by Gregory Hill
To review: I’m moving extremely fast, I found my mom, I lost my mom, one of the Riles boys is clearly responsible for the shape of my nose, Vero’s eyes are locking onto my latest love note, I’m sore-kneed, and I strongly suspect that I was discovered as an infant lying under a sagebrush in the middle of a prairie grassland. Adventure! Mystery! I should be totally jazzed right now. I’m not.
Listen, I am amazingly resilient, but I do have limits. Read the previous paragraph again. Now tell me I shouldn’t be confused, lonely, overwhelmed. The dangling threads, the conjecture vis-à-vis parenthood, and, well, this whole shit-mess of stuff that I’ve been trying to explain to you just now, it’s like there’s a pit bull trapped inside my ribcage.
The situation demands some deep thought. In an effort to find equilibrium, here in the garden behind Charlene Morning’s house, I shall fold my stiffening legs into the lotus position and summon my spirit animal. Oh, eternal narwhal of the oceanic dream, where does your wisdom lead me?
Many breaths later, I am graced with neither a spirit animal, nor even with a linen-clad hallucinatory woman, nor with anything close to contentment. Nay, I am graced only with a desire to abandon everything before me, to leave Vero in this backyard garden, and to once more walk west on Route 36.
That’s preposterous. You can’t just run away.
And yet, what would it hurt to get out of here for a while? Everything that’s happening excruciatingly slowly now will continue to happen excruciatingly slowly until I get back. I don’t care about time anymore, remember?
I’m still in lotus position, by the way, and my hips hurt. More deep breaths.
*
A memory.
In my early twenties, I occasionally smoked pot with a girl who had recently dumped me, but who I figured would undump me if she inhaled enough weed to forget that I was an idiot. This is the girl who gave me my unread copy of On the Road. I know I said I wouldn’t mention her again, but.
Shortly after she’d given me the Kerouac book, this being the interim between the time she dumped me and the time I realized that she’d dumped me, I still made regular visits to her place to smoke pot, as I’ve just mentioned. On this occasion, the two of us were high as kites, playing canasta on the floor of her Capitol Hill apartment when her roommate, Tina, returned home from her job at the soda fountain. It was winter and dark.
As Tina the Roommate was unwrapping herself from her scarf, my ex-girlfriend said, “I’m gonna get some pizza.”
Tina said, “Cool.”
I said, “Cool.”
My ex-girlfriend grabbed her coat and grabbed her hat and off she went.
I was sitting on a beanbag with a deck of cards spread over the floor in front of me. A Bauhaus CD played low on the stereo. Tina lounged upon the couch, eating Fig Newtons and writing in the little notebook that she carried to coffee shops in hopes that a boy would ask her if she was a poet.
I ignored Tina and focused instead on waiting for the ex- to return with some ‘za. The CD finished and Tina swapped it out for some early Genesis, the Peter Gabriel era. Tina had orange hair. She loved prog rock and Wiccan recipes.
Ten minutes in, I’m having an auralgasm, which is what happens when you’ve smoked enough weed to actually enjoy early Genesis, when the music sends you flying like a dove over an ocean filled with Day-Glo dolphins.
In the midst of this auralgasm, Tina saw me squirming around, rubbing my belly and whatnot, and she said, “She’s not coming back.”
Up to this point, I hadn’t registered that Tina was a person. She’d always been My Girlfriend’s Roommate, an obstacle, someone to be polite to when, the morning after a sleepover, I needed the bathroom before we all headed to our jobs. This was shortly before I became a basketball official. I believe I was working at a map store at the time.
I asked Tina to clarify the meaning of “coming back.”
She said, “Both. She’s not coming back with pizza, nor will she ever come back to a conjugal relationship with you.”
I said, “What do you know?”
She rolled her eyes behind her huge lenses. “I know she’s ready to date other people. I am her—”
“Is she dating other people at this moment?”
“She went to a movie. By herself. I’m her roommate. She tells me things. She doesn’t like your goatee.”
I had a goatee at the time.
Tina said, “Your facial hair is a mask you hide behind. Just like you hide behind your sarcasm.”
“Did she tell you that, too?”
“Your sarcasm told me.”
Tina made some markings in her notebook.
“You appear to be taking notes on this conversation.”
“That’s what poets do.”
“Define poet.”
“Shall I read some of my work?”
I said, “Only if you do so silently.”
Tina said, “Poetry should be heard, not read.” She stood up with the grace of one who has recently begun attending yoga classes and went to her room. I expected her to return clad in bondage gear with a black plastic leotard and nipple holes. You never know with these poetic types.
The Genesis CD ended and I put on the Crash Test Dummies, because I hated them.
When Tina returned, I was mostly relieved to see was still wearing her black jeans and white T-shirt. Also, she was smoking a joint, which she generously shared with me.
She sat cross-legged on the couch, opened her notebook, and began to read. Her voice was smooth, languid at times, with occasional hints at the slam syllabic ejaculations that had recently become The Thing Young Poets Do. Her work centered on a common theme: puppies trapped inside her chest, lonely little beings that needed to climb out but she couldn’t dare let them out because they were too bloody and small to live in this world.
Tina’s poems were her puppies, you know, and she let them out for me, and they were bloody, gruesome, desperate things.
After she’d finished several pieces, to which I listened with a rapt expression on my face, she said, “I’ve never read to anyone before.”
I said, “Your pronunciation is spot-on.”
She said, “You’re strange, Narwhal. There’s something.” She tapped her cheekbone. “Something obscured about you.”
I said, “I’m hiding behind my facial hair.”
Tina tilted her head at me, skeptical. Her orange bangs were asymmetrical, sort of sloping to one side. She said, “You’re a funnyman.”
“Thanks.”
“Do you know how to be anything else?”
Just three days ago, during the conversation in which she had dumped me, my ex-girlfriend had asked me that very same question. At the time, I had taken it as a compliment. Hearing it from Tina suggested two things:
1) I had been the subject of deep, inter-roommate conversations.
2) You know, maybe it hadn’t been a compliment, maybe I was a pathological wisecracker, and maybe that was a problem.
It’s virtually impossible to ease gracefully out of a conversation of this sort, especially when you are cross-eyed stoned. There’s no defense against this type of psychotherapeutic prodding, and to go on the offensive would only lead to accusations of denial, projection, Oedipal issues.
Pugilistically speaking, it was time for me to take a dive.
I said, “You’re absolutely right. I am a scared little puppy.” I said this with the same inflection one would employ in saying, “You’re right. There is a tiger staring at us thru the blades of grass.” Done correctly, this inflection can be very convincing, and I did it correctly.
Tina was on the couch, I was seated on the beanbag facing her. She leaned forward, her back straight, and kissed me on the forehead. Then she returned to her upright position and said, “Honesty is soap for the soul.”
She gave me a come-hither look.
Screw it. I joined her on the couch and pretty soon we had our shirts off, hands pawing at flesh, kisses on shoulders.
Tina
’s jeans were tight and not particularly flattering to her belly, which flowed over the top like a floppy chef’s hat. I had developed a beer belly of my own at that stage and had my own spillover problems. I ran my fingernails over her back, scraping off tiny scabs, those little pinhead ones you get from a mild case of post-post-adolescent back-acne. Her breath picked up.
I said, “Perhaps we should remove our trousers.”
She ran a finger along my ear lobe, “No can do.”
I said, “Okie dokie.” Although shedding clothes had a definite, deviant appeal, I was completely open to keeping things just as we were, she and me stoned on the couch, the Crash Test Dummies singing about birthmarks, our bellies stretched fat by the puppies within.
She said, “I can’t take off my pants.”
I said, “That’s fine.” It really was fine. This could have ended at any moment, or we could continue as we were. I didn’t mind.
She said, “Three words.”
“Three words what?”
“I can’t take off my pants because of three words.” She nipped her teeth at the tip of my nose.
I said, “I am uncertain of how to proceed.”
Tina said, “Don’t be. There’s a good reason why I can’t remove my pants. And that reason can be explained in three words. That’s all.”
Be the scared puppy, Narwhal. Be sincere. Must. Resist. Humor.
I said, “Are the three words, ‘Jumanji, Jumanji, Jumanji’?”
She tilted her head and said, “I can’t tell you, Narwhal. Not now.”
Screw the scared puppy. I needed to know the three words. I looked at her with my big adopted eyes, waited a beat.
“How about now?”
My wit was working. She looked at me with her big poetic eyes. A broad, naughty smile crept out of her mouth. She said, “Promise not to—”
Whereupon my ex-girlfriend returned, burdened by a cardboard pizza box. What’s a person to do? What are three people to do? Not being a porn flick, it did not conclude with the lot of us squirming around on the kitchen floor. Rather, my ex-girlfriend brought the pizza directly to her bedroom and slammed the door as I rather hastily found my shirt and Tina found hers. Tina excused herself to the bathroom and I made a quick exit.
I never went back to that apartment, never saw my ex-girlfriend again, never saw Tina again, never finished On the Road. In the years since, I have replayed the scene in my head, focusing primarily on what may have happened if my ex- had arrived with the pizza just a few minutes later, long enough for Tina to say those three words that had required her to keep her jeans on.
I can only speculate what those words were. Candidates include: “Herpes simplex virus.” “Incomplete sex change.” “Embarrassing Nazi tattoo.”
As a childhood fan of all things Narnian, particularly the goat-legged Mr. Tumnus, I lean toward “I’m a faun.”
It was shortly after the pizza incident that I enrolled in a training course with the Denver Basketball Officials Association. I never again wanted to be in a room full of fucked up people where nobody knew the rules.
I unfold my lotus legs. I know what I must do. In order to evict that goddamned pit bull from my gut, I must find answers, solid, factual answers to the question of my conception. Not all of those answers will be found on the Colorado prairie. I must walk west. I will venture on a vision quest and I will return to Vero as a man of wisdom.
52
Before I depart, I add some text to my letter to Vero. It now reads:
I’ll be your sand if you’ll be my sun.
I’m going to Denver.
Back in a few minutes.
I could have come up with something better, but my head’s all over the place, what with this new adventure upon which I am about to sally frothily.
I will walk straight to Denver. I’ll bypass the tornado and the Riles Place and the Jim and Jane Jones Cult of the Jellified Mushroom and any other roadside distractions. I’ll go to Denver and gather myself and then I’ll come back to Charlene’s backyard garden and see how Vero’s doing, and then I’ll solve the mystery of my parentage, and, finally, I’ll figure out how to reset my clock so Vero and I can hold hands again.
My hair is an inch and a half long.
PART
THREE
And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, in hints and mighty visitation, far off, the great snowy-tops of the Rocky Mountains. I took a deep breath.
— Jack Kerouac,
On the Road
53
Clunk, step, rattle, step, clunk, step, rattle. As my crumbling knees carried me all one-hundred and thirty miles to Denver, the rest of my body began to ache as well. Shoulders, elbows, neck, back, wrists, ankles, hips—name a joint, it hurt. The thick air that had made me stronger was now shaping me into an arthritic spider.
Wake up, stretch. After lunch, stretch. Pre-slumber, stretch. No running. Maximum of ten aspirin per day.
I stopped for neither semi, nor tornado, nor pronghorn, nor lunatic compound. My purpose was pure. I made my shambling pilgrimage thru the oceanic grassland, and the Rocky Mountains rewarded me by slowly climbing themselves up from the horizon.
I shambled until downtown Denver pressed out of the skirts of the mountains. The buildings grew like shoots from a garden of glass and steel and concrete until they were fully extended, ready for Jack to ascend and give the giant a dose of fee-fi-fo-fummery.
The lights were lit in the skyscrapers, which loomed as starry silhouettes against the orange and blue pre-crepuscular sky, each floor containing more light bulbs than any three of the towns I’d passed on my way there. The time was now nearly seven-thirty on September first, 2009; seven minutes had passed since I’d gone hypertemporal. Dusk was well on its way. Try to picture this: although the sun was higher in the sky the further west I went, the mountains—and therefore the western horizon—also grew higher. Consequently, as I approached the mountains, twilight accelerated.
Given the duskiness of the city, my first stop was a hardware store where I found a display of LED flashlights in which several models were in the blessed state of on. Ignoring the empty glares of dozens of patrons and the vacant stares of orange-aproned employees, I liberated a headlamp from the display. I put it on my head and strode out of the store confident that the batteries would last me the rest of my hypertemporal life, and optimistic that a little light would render the shady portions of Denver a shade less intimidating.
Dressed in my zebra shirt, a pair of sweats, and black shoes, I walked south to Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard and started my westward march into the city proper. MLK, like most MLKs, was four lanes wide, flanked by brick houses, corner shops, churches, liquor stores, and the occasional park. The folks on the sidewalks tended to be of a darker hue than I. The cars on the road itself tended to be driven by folks of a wealthier hue.
The scene was a wax museum, a zombie town, a manikin display, a diorama.
I haven’t mentioned this before, because I hadn’t noticed it before, but the people of the plains seem generally happy. If not happy, then at least bemused. If not bemused, then at least aware of their surroundings. In Denver, first off, there are people everywhere. It’s disconcerting to have to dodge a pedestrian every ten feet. Second off, everyone is frowning, focusing on some tiny spot directly in front of their faces. Usually that tiny spot is a telephone whose screen consists of pidgin language conversations conducted in alternating green and grey cartoon bubbles. The few individuals not staring at phones are staring at absolutely nothing, which is where people look when they don’t want to look like they’re looking at anything. There’s nothing worse than two corporeal persons admitting that they know the other exists.
I sat on a curb for a moment, rubbing my knees, which had recently begun crunching like somebody breaking up handfuls of dry spaghetti. I rotated my shoulders, clunk and pop.
Remember when I found that bottle of expired hydrocodone in Charlene Morning’s medicine cabinet? And h
ow I said I wouldn’t ever take pills because I feared they would compromise my irrepressibility? Let the record show that I made that statement prior to walking to Denver. Let the record show that after walking to Denver I was profoundly sore, like, arthritically, practically cripplingly, sore.
I found a supermarket, the kind with a pharmacy. I exited the supermarket with several bottles of controlled substances in my backpack.
Fifteen minutes later, with two Vicodin in my belly, the joint pain had retreated, although the crunching continued. I will not overdo this, I promise.
Next stop, food. I chose a Chinese restaurant in a strip mall. I slid a plate of drunken noodles out from under the nose of the restaurant’s sole diner, a balding black man, and gobbled it clean. Screw my Personal Prime Directive. When the zebra’s in the city, anything goes.
Speaking of anything going, you know how you sometimes drive by a strip club in the middle of the day and see rusty hatchbacks in the parking lot and you think, “I wonder what’s going on in there?” But you won’t go in for the sole reason that you’re afraid that someone might recognize your rusty hatchback in that parking lot and, at some unanticipated future encounter, accuse you of being pathetic?
Lucky for me, I no longer have a car. (You’re welcome, Sandy.)
Also, bear in mind that, thanks to my incredible self-control, I hadn’t seen nudity in months. And Vero did cheat on me. Even though I’d come to terms with this, I reckoned that I had sufficient karma-credit to justify a quick visit to a titty-bar. Plus, I was on a vision quest.
And so, without trepidation, I crossed the street, opened the door, and entered a place called Jiggles.
As I may have mentioned, a human looks goofy when thon’s motion is rendered static. Our eyelids, mouths, and everything else are intended to be viewed in a state of perpetual transformation. A mouth doesn’t switch instantly from a neutral position to a smile. There’s a transition that happens so quickly we don’t see it. Unlike, say, herky-jerky songbirds, humans exist in a state of, as dear Heraclites would say, flux. In my hypertemporal state, the flux is fucked. All I see are the transition points. It’s a connect-the-dots picture and I don’t have a pencil.