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American Purgatorio

Page 14

by John Haskell


  Either way, it was a memorable experience, one I would savor and cherish, and as I was thinking about what a fine experience it was and how happy the experience was making me, a car drove up outside. Gilbert went to the door and there, standing at the door, was a white man, a ranger. He’d seen the Pulsar, he said, and now he was here to take me back—something about the native domiciles being off-limits, or private property, or National Park regulations. My car, however, was a unique situation, and so he’d make an exception and let me spend the night in my car. I nodded at Gilbert, who nodded back, and I got in the truck with the ranger. He dropped me off, took down my information, said he’d check back in the morning and that I could make the necessary arrangements then to have my car towed out of the park.

  The stars were out and then the clouds came in and I stood outside, leaning against the car. I drank from a bottle of water, ate cashews, unrolled my sleeping bag in the back seat, and although I tried to sleep, I was awake the whole night. My mind was filled with thought after thought, starting with the car. Why hadn’t I fixed the car before it was ruined? Why had I been such a cheapskate? And it wasn’t the car; it was my life. The dream I’d had for my life was getting smaller and smaller, shrinking and cracking, and at a certain point tears actually came to my eyes. I was crying for that dream, or the loss of that dream. I felt an actual physical pain, a heaviness in my body. And once I felt it, once the reality of the deadness of my dream started festering in me, sleep was impossible.

  5.

  I mentioned that I was an editor in New York, at a baby magazine. But I wasn’t always an editor. Growing up in Chicago I had, I don’t know what to call it, a dream, I guess. I wanted to be a playwright. I felt I needed an identity, as a person. I needed something I could be, some thing, and I thought a playwright, that was something I could be, I could live with that. If I was a playwright I could be happy, I thought, so I got together with some people and started a theater company. I did all the things I thought a playwright would do. I got an odd job. I wrote a play. I wrote this play and the play got a production and I thought, Okay, this is it, I will be the thing I want to be. This will make me what I want to be, I thought, and the theater mounted the play and the play was a failure, critically and artistically. I could see that. But I thought, No, you learn from your mistakes. Yes, you do, you learn, and I did, I learned from my mistakes and I knew, I knew what to do the next time. I wrote another play, and this play was much more original. It was something no one had ever seen before, and it was going to blow the walls away. I directed it, with a pornographic movie projected on a screen behind the actors, and I thought it would be good, really good, and I was excited about it. But the play was a failure. A different kind of failure, but a failure nonetheless. But no, I thought, you learn from your mistakes, yes, yes you do, and not only that but those obstacles make you stronger. A great playwright isn’t just born, you have to struggle and overcome the obstacles and be stronger, and I was, I was getting better. I knew what I’d been doing wrong. So I wrote another play, and I thought this play would be good, and it was, it was really good, it was from a true-life experience and it really was good and this play won a prize. So the confidence I had in myself was confirmed, by an outside source, and yes, I thought, I’m on my way to being the thing I want to be. I’ll be happy now. And that’s great, and the play won another prize. I was flown to New York and I thought, Okay, here we go, and I felt as if the world … here it is, and I went to New York and the New York producers looked at it and it wasn’t quite right for them, they said. But that was okay because a theater was planning a Chicago production, and I thought, That’s good, that’s better, start small, start small and then just go forward, conquer the world, and the theater put on the show and no one came and the show lost a lot of money. The theater company went bankrupt, and I didn’t know what to do. I began to think, Something is not right here, obviously, and I took some time off and I discovered what it was, what it was I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t being myself. I was trying to do something else, and that’s it, I thought, I will write a play that is who I am, about people and the things between people, and the society, and the structure of that society. And I wrote this play that I thought was good, brilliant even, and it had a reading and it was terrible. It was. I was cringing at my own words. And so I didn’t know. I just didn’t know. And I began to think that maybe the dream was not the right dream. Maybe I had the wrong dream. But I didn’t want to say that, I didn’t want to admit defeat. I was strong. I could persevere. And I was walking along, in New York, on Wooster Street, it was Wooster Street because the sidewalk was bumpy and I had to keep my eyes down so as not to trip, and I was walking along, and all of a sudden I felt it snap. It snapped. The dream. The dream died. And I let it die. It didn’t feel that bad. In fact it felt good. It felt like what it must feel like, or what I imagined it must feel like, when a dream comes true.

  6.

  In the morning the ranger knocked on my window. He gave me a ride to the ranger station where I called the towing service. As I waited for the tow truck, I wandered around the exhibits and dioramas, reading about desert plants. As I sat on the toilet in the Park Service headquarters I realized I hadn’t thought about Anne for almost a day, and thinking that, I remembered how she used to arch her feet when she sat on the toilet.

  When the tow truck came I watched the man hook the Pulsar to a chain and winch it onto the truckbed. I got in the cab and we drove off across the undulating flatness of the desert, punctuated here and there by masses of less eroded sandstone in the otherwise eroded expanse. There were ruins along the road but I wasn’t paying all that much attention. I was worried about the bill. The driver, the son of the tow truck owner, talked about timing belts and said there was a fifty-fifty chance of piston damage.

  We pulled into the Sinagua Trading Post, a curio shop and towing service with a junkyard in the back. It was run by a man named Cecil, an old Arizona leatherneck—literally a man with a leatherlike neck—who told me my car was junk. He said he’d fix it if I wanted him to, but there was a fifty-fifty chance of valve damage. He said he’d buy the car and offered me fifty dollars, which just about covered the tow.

  I wanted more than that. This was my life and I didn’t want to give it away, which is what the man, essentially, was asking. I was not in a good negotiating position, leverage-wise, but I didn’t want to let go. I’d bought the car and had invested the car with my dreams. Money too, but mainly dreams. I’d invested that small, powerless, uncomfortable car with my life, so it wasn’t that easy to just let go, to just say take it, to just walk away from what had been my self.

  When we dream of cars and driving in cars, they say we’re dreaming, partly, about our selves, the things that move us through the world. And at first Cecil seemed to recognize this; he was polite and even compassionate, but he was also businesslike. He added up the hours replacing a timing belt, and parts. Plus the tow. Plus the fact that the car wasn’t worth that much from the get-go. And then he gave me time to think. Which I did, outside the store, on a bench in the shade, looking at the hills, watching cars pass on the road. Slowly I came to a realization that the era of the car—and me in the car—was over. My car was gone, and being gone it was one less thing to stuff my life with.

  So I sold the car. In the process of selling it, what with papers of transfer and registration fees, I ended up having to pay Cecil (with my credit card) about fifty dollars, but it was worth it. I felt a lightness. I’d lost this thing which had meant so much to me and now, without it, I felt a weight had been lifted. Instead of feeling the loss I thought I would feel, I felt renewed.

  I took the cactus out of the car, carried it to a suitable location in the desert sand, dug a shallow hole with my fingers, and planted it. I left the antique binoculars in the glove compartment, and I took out of the car my box of books and the envelope of photographs, including the one which had fallen off the dashboard. I took my laptop computer, the plastic sack of cassette t
apes, the mandolin, a backpack filled with my clothes and sleeping bag, and a small red shoulder bag. I stood in the sun, in front of the building’s Fort Apache architectural façade, and once again I was waiting. This time for a ride into town where I would catch a bus, somewhere.

  After a while of waiting, a man in a large mobile home who’d stopped at the trading post gave me a ride. He was a retiree who told me that “Anasazi” was no longer a correct term for the ancient people who lived there. He said that “Anasazi” meant “enemy” in Navajo, and that the Hopi, who also lived in the area, naturally thought the word was an incorrect description. People had lived with the word for a long time, but now, according to the man, quoting a Visitor Center brochure, they were changing it.

  The man let me off at a main intersection in the northern part of Flagstaff, near the railroad depot. I was going to do what people do in the movies, take the first train out of town, but a railroad employee behind a booth told me no train was leaving anywhere until the next day, and since it was already getting into the afternoon, I started walking to one of the bars the man recommended, walking with my box of books in my arms, the backpack and haversack and mandolin on my shoulders, and the bag of cassettes in my fingers, until my fingers gave out, then stopping, setting down the load, resting, then walking some and then resting, then walking and resting, and I carried my possessions into an older, seedier quarter where I happened to see the El Rancho Grande, a bar I’d noticed the day before. It was an old bar, an old-style bar, almost empty, and I went to the bar and took the money I had left and had a beer. I was leaning against the bar in a typical way when an older woman who looked a little ragged took the stool next to me, said “Hi,” and then asked me to buy her a drink. Which I did. She introduced herself as Conchita, which was fine, but then from somewhere in the shadows of the bar another woman, a younger woman, joined me on the other side. This was Conchita’s niece, named Cheyenne, and she also wanted a drink.

  I said I really didn’t have enough money, which was mostly true, but I also wanted to start on my new life and I wasn’t sure this was it. I wanted to be rid of unnecessary appurtenances, but money was not, at this point, unnecessary. I said I couldn’t buy them a drink but I offered to go in on a pitcher of beer, but by then they were already kneeling on the floor, examining the plastic bag filled with cassette tapes.

  I offered them my books. I said, “Check out some of these,” but they were too busy checking out the tapes. I’d spent years recording the songs on those tapes but I was ready to let them go. My new friends weren’t impressed with my taste in music but they wanted the tapes, and were reaching into the plastic sack, indiscriminately taking every tape that touched their hands, not that they intended to listen to them, but because these things existed. I told them to take the whole bag, which they did, too far gone, or too lost in their own wanting, to notice when I left.

  Although my load was somewhat lighter, I still had the other articles of my life, and I carried these up the street to a coffee shop. The train depot worker had mentioned a “hangout” place, and this was it. An imitation New York beatnik coffeehouse. I noted the college students sitting at various secondhand tables, and I was going to order something warm and comforting, but realized that I was extremely low on money. So I just sat at the wooden bar. Someone sat down next to me, a student probably, and this person started talking to me. She looked like a student and I talked to her, and oddly, I didn’t want to sleep with her, which would have also meant a place to stay. Instead, I asked her if she liked to read books.

  She said she did and I showed her the ones in my box and she picked out a couple that interested her. I pointed out the mandolin case and she opened it, took out the instrument, and although she said she couldn’t play, she held it as if she was about to play. I told her it was my father’s mandolin and that I couldn’t play it.

  “You can have it,” I said, but she said she didn’t need it. “I would like you to have it,” I said, and she took it and thanked me. She held it flat in her arms. I showed her the computer in my backpack. “Are you kidding?” she said. “It’s old,” I said, and I set it on top of the mandolin case. She stood there. “I don’t know,” she said, and I told her, “I’m not using it anymore.”

  I wanted to give away the ache in my heart, and I was hoping that if I unburdened myself of my possessions the ache would go away. She agreed to take the computer and the mandolin, and I ended up leaving the box of books on the floor, in front of a glass display of muffins and scones.

  She led me to a table where her friends were sitting. She had me take a seat and offered me a cigarette from one of the packs on the table. A half dozen people were sitting around the table, talking about a potato gun someone had made that shot potatoes into the air, and they were laughing about this, and all the time the talk was going on I could hear them, and I could see them, but a veil was placed between me and them. It seemed. I was in the circle, at the table, but at the same time I was removed from the circle. I was receding even as they spoke to me. Even as I answered their questions and commented and laughed, I was fading, and I could feel myself fade, and I didn’t like it. Partly I did like it. Partly, I felt serene in this state. Serene and numb.

  But I was only numb and serene on the outside. Inside, in with my organs of memory, I was in another state, and it was in this state that I thought about what had happened at the gas station in New Jersey. The people at the table were talking away, happy and convivial, and it wasn’t that I wanted to think about a time in the past. I wanted to be done with the past, but I could hear the dark car and the brakes of the dark car right before it collided with our little maroon car.

  Anne had stopped to pick me up from the convenience store entrance. I was just getting into our car, just opening the door, and that’s when I heard the brakes, and in a split second I looked up, saw the outline of darkness. And I felt the impact. Anne was hurt. They had collided with her side of the car and I was all right but Anne was knocked forward into the window and the steering column and she wasn’t speaking. She was unconscious. The dark car sped off and I tried to look at the license plates but I was more concerned with Anne. I went to her, held her head in my hands, and something was wrong. I told someone to call an ambulance and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to slap her and there was no doctor. I asked for a doctor but it was just the gas attendants and they didn’t know anything. No one knew anything and I didn’t either. She was dying. I didn’t know. What it meant. She was breathing. I felt a pulse but I couldn’t wake her up. When finally the ambulance came I was yelling at them, why it took so long, and they didn’t want me in the back. I wanted to be in the back with Anne but they wouldn’t let me and so I had to find them later, had to find the hospital, they took her to a hospital in New Jersey. I didn’t know New Jersey. I knew Mount Sinai but that wasn’t in New Jersey and they told me which one but I didn’t know where it was and the car wasn’t working and I wanted to be with Anne. I wanted to be with Anne. I kept telling them that I wanted to be with my wife.

  7.

  There I was, walking through the night, but even with my lighter load, the feeling of lightness had slipped away. Carrying only my small backpack, containing everything that was mine, I walked through the night, walking south, down the nearest road, not because I wanted to go in that direction, but because that was the road I was already on. I felt I couldn’t stop moving, that I had to keep moving. I felt that if I didn’t keep moving I’d fall, like a child on a bicycle.

  I was walking past gas stations and fast-food outlets, walking and turning and putting out my thumb, when a car passed. And the cars did pass, and they didn’t stop, and after a while I found myself walking through a temporary city, a temporary-looking city, built with trailers and aluminum siding, and the parking lots weren’t paved. There were bars and stores and trucks parked at these establishments but no sense of solidity. I walked into a go-go nightclub to see if I could find someone going my way and maybe get a dri
nk of water. I wanted to save my money and since just to sit in a chair cost money I walked back out into the night and the temporary town gave way to cleared land, newly plowed and leveled earth, drained of color and ready for development, ready for money to be made. I walked past irrigation ditches and rows of trees and then, like a nomad coming to a palm oasis, I came to an area of palm trees. Palm trees and green grass. Even in the night I could see it was green. The houses weren’t houses exactly, but they were meant to be lived in. They were all model homes, extremely suburban model townhomes, made to look like chalets, and the streets were winding, not because they had to be, but because it was someone’s vision. This was a manufactured town. A faux town. It was also deserted, which was good for me because now I could sleep. I found an area of sand, a children’s play area near some green grass, and because I wanted to stay dry, I lay in the sand, away from the sprinklers that seemed to go on at irregular intervals. I lay in the sand waiting to fall into a deep deep sleep because soon it would be morning.

  And then it was morning.

  I left the children’s playground before the security guards would make their rounds, and continued walking. I was headed in a definite direction. I needed a direction and I had it. And this feeling of direction I had was confirmed, I thought, when I walked to the highway and the first vehicle driving along the road, or almost the first vehicle, a truck with a Mexican driver, gave me a ride to Phoenix, Arizona.

  Phoenix was named after a place named after a bird that rises from the ashes, and I found a quiet corner at a Winchell’s coffee shop, where I sat over coffee near a group of old men, the old men of Phoenix, who were talking about dead friends and dying friends, and I sat there, blending in with the bright unobtrusive surroundings.

 

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