“Turn it off!” I brayed.
The operator stood glaring down at me. I had assumed a semifetal position with my arms protecting my head. “Why didn’t you say you didn’t know how to dismount properly?” he shouted.
Apparently we were to debate the issue while I was being mauled to death by chairs. At that point, my survival instincts kicked in.
“I’ll get you!” I yelled insanely, lashing out at him with the stump of my broken ski pole.
Miraculously, I managed to scuttle out of the way of the chairs. I staggered to my feet and made a last, ineffectual lunge at the operator with my good pole as he fled into his booth. Where, at last, he saw fit to press the shut-off button.
Not one thing that had happened after the lift stopped, stranding me halfway up the mountain, made a particle of sense to me. What I did next, however, did. Without further ado, I hobbled over to one of the trails, shoved off with my unbroken pole, and started down the mountainside.
The trackless new snow was as light and fine as confectioner’s sugar. The lift overhead was running smoothly. A middle-aged couple riding up the mountain in identical red parkas waved, a ski bum dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt gave me a thumbs-up. In the freshly groomed snow, I turned sharply in little upflung flurries, sped grandly around sweeping curves, traversed long, steep pitches as if I were a truly expert skier. Even with just one functional pole, it was the most glorious downhill run of my life. And the last.
At the bottom of the hill I executed a neat turn-stop. I unbuckled my bindings, shouldered my battered skis, and made straight for the ski shop in the basement of the lodge. “I’d like to trade these in on a new pair of cross-country skis,” I told the guy at the counter. “Don’t ask me why.”
33
The Great Southwest
The American Southwest is a geography of bright colors. Red sandstone outcroppings. Irrigated green fields of alfalfa. The desert in blossom. And wide, blue rivers.
I could not seem to stay away from rivers. Here I was at five in the afternoon in Albuquerque, moseying along on foot through the big cottonwoods lining the fabled Rio Grande, for the love of Pete. The breeze off the water sifted through the rustling gray-green cottonwood leaves overhead—fleetingly, I imagined they were saying “Keep the kids out of the mill.” I thought of Rangers McCrae and Call of Lonesome Dove crossing this river on the eve of their great American odyssey to steal back their horses from the old Mexican bandit Pedro Flores, and I thought of the borderlands ballads of Marty Robbins, and I will be damned if it didn’t occur to me, right out of the cobalt New Mexican sky, that I was taking this trip in part to see if I could. A little 20,000-mile, 100-city, 190-store confidence course to prove to myself that I could still see the U. S. of A. on less than one hundred dollars a day in a 1980s Chevy beater with 291,000—no, make that 294,480 miles—on the odometer.
“Listen,” I said to the West Texas Jesus as we walked along the riverbank together, killing time before my evening event at Albuquerque’s excellent independent, Bookworks. “Can I tell you something?”
“I don’t know,” he said, flinging his just-drained empty into the river and opening a fresh one. “Can you?”
“I want to tell you a story,” I persisted. “About some unfinished business with my deceased uncle.”
“If this involves money, I don’t want to hear it,” the Jesus said. “You know I’m not interested in money. Never have been.”
“What about your yarn of the good and faithful servant who increased his master’s talents? That involves money.”
“What about it? The money wasn’t the point. The point, Mr. Writer Man, is how are you going to use your talents over the next while. ‘Bring forth that which is within,’ so to speak. In the meantime, I know all about your unfinished business with your uncle. That’s between you two to work out.”
“Do you know about the legacy?” I said. “Since you seem to know so damn much?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” he said. “And I know that you need to put all that behind you. You need to think about what you want your legacy to be. You’re the writer here.”
He reached into his hip pocket and magically produced another ice-cold Corona. “Here,” he said. “Drink this, Harold, and lighten up.”
The place sat alone in the desert, a concrete-block, bunkerlike affair with a single rusted gas pump and not another building in sight in any direction. I was somewhere between Albuquerque and Phoenix, and the air was as hot as the smelting room of a steel mill. An outdoor thermometer in the shape of an old-fashioned Coca-Cola bottle hung at a cockeyed slant beside the store’s screen door: 112 degrees.
As I pumped my gas, a woman pushing a shopping cart resolved out of the heat waves. She was dark-complected, with long black hair. She might have been thirty, she might have been fifty. I couldn’t guess because, in the shimmering heat rays, she looked absolutely apparitional.
She began sorting through the trash barrel beside the pump, came up empty, and went into the store a minute ahead of me. I arrived at the counter just in time to witness the following transaction. The shopping-cart woman was holding a pint of milk, which the clerk had just rung up. On the far end of the counter sat a small black-and-white television set tuned to the Arizona Diamondbacks’ game.
“You’re eight cents short,” the clerk said, pointing at the coins on the counter.
And right then, I made my worst mistake of the trip. Waiting for the clerk to say No problem or Close enough or Catch you next time and hand over the bottle of milk to the woman, I hesitated. Distracted by my own petty thoughts and by the baseball game on the snowy TV, I failed to act. Not for long. Maybe a second or two. But that was all it took.
By the time I reached for my wallet and, like Martina McBride in her song “Love’s the Only House,” said “I’ll cover that,” the shopping-cart woman was out the door. The pint of milk sat on the counter, stark as a guilty verdict.
“Wetback,” the clerk said. “She came in here with three kids last night at rush hour wanting to redeem bottles they’d picked up along the road.”
Not waiting for my change, I rushed outside with the milk, into the blasting heat. The parking lot was empty. How could this be? Not fifteen seconds had passed since the woman had left the store. I could see for hundreds of feet in every direction. There was no place to hide, and no vehicle had stopped or even passed by since I’d pulled up to the pump. But she’d vanished, along with her cart, as mysteriously as she’d appeared. My opportunity to be of some help to somebody other than my sorry self had vanished with her.
The former president of the American Booksellers Association, bookseller nonpareil Gayle Shanks, had drummed up a great audience for me that evening at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, on the south edge of Phoenix. Gayle told me that when the store was struggling through its early years and on the brink of failure, a network of local women, all avid readers, had formed several book groups expressly designed to keep the store afloat. They certainly hadn’t failed to act and let an opportunity to help their community slip away.
When I settled into my sleazy motel on the outskirts of Phoenix that night, I was still angry with myself. My father never would have hesitated, back in that convenience store in the desert, before reaching for his thin schoolteacher’s wallet. My storytelling uncle Reg would have made the good Samaritan himself look mingy-spirited. Phillis would have taken the woman and her kids home and befriended them.
“You’d have helped that Mexican lady,” I said to the West Texas Jesus. “The one with the shopping cart. Wetback or no.”
“I hope so, señor,” he said with a slight south-of-the-border accent I hadn’t really noticed before. “How do you think I got here?”
34
Sweeping Up in El Dorado
It is widely held that as members of our dubious species grow older, they require less sleep. I have never been much of a sleeper. I’ve always been afraid I’d miss something important I might want to write abo
ut. What might I be missing at 4:30 a.m. on a foggy summer morn in the vicinity of my Motel 6 in Oakland? I had no idea. But as usual, I was already up and doing, with all of the unswerving, slightly crazed purposefulness of a small-town busybody.
So in the early light of this Bay Area dawn, nothing would suffice but that I jog the mile or so along the water to Jack London Square and its famous open market to see what I could see. En route I reflected on what I had accomplished in sunny California over the past week. I’d visited a couple dozen of the best independent bookstores in the country, including Vroman’s in Pasadena and Village Books in Pacific Palisades. And yes, I’d walked the sweltering streets of downtown LA with Uncle Reg, in the footsteps of Raymond Chandler’s detective hero, Philip Marlowe. And I had prowled the hills and waterfront of San Francisco with an eye out for that short, fat human Gatling gun of a private eye, Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op. Finding him at last right where I had found Faulkner’s people back in Mississippi—in the city’s great independent bookstores. And, oh my, how proud my uncle would have been—how proud, and humbled I was—to discover a few of my own novels not far from Chandler’s and Hammett’s in City Lights’ great fiction section, just a few short steps away from the famous sign, hand-lettered by the store’s poet-owner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: NO SHIRT NO SHOES FULL SERVICE. It brought tears to my eyes. (Or was it the signed but still unsold copy of my novel A Stranger in the Kingdom, which I had inscribed on a swing through San Francisco some twenty years ago, that did that?)
Across the bay in Jack London Square this morning, the refrigerated Southern Pacific railway cars and eighteen-wheel semis were unloading broccoli, spinach, cauliflower, oranges and grapefruit, vast red slabs of beef marbled with white fat, sides of pork, lamb, chickens plucked and clean, twenty kinds of Chinese vegetables, tropical fruits I could and couldn’t identify, Oregon blackberries and Washington raspberries, fifty varieties of cut flowers, Idaho potatoes. Clickety-clack, people were talking up a storm in English, Vietnamese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese, and here on shaved ice in metal bins were a dozen kinds of ocean fish, their big, glazed eyes gazing at stalls stacked high with colorful melons of every size from a softball to a beach ball. I ducked into a breakfast café no bigger than our kitchen back in Vermont. Out came my notebook. Steinbeck could have pulled a short story out of Jack London Square before ten o’clock this morning. Likewise Jack himself.
Here’s Harold, scribbling away at a tippy table in a hole-in-the-wall breakfast joint, in my Red Sox Nation jogging sweatshirt and coffee-stained khaki jogging pants, low-cut ratty sneakers, and sweaty Sox cap. He is as yet unshaven, unbathed, and suddenly quite undone, as the counterman hollers over at him, “Hey! You there. You hungry?”
“Well, maybe in a few—”
Outside the café, two young forklift drivers were racing their loaded machines down the crowded sidewalk as hard as they could go, devil take the hindermost. I was chronicling their contest in my notebook.
The counterman’s sharp eyes took in my seedy appearance.
“What are you writing?” he said.
“Oh, just some notes. Maybe for a book.”
“Right,” he said. “Everybody’s writing a book these days. I’m writing one. You know how to sweep?”
“Sweep?”
He came around from behind his counter, walked fast to a little closet, and returned with a push broom. He shoved it at me handle-first. “First you sweep. Then you eat.”
The kindly counterman had assumed, not without good reason, that I was homeless (close), unemployed (closer), perhaps slightly deranged (on the verge), and lacking the price of breakfast. As in fact, having left my wallet back at the motel, I was. Naturally, it followed that I would claim to be a writer.
Fine. I swept the floor. It didn’t take long and I was actually proud of myself. Fleetingly, I imagined a whole new career, my first honest-to-goodness real job in the real world in thirty years.
The counterman slapped down in front of me a paper plate heaped with gleaming fried eggs, several strips of crispy bacon, homemade toasted bread, and strawberry jam. He handed me plastic tableware and a large, steaming, paper cup of delicious coffee. I enjoyed every bite, then offered to mop the floor.
“No, thanks,” said the counterman. “You can move along now and write your book. Somewhere else, not here. Goodbye. Good luck.”
“Good luck with your book, too,” I said, and headed out the door. Jack would have been proud of me, I thought. He’d swept a few floors in his day, too.
35
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dolt
My short stint as a sweeper in Jack London Square wasn’t my first foray into the janitorial field. For Christmas money in 1964, I took a temporary evening job at a downtown five-and-dime store in Newport, ten miles north of Orleans, at the south end of Lake Memphremagog.
Every day after school I parked our station wagon in the lot beside the frozen lake and made a dash for the store with the north wind howling at my back, blasting right out of Canada and producing a chill factor that would make International Falls in January seem tropical. My part-time night job consisted of general clerking, stocking shelves, unloading trucks, sweeping the old hardwood floor, and cleaning the restrooms, all for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour. The store was failing and slated to close right after the holidays. My aging boss was testy and didn’t like schoolteachers.
It’s Christmas Eve. There’s a raging blizzard outside, what in the Kingdom is called a Canadian thaw—four feet of snow and a hell of a blow—with hordes of last-minute shoppers tracking in mud, slush, and snow. I’d swab out the restrooms, and half an hour later they’d look as if Attila the Hun and his outfit had just availed themselves of the facilities. Every hour on the hour I repaired to the janitor’s closet to fetch the store’s single push broom. An even more feckless predecessor of mine had managed to snap off so much of the handle that it now measured slightly under two feet long. To shove it along in front of me, I had to bend way over at the waist, which delighted my boss. He began to call me Igor of the North. Over the years the horsehair bristles had curled back like gnarled fingers. If, at the end of an aisle, I turned to survey my handiwork, I’d see a diagonal line of dust, lint, sidewalk salt, and indeterminable debris that the ancient, crippled push broom simply would not pick up. My sadistic employer would chuckle. “Mr. Teacher Man,” he’d say, “you’re leaving a trail. Do it again. Then get onto those restrooms. They look like hell.”
What would Philip Marlowe do? What would Jesus do? What in the name of heaven would I do if one of my students happened in and saw me, like Roger Miller’s King of the Road, pushing broom at this dump? On Christmas Eve, no less. No sooner had that unsettling thought come to me than Prof himself stumbled through the door, three sheets to the wind and tacking down the aisle toward me like a derelict freighter headed for the breakers. “Mosher,” he shouted, “you’ve got to lend me five dollars so I can get my wife a box of Christly candy. I forgot it was Christmas.”
“I can’t, Prof,” I said. “Not until I get paid. Can you come back in a hour?”
“No, I can’t come back in an hour,” Prof roared. “In an hour I’ll be passed out. You’ve got to help me.”
I looked beseechingly at the store manager. He smiled and held up his index finger: one more hour to go. No advance.
“Prof, I’m sorry,” I said.
“Goddamn you, Mosher,” he shouted. “I thought you were my friend. You should clean shithouses for a living. It would do you a world of good.”
With that he headed back out the door—but for once in my life, I thought of the perfect rejoinder right on the spot.
“Prof,” I called after him, just before he plunged into the raging blizzard like Lear himself, “I already do!”
36
The Parable of the Reluctant Samaritan
From The Apocryphal Gospel of BOB
Now it came to pass that HAROLD WHO and the WEST TEXAS JESUS, out cross-cou
ntry joyriding, journeyed up through the land of microbreweries and vineyards and good independent bookstores, past white-capped Mount Shasta, and into that region called Oregon. And here they paused to refresh themselves at a place of rest where there were outdoor faucets gushing rust-colored water, chained-down picnic tables, and brick facilities, both for men and for women, of which HAROLD had much need to avail himself.
And as our self-styled scribe came forth from the place of ease, a great clamor arose from a hard-used station wagon that had stopped near the Loser Cruiser in the parking lot—a clamor not of timbrels and lutes, but of a much anguished voice crying out, “Bob! Bob! Take me to fucking Roseburg, Bob.”
And another voice, very wroth, shouting, “I ain’t taking you nowhere, you no-good drunken son of a bitch.”
And behold, two men conducteth an affray, one inside the station wagon and well stricken with years, the other in the prime of his manhood and as tall as the cedars of Lebanon, who sought to pull the thrashing ancient out of the front seat.
And the tall man saith, in a voice as loud as the ram’s horn on the day of reckoning, “I don’t care if you are my brother-in-law. Get out of my car, you COCKSUCKING BASTARD.” And he would fain beat the rheumy-eyed elder, who wished nothing more than to be carried to Roseburg, and he did lay upon his shoulders and head many thudding blows, whilst a goodly number of wayfarers stood about, and were mazed, and knew not what to do. But one man in a semi hauling Douglas fir logs got on his CB and called 911 as the beating proceedeth.
Then spake the WEST TEXAS JESUS to that craven HAROLD, saying, “Best get your ass down there, boy, and put a stop to that business.”
The Great Northern Express Page 10