To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

“Fine by me,” he said.

  So I made plans to bus back to Mexico City, mail my bike to Nicaragua, fly to Nashville, then fly to Nicaragua after Christmas. While I was booking flights, Weston organized his spirit quest and terrorized the bathroom with diarrhea.

  “I’ll wait for you to leave, then I’ll go to the mountain,” he said. “I don’t want you tainting the vibe.”

  “What does that mean?” I laughed.

  “It’s spiritual. You don’t like stuff like this.”

  “I’m spiritual!” I said.

  “Yeah, but you’re like churchy. This is witchy. Pagan. You wouldn’t like it. And mushrooms make you sensitive to people’s energy. You’ll fuck it up,” he said with a grin.

  “Oh. Well, in that case, yeah, I wouldn’t want to harsh your mellow.”

  We both chuckled and I felt good with our choices. The moment I made the decision to go, I felt a weight lift from me.

  * * *

  —

  I LANDED IN Nashville with stinging wet eyes and a lump in my throat.

  My mom picked me up in her shiny Nissan.

  “Not a scratch on you,” she said. “Prayer works!” She leaped from the car and hugged me.

  “Or perhaps Mexico isn’t as dangerous as you thought, Mom,” I said with a smirk. I was playing it cool.

  “Don’t take this away from the Lord,” she said.

  I got in the car and we headed down the interstate at 70 miles per hour. It felt like flying. The roads seemed so freshly paved. I didn’t have my bike stored underneath or in the trunk. I felt so light. Just my body and a little bag. It was a twenty-minute ride from the airport to my mom’s house, and I was glued to the window. The houses had no fences, no walled-in courtyards, no security gates. The yards looked manicured and orderly.

  The Nashville trees were without leaves, and everything felt crisp and organized. The twenty miles from the airport to my childhood home would’ve been almost a day’s ride on the bike. I was staring at everything. My mom was talking about the holiday plans. I’d slipped right back into a previous life. The bike might have been a dream. We were home before I would’ve had time to tie my bags to the rack.

  My sister and new baby niece were waiting at the house. I held the baby and thought about how life had moved on without me. I thought of my dad saying, “No one will change. Everyone will be the same when you get back.” In this case, that was a lie. This baby was twice as big as when I saw her last. She had a different, fuller face. She had a personality. I had missed her becoming herself.

  I was home for ten days. I saw old friends, and we went to Santa’s, our favorite karaoke bar. We sang and drank cheap beer and they asked me all the standard questions. “Were you scared?” “How’d you charge your phone?” I had canned answers at this point.

  I hated jokes like “Hey, you’re home!? Did you quit? You can’t just come back, cheater!” I’d give a snarky response. “Did you just bike to Mexico City? Or did I? I can do what I want. This is my trip.” They’d laugh and say, “Good point.”

  I had Christmas with my mom and siblings and the new baby. We ate honey-baked ham and watched old home videos. We laughed a lot and did next to nothing. My brother said, “How’s the trip so far?”

  “Good…and hard,” I said.

  “Cool.” And we didn’t speak of it again.

  My mom and I didn’t talk about anything too serious. We’d never talked about my sexuality in person. Only over the phone. Like twice. And by e-mail, once. And she was so happy to see me, I knew she wouldn’t taint it all with a confrontation. Neither would I. I wonder how many millions of relationships are alive because of this, avoiding conversations.

  I told her stories about Weston, about how much he loved weed, about getting lost in Mexico City and buying drugs. I told her these things to punish her for forcing me to invite someone else. I’m not sure why I felt the need to challenge my mother with these stories. She had been right—I was grateful she’d made me bring a friend, and I indeed loved Weston. Yet some spiteful teenager inside me wanted to poke at her.

  My mom would walk past me and put her hand on my shoulder and leave it a little too long. She would sit next to me at dinner and pat my knee and talk about her dogs or how the deer kept eating all her flowers. She kept touching me. She would ask me the same questions over and over with different words, as if the act of talking was the goal, not the exchange of information. And she would often launch into stories of walking across America. Some I’d never heard.

  “You know why I want you to be so careful on those roads? I was walking in Texas, minding my own business, your father way on up ahead of me because he didn’t like walking as slow as I needed to, and I got hit by a car going sixty miles an hour. This was before cell phones in the car, so I don’t know why they didn’t see me, it was broad daylight. But they hit me square in my backpack and I flew forty feet in the air. And I landed on my backpack, on the grass lawn of a mortuary. When I opened my eyes and realized I was alive, and saw that mortuary, can you believe it!? My pack saved my life. Well, the Lord saved my life, but used the backpack,” she said with a laugh. “With you on a bike, I just worry so much, but I trust if the Lord could land me in a mortuary, and wink at me like that with a little joke, He’ll do the same for you.”

  I was glad to have come home to see her, if for no other reason than to make her as happy as she was that Christmas.

  “You know there’s a lot of Scripture that talks about journeys, walking through the desert. Have you been reading the Bible I gave you?”

  “Oh yes, I have,” I said, lying. “It means a lot to me that you gave me your Bible from the walk, truly,” I said, not lying. It hadn’t dawned on me until that moment that I hadn’t read the Bible once on my trip. I hadn’t wanted to. But I had seen it in my bags. I had felt it on my bike, traveling with me. God with me.

  After the holiday and good lazy days with my mom, it was time to drive down and see my dad. He had been spending most of his time in Mississippi with his girlfriend. I had met her once before. She was from there and was quick-witted and crass in a classy way. She had a refinement about her but would gossip with language like “horse-shit” and “a real backwoods racist asshole.” I liked her right away.

  She gave my dad shit. She didn’t worship him or coddle him. She just liked him. And I had never seen him that way with anyone.

  It was the flirtatiousness of twenty-year-olds. Strange and simultaneously inspiring.

  Ever since my dad divorced my stepmom back in 2006, his romantic life was a minefield in the family. Especially for my sisters. He’d been married to my stepmom for seventeen years. My half sister came from that marriage, which I had thought would last. They seemed so in love. Then it ended. I was twenty-three years old. My sisters hated any new woman that came close. “This bitch can’t just pretend like we’re gonna play house with her,” my older sister would say. My brother and I didn’t hate anyone, we just didn’t care to invest ourselves. I was off in California, far away from Tennessee. I wanted my dad to be happy, but I also wanted him to be with someone that wouldn’t take advantage of him, or be terribly annoying. I had discovered my dad’s humanity pretty early. He was never a god. Not like my mom. He was my friend.

  When he called me to tell me he was divorcing my stepmom, I asked him why. He said he wasn’t in love and he’d met someone else. I told him I was disappointed in him. He couldn’t stay married. To me, it seemed like he married the way other people date.

  “Dad, you think love is the feeling of being in love, and when the feeling fades, you think it’s because you made a mistake. So you leave. That’s not love, that’s not commitment,” I said, with the confidence of never-married, Christian arrogance.

  “Jed, I remember my dad was a real asshole. I remember he took me out in a boat, when I was a teenager, and he had been real bad to my mother, and h
e said, you can hate me, or not, but that’s up to you, I’m the only father you’ll ever have. You can hate me, but I’m just doing my best. He took me out in that boat and gave me permission to hate him. Took the rage right out of me. So, I’m sorry. But I’m tired of being sorry. I took all the blame with the divorce from your mother. And that’s fine. But I can’t take it anymore. I’m not sorry anymore. Life is really complicated. I hope you won’t hate me.”

  That took the rage right out of me. I felt his tiredness with himself. He was tired of guilt. Tired of mistakes. Tired of carrying it all. He wanted freedom. My sisters weren’t ready to give it to him. I don’t know if my brother was. I was.

  That conversation had a big impact on me. Not just in humanizing my father, but in acquiescing to vice. I was in my twenties and fighting my vices, my sexuality, my manipulations…and here was my dad saying “I used to fight them. I quit that.”

  Maybe you’d think it was inspiring to hear that kind of freedom. It was terrifying. He had wrecked several families, and left daughters that wanted to strangle him. Ex-wives spoke of him like a hurricane they’d lived through. This was life? Quitting the fight and accepting yourself, flaws and all? I don’t want to accept my flaws.

  I was melancholy about it all for a while. Then, like God hand-delivered some hope into my hands, I was at a New Year’s party a few months later and a guy I didn’t know gave a toast. He was drunk but I think he said it right. “Be ever at peace with your neighbors, ever at war with your vices, and let every year find you a better man, that’s ol’ Benjy Franklin!” he said, and cheersed his beer, splashing it high.

  In a moment, my thoughts were beyond the party, floating above us. “Ever at war with your vices.” It didn’t say “let each year have you conquering a new vice.” No. It wasn’t about winning. It was about fighting. Continuing the project of improvement. The intention and effort was what built character. Not success. That changed a lot of things for me. I think it kept me from kissing boys for another four years, thinking that was a vice I had to fight forever. I think it also kept me from nihilistic meltdown. It was a double-edged sword.

  I never felt victimized by divorce. I never longed for some cohesive family unit. I can’t explain why. I just didn’t like the thick air that would form around my mom when she would complain about my dad. As for me, divorce was what normal families did. It’s all I knew and all I remembered. Did my dad still love me? Yes. Did my mom still love me? Yes. Did my stepmom still love me? Sure. Then what’s the big deal?

  But my sisters felt the divorces differently. They hated the blonde my dad had dated for a while. Then he met Kelley. She was smart and financially independent and had a good family and didn’t give two shits about my dad’s writing fame or money. But she didn’t stand a chance. My sisters didn’t like Kelley. Not necessarily because of anything she did; they just didn’t want anything to do with another woman. “Dad thinks we’re just gonna invite her in, like she’s part of the family?” my older sister would say. “I’m not doing this with every flavor of the month.”

  In the past, my dad would have fought for my sisters. He would have said, “Kelley is different, this one is real.” He would have made time and tried to explain himself and sought out the girls over and over, bending over backward. He did try for about a year, but then something snapped. It dawned on him that he’d been apologizing his whole life. He’d been begging for forgiveness since the mid-eighties. He was older now. He grew tired of the theatrics and decided to retreat. Nowadays, he spent most of his time at Kelley’s house in Mississippi. My dad was in love with Kelley, in a way I’d never seen before. There was a completeness, a brightness, an absence of guilt or escape. Seeing them together, it was strange. I wondered if they were each other’s soul mate, and if that meant my mom and dad never were. And yet, here I am. It was all confusing.

  The politics of family, my dad staying at the farm, my sisters avoiding him, my brother avoiding conflict and not taking sides, the expectations of Christmas and family harmony, the things unsaid and the hurt buried—I didn’t like it. It was like a squirming thing under the covers on a bed. It made me remember why I liked living in California, free from the odd feelings of family obligation and love. Somewhere inside my relationship to my family was the root of fear, fear of my sexuality, the root of my faith in God. My friends in California and the life I’d built out there were all on top of this small group of people that made me. I wondered for a moment if I had gotten on my bicycle to escape my family. Then I thought, “No, I love these idiots. This mess is what made me. I just need to control my doses. It’s easy to overdose and get sick.”

  So it was just me, my dad, and Kelley down on his farm for a night. We ordered in Indian food and Kelley was chatty.

  My dad didn’t say much. He was watching us talk. I thought he would ask me all kinds of questions about the trip, and slide into story mode about the first months of his great walk. But he didn’t. The emotion of Christmas seemed to eat him alive. The decision not to beg my sisters to come down. I think he had asked my brother, but he hadn’t come. The tension turned my dad into an introvert. I think he watched as Kelley and I laughed and hit it off, and was glad, but also sad that it was only me. I think he was quiet because his thoughts were loud. At the end of dinner, Dad, in a peacocky way, said to me in front of Kelley, “Maybe we come visit you in Paraguay? Or Peru? Or Patagonia? Maybe we go on a trip and treat your tired legs to a nice hotel room. I’ve never been to South America.”

  Kelley seemed thrilled. “Oh, yes! I’ve hardly ever been outside of Mississippi. I’ve barely ever seen a mountain. Let’s go drink wine and see mountains!” Her thick southern accent was like music in the room.

  No definitive plans were set, but the sweet intention was comforting. I loved the thought of adventuring with my dad. Of witnessing something foreign to both of us, together, for the first time.

  At first arrival in Nashville, I’d thought my dad’s advice was wrong. Home had changed, I had changed, and I was sad for it to flow by without me. I had a new niece. My sisters weren’t talking to my dad’s soon-to-be fiancée. Things felt like they’d been advancing quickly. But even a few days later, as Christmas wrapping paper was being thrown away and the post-holiday melancholy of monotony set in, I saw the truth of my father’s words. The place went right back to normal, and that normalcy was what I was escaping. I had left my family for California, and now left California for the road. Not forever, but for this season. Only a year more. And it would be here when I got back. Perhaps tweaked and slightly changed, but not transformed. It would be the thing I stepped away from. It would be the routine I could return to.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THE TIME came to go back, I e-mailed Weston. He was already at the beachside hotel in Nicaragua with friends. He said my bike had arrived. He also said he had tracked down some San Pedro cactus and would be making a potion on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t ask follow-up questions.

  I had seen and tasted home. It was still there. But I had dethroned it from my infatuated desire in Mexico. I could return to the bike, knowing that all the comforts of home would be waiting for me when I was ready. I was also reminded of what I was looking for. A shaking-off of that film over my body I feel at home. Of confusion. Of self-loathing. Of constriction. I had to peel it back and see myself clean of what I had been told.

  I boarded my plane for Nicaragua, more excited than I had expected. From Managua, the capital city, I bused my way to the thatched-roof beachside haven of Maderas Village on the west coast. The stress of boxing up my bike and finding a service to mail it had paid off. There it was, the box beaten and crumpled, but all together. I felt affection for my bike, seeing it there waiting for me. Like a dog. I pictured it wagging its tail to see me.

  A few of our friends from LA and New York were there. They had planned this group trip to Maderas Village and talked about the fun drugs and parties w
e’d enjoy for New Year’s. Weston quickly said yes and had already been down here a week. I hadn’t checked in on him much over the holiday. But I did miss him. Even ten days apart now felt like the loss of a limb.

  Maderas Village perched on a dusty cliff overlooking the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. The trees were crispy, and the dust from the dirt road kicked up into the air, coating every low leaf. It was the dry season. The world was browned, the air hot, the ocean cool and inviting. I walked up the property looking for friends, passing by a few cabins and a main house, and asked an overly tan man in short board shorts and Ray-Bans if he knew Weston. The guy was obviously American. “Oh yeah, he’s making some magic potion up behind the last cabins. Just keep walking up the hill.”

  I found him in the woods, stirring a cauldron over a wood fire with people I didn’t know. He was shirtless, shoeless, with tattered khaki shorts and a big stick stirring the brown milky substance in the pot. The strangers were sun-crispy and barefoot, too, staring intently into the mixture. “Jed!” Weston exclaimed, as happy to see me as I was to see him. “Come come! I got us some San Pedro cactus, and I’m making a potion. I have to boil it for twelve hours, then drain it with this cheesecloth. We’re on hour two.”

  “You have to stir it for ten more hours!?” I asked.

  “Yeah, or it will burn.”

  “What does San Pedro do to you?” I felt like a dad asking about his son’s new toy.

  “It’s one of three cactuses with mescaline,” Weston explained. “In the right doses, it makes you euphoric, gives you visions, exposes the parts of the brain that can only be reached by this. It’s actually one of the safest natural ways to experience an altered spiritual state. Not like datura or angel’s trumpet, which can kill you. You just don’t want to drink a lot of this, because it tastes like worm snot.”

  “It’s nasty? Yikes.”

  “Well, yeah. But it’s magic that has to be respected. It’s called the Grandfather in shaman lore. He is wise and guides you gently with love. But doesn’t that make you ask questions? About God or the universe? Why would the universe make parts of our brains, parts of us, only accessible by these plants he placed around us in nature? Seems to me like we’re supposed to access truth through them. Nature is reaching out to teach us right now, show us things, because our society is killing nature. Mescaline is one of the doors the universe wants us to walk through. And it’s a bitch to prepare right. But I think it’s worth it.”