by John Nichols
Of course, wherever no elaborate dwelling punctuated the drawn-and-quartered fields on the way home, a simple white tipi extended its lovely inverted cone of slender aspen pole-tips toward the smiling bourgeois sky. It had been hundreds of years since local Native Americans had last bedded down in these smoky domiciles. Hence, the kooks inhabiting the dozens of tipis along 240 between the plaza and Joe’s current lodgings were: a onetime Oklahoma DA turned jewelry czar, a potter with an NYU master’s in child psychology, a former stock analyst with Bache and Company, a reflexologist who used to be a teller in the San Diego branch of the Bank of America, an ex-presidential financial adviser (under Gerald Ford), a onetime speech writer for Billy Graham, two ex-Moonies, and a female industrial nutritionist turned born-again plumber, who also did sexual massages for a privileged few (and much hard cash).
Squat beehive-shaped adobe sweat lodges next to the tipis were kept going day and night.
Occasionally, Joe felt bewildered and disheartened by the relentless development. Pizzafication, urbanization, cutification! What was the point to domes made of bottles or beer cans, or to family rooms fabricated from five hundred old tires? It was all too pat, too self-indulgent. Everybody was fleeing urban jungles and mind-fucking occupations to create a new life and a simpler life. Instead, they were trampling down the vineyards where the grapes of tranquillity had been stored, boldly and idiotically polluting the landscape with aesthetically relevant bullshit, and in the process re-creating only a semicamouflaged image of the pernicious complexity they had hoped to escape.
Then again, Joe saw Chamisaville as his first real chance in life to create around himself and his little family a humane and compassionate ambience, something low-key, unexploitive, articulate, and (coincidentally) comfortable. A life with access to reason. Then Chamisaville could be a rainbow, a magic valley.
Joe beeped at Dr. Phil Horney and his wife, Gretchen, the head of Sköl Realty: she had arranged the deal with Eloy Irribarren. Phil had recently taken Joe off Tedral and put him on Aminodur; the Tedral had given him hot flashes, cold sweats, and fainting spots before his eyes. They (the Horneys) wore matching forest-green headbands, sunflower-yellow jogging suits, and white Adidas with slanted maroon stripes. Joe waved, they returned the salutation. Aloud, though not so they could have heard him, Joe said, “Someday, you turkeys, I’ll swerve and flatten an unsuspecting jogger, and I’m gonna run back and forth over the carcass until it’s just a mangled splash of plum purple or cobalt blue against the asphalt of this bumpy road.”
He was exhausted, and frightened. What had happened to Peter? How should he act with Heidi, what could he say? Confronted by this dilemma, did a man lie his head off, or tell the truth, hoping for mercy? Already, the whole town knew of his infidelity—how could he keep it from Heidi? And what about Nancy Ryan? Would she leave him alone? Perhaps all she had wanted was a one-night stand. Did he dare hope? Joe hated her, he hoped never to see her again. She had lured him into it against his will. Christ, such diabolically clever creatures! He was terrified of them all. Was Nancy capable of blackmail? Joe wished he were back in the bar last night with a chance to play it differently. Why hadn’t Peter gotten off that goddam bus? It was all his fault.
Out of nowhere a thing swelled up under his diaphragm, making him almost dizzy—a wave of pure, unadulterated lust for Nancy Ryan.
“Oh shit,” he moaned. “I’m just another cock, now, that went after just another cunt, now, in the screwing pool.”
Shame! Remorse! How come his sexual moves could be just as banal as everybody else’s erotic gropings? He was an insult to his own intelligence and sensibility. One greedy misstep, and he’d brought himself down to the level of a True Romance magazine, or, to coat it in a bit of intellectual sugar, a John Updike novel.
Yet suppose this Nancy Ryan affair opened the floodgates, releasing him from his puritanical hang-ups? Off he’d gallop through the valley’s Ready, Willing, and Able—forget the cynicism involved—pulchritude. Joe Miniver, Traveling Stud. “Yes ma’am, I certainly do make house calls.” He would cart his prick around in a fancy, velveteen-lined, fiber-glass carrying case, as if it were a pearl-inlaid custom-made, two-piece pool cue. Why not? His truck, like a plumber’s jalopy, would be full of his sexual accoutrements. Whips, chains, dildos, leather outfits, rubber scuba suits, tubs of Vaseline, sacks of scented condoms, jars of aphrodisiacs. A mini-fridge would keep the fresh seafood from spoiling: “Eat Oysters, Love Longer.” Every evening around five thirty he would open his eyes and spend twenty minutes stretching, yawning, and slithering erotically around on his satin sheets, waking up slooooowwwwwly, sensuuuuuoussssssly. Then he’d check in with his answering service to see who was lined up for that night. “Hello, Joe—this is Diana Clayman. Would you be free around two A.M.? I got a feeling I’m gonna need that great big motor-driven Roto-Rooter of yours.…”
Joe started writing another in a long line of farewell letters to Heidi. He was always in the car alone when the urge hit to speak them out loud. Eyes glazed, barely paying attention to the road, his heart aching—how come he so often felt crippled with emotion? Why did his assessment of his needs, ambitions, and goals in life change so often? One minute he was truly in love, in control, happy, on top of the situation. But sure as hell the moment he settled into a smug frame of mind, whoever minded such things yanked the rug out from under, and he got hit by a nearly suicidal rush of despair.
“Dear Heidi, I love you, you know that. You will always be the most special person in my life. After all you’re the mother of my children—” Uh, can that, Miss Pierson, she’d clobber me. It has a male chauvinist ring. Okay, from the top again—you ready? “Dear Heidi”—take two. “Fuck you, fuck women’s lib, fuck being a house-husband, fuck the whole goddam shmeer—I want to be a male chauvinist pig! I am a male chauvinist pig, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’m tired of the clothes you wear. When we first met you wore lipstick and mascara, miniskirts, garter belts and stockings and high-heeled slingbacks and transparent panties. Now all you ever wear are dungarees and sneakers and sloppy sweatshirts and you never wear rouge, you never wear perfume, you never wear lipstick. I’d give a million dollars, sometimes, just to hang out with a miniskirted, butt-wiggling little Kewpie doll again!”
Brilliant! Senility already at thirty-eight? “Erase all that, Miss Pierson, let’s start from scratch.”
Who exactly was Miss Pierson? And that really was Miss, not Ms., all you libbers out there, all you members of the Crypto-Lesbo-Commie-Whore-Fascist-Retaliation Society! Joe had never pictured her too closely. Call her just another mythical secretary who, coincidentally, wore tight fire-engine-red sweaters and had enormous jugs à la June “The Bosom” Wilkenson.
“Dear Heidi. I don’t know how to tell you this, but I did something awful. Actually, I don’t even know if it was awful or not. Probably it isn’t, in fact. Probably it’s just a routine thing that shouldn’t even raise a half of anybody’s hackles, except we are all caught up in a totally confusing system which doesn’t know its moral ass from an ethical hole in the ground.”
Too cute. Let’s try it again, Miss Pierson.
“Dear Heidi. I don’t know about you, but I know for a fact that I’m tired, I really am. I’m tired of all the chaos. I wonder where we are going together, and I can’t come up with any answers. We seem to have lost the thread. I’m so sick of raging kids, of a house that always looks like the atomic bomb hit it, of shot nerves and sleepless nights, of tension, silent hostility, moodiness, anger, bitching—”
Joe paused, thinking it over, wondering if he ought to dictate in a few tears on the face of this self-pitying cliché clown.
One more time, Miss Pierson: from the top.
“Dear Heidi. Actually, if you must know, I just drilled this cunt on the other side of town. And if you give me even one iota of lip about it, I’m gonna emigrate to Alaska, become a powderman on the pipeline, marry an Eskimo, move to one of those desolate little islands up there crawling
with foxes, and just hang out until I get my Berings Strait. Ha ha.”
Ha ha indeed.
Veering too speedily around a corner at the deserted and crumbling Ranchitos Cantina, Joe swerved to avoid striking two nasty little black-and-white dogs—Mimsy and Tuckums—that charged his bus as if they meant to dismember it piranha-fashion. A right turn at this juncture would have taken Joe to Eloy’s land; it lay three hundred yards along the hideously potholed road. Instead, he bore left, heading for his current digs (two miles farther south), trailing yaps, snarls, and growls like a string of wedding-day tin cans.
“Where will I live?” he wondered aloud, “if she throws me out?”
Even more gloomy to contemplate: Given a divorce, if the dope deal went down successfully, who would get the land, already retained in both their names? Would they draw straws? Would he have to sell it a week after risking his life to buy it in order to pay her off?
Enough! A hex on such vicissitudes! A simple human being (male) pokes the business end of his thing into another simple human being not his wife (but female), and the stock market shudders, thousands of dollars change hands, marriage counselors trade in their old automobiles for this year’s models, real-estate agents add another wing to their houses, group therapists nail their shutters closed and fly to Saint Croix, divorce lawyers plan Hawaiian vacations as soon as the lucrative proceedings are over, and the thousands of greenbacks to be earned by two upper-crust sophisticated honkies disappear in a puff of emotional and legal hysteria. And what about the future lives of two adorable, normal, middle-class brats originally destined for fame, fortune, and security? Suddenly, Michael’s cards are holding reform school, alcoholism, perhaps patricide with an ax, eleven years on death row, and finally—despite a last-minute conversion to born-again Christianity—the electric chair. Heather, lacking a father figure (or a mother figure, depending on who won in the divorce proceedings), is a pill popper and promiscuous by the age of eighteen, drops out of Sarah Lawrence, marries a Mafia bagman, loses him and becomes a high-priced call girl until her looks nose-dive, and eventually winds up as a lady bum wearing a grease-stained trenchcoat and stockings rolled down around her ankles, rifling trash baskets on Third Avenue, New York City, for other people’s rejected goodies, which she stores in plastic-coated Macy’s shopping bags.
Or maybe she would get off easy, at age seventeen, with a case of anorexia nervosa that would reduce her from 130 pounds to 63 pounds in six weeks.
“Help, help—sharks!”
* * *
JOE’S HOUSE—not his, actually, but rather Tribby Gordon’s Castle of Golden Fools—loomed on the horizon. In return for room and board, Joe and Heidi had, over the last two years, helped with various aspects of construction. The house itself defied coherence: it was a ponderous figment of Tribby’s whimsy, incorporating a dozen major materials, architectural styles, and protuberances that struck the eye, at first, as sheer anarchy. Tribby had designed and built the house largely by “playing it by ear.” Constructed a room at a time with whatever materials happened to be on hand, the house was like a three-dimensional crazy quilt. It seemed part Bavarian castle, part sharecropper shack, part Navajo hogan, part solar dome, part log cabin, and part frontier fort. It had started as a one-room barn. Now it had eighteen rooms, six chimneys, two greenhouses, one trombe wall, and a large green pyramid housing the master bedroom.
Everything, of course, was in a disarrayed state of “almost completion.” Windows had been studded into frames, but never puttied. Flaps of ninety-pound granular paper dangled over roof edges like the feathers of a queer molting bird, waiting to be trimmed. Walls made of adobe, and hung with chicken wire attached to nails, had waited two years so far for plaster. The forms had yet to be removed from one poured-mud flying buttress. Uneven viga butt-ends poking out from mud walls waited in vain to be trimmed to uniform and eye-pleasing extensions. Discarded lumber, wire, and rebar lay scattered among the weeds, rusty wheelbarrows, and inoperative cement mixers. A vast array of useless green hosing was frozen in silent writhes across the yard. Piles of beer cans, collected by Shanti Institute students, glittered destitutely, waiting to be bound into the six-pack blocks Tribby had used to construct several wings of his monstrosity. Dozens of birds nested under the overhangs, in little niches created by the turrets, gables, cupolas, eaves, and shoddy workmanship.
The Minivers occupied a second-story apartment consisting of a large living room, two bedrooms, and a kitchenette. Leading to their front door was an outdoor ladder which could, of course, be drawn up in case of attack. Atop their roof, underneath a green plastic corrugated awning Joe had erected, sat Michael’s drum set, (hopefully) rotting due to exposure.
Heather, at least, had shown interest in the guitar.
When neighbors accused Tribby of creating a monstrous eyesore, he explained that the house was “creative,” “functional,” “a work of art,” “a white elephant with sentimental value,” “the best he could do under the circumstances,” or “Chamisaville’s own San Simeon.” Ralph Kapansky, residing in a tipi upon the grounds, had a flair for pegging the monstrosity more accurately. He once described it as “an intergalactic shitheap.” Another time he called it “a masterpiece by Frank Lloyd Wrong.” In his lighter moments he suggested it was what happened when “California architecture fucked Victorian sensibility in disco heaven.”
Once, when Joe asked Tribby why he had built the enormous, garish thing in the first place, Tribby replied, “Because it wasn’t there.”
Fearful and trembling, Joe entered the driveway, coasting to a halt among a passel of vehicles that resembled the stage setting for a play about Hiroshima. Rimpoche danced around the truck, barking his hydrocephalic head off. Well, this is it, Joe thought: the jig is up. Inside that convoluted excuse for a dwelling, Heidi awaited him with a rolling pin and a thicket of divorce papers. Beside her, FBI agents, Treasury, Firearm, and Tobacco flunkies, state narcotics bruisers, and local law-enforcement personnel eagerly tuned up their lie detectors, subpoenas, and rubber truncheons. In their midst stood Peter Roth, manacled and in leg-irons, his eyes puffed shut, most of his teeth missing, blood crusted at his nostrils. “Who’s this bum?” Joe would growl. “Get him out of here. I never saw him before in my life.”
Despite his bluff, the FBI’s chief torturer grabbed him: another man clipped electrodes onto his testicles. “Heidi, do something!” Joe screamed. “Die, you male chauvinist swine!” she replied.
Unable to move, Joe sat tight. Everything he had worked for all his life was about to unravel; he couldn’t understand why he had allowed it to happen. What insane alter ego had goaded him into risking his personal existence as well as a life term in jail for selling dope? Even if, somehow, miracle of all hallowed miracles, they stumbled to a successful conclusion on the cocaine front, what good would the money do him? For two hours in the arms of another woman he had thrown away his children, his unbuilt house, his wife, his promising future.
Opening the door, he got out. Joe ignored Rimpoche: the dog barked, growled, groveled, whimpered, and bared his teeth, not knowing whether to kill Joe or slobber fawningly over his feet. Standing beside the bus for a moment, Joe thought he could hear the planet draw in a slow sad breath and hold it. The script called for a last look around before the warden yanked that lever.
Sunday morning, Lower Ranchitos, Chamisaville, USA. Oh, Dem Golden Rockies!
Cool spring sunshine glittered in cottonwood trees whose leaves were young, more silvery than green. Early butterflies puttered above young alfalfa plants and budding timothy. Faintly, in the distance, sounded church-bells. Far to the left, across dozens of small pastures, every one of which harbored a new house abuilding, the Midnight Mountains presided over the valley like a melancholy judge frowning upon the frenetic (and criminal) development below.
Slim little airplanes dotted the sky. Some were gliders, circling thoughtfully, plying the thermals. On Sundays, the Coyote Glider Club did their thing. Heidi took lesson
s from Gil Forrester, dreaming of the moment when she could drift between sentinels of unruffled cumulus froth all alone. Though an acrophobe himself, for three years Joe had wished to go aloft for an hour, just to have that macroscopic perspective, not to mention a permanent memory of silken buoyancy. But he hadn’t yet summoned enough nerve to risk everything on such an infantile whim.
Joe’s 1947 Chevy pickup, known as the Green Gorilla, caught his eye. He scuffled over and leaned contemplatively against the hood. Rimpoche gave up and crawled into shadows beneath Ralph’s 1953 Chevy two-door sedan. The warm metal of the Green Gorilla gave Joe succor. Every week, for the past two years, in the Chamisaville News classifieds, Joe’s ad—featuring that hideously decrepit (but heartwarming) vehicle—had appeared:
Need trash carted away, furniture moved, goodies transferred? Call for Joe Miniver and his Green Gorilla. We haul everything from soup to hay. 758-3989.
Joe loved that truck, and would miss it when he was just another number on the state’s dole, manufacturing license plates fourteen hours a day. It was no great shakes physically, but Joe had kept it running. He constantly stuffed oatmeal into the transmission, plugging up holes; he broke eggs into the radiator, stopping leaks; and he went through a bar of Ivory soap every week, sealing the flak wounds in his gas tank. The truck had a quart-of-oil-every-twenty-miles habit: when Joe accelerated on the highway, it laid down an impenetrable smoke screen. Other marvelous details included: a reverse-gear trigger on the stick shift that constantly malfunctioned, vacuum-operated windshield wipers run off the manifold which stopped dead whenever he accelerated or climbed a hill; five-dollar voltage regulators that self-destructed so often Joe kept a box of a half-dozen in reserve under the front seat; a gas gauge, oil-pressure gauge, battery-charge meter, odometer, and speedometer that didn’t work; a driverside window rusted open; and other byzantine quirks too numerous to mention.