissance. We learned to drive and fire M551 Sheridans (shitty aluminum tanks with a 155mm main gun that mostly sank when we tried to swim them and were mostly broken the rest of the time) and M113 APCs (aluminum boxes with tracks), observe and report enemy action, read a compass and topo map (and learn the difference between a kilometer and a mile and the importance of contour lines, especially when they’re close together), fire and movement, call for artillery, search and destroy, harass the enemy with tanks and small arms, rear guard delay actions, advance and retreat under fire, and blow things up with C4, bangalore torpedoes and claymore mines. In AIT, God and I got tattoos, God lost his virginity, Cal drove.
Cal was from Berkeley. His father was a doctor and a college professor and taught at UCSF. His mother was an artist, she used a spare bedroom with a view of the bay for a studio and drank for inspiration. Cal was a couple of inches over six feet and pasty with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and flouncy butt cheeks; he looked like a paunchy white Jesus. He went to Berkeley High and spent his junior and senior years protesting Viet Nam and Nixon on the grimy sidewalks of Telegraph Avenue waving signs, smoking weed, and fucking hippie women in People’s Park. After he graduated, he spent a couple of years at UC studying physics. His sister Cece was killed in a helicopter crash in Viet Nam, she was a nurse and a captain. A few months later, over Christmas break his junior year, he signed a recruiter’s papers. He didn’t tell his parents he’d joined the Army until the morning he got in his Porsche to drive east, a faded yellow ’67 911S with an air cooled flat six, five-speed transmission with first gear left and down, wooden steering wheel, low-back black vinyl seats in front, little vinyl seats in the back. It had been his father’s car, he’d bought a new one. His mother hugged him on the driveway, there was bourbon on her breath. His father had a class.
God, the name stamped on his dog tags was Godefredo, grew up in his great-grandfather’s wood shack on a bayou in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, cooked on a cast iron stove stoked with wood he’d split and from kindergarten, piloted his grandfather’s flat bottom wood bateau with its ancient two-stroke Evinrude outboard to the school bus stop where he ran it up the bank and tied it to a tree. He dropped out of school when he was twelve and started mudbugging full time, that’s what he called crawfishing; setting the traps after dark with fish heads for bait and in the morning selling the catch out of the back of the pickup to neighbors and restaurants so he had money for food, 2-stroke oil for the Evinrude and gas for the truck.
God’s father was a construction superintendent. Before work, he’d pour half a fifth of rum into his coffee thermos. By lunch he was tripping over building materials and cussing the trades, by quitting time he was sound asleep in the cab of his truck, a faded red 1960 Apache C10 with a white top, 235 inline six, three-on-the-tree transmission and wrinkled door and fenders on the passenger side from banging it into the live oak in the front yard coming home drunk. At home, he’d keep drinking into the night and there’d be arguments with God’s mother. Sometimes he’d bloody her lip or yank her shoulder out of the socket and a couple of cops would show up and say hello by name and take him outside and lecture him in soft and gentle tones so God and his mother couldn’t hear the words and his father would sit on the hood of the patrol car and cup his face in his hands and cry and say he was sorry over and over and the cops would pat his shoulder and leave and the next week or the following week it would happen again just the same, except maybe she wouldn’t call the cops.
When God was eight, his mother left. She didn’t leave a note. About that time, too, local contractors quit hiring his father; he’d earned his reputation. He took a job as a traveling superintendent remodeling motels around the country; he left a five and some ones on the kitchen counter when he left. He left his truck, too. At first, he came home every couple of months or so; as God got older, he came home less frequently until he stopped coming home at all. On his seventeenth birthday, God joined the Army; his father sent him back the signed enlistment forms without a note; he was on a project in Salt Lake City when God got on the bus in front of the recruiting station in Orange, Texas, just the other side of the Sabine River. He left the pickup in the parking lot.
God was short, five-two, maybe five-three, and wiry lean so in the barracks barefoot and wearing just skivvies, you could see the blue veins and long muscles in his arms and legs and abs ripple and bunch under his skin as he made his bed, dressed and undressed and polished his boots. He had deep green eyes, wavy dirt blond hair, shoulder length and greasy before the Army cut it off, a broken front tooth, black crescents under his ripped and jagged fingernails, and a nose that was French and narrow at the bridge, wide and African at his cheeks and twisted like it had been broken and never set straight. Living alone, he hadn’t bothered much with personal hygiene.
At Fort Knox, barracks for Basic Training were open-bays with a 10’ center aisle, double grey steel doors at one end. On both sides of the center aisle, 40 grey steel wall lockers and 20 steel bunk beds with Army-green wool blankets, folded sheets and pillows stacked at the ends were aligned straight and square with the beige-on-beige checkerboard floor tile. The room was lit by flickering 8’ fluorescent lights. Cal and God were assigned bunkmates, I shared the next bunk with Freddie, a guy from St. Louis who doesn’t figure into our story. I had the bottom bunk and we didn’t argue.
“I’ve got top,” I heard Cal say.
God, who’d been living alone for years, had lost the habit of negotiation and even conversation. He glanced at Cal then he put a hand on the on the top bunk, jumped and spun and sat on the mattress in one effortless move and made it his.
Cal said it again, the top was his, and God looked down at him.
“Fuck you. I’m not sleeping down here.”
God slid off the bunk and stood in front of Cal looking up and in that moment of exasperation, Cal put a hand on God’s chest and shoved him. I doubt he meant to, but he pushed him hard enough that God tripped over his foot locker and fell backwards. But instead of sprawling on his back, in the four tenths of a second before he hit the floor, God twisted in the air so he landed on his palms and toes with his legs cocked and in the remaining six tenths of that second, he bounced to his feet and faced Cal in a crouch. He held his fists low and curled into hard knots and there was no hesitation; as he was on his feet, he started to jab and cross with punches too fast for my eyes to follow. He didn’t fight like he had training, he fought like he had experience and he punched into Cal like I imagine the prop on that ancient 2-stroke Evinrude cut through swamp weeds, small, fast, powerful and relentless. Cal kept circling away, trying to negotiate a truce, “Hey, be cool, be cool. Hey, man. Hey, take it. Take it, take the damn bunk, I don’t give a shit. Hey…,” all the while he was yelling for peace, he was trying to block punches and taking blows to the head and gut until the floor around them was spattered with blood from his nose.
Cal slipped in his blood and fell to his knees. He grabbed God around the legs and dragged him down so the two of them were rolling and wrestling on the floor. We circled around, a couple of us tried to separate them, most everyone else cheered and catcalled, “stomp that motherfucker,” “beat that white boy’s ass,” until somebody called “ten-hut,” and Sergeant Leonard in his starched fatigues, spit-shined Corcoran jump boots, Smokey the Bear hat pulled low over his eyes and his swagger stick tapping his calf, strolled down the center aisle and surveyed Cal and God standing next to their bunk and the blood smeared on his floor and Cal’s face, “Formation, gentlemen. Boots and trousers. Two minutes.”
That was our first night in Basic and it was a long run that none of us was in shape to do, except maybe Sergeant Leonard and God. As we ran, Sergeant Leonard taught us the first (of many) call-and-response cadence chants, “If I die on the Russian front, bury me deep with a Russian c***….” He was a baritone and he’d carol the words and we’d chant them back, 41 boots hitting the dirt on the syllables. Every few minutes, as we ran through the night, he’d bark, “Platoon halt. Drop and give me ten.” As soon as we were done with the pushups, we were back on our feet and running again.
Cal and God, they became friends during that run; while I was focused on the growing sweat stain on the fatigue shirt in front of me and the panting and cussing around me, both of them were admiring the sky, it was clear, no moon, the stars just out of reach.
Back in our bunks, exhausted and pissed, I heard God say from the top bunk, “Bèl ciel ce soir.”
“Fuck you.”
“Down Louisiana, you don’t see Orion that clear.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“We’d go in the bayou nights, set traps, my mom and me. When the mist was clear, she’d point to pictures in the stars and tell me their names.”
There was a silence for many seconds and I heard springs in their bunk squeak as one of them turned over, “When I was a kid, five, six years old, my mom would drive us up to Tilden, that’s a park up on top of the hills in Berkeley, and we’d lie on the hood of her VW bug and she’d point to the stars and name them to me until I fell asleep then sometime in the night, she’d wake me up and drive us home. Betelgeuse was on fire tonight.”
Some days later, I came into the barracks, the two of them were entwined in tendrils of smoke from the Kool and Marlboro cigarettes poking out of the ashtrays on their bunks beside them. God, in fatigue pants, dusty boots and no shirt, sat with his legs dangling over the edge of his mattress as he read out loud a story from Stars and Stripes, Cal sat on the bottom bunk brushing Kiwi polish into his boots and helping him sound out the words he couldn’t figure out himself. I walked around their bunk so I wouldn’t smell God’s body odor.
“Cal.”
“Let it alone.”
“Last week, God wiped the floor with your face. Now you’re teaching him to read?”
“What the fuck’s it to you?”
God kept stumbling down the columns, one syllable at a time. Until that evening, I hadn’t heard God speak more than a few dozen words besides, “Yes, Drill Sergeant” and “No, Drill Sergeant.” He was a tenor with a drawl and an accent that from time to included some French words, “Piké twa,” he said.
“He just told you to get fucked.”
“Fuck you, too,” I said. God went back to reading the newspaper.
Except for letters and care packages from moms, almost always chocolate chip cookies and sometimes shared, and Stars and Stripes, we were cut off from the world we’d grown up in, no newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, or telephone. Our conversations were bragging, bitching and gossip; we had nothing else. The runs, the marches, the blisters, the lack of sleep, the sore and strained muscles, the over-explained and poorly-explained classes, the drill sergeants for their unfairness and cruelty, the lousy tents and backpacks, the leaky gas masks, the air mattresses that went flat in the night, rifle and machine gun if-not-for excuses (if not for screaming drill sergeants, lousy weapons, crosswinds, poorly zeroed sights, target malfunctions, buzzing flies and any number of other the-sun-was-in-my-eyes reasons for shooting poorly), hand grenade throwing scores, PT test scores, the rumored saltpeter in our food (reduces desire for sex, or so went the story), KP, guard duty, bunkmates, the latest guy to DNF, letters from girlfriends, girlfriends gone silent, cars sold and missed, bad and good plays at spades, cribbage and poker.
We graduated from Basic Training, the three of us. On the final PT test, God ran a 4:20 mile.
* * * *
In AIT we were allowed to have POVs (Privately Owned Vehicles) on post, although most of us had sold (or abandoned) our cars before we got on the bus. In Alpha Troop, Cal was the only guy I knew with a car, he’d paid to store the Porsche during Basic. The first night we were allowed off post, we took it to Louisville, Cal and God in front, me twisted sideways on the backseats. Before we left, we stood at attention in front of the barracks while Sergeant Leonard inspected our uniforms, ‘c**t-cap’ sitting square, slice-a-knuckle creases in our khakis, glistening brass, low-quarters spit-shined so you could trim a teenage mustache in the mirror. He gave us the lecture; ‘Don’t get too drunk, don’t get the clap, don’t be stupid, be here for morning formation.’ Even God had taken a shower.
We went to Trixie’s, a strip joint in Louisville, permanent duty guys told us it was the place to go. We spent the night banging shots of Jack and chugging beer backs while watching women get naked and dance and sliding bills into their G-strings; the Army paid new E-1 privates $344.10 a month less taxes, enough for boot polish at the PX and candy bars and beer from the vending machines on the first floor of the barracks. The bills we had were mostly singles, not a lot of action for a buck, even in those days, even less if you were throwing quarters and nickels onto the stage.
Cal’s mom sent him checks. He took a stool at the raised stage and waved a ten at the gal on the pole and she sashayed over in her red stilettos, her shoulders and hips swaying in time to the base line as Tommy James whined about teenage lust. She stood over him and let him stare at her shaved crotch then squatted with her thighs on either side of his face and ran her fingers over his shaved pate and whispered in his ear and Cal squeezed her butt and pulled back the elastic strap as it slid between her cheeks and slipped in the ten and she stood up and turned around and bent over with her ass a foot from his face and give him a long gawk and shimmied away. The other dancers caught on and Cal got attention. God and I stood behind his chair and basked in his money and the clouds of cigarette smoke and the stinks of overflowing ashtrays, cheap perfume, sweat, vag, butthole, whiskey, beer and vomit and stared at the strings as they disappeared into the abyss.
Cal whispered in one of the girl’s ears as she was squatted in front of him and she nodded and turned around then shimmied away with two twenty-dollar bills bow-tied into her butt floss and when her set was done she came around and Cal pointed at God and she took his hand, you could see his face turn red in the bar light. He pulled back and she stepped close to him and whispered in his ear, she was a couple of inches taller than him and skinny, shoulder-length straw-blond hair, smoker skin, red lipstick smudged around her mouth, saggy little breasts with a dark mole centered on her chest between them; she was maybe twenty and naked except for her spike heels and her thong tucked with bills. He whispered back to her and she tugged at his hand and he looked away, more whispering and tugging and then he took a step and another and she led him through a curtain and disappeared backstage.
I went back to drinking whiskey and beer and watching Cal’s private show. An hour later, the woman led God back into the bar. He wasn’t a virgin anymore; the lipstick on his neck, the wrinkles in his khakis, the grin on his face told the story. Cal waved the waitress over and ordered beer and whiskey, “There’s only one first time,” he said.
God lit a Kool, the cigarette shaking between his fingers, “She’s nice, Angela, she’s really nice.”
“She do what you needed her to do?”
“I was the first guy she ever did it with for money.”
Cal laughed, “She told you that?”
“We’re going to a movie next week if I can get a pass.”
“She’s a whore, God. She dances naked and fucks for money. That’s her job.”
“You don’t know her.”
“Where’d you do it?”
“Backseat, her car. We talked after we did it. She said she thinks she loves me.”
“God, she fucked you for your money. Actually, she fucked you for my money. What in hell did you talk about? Did you use a rubber?”
The waitress showed up with the beers and shots balanced on a tray, “To God and Angela,” Cal said and the three of us pinched our shot glasses and threw back the whiskey.
“Cal, she’s his girlfriend, show some respect.” God looked at me hoping I wasn’t joking. I didn’t know whether I was joking or not.
“She wants out of here; she wants out of Louisville, out of Kentucky. She wants a life.”
“I’m sure she does,” Cal said. “And we’ve got PT at oh-six-hundred.”
“I love her.” God turned toward the backstage curtain, he was staggering drunk.
Cal grabbed his arm, “It’s 1:30. We’re out of here.”
God yanked his arm, Cal held on, “I’m going to marry her.”
I grabbed God’s other arm, “She’ll be here next week.”
“Let go, she’s going to be my wife.” He struggled for a few seconds with both of us, pulling hard against our arms, “Piké twa.”
Together, Cal and I pulled him out of the bar; I don’t know that we could have done it if he wasn’t drunk. Still holding his arms and wrestling with him to keep him from falling on the asphalt or going back in the bar, we staggered around the parking lot until we found the Porsche. As we were pulling out of the parking lot, God, in a drooling slur, said, “I want to go to Charlie’s.” Tattoo Charlies was a storefront parlor right on Dixie Highway, we had to drive by it to get back to Knox. Permanent duty guys showing off their ink bragged about it.
I said, “Let’s get some fucking sleep.”
“We’re stopping at Charlie’s,” Cal’s voice was slurred, too, and he was hunched over the steering wheel staring through the windshield like he was trying to figure out what he was supposed to be doing.
“Oh-six-hundred,” I said.
“It’s God’s night. Let’s get him a tattoo.”
God was sitting with his head leaned back against the headrest. “I’m going to marry her,” he slurred the words then started to heave.
Cal slammed the brakes and skidded the little car to a stop. God pitched forward against the dashboard then somehow got the door open and started blowing his guts on to the shoulder, I tried not to smell the vomit or listen to the heave and splash. After a while, he sat up, “She gets a life.”
“Let’s get some sleep.”
“Big night for God. Let’s help him remember it.”
Charlie’s was open for the bar rush. When we walked in, the slinger was finishing a tattoo of the Keep on Truckin’ dude on a guy’s forearm, there were buck sergeant stripes on the collar of his fatigues, “Gentlemen, have a seat,” he waved at chairs near the door. Shaved head, black goatee and mustache, stubble cheeks, wife-beater tank top, a two-inch curved tooth hanging on a gold chain around his neck, and all his skin I could see covered with ink. He handed me a binder, “some ideas if you don’t know what you want to do.” I took it and handed it to God who shook his head, “I know what I‘m getting.”
I handed it to Cal. He shook his head, his eyes half closed, “Too drunk. Not doing it.”
“We could be in our bunks.”
“Only one first time,” he muttered like he was falling asleep.
I leafed through the pages and pages of color photos of tattoos on every body part, male and female; flags, helmets, skulls, Hueys, Cobra gunships, fighter jets, the Statue of Liberty, the sun, hummingbirds, tigers, snakes, wolves, flowers, sheet music, geometric designs, women’s names and portraits, Chinese characters, military branch logos and unit crests, Sheridans and M60s, an M16 on a bayonet sticking out of the ground with a helmet balanced on the stock, plain and fancy Christian crosses, wavy hair Jesus nailed on a cross, sailing ships, the Keep on Truckin’ dude (various colors, poses and legends), clenched fists, rosaries, eagles, lots of eagles. I got an eagle soaring in front of a red sun tattooed on my right shoulder. In all the life I’ve lived since, that eagle has been a ready reminder that drunk decision-making makes for drunk decisions. The red sun has long since faded away and all that’s left is a crudely drawn pale blue bird.
After we graduated, Cal accepted a post at West Point, God was assigned to the 2nd Armor Division at Fort Hood, Texas, I was posted to the 1/1 Cavalry Squadron at O’Brien Barracks, Schwabach, West Germany. We got drunk and shook hands. I figured I wouldn’t see either of them again. We weren’t letter-writers.
* * * *
I saw God again at the field headquarters for the 2nd Armor Division; command tent, medical tent, open air mess, division recovery and maintenance. The 2nd AD had come to Germany for Reforger, they’d shipped over from Hood. There was a couple of dozen or more deuce-and-a-half and five-ton trucks clumped together by section, Jeeps scattered haphazardly around, APC’s, five-ton wreckers and M88 track recovery vehicles, POL (fuel) trucks, tool trucks and trailers, water trailers, Gama Goats, and broken M60 tanks and APCs and trucks. For air cover, the bivouac was scattered under the trees in a dripping wet wood outside a little town. Loops of concertina wire surrounded the area. The wire didn’t keep out the local kids and after school they’d come by and laugh with us in German and spotty English and climb on the tracks and trucks and bounce on the seats and we’d give them the Chiclets from our C-rations.
In a clearing in the wood, the cooks set up serving tables for chow and around the clock they kept a wood fire going under a twenty-gallon pot hanging from a steel tripod and a chain, the pot filled with boiling coffee. A dipper hung from one of the legs of the tripod. When the coffee ran low, one of the cooks would dump in another five gallons of water from a jerrycan and a No. 10 can of ground coffee and stir it in with the ladle. The coffee was hot and bitter and you had to spit out the grounds that stuck to your lips and teeth. We were wet, cold and exhausted and we’d stand in the mud and drink that coffee out of our canteen cups and warm our hands and feet at the fire and cuss the Army. Best coffee I ever drank.
We didn’t bathe in the field except sometimes in our helmets to scrub the gear, and a lot of guys didn’t do that. And so, we were immersed in stink; mud and wet trees, wet canvas, wet clothes, the damp gray stink of cigarette smoke, wood smoke from the cooks’ fire, reeking breath (sometimes with an after-waft of bourbon or hashish), unwashed ass and pits, diesel exhaust, diesel fuel, gasoline, and the oily steel stench of our machines that engulfed us always. Our fatigues were clammy and wrinkled and bagged at the knees and elbows and stained with food and coffee from eating standing up or in moving vehicles. Our underwear, too, got sticky with the damp and the sweat and the cold and would bunch and chafe and most of us didn’t wear any. Our socks and boots were wet and cold, too, no matter how often we changed them and tried to dry them with the diesel heaters in the tracks.
God was standing next to a Jeep under the dripping trees in the 2nd AD bivouac. He was some distance away and at first he didn’t see me. The hood was up on the Jeep, he had his sleeves rolled back and his hands were black with engine oil and grease. In his right hand, he held an adjustable wrench. When finally he saw me, he laughed and waved. Even at distance, I could see Angela’s name tattooed on his forearm in a fine and delicate cursive surrounded by red hearts and colored flowers and smeared with grease. Through the grime, the light flickering through the wet leaves reflected the gold on his finger, “Piké twa, motherfucker,” he yelled at me. I didn’t yell back, Captain Sawyer was calling for me. I never saw God again.
The Red Roof Inn in Montgomery, Alabama is a U-shaped motel facing Zelda Road, a busy four-lane thoroughfare named for Montgomery-born Zelda Sayre, a rich white woman who knew how to party, married somebody famous, took his name and Fame, and wrote a lousy book; to celebrate those accomplishments, the city put her name on street signs. Montgomery was also home to Big Mama Thornton, Rosa Parks, Howard Johnson, Nat King Cole, Martin Luther King’s kids Martin III and Yolanda, and Octavia Spencer. Fast food signs light up both sides of Zelda’s road. Rooms were forty-eight dollars. I stayed two nights.
The front side of the Red Roof Inn is freshly painted and well-lighted and the parking lot is shiny black with a fresh sealcoat and crisp yellow stripes. A bright new pylon sign with the new company logo faces the street. My room had been newly remodeled and reeked of latex paint and old cigarette smoke. The sides and back of the motel were unpainted and unlit and the rooms abandoned, stacks of stained mattresses, wadded up bedding and overturned furniture visible through the windows.
Room 121 is the first-floor corner room to the right as you face the building. I canted the Harley onto its side stand on the shiny asphalt outside the door. When I went out to get some dinner, there was a guy selling product in the shadow around the corner from my door. He was sitting in a chair facing three handicap parking stalls, faded blue stripes, blue concrete wheel stops, oil-soaked and crumbly asphalt. He asked me if I needed anything, cookies, lollipops, weed. He had a joint pinched between his fingers and he saw me looking at it and handed it to me. He said his name was Iz.
Iz’s pants hung below his butt cheeks, he used one hand on his belt to hold them up when he walked. The pants were shapeless and red and tattered at the bottom, his underwear was plaid blue. On his feet he wore black socks and red rubber slides with dirty white Adidas logos on the straps, the strap on the left one was torn and made a little slap-squeak noise when he stepped on it. He had a limp on the same leg and used a cane. He had short-cropped hair just visible under his hoodie, the hoodie was black, and a curving pink scar that started under his left eye and sliced through his cheek and shade of a mustache and notched his upper lip so you could see the glisten of a silver tooth when his mouth was closed. Several of his upper teeth were silver. Under his right eye he had cross tattoo. He was thin and medium height and twenty-two.
His office, two oak chairs with motel-stained, faded-to-pink fabric and loose and squeaky glue joints set side-by-side in the dark shadow and protected from rain by the second floor balcony above, faced the handicap spots. Guys would idle into the spaces in dented pickups and rusty sedans, roll down a window and exchange cash for whatever it was they were buying. He had walk-ups, too, hookers in lipstick and spike heels, guys in sweat pants who looked like they’d slept on a cardboard box, guys in nice cars who parked under the lights in front of the motel and seemed to always leave a pressed pant leg and an expensive shoe outside the shadow while they did their business with Iz.
As we passed his weed back and forth, I asked Iz about his foot, “Concrete work. Mix truck backed over me, crushed my leg. Nine yards of mud on that truck.”
“Can’t work?” I took a hit.
“Can’t work where I gotta stand.”
“Office work?”
“What company’s going to hire a crippled n****r with tears sewed into his face? Nobody wants to see that every day.”
“You from Montgomery?”
“Natchez, Mississippi.”
“I’ve been there. Pretty town.”
“Slave selling capitol of America; that town got rich auctioning off black people, built some nice houses with the money. Mostly white people own them still.”
“You grow up in Mississippi?”
“I grew up in a lot of places, Greenville, Baton Rouge, Gainesville, Atlanta for a while, my mom had a bunch of boyfriends and a bunch of jobs. Went to tenth grade in Oakland, California. That’s where I got my face cut and my teeth busted out. Spent a year in JD riding a broom around in the Harry Potter books. Never did go back to school. But they got me a library card.”
We were quiet for a minute and I handed him the joint, “I’m going over to Captain D’s get something to eat.”
“Do you.”
Captain D’s is a fast food fish joint across Zelda Road from the Red Roof Inn. I ordered the Giant Fish Sandwich Combo; “two Batter Dipped Fish fillets on a toasty bun with tangy tartar sauce and shredded lettuce, served with your choice of one side and a refreshing beverage.” I had a refreshing Coke and fries. When I got back to the motel, Iz was with a customer and I went to bed, long day on the bike.
* * * *
On a Friday afternoon a dozen years ago, Ron Davis was sitting on the curb in front of a Subway sandwich shop; he asked me for money for something to eat. I bought him a sub and chips and asked him if he was looking for work and he said yes and I gave him money for the train and the next day he came to my house. Ron had big hands with thick fingers, walnut-size knuckles and square cut nails. He had the letters RIO tattooed in blue ink on the back of his left hand in capital letters; Spanish or acronym, I never knew.
That first day, my wife Jane asked him to move hostas from the front yard to the back. He held the shovel in his hands like it was fragile, gently nudging it into the soil around a plant then lifting the hosta out of the ground as though a sudden move would damage it. He would then dig a hole in the backyard where Jane pointed and set the plant in its new home, carefully arranging the roots, patting the soil into place with those hands and brushing dirt off the leaves. Later, Jane asked him to take out a small scrub tree and he came back to tell her that he couldn’t dig it out, that it was still alive. He told her afterwards that he’d said a prayer over it before pulling it out of the ground. That fall he did work for neighbors up and down the block.
When I met Ron, he was thirty-one, schizophrenic and living in a homeless shelter down the street from my office. He’d stop by from time to time and we’d chat. I’d talk about my business and projects, he was born in Chicago and liked hearing about our projects there; he’d talk about his kids, Sammy and Ronelle, and girlfriends and problems in the shelter, drugs and alcohol and stuff getting stolen and people getting beat up. Once in a while, he’d bring a friend. Jamal, a polite, lanky kid he introduced as the next welterweight champion of the world. Jamal was training hard and his coach had promised him the title. I don’t what happened, I don’t follow boxing.
Ron and his sons spent Thanksgiving and Christmas at my house with Jane and our teenage kids and a dozen or so friends. To watch him change a diaper was no different than watching him put a plant in the dirt, those powerful hands holding and moving that baby as though a bump or jar would damage him then carefully arranging the diaper before patting the sticky tabs into place and then a tug snap zip with the pjs, Ronelle giggling and squirming the whole time, Ron laughing with him. We gave Sammy Legos and he and Ron sat on the floor and made whatever it was, those big hands carefully selecting and squeezing and snapping the plastic bricks. Sammy was Ron’s ex-wife’s child and unrelated to Ron.
In the coming years, I introduced Ron to construction companies that gave him jobs before they fired him. I sold him an old Chevy work truck to get him to job sites; he never could pay me for that truck. Eventually he crashed the truck, he was driving back to St. Paul in a blizzard, back from a weekend with the boys in St. Cloud, seventy miles northwest. The truck was wrecked. He’d been sleeping in it in the parking lot of the shelter because of the theft and violence, the truck idling all night for heat.
While we were friends, Ron spent six months in the workhouse for B&E, he and another guy broke into a Verizon store; it was more of a smash and grab then a scripted movie heist. Security cameras caught their faces and the license number of the getaway car. It took a few hours to round them up, the loot was still in the backseat. He didn’t tell me about getting arrested and his time in the big house until he was out, he just disappeared and reappeared. Mental health problems, drug problems, legal problems, ex-wife problems, girlfriend problems, child support problems, debt collector problems, job problems, lost and stolen and broken cell phone problems, un-bankable, uninsurable, fights and thefts in the homeless shelter, crashing the truck, and all the rest, and for all the time I knew him, his big break was ever just over the horizon, get through today, tomorrow’s gonna be great.
Ron had a schizophrenic episode and had a knife and a white St. Paul policeman shot him and he bled out in the street with his head lolled back on the curb and the cop cam rolling. The local TV news covered the story for two or three days, it was clear, well-focused video that followed the action and allowed the pretty newscasters to deplore the violence. The cop was a hero. There was a dozen or so people at Ron’s funeral; a couple of people who worked for the funeral home hustled the rest of us for donations, they were white. An old black man, I don’t remember his relationship to Ron, advised me, “Don’t give them motherfuckers shit.” Ron’s new wife and widow, Missladybee Davis, was there with her five kids and her mother.
That Ron and I became friends was luck, more mine than his. He showed me that the world I live in, the tidy, white-man world of trust and camaraderie and easy correlations is not the real world or to the extent it is the real world it is a very partial and insular world. In the larger world, food, warmth and safety are luxuries. That was Ron’s world and he let me see it full-frontal. What he showed me was that duress inspires humanity; that his gentleness, generosity and optimism were products of who he was born and where he came from, not from schooling, a good book, a pampered upbringing, certainly not from having more than enough. To the contrary, he taught me that privilege obscures humanity, that the smelly and poorly dressed are not our threat; our threats wear cologne and Brooks Brothers. He taught me that beneath our wardrobes, we are all smelly and naked. A lot of that he taught me after he was killed.
* * * *
The Legacy Museum examines Ron’s history over the course of four centuries. It tells the story of the two million black people who died in ships crossing the Atlantic their bodies tossed overboard and continues on to connect the lynching, beating, rape, and separation and sale of families of our past with the segregation, mass incarceration, unequal law enforcement and brutality, and apathy of our day. it shows us who were and who we are, that flowery words about justice for all are just that, pretty words, fairy tales that for all of our history we’ve told ourselves to ease our sleep. It’s a terrible history and there are no words. I’m an old white man and I wandered through the long, long galleries of quotes and images and multimedia displays and shelves and shelves of thousands of canning jars filled with soil from lynching sites each with a name and a date with tears on my cheeks unable to meet the eyes of other visitors. And white visitors, tears on their cheeks, weren’t lifting their eyes to meet mine, either. They shared my shame. Black visitors had tears on their cheeks, too but it wasn’t shame in their eyes, their response seemed more nuanced, more complex, a mix of familiarity, rage and resignation that they shared in their glances amongst themselves and in their soft conversations. They didn’t look at me and I don’t blame them.
* * * *
That next night when I got back from the museum, Iz was in his chair, “How’s business?” I asked him.
“Slow.” He was smoking a joint and handed it to me. He did have good weed. “Wednesdays always slow, motherfuckers broke waiting to get paid on Friday, then come over here and sit in traffic in the parking lot waiting to buy shit for the weekend.”
“Cops fuck with you?”
“Mostly no. Long as white folks ain’t getting rolled or shot, cops in this town don’t give a shit. Except they’re looking to make their own score. Minnesota,” Iz said, pointing at the Harley. “Damn.”
“That museum’s in your face. I was there a couple hours today and had to leave, that was all I could take.”
Iz turned his head and stared straight in my face, “Motherfucker, black folks been taking that shit for hundreds of years. You spend two hours in an airconditioned house looking at pictures and you walk away because that’s all you could take? Centuries now, black people had all they could take, too. But they couldn’t walk away. And they sure as fuck didn’t have no fucking air-conditioning.
“Here’s the thing about that museum, it ain’t history. It ain’t even yesterday. That same shit you’re seeing on the walls there is going on right now, today. Same shit. You didn’t have to ride a motorcycle a thousand miles to see black people getting beat and killed by cops and scared-stupid white people; you can see that right at home in Minnesota. The thing that’s different between then and now is white folks quit doing your own lynching, ain’t charming to have your picture in the paper standing next to a dead n****r like it used to be. Now you hire cops to do your killing and send them to jail when they embarrass you.”
“You’ve done a lot of thinking about this shit.”
“You saying you’re surprised that a black man knows some history, read some shit. You thinking we don’t know what’s been done to us? I told you, I got the fucking library card.”
“I’m just down here to learn.”
“Learn? Learn what? Learn that your people whipped and raped and killed my people for centuries, that you bought and sold my people like cattle, like our families and kids and bodies didn’t fucking matter? Learn that black people built this country, made it what it is, and never got paid? That we didn’t get jobs or schooling or a vote? That we were only a little more than half a person, you didn’t learn that? There’s nothing new at that fucking museum. Where the fuck you been?” His voice was getting loud.
“I don’t want to argue.”
“That’s because you got no fucking argument, white man. You knew it all before you got here. You’ve known it your whole fucking life. Maybe you came down here for proof, some words and pictures and numbers, the bloody hand prints of your history. Or maybe you came down here to say you’d done your bit, that you’d seen it for yourself. Shit, all you did was spend money and time to ease up on your shame and take a motorcycle ride. The proof has been in front of you motherfuckers for hundreds of years and you’re looking for more?”
“I came down here because that history is my history,” I handed him the joint.
“Hang on to it.” A blue F-150 with rattle exhaust and a crumpled passenger-side front fender, white guy in a baseball hat at the wheel, pulled into one of the ADA spots and rolled down the window. I stood up and Iz reached up his hand and I pulled him to his feet and stepped around the corner so he could do his business.
After the pickup clunked into Reverse and clunked into Drive and rattled away, I stepped back into the shadow and handed him the joint and he kept talking, “You ain’t hearing me. You and your motorcycle and your house someplace that ain’t here and me standing on the curb selling dope to crackers and risking getting killed or going to Alabama jail every fucking day just so I got something to eat. That ain’t new. You don’t need a museum to see that. You just need to open your eyes. You’re not going to see something in those pictures and words that you don’t see standing in front of you. You’re looking at me right now and you don’t see me; I am it and you don’t see me.”
“I’m going to get something to eat.”
“That’s right, walk away, bitch.”
“I ain’t walking away, bitch. ”
He looked at me, his eyes squinted into thin lines and his lips pressed together so I could see the pulse in the scar on his face, and he reached for his cane like he was going to beat me with it and struggled to get out of his chair, he was nobody’s bitch.
“I’m walking over get a Big Mac. Want one?”
He grinned through his silver teeth and slumped back in his chair, “Quarter pounder, no cheese, bitch.”
When I got back with the clown bag, we sat in the dark shadow at the side of the motel and ate burgers. The little bags of fries had dumped over in the big bag. I set it between our chairs and our hands rubbed together reaching down and rustling for potatoes. They were hot enough to burn your fingers, greasy and gritty with salt.
“Fries are fucking awesome,” that was the weed talking.
Iz ignored me, “What’s different now you seen that fucking museum?”
“What do you mean what’s different?”
“What makes your motorcycle ride to Alabama worth your time?”
“I know more. I understand black history better.”
“Two hours this afternoon taught you the history of black America? Fuck. What are you planning to do with that new learning?”
“What do you mean, what am I planning to do with it?”
“Just what I said, all this time, all this money, to come down here and get you educated. What the fuck you going to do with it? You ain’t the first white man to come down here and get slapped hard by his history. What are you going to do? Vote? White people been voting for hundreds of years and I’m still selling dope. What the fuck are you going to do?”
I didn’t say anything for a while, “I don’t know that I thought it through, Iz.”
“Then think this through, I’ll be dead in a year. There’s nothing you or I can do about that. I’ll be shot by cops or some dude high on shit, or some motherfucker’ll cut me up with a switch knife and steal my product, or I’ll peddle some bad dope and some pissed-off prick will come looking for me, or maybe I’ll put some bad junk in my own veins. That’s the business. My story is not a Harry Potter story, I don’t have a wand and nobody’s coming to save me. But it’s a human story and it’s big, bigger than me, and I want it to be remembered. You’re a writer, write my story, write my fucking legacy. You owe me. That museum taught you that.”
* * * *
The difficulty in writing about The Legacy Museum is the writer’s complicity in the history it reveals, particularly white writers, particularly white male writers. The museum presents an American story that is unflattering and unfinished. It is who we were and who we are. Our lack of empathy in dominant culture, our lack of reason, our lack of ironic perspective, our lack of curiosity, our inability to step back and see that the opposing jaws of apathy and oppression are the vise crushing both our neighbors and ourselves; as we destroy the lives of those against whom we bring our violence and apathy, we destroy ourselves. We the oppressors are also our victims.
After my driver’s license was suspended, I started hanging out nights at the Pit & Paddock. The Pit was a 3.2 joint on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. It was deep and narrow with a black door, black walls, black ceiling, fluorescent lights hanging on chains, the lenses yellow with cigarette smoke, a worn and grimy checkerboard floor that was at one time maybe white and red, pinball machines on the left as you came in and further down the bar with red vinyl stools tucked under. On the right, a foosball table just inside the door then half-a-dozen red vinyl booths with strips of duct tape holding the vinyl together and then the juke box pounding out Joe Walsh, Doobies, Skynard, Airplane, Cream, CCR, Zeppelin, Sly, Janis and the rest, all stuffed into a flashing glass and chrome box, the arm shuffling through the vinyl 45s between songs cool to watch.
In the back there was a seven-foot pool table with beer-stained cloth that cost a quarter and a dime, and past that, a couple of bathrooms where drug deals and blow jobs transacted and occasionally somebody would take a leak. The guy who owned the Pit, Ethan, was from England and raced and wrecked Mini Coopers as a way to spend the money he made selling beer, pictures of the car, dark green with white stripes on the hood, numbers on the doors and big chrome driving lights in front of the grill, gravel spraying from the front tires on some dirt rally course hung on the walls, Ethan’s face, framed by his helmet, recognizable through the windshield, his eyes open and intense and focused on something beyond the camera. Ethan’s girlfriend, Iggy, was the bartender. Ethan wasn’t around much.
The Pit was a biker bar. In the summer, Harley shovels, pans and even some knuckles, along with the odd Norton or Triumph, would line the curb in front; in the winter, it was pickups and vans, a lot of vans, Fords, Chevys, Dodges. This was 1972 and even then “biker” was not a big paycheck occupation so the pickups and vans tended to vintage and rust. Iggy ran a tight ship, she didn’t have a bouncer and didn’t hesitate to ask for help putting a lousy drunk on the sidewalk or breaking up a fight, and the guys at the pool table would more or less oblige depending on the customer and the colors flying on their vest and who was doing the fighting. The cussing and shoving was mostly back by the pool table. I tended to stay up by the foosball table close to the door playing for beers and mostly winning and was left alone, pretty much. As for Iggy, I never saw anybody mess with her.
A friend of mine, Swede, would drive us down to the Pit in his Plymouth Fury, four doors, 383 V8, auto, rust coming through the floors and fenders, and we’d play foosball and drink beer. One night, Swede gets up to take a leak and bumps a guy taking a shot at the pool table. The guys were playing for money and Tiny, the guy taking the shot, had been losing for a while and when he missed his shot because of Swede, he stood up and swung his fist around and hit Swede in the side of his head and knocked him down and while he was on the floor kicked him hard in the ribs, he was wearing the beat up Corcoran jump boots he’d worn in the Army, called him “little motherfucker” while he was doing it. Swede, skinny and sixteen, same age as me, got up, took his leak and came back and played foosball the rest of the night and didn’t say a word about it. Tiny was big and muscly and drunk and standing there with his long beard and his biker vest and his wallet on a chain and swinging his pool cue around like ‘I’m here if you want some’. Swede for sure didn’t want any of that.
A week or two later, Swede’s looking for a parking spot for the Fury, it’s a cold spring night, still piles of snow here and there, and he points to a pickup and says, “That’s his fucking Dodge.” He finds a spot, grabs a magazine or catalog or something out of the back seat, I can see him in the street light, he looks around, unbuckles, squats and shits on the sidewalk next to Tiny’s truck. And then he takes the magazine, picks up his shit and smears it on both the door handles and the windshield. Then we went in the bar, played foosball, won some beers, and when we left, Tiny was still there playing pool, his girlfriend sitting at the bar chatting with Iggy, her fingers laced around a Hamm’s beer glass.
Hanging out at the Pit, you saw a lot of stories. Hot summer night, close to bar time, a woman staggered in blown out drunk, she was heavy set, short black hair, crooked teeth, short black dress, bra strap slipping off her shoulder. She was buying beer; some guy driving a Javelin had dropped her in front and was going around the block waiting for her to come out with the Schlitz. Leroy, good-looking guy, dark hair to his collar, droopy mustache, tattoo on his forearm in blue ink of a helicopter, the words “Viet Nam ’68 – ’70” inscribed in an arc above the Huey, “1/1 Cavalry Squadron” in an arc below, he started chatting her up at the bar. While Iggy was getting her beer, Leroy put his arm around her and in a couple of minutes he was whispering in her ear and she was leaning on him and whispering back and then he called out to Roach, who was standing by the pool table holding a beer, “Get your van.”
The front door was open and Leroy leaned against the jamb watching for her guy to drive past. When he did, when he slowed down and she didn’t come out, he accelerated around the corner for another lap. Once the Javelin turned the corner, Leroy stepped out and waved and Roach pulled up in his van and Leroy and the drunk woman staggered across the sidewalk. As they were going by me, Leroy shoved the bag of beer into my arms and I followed behind, stepping sideways between the bikes trying not to trip on a kickstand, then ducking in the side door of the van. Iggy was counting cash at the register.
Roach’s van was an orange Chevy half-ton, the rust holes in the rockers sprayed over with flat-red rattle can Rust-Oleum. There was a Tet ‘68 sticker on the bumper. Roach was part owner of a muffler shop and by the dome light, I could see the back of the van was stacked with mufflers in boxes; lengths of exhaust pipe clanked back and forth under our feet. I climbed into the passenger front seat and Leroy and the woman got cuddly on the bench seat in back. The van had a little six-cylinder engine that needed exhaust work, a three-on-the-tree transmission, and a Craig cassette deck stuffed into the steel dash where the radio used to be. We hadn’t pulled away from the bikes at the curb before the woman’s face was in Leroy’s lap, her head bobbing up and down as Lenny drove us past dark St. Paul houses on the 1:00 am streets.
Lenny drove us to a park on the river. The park closed at sundown, that’s what the sign said. There were no cars in the parking lot. We sat at a picnic table by the water and I put the bag of beer in the middle of the table. There was no moon but the night was bright with light from the stars and we could see each other as we drank her beer. The river was glassy smooth so that it reflected the individual stars, the terrible force of its currents hidden beneath its mirror surface.
After some minutes and some beer, the woman got up from the table and took Leroy by his elbow and led him close to the water. And in the light of the stars, we listened to their groans and curses and watched them fuck on the sand. When Leroy was done, he got up and buttoned his fly while she lay on her back staring at the sky with her feet pulled up to her naked butt. Roach fucked her then, he didn’t last long, and then it was my turn. I walked to where she lay on her back on the beach looking at the sky, she was covered with sand, her dress bunched between her waist and her breasts, her bra and underwear somewhere lost. She stank of cum, sweat, vomit and beer.
I sat next to her and she lay beside me not moving and still staring at the night sky. Leroy and Roach sitting at the table had finished the beer and were sharing a joint back and forth and telling war stories and ignoring us. After a while she said, “What was your branch?”
When I didn’t answer she said, “Army, Navy, Marine Corps?”
“I’m in high school,” I said, “eleventh grade this year.”
“You look just like Eddie when he went in, baby face, long, pretty hair. He only had to shave once a week.”
It was late and I was tired and the beer was making my thinking soggy, “Who’s Eddie?”
“My fiancé.”
“The guy driving the Javelin.”
“That was my brother. He’s trying to save me.”
She was quiet for a few seconds then she said, “Eddie was KIA. The army sent his stuff home,” she said it matter-of-factly like it was something she’d read in the Pioneer Press or heard on the radio, like it was somebody else’s news.
Her voice dropped into a snarl, “I want him, I want him back, I want him so I can’t sleep, so I can’t eat. All I can do is drink and fuck and try to make it stop. And it won’t stop. No matter how much I fuck. No matter how much I drink.”
Her snarl became a moan, a resonant hurt that went on and on. The raw force of it twisted her face into a tragic clown mask, mouth and red lips open wide against her pale skin, eyes huge and black reflecting the night sky, a river of tears flowing down her cheek into the sand. I took her hand and held it because I didn’t know what else to do and we sat there until she stopped moaning.
And when she did, she stood up and shoved her dress past her hips and it fell to the ground around her ankles and she stepped out of it and she was naked except for the dog tags hanging from a chain around her neck. She took my hand and led me to the water’s edge, the glistening stream in its tree-furred canal disappearing into the stars in both directions. When I stopped because I didn’t want to get my boots wet, she tugged my hand and I let her pull me in until the river was past my waist. The water was body temperature and had a faint, late-summer pee smell to it. I felt the tug of the current on my legs and stopped again. I wasn’t a good swimmer and my jeans and boots were soaked and heavy. She let go of my hand and backed away from me into the water until it reached her chest and she lay back and let the current take her, only her head and white breasts visible on the dark, star-specked river. As the current of the center channel took her, she accelerated away from me until her face and breasts were just tiny points of light, until she became one with the stars.
