by Ken O'Steen
Even if I hadn’t been loaded, even if the weather hadn’t been slightly poor, I don’t believe anyone would have found me complaining about having to slurp vodka out of Bob’s rusty, tin measuring cup. That’s the kind of trouper I was. Lila was proceeding with relative moderation. I, on the other hand, had smoked such a quantity of Bob’s Chronic, that by the middle of the afternoon I long since had reverted to my traditional way of talking to myself when critically zonked, in other words, addressing myself as Ollie of Laurel and Hardy. There was no change whatsoever in Bob, nothing to distinguish his activity then and there, from any other time and place.
Bob’s old-school music was rattling the house worse than the wind. He was practically deaf, and Lila and I liked it loud to begin with, so the decibels had their way with the joint. Lila had discovered in the Bob archives one of those paddles with a ball that’s attached by an elastic string; and she slapped the ball on the paddle very precisely to the beat of a tune from Shuggie Otis’s, “Inspiration Information.”
By four in the afternoon, I had smoked so much stinkweed I was hungry enough to eat my way through the center of the Earth to China. Chef’s duties were out of the question for me since I literally could not have found my way into the kitchen. The others were hungry too, so they did KP while I listened to an Arthur Lee and Love album Bob put on. As my right leg, crossed over my left one, jimmied up and down like a metronome in the throes of Tourettes, keeping time to the music, Bob could be heard in the kitchen amid the clang of the pots and silverware, in a true demonstration of the stoner-savant in action, croaking the lyrics to, “My Little Red Book: “I just got out my little red book/ The minute that you said goodbye. I thumbed right through my little red book/ I wasn't gonna sit and cry.”
When this gonzo prepared repast came out of the kitchen, there were three big plates of baked beans Lila had cooked in the microwave. Bob, following right behind her brought a stack of wieners he had fried crispy black in a skillet, stabbing them with a fork, and dropping them onto the plates of beans. We ate it with such happy violence, the sound of Emily Post rolling over in her tomb drowned the noise of the storm.
After the meal, sated but not sobered, we sprawled all over the furniture, Bob in “the chair” of course, all of us yowling along with Sugarcane Harris, and after that the Zombies. It was somewhere around this time the remark about luck the neighbor had made on the beach the day before started working at me. I didn’t know why. For some reason, I started to think…about luck. There was something especially deflating about reflecting on the subject of luck. I’d had to endure some of the bad stuff, I thought, in a few important areas. On the other hand, all in all, I’d had an enormous preponderance of the good stuff, extremely good, in a few significant areas, too. For some inexplicable reason evaluating which kind of luck, that in my case had been the preponderant kind, analyzing its lasting effects, and putting all of it into perspective occurred to me as a thing I ought to do. So, in that state of profound dissoluteness I tried to do as much, while the storm flailed beyond the window, and music and sing-alongs held sway indoors. Yet even while zapped it was a miserable experience. And one could hardly ponder one’s luck in the past, and not wonder about one’s luck in the future. Worst of all even luck itself seemed entirely irrelevant to my future. And by extension, logical or drunken, the human inclination to look ahead, the very notion of looking forward began to strike me as no longer of relevance to me either. Not only looking forward, but even reflection on the very concept of looking forward could result in little but a heavy dose of blahs for me. I wasn’t tormented by this absence, even though I regretted it; or at the least, felt like I should regret it. The result of this brief endeavor was that I recoiled backward, toward oblivion, this episode of meditation no matter its brevity, causing me to rededicate myself to the proposition that sensory abuse truly was a gift from God, sent from him to ease our pain…and much, much more. I said goodbye to the measuring cup and began to consume my vodka directly from the bottle.
“Glutton,” Lila accused me accordingly.
“What’s your point?”
Bob brought over his water pipe copious with ganja, and stood holding it for me while I sucked a stratospheric high from deep within. After that, he deejayed us into Ornette Coleman’s, “Change of the Century,” Charlie Haden rolling out a bass so supple and so fine it would be standard only on Olympus.
On the outside the wrath of hell itself was breaking loose. Rain swept over the house, one ululating squall followed immediately by another, a curtain of water blown by an enormous fan it seemed. We noticed the following, though barely: bangs, thuds, cracks, creaks, snaps, buzzes, crashes, clangs, and pops, in no particular order. We watched as shingles, shutters, pieces of wood, strips of plastic, beach umbrellas, chunks of insulation, leaves, branches, shrubs, windshield wipers, newspapers, bicycle seats, shirts, some sort of restraints, and what looked suspiciously like a colostomy bag went flying by. I thought I saw a poodle, though more likely it was just a mop.
Bob, who had allowed the remote control for his cd player to tumble down into the nether regions of, “the chair,” accidentally put Ornette on pause, sitting or pressing his buttocks on the button, and pausing the album a song away from its end. In the meantime, the lights blinked, blinked again, and then again, distracting Bob from the interlude of stilled music. As a means of filling the void, I began to sing, lilting into the theme from the movie, MASH, which had popped into my head from who knew where. I sang: “The game of life is hard to play/I’m gonna lose it anyway/The losing card I’ll someday lay/So this is all I have to say…that suicide is painless/It brings on many changes/And I can take or leave it if I please.” This caused Bob, once he had noticed to make the observation that there were some very good theme songs for movies and television shows in the 1970s.
“Theme from Green Acres really can’t be beat,” Lila said.
“I think he means not just campy or funny, but actually pretty good,” I qualified.
“Oh really,” she said, albeit, with vaudevillian exaggeration.
“Barney Miller and Taxi were pretty good,” Bob said.
“Remember the movie ‘Blow-up’?” I asked. “It has the scene with the version of the Yardbirds when Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck played guitar in the band at the same time. Not a theme song, though…not the Seventies either…well...hmm.”
“I remember that,” Bob said. “Not the movie,” he corrected, speaking slowly, “I mean the scene.”
“The best one, and it was plain good, was “Secret Agent Man,” he then asserted.
“You may be right,” I agreed.
“I’ve got to find my Johnny Rivers,” he clamored abruptly, “’Secret Agent Man’ is on, ‘The Greatest Hits.”
As he began to search, Bob came ‘round to awareness of the cessation of music, and pulled the remote out of the seat and restored Coleman. About that time the lights began to flicker, and the music sloooooowed down for a moment, though Southern California Edison never let us down.
“Time to reload,” I said, having in mind a refurbishing of my measuring cup. But a split-second after I’d decided to stand, I felt as though someone had put a slug right between my eyes. I eased back down in my seat. There I found a return to gliding…the euphoria of free flight.
In the meantime, miraculously, Bob had searched down the Holy Grail of TV themes, located as he’d said, among, “Johnny Rivers: Greatest Hits.” I heard a few glorious seconds of “Seventh Son,” before Bob moved the show along, flipping the remote and launching the strains of, “Secret Agent Man.”
“The Golden Age of TV,” I proclaimed, “wasn’t it?”
“Movies too,” Lila said.
“The Golden Age of Promiscuity, they say.
“How would you know?” she demanded to learn.
“I hear things.”
Bob was digging the song, an
d digging it some more: “…They’ve given you a number/And taken a-WAY your name…”
”Remember when,” Lila asked, “the Flintstones was meant for kids?” This was definitive enough that we all pondered it in silence for a while, each to himself, or herself, and each in his or her own way. This allowed us not only to see the water swooshing up and over the patio, but also to hear the sound of the hissing foam. Bob leapt up, and without saying a word, took off out the door, splashing his way into the tide.
“Fuck,” Lila yelled.
“What’d he do?”
“That stupid fucking thing of his that sat on the porch…the water washed it away.”
“What thing?”
“That statue thing…the statue of Richard Petty…he got at 7-11.”
“Hmm.”
“Jesus…he’s chasing after it in the water…Jesus.”
I wobbled up, then stabilized myself by leaning against the wall, and grasping the windowsill. Bob continued to wade, going farther out. The water was up to about his chest, when he stopped, and started clutching at himself in a very unusual way. Then slowly he seemed to be kneeling down, the water appearing to swirl around his chin.
“Shit,” Lila yelled, and flung open the door herself.
“What?” I shouted back.
“Something’s wrong,” she said, and plunged into the water too. I followed her in. She heard my splashing and stopped in her tracks and turned around.
“Stop. Stay here.”
“Why?”
“You’ll drown. You stay right there.”
She started off again, turned abruptly once more, and yelled, “You’re fucked…way too fucked. Go back…do you hear me?”
I turned around and walked back to the patio to watch from there.
It was difficult to stand, because of the strength of the wind and the diminishment of my equilibrium. So much water was in my face, and despite my arm remaining in a continuous wiping motion in order to improve my sight, the best I could accomplish was a blurred view. Lila had made it as far out into the ocean as Bob. She seemed to be bending down reaching into the water. Then I saw Bob. The two of them were together in the water. A wave crested, and battered down hard on both of them…then they were gone…disappeared. I stood with my back braced against the wall of the house and watched. All of the sudden, there they were swimming or floating, though they had drifted farther out into the ocean and were moving away. The current was pulling them north, in the direction of the oilrig.
They continued going, farther, then farther away. Finally, I couldn’t see them at all. I told myself that perhaps they were actually swimming, rather than being pulled away, conscious or unconscious by the current. How far up the beach could the ocean take them I wondered? If they got out of the water, say a half a mile up the coast, how long would it take them to walk back? By now, I could hardly stand, braced against the wall or not. I inched nearer the door, struggled with it in the wind, and finally got inside. Once there, I leaned for a moment, my back against the door, staring. Dazed, fried and stupefied, I asked myself, “I wonder if they’ll be coming back?” One thing I knew for sure was swimming was my own head. I teetered, and then fell in the direction of the floor, face-first.
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