by Paul Neuhaus
Kumbaya, Space Hippie
Paul Neuhaus
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”—Mark Twain
Prologue
Odysseus’ adventure amongst the lotus-eaters occurred early in his journey from Troy to Ithaca. It happened before the great hero met the cyclops, or evaded the sirens, or sailed between Scylla and Charybdis, or spent seven years in erotic thrall to the witch Circe. Thus, the story is not as widely told.
The lotus-eaters—or lotophagi as they are also known—lived on an island isolated from the main trade routes. This island grew the lotus plant in abundance, and the fruit of that plant was the cornerstone of the lotophagi diet. The fruit contained a powerful narcotic, and the island’s residents spent much of their time in a lethargy so deep it affected both the body and mind. Indeed, the lotophagi inhabited the world of dreams more than in the workaday realm of common folk.
When Odysseus and his men anchored at the island to gather provisions, the lotophagi greeted them and offered them sustenance. But it was not entirely kindness that drove them. Like religious zealots, they were eager to spread the influence of the lotus plant. They believed that Man, under the influence of their sacred fruit, was a more docile creature incapable of making war upon his neighbor. The bitter toll of the Trojan conflict bolstered their philosophy. Odysseus and his men accepted the hospitality of the islanders, unaware it would cost them many days.
After a week, clever Odysseus awoke from a hazy dream of revelry and good fellowship. His head ached, and he could not recall his experiences of the preceding days. Knowing the fruit had distracted him from his purpose, he crawled off into the underbrush to vomit as many times as his weakened body would allow. When he left ruined Troy, he had but one aim: to return to his wife and his son in Ithaca. He knew he would never achieve that aim while under the spell of the lotus. Worse, he knew that, in time, he would stop caring.
As quietly as he could, Odysseus returned to the village. In the common area he’d just abandoned, he found his men; the crew of his ship. Without them, he knew he could not complete his journey home. But that was not the only thing driving him. These men were also his comrades. He knew them, and he knew their families. He would not abandon them to oblivion.
The great strategist withdrew a brand from the still-burning fire. Then, one at a time, he applied the cruel heat to his sailors, marking them on their extremities. Each man cried out and cursed their leader, but each man also became instantly sober. In time, Odysseus and his full cohort, tip-toed out of the village, leaving the lotophagi to their dreams. Once they were aboard ship and raising anchor, Eurylochus, a sometimes-insolent member of the crew said to Odysseus, “Why couldn’t you leave me there? For the first time since I left Greece, I knew true happiness.”
The captain glowered at the boy. His head hurt, and his empty stomach had just begun aching. “Yes, but you were a fucking waste case. Now shut up and make me a sandwich.”
1
Dora
I was drunk. I was very, very drunk. Sound wove in and out of my head in ribbons and my balance was off. I was laughing, and I forgot why. Donatella Padovano was looking at me in a way I couldn’t define. Was she judging me? Probably. Was she having a good time? No. But I was too far gone. I wasn’t in touch with my empathy. If I dug deep enough, I’m sure I could’ve found it, but that would’ve required a swim down to where my better angels were pickling themselves. I decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I heard myself saying. I was pulling her along, not by her hand, but by her fingertips. She didn’t want to come, and she resisted my tugging. “You have to see this. It’s amazing.”
Dona didn’t care about the automated fortune teller booth. She wasn’t American, so she wasn’t as enticed by the fact the fortune teller robot wasn’t a gypsy but rather a plastic, light-up Richard Nixon. (Hell, she wasn’t even alive when Nixon resigned.)
The beautiful Italian dug in her heels and pulled back at me. “No. I don’t want to do that. I want to sit down. I want to talk to you. I told you I wanted to go someplace quiet, so we could hear each other. This place is not quiet.”
She was right about that. It was Saturday night and Tricky Dick’s in Long Beach was bumping. Johnny Cash played over the P.A., and the thick crowd filled the space with half-intelligible murmurings. I let go of Dona’s fingers and she fell on her ass. That’s what she gets for pulling in the opposite direction. She gave me a look of pure venom and tramped back to our booth without comment. Whatever. I wanted a fortune and a fortune I would have. As I dug in my pockets for a quarter, I saw Todd, the barkeep and owner giving me the stink-eye. He hadn’t missed Dona’s fall. As if his disapproving glare wasn’t enough, he added a shame-shame-shame gesture, rubbing one pointer finger over the other. I gave him a dismissive wave and dropped a coin into the machine. The last time I’d been to the bar and indulged in Nixon’s prognostications, I’d gotten an uber-specific reading that’d curled my toes. I was hoping for the same thing again. Instead, I got a dose of judgement. The little white card read, “You’re becoming a burden to yourself and others.” I had to read it twice to grasp its gist. It made me angry. “Oh, yeah?” I said to the plastic former president. “You’re not exactly a role model yourself, Milhous.” I slammed the glass with the butt of my palm and the machine rocked back and forth.
This time, Todd gave a high-pitched whistle. He got my attention as well as the attention of every patron in a twenty-foot radius. “Yo, Dora! I’m trying to run a laid-back place here. Hands off the decor.”
I nodded to him, raising both of my hands and waving them in front of me in a gesture of, “Alright, alright. My bad, my bad.” I turned and wove through the crowd back to the booth Dona and I’d staked out when we’d arrived. Dona was sitting there with her arms folded across her ample breasts. “What?” I said, off her furrowed brow and narrowed eyes.
“I’m going to have a bruise on my bottom,” Padovano said.
I grinned at her and burped. “Do you need me to kiss it and make it better?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t trust you right now. You’re drunk and you’re acting mean and crazy. I think you might bite my heinie.”
That struck me funny. Even as I laughed, I took a sip of beer and the laughter made bubbles in the mug. That struck me even funnier, so I made more bubbles with my mouth. Soon, I had a good head of foam. “You do have a savory ass,” I said, over the rim of my beverage container.
“I don’t want to talk about savory asses,” she replied, unfolding her arms and putting her hands on the table. “That’s not why I invited you to go out.”
“You invited me to go out? I thought I invited you to go out.”
“No, you’re not inviting anyone out, remember? You’re not leaving your house. You’re not using your telephone. You’re smoking the weed.”
For some reason I flipped her a salute. “That’s true. I am smoking the weed. The ‘kind bud’, that’s what they call it. Do you know why they call it that?”
She sighed. “Why?”
“I’m asking. I have no idea.”
Dona did something smart then. She slid her hands across the table and removed my hands from my mug. She not only held onto them, she dug her nails in just enough to hold my attention. “Here is a reminder,” she said. “I asked you to come out. I asked you to find a quiet place where we could talk. I told you we were going to talk, and that we were not going to party. You said you understood. When I picked you up, you’d already been drinking. When I asked you where we should go, you directed me here. This place is not only not quiet, it is the opposite of quiet. I tried to talk to you. More than once. You kept ordering more and
more alcohol. You kept changing the subject. Do you know that what you’re doing is very disrespectful to me? If I say I want to go out with you and I want to talk to you, you should honor my request and not do something else. Something that is harmful to you and mean to me.”
Dona and I had seen one another off and on for years. Our relationship was almost entirely physical, so her lecture caught me off-guard—which is amazing since, in order to catch me off-guard, it needed to pass through a thick fog of contrariness and booze. My response was not everything it could’ve been. “Fuck’re you talking about?” I said.
Padovano dug her nails in deeper. “Do you remember when you came to me and you said you wanted a disguise and a car?”
I nodded.
“And you said that you’d been hiding in your house and you had gotten fat?”
I didn’t want to talk about getting fat. I nodded, but with less enthusiasm.
“I know that mostly we just do crazy things together and lick each other’s gnocca, but I was still worried about you. You—or at least the you I knew from before the fatness—was not the kind of person who should be hiding away. Not with so much life inside of you. I think, if you have a lot of life in you and you share it, other people get more life. It’s like free life.”
I gotta be honest: I was barely firing on one cylinder, let alone all of them. I lost the thread. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, grinning at her. “You’re like a pretty puppet going, ‘Bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh’. Make sense, pretty puppet! Make sense!”
Padovano was sensitive about her English so I touched a nerve. I touched a nerve like I intended to. She pulled her hands away and folded her arms over her chest again. “You are just being mean. Do you know what my father says about mean people?”
“Ooo, I know this one!” I said. Then I put on the stereotypical voice of Mario, the famous video game plumber. “‘Mama mia! That’s a spicy meatball!’”
Dona picked up her drink and tried to throw it in my face. Her glass was empty. She reached for my mug, but I was too fast for her. I grabbed it with both hands and pulled it toward me. Her face had gone red like a tomato. Which looked weird with all the copper-colored hair surrounding it. “Oh! You are terrible! You are like an infant! What is wrong with you? Where is the girl I know?!”
Right then, two cowboys with the worst timing in the history of cowboys bellied-up to our table. The taller of the two said, “Heya, ladies. We’ve been looking at you. And we like what we see. Hell, you’re the two best-looking women in the whole damn place. You wanna dance?”
Dona spun on them, redirecting her anger in their direction. I swear, as she yelled at them, her accent grew thicker. I half-expected her to lapse into Italian. “No, we don’t want to dance with you! Do you not have eyes? You do have eyes! I see them there. They’re on your faces! Since you have them, maybe you should use them! We are fighting! We are angry! Why would you want to get in the middle of that?! Why would you not leave us alone?”
Not only did these two cowboys have bad timing, they weren’t good at reading social cues either. Actually, scratch that: We’re not even talking social cues. Dona pretty much told them to go away, and they found it cute. Tall Grinning Cowboy turned to Short Grinning Cowboy. “Looks like somebody’s got their back up,” he said. He looked down at Dona. “Come on, lil’ girl, don’t put bad vibes in the air. Why don’t you let me cheer you up? My buddy’n me got just the thing to cheer you up…”
I looked over at Padovano. I put my upright hand next to my mouth and leaned toward her like I was sharing a secret. “I know English isn’t your first language, so I’m gonna help you… When he says they’ve got just the thing to cheer us up, he means their cocks.”
Laser beams practically shot out her eyes when her head snapped toward me. “I know what he means, and I don’t want anything to do with their smelly old cocks.”
Tall Grinning Cowboy took offense. “Hey, I’ll have you know I got the best-smelling cock in the place. A little soap and water, a little Axe Body Spray. It ain’t exactly rocket science.”
I looked up at him apologetically. “I’m sure your cock smells just fine,” I said. “Don’t take it personally. My friend here orders the Filet o’ Fish rather than the Quarter Pounder, if you catch my drift.”
The two cowboys nodded and the short one started to say something. I never found out what it was. Under the table, Dona kicked me square in the pussy. It hurt like a motherfucker. Not having testicles, I can’t make a direct comparison between a shot to the hoo-hah versus a shot to the jimmies. Take my word for it, though: a shot to the hoo-hah is no Sunday picnic. I turned bright red and doubled over. My date for the evening gathered her purse and tramped toward the exit. She practically had a thundercloud over her head like in the cartoons.
The cowboys watched her go. “Bit temperamental, ain’t she?” the short one said.
“What makes you say that?” I replied, still wheezing.
After Dona left, I realized I had a problem. Padovano drove us down to Long Beach, and I didn’t have a ride back. I also didn’t have a cellphone, so I couldn’t do Uber or any of that fancy shit. A cab ride back would cost a pretty penny, so I improvised. I strung together a series of rides from horny men. First, I hung out with the cowboys for a while (they weren’t so bad once you got to know them), then I had them take me to another bar a few miles north. In that way, and with a series of guys I’d only just met, I barhopped up the coast. Each bar was a new, wonderful experience, and, since I wasn’t in a big hurry, I enjoyed myself. Getting to know the weirdos at every stop then bumming a ride to the next joint. In retrospect, I probably spent about as much on booze as I would’ve spent on a cab, but that wasn’t the point. By the third bar, I’d forgotten all about Dona and her Italian passions. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Italians, but they’re Mediterraneans just like the Greeks. Hardwired for emotionality. Extreme, even. I wasn’t mad at Dona—not even for abandoning me—but I also couldn’t remember half of what she’d said. Something about caring and sharing, I think.
Somewhere in my reptile brain, I did remember I had an appointment at nine A.M. Amanda Venables wanted to have coffee and talk some girl talk. No doubt about the rigors of being queen of the Underworld and being pseudo-married to a goofball. Although I wasn’t particularly keen on having that conversation, I used that coffee date as my deadline. If I could get back to Malibu in time for that, I’d get to say, “What a good girl am I!”.
Along the way, I did mushrooms with two guys from Possum Grape, Arkansas (which is a real place, I kid you not). I also met a woman who lost her right tit in an industrial accident (she wouldn’t elaborate). Oh, and I talked to a guy who had someone else’s face tattooed over his own. Not anyone famous, just this other guy he knew. Never let it be said that getting out on a Saturday night doesn’t have its rewards. By the time I got back to the trailer, I felt like I’d been everywhere and seen it all.
My final ride dropped me in the parking lot of the Tonga Lei Lounge just as the sun was coming up. I thanked the shy Mexican man who’d been my last chauffeur and walked across the pavement between the silent restaurant and my long aluminum home.
I wasn’t alone.
There were two wooden steps leading from the ground to my trailer door. Tiresias was on the top step banging on my door. In his right hand he held a briefcase. Well, not a briefcase, really. It was way longer on the sides than a briefcase. Imagine a briefcase designed to carry an oar. “She’s not home, you crazy old bastard!” I said to him. I immediately regretted my own loudness.
Ty turned and looked down at me with his all-white eyes—just like the teacher guy from the old Kung Fu TV series. “Dora?” he said.
“Who else? Do you have any idea what time it is? It’s like six in the morning.”
“No, I don’t know what time it is. I’m blind. Day and night are the same to me.”
I stopped a couple of steps away from the trailer. “Don’t they make specia
l watches for you fuckers? Like talking watches? Or maybe you could hire a neighbor kid to follow you around and tell you what time it is.”
He furrowed his brow. “Do I look like Nelson Rockefeller to you?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know what Nelson Rockefeller looks like.”
“I’m told he was an average-looking white guy. Anyway, he’s dead so he doesn’t look like anything now. Which gives me the advantage. But I didn’t come here to talk about Nelson Rockefeller.”
I brushed past him. “Disappointing,” I said.
As I stood next to him, unlocking the door, he said, “You stink.”
We both went in. “As in scent or personality?”
“Scent. The jury’s still out on personality.”
Once the old man was inside, Hope said hello to him from the desk. After he returned the greeting, he said to me, “Wait, you weren’t carrying Hope outside, were you? I mean you didn’t just bring her in and set her down…”
Hope sighed. “No, I’ve been here all night. Alone.”
I shook my finger at the clay jug and the disembodied voice from inside it. “Don’t be such a baby. Do you know what a buzzkill it is to carry a pithos on a bar-crawl?”
Ty grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me to face him. “Pandora. Didn’t you have Hope stolen once already? It wasn’t even that long ago. You can’t leave someone as valuable—and dangerous—as she is just lying around. It’s not wise.”
“Thank you,” Hope said. If she’d been visible, she would’ve turned to me and given me an I-told-you-so glare.
I plopped down on the couch. A twinge in my nether regions reminded me of the pussy kick I’d taken the night before. “What’s the big deal? She’s here, isn’t she? Things’ve been quiet. She’s not in any danger.”