Free Spirit

by Joshua Safran

  We purchased tables and displayed our wares for sale at all the local venues: Loggerodeo, the county fair, and various flea markets and arts-and-crafts shows. We sat for hours, shivering in the fog, staring hungrily at passing faces, trying to catch their gaze and trick them into buying something with frozen smiles and plaintive eyes. But the results were disappointing. The old biker selling bookends welded from horseshoes did pretty well. The husky couple in the matching Hawaiian shirts did even better with their novelty fisherman coffee mugs. The skinny Asian guy sold out his entire supply of tube socks. And the two blonde ladies selling hot dogs walked away filthy rich. We failed to sell a single piece. Instead, we were out the price of admission and lost a moon mask when I tripped carrying it back to our car.

  Claudia hated to admit it, but she recognized that Capitalist market forces were at work here. It couldn’t be that there was no demand for her artwork. It had to be that there was no demand at the high prices she was charging. But she couldn’t lower her prices because it took so long to make each piece, and her overhead was high and fixed. What she needed was a product that she could manufacture assembly-line style. And her own kiln. This was her Henry Ford moment, and I reluctantly set aside my Land of Oz books and rolled up my sleeves to help out. Together we dug a trench across the hayfield from Frank’s house to lay down a phone line and a series of extension cords. We dug a pit for the fifty-five-gallon water drum and affixed it with a hand pump. We worked the phones to Grandma Harriette, appealing to the frustrated artist within her that never got to express herself, and successfully obtained a loan for a kiln and high-fire glazes. Finally, we laid a concrete foundation for the kiln and built it a rain shelter.

  With our innovation laboratory completed, I watched as my mother conceived of the perfect, replicable product for the market. After a day and a night of furious pacing and frenzied pounding at the blocks of red and white clay, she got it. It was a duck. A clay duck sculpture with outstretched wings that would double as a hanging planter.

  To be successful with a product like this, my mother finally concluded, we needed a more moneyed, sophisticated audience than the Logerrodeo set. We tried our luck instead in one of the bustling stalls of Pike Place Market in faraway Seattle. As we passed through the sad, soggy suburban netherworld north of Seattle, we did the math. We needed six hundred dollars a month to survive. That meant selling six ducks a week at twenty-five dollars a bird. No problem.

  It turned out to be kind of a problem. The artisanal marmalade woman was doing OK, and the Starbucks coffee shop was moving product like it was unstoppable. But the ducks weren’t flying. I wandered around the marketplace by myself, staring longingly at the squares of rich fudge and the shining samurai swords, hoping that when I got back to our table it would be empty. But when closing time came, we hadn’t sold a single duck planter. We left in a deficit. We were out the money for the table and for gas and morale was low. When we got back to our hayfield, I tripped in the dark and went down with a duck in my arms. Its wing was smashed, and I cried. Claudia didn’t care about the duck, but she was crying anyway.

  We tried our luck at Pike Place Market a few more times and finally did sell some of the birds. But it wasn’t enough. Besides, whatever money she made had to be reported to the awful people at Welfare, and they just deducted it from her check. “What’s my incentive to work if you just take my earnings away?” Claudia reasoned with the pudgy lady who was chewing gum behind the counter. “I’ve got to put the money back into my business if I’m going to be successful.” But the Welfare people wouldn’t listen to reason. They wouldn’t let us invest in plaster of Paris molds to streamline production and bring down costs. Claudia even pitched the idea of the Welfare system investing in the molds and sharing some of the return. But the woman just grunted: “Next.” We seethed out the door, Claudia hissing, “Shortsighted bastards!”

  It was time to concede defeat. Claudia turned her back on her visual art and submitted to a series of menial part-time jobs. She trimmed evergreen trees on a Christmas tree farm, cleaned disabled people in a care facility, and provided home care to the elderly. This work left her depressed and demoralized. In her diary, Claudia struggled with her fate: I keep telling myself, “when I’m settled, I’ll lead the disciplined life that will turn me into a saint—or at least a psychic healer/teacher.” How many years since I promised this to myself? When is “settled”? Where is community?

  After several months of emptying bedpans and wresting cat food away from elderly mouths, Claudia decided it was time to take up our search for community again. We took to the road via Green Tortoise and rode through Oregon, chanting alongside a band of Australian Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh devotees dressed in lavender and orange. We met with a group of self-identified Native Americans who believed that Mount Shasta was the center of UFO activity on Earth and were preparing to walk barefoot up the mountain to be teleported home. We made a lot of inquiries, but my mother was too independent-minded for any of the cults that we visited. She didn’t want leaders to follow, she wanted partners to build with.

  For a time, Claudia found a partner in Thaddeus, a Mennonite Rastafarian carpenter and pot dealer who owned a huge vinyl collection and a warm wooden house outside of Mount Vernon. After their relationship failed, Claudia began dating a perpetually stoned Norwegian carpenter named Gunnar who lived in a ganja-farming settlement at the end of Janicki Road up on Cultus Mountain, above Clear Lake, Washington. The place was owned by a stout, dark, and hirsute herbsman named River Kerry who was perpetually clad in raw wool and splattered in mud and patchouli. He was a frenzy of dreadlocked energy, cultivating marijuana and overseeing the swarm of quasi-indentured servants like Gunnar who worked the land in lieu of rent.

  From the road above, River’s settlement could have been the cover of a sci-fi novel. Down on his Forest Moon of Endor, Ewok huts and rammed-earth sculpture houses dotted the hillside. Out of the valley sprouted boat-like structures on stilts and, in the foreground under a cloud of construction, was rising a colossal wooden pagoda with cantilevered roofs. About thirty feet up, the belly of the pagoda was pierced horizontally by a giant tree, its massive root structure bursting into the air on one side and its expansive tangle of branches blooming from the other. How it got there was a mystery of physics.

  Gunnar lived in one of the stilt houses, and we had to pull ourselves up a long ladder to get to him. We were rewarded with soup. And then my mother received sex in the back room. I curled up on a little couch next to the door with A Prairie Home Companion blasting from the radio to drown out the rhythmic squeaking and my mother’s yowls. The carnal visits to the house on stilts became more frequent, and my mother bought herself a tubal ligation for her fortieth birthday. We stayed at Gunnar’s stilt house for days while she recovered. Mercifully, the Walkman Uncle Tony sent me for my ninth birthday arrived just in time to drown out the sounds of renewed lovemaking.

  Claudia wasn’t ready to move in with Gunnar on River Kerry’s ganja farm, but she found a cabin nearby. “Just wait till you see it, Joshey!”

  “Does it have running water or electricity?” I asked hopefully.

  “No, but it’s hidden in the middle of the beautiful woods on Cultus Mountain. It almost looks like it’s part of a big mossy tree stump. You’ll love it!”

  Just as she promised, the evergreen canopy swallowed the one-room cabin whole and enclosed it in a thick, perpetual mist. It never received a photon of direct sunlight. The one room housed a bed, shelves, and a propane stove. Up a worn homemade ladder, an enclosed little platform jutted out from one wall. This was my “loft.” It was just big enough for me to unroll my sleeping bag, put my books on a shelf, and deposit my toys into a trunk.

  Down the trail was the tiny elfin cabin of Michael McNeary, a pale little man with an oversized Adam’s apple and a deep thirst for whiskey. He dressed like a leprechaun and communicated primarily through his violin. He was rehearsing Bach’s Mass in B Minor, accompanied by a glass of grog, on th
e day we met him. When his blood alcohol level passed a certain point, his violin became a Scottish fiddle, and he was known to sing to himself as he stumbled half-blind up and down the trail. In exchange for free classical violin music, Claudia sometimes gave Michael chakra readings and administered psychic healing to his pickled soul. He showed us how to skin a rabbit and how to dump sawdust down the outhouse hole to keep the smell under control. Michael sometimes drove us into Mount Vernon in his little blue pickup truck to the food bank. There we waited in line with bedraggled elderly people and seasonal laborers. Former drug addicts served us fresh eggs, milk, and bread. We gave Michael our block of yellow cheese since Claudia thought it had too many preservatives in it. We didn’t have refrigerators, so we had to wolf the food bank fare down quickly before the salmonella could set in.

  The day after we moved to Cultus Mountain, Gunnar broke it off with my mother. Claudia processed her feelings of hurt and abandonment with me, and we made ourselves feel better by building a wood shed. On our way back up the trail from the hardware store, a massive white ape-man stumbled out of the bushes and came thumping down the trail at us. He was completely naked and bushy clumps of red hair bulged out of his head, eyebrows, jaw, and genitals. His body was littered with pine needles, cedar sprays, and dirt. “They’re all lying!” he hollered our way. “They don’t care about people! All they care about is money!”

  I nearly pissed myself with fright and jumped behind my mother, fingering the smooth wooden handle of the hammer in my right hand. Every other woman on Earth would have turned and fled. But not Claudia. She actually took a step toward the ape-man and yelled back in encouragement: “You’re damn right they’re lying to you! The corporations have one objective, and that’s to maximize shareholder profit! That don’t give a fuck about the People!” Claudia kept advancing up the trail, gesticulating wildly: “The tin conglomerates napalmed half of Vietnam to keep their stock prices up! The copper companies overthrew Allende in Chile and a hundred thousand men, women, and children were tortured and murdered. Even now, as we speak, the fruit companies are bankrolling the Contras in Nicaragua and the death squads in El Salvador!”

  The naked ape-man stood still, a stunned look sweeping his face. His eyes focused on us, and he stopped grabbing at the air. “I’m John,” he said, suddenly apologetic. “They call me Crazy John, but I don’t feel like I’m crazy.”

  “You sound like the sanest person I’ve met in a long time,” Claudia reassured him. “I just broke up with a guy who listened to Paul Harvey and thought the rich people deserved to own all the land just because they’re rich.” We invited Crazy John in for peppermint-rosehips tea, and he sat down agreeably on the towel my mother draped over the milk crate for him. Claudia redubbed him Red John for his brilliant thatches of hair. But he still seemed pretty crazy to me. Crazy John emerged from the woods regularly after that to discuss politics, ethics, and the concept of so-called reality. He became my mother’s closest friend on the mountain.

  My closest friend was a boy named Eli who lived down the road. Eli was smaller, darker, and more bucktoothed than I, but we complemented each other well. He had a room full of new toys—Transformers, action figures, and Legos—but no one to play with. He prized his shelf of Douglas Adams and Lloyd Alexander books, but couldn’t read them by himself. Though he was my age, the self-actualization-and-positive-thinking-based private schooling he’d been receiving had left him nearly illiterate. I stepped into the void to read to him and to enjoy the warmth of his home.

  Eli’s mother, Karma, looked like Sacagawea and spent most of her time stoned in a back room behind a tapestry. Her husband Richard, Eli’s stepfather, was a much older, fast-talking marijuana grower/dealer with a ponytail of frizzy white hair. He slept in a separate cabin out back but would come to the main house for dinner and tell us stories about barfing up his innards on peyote or wedging bags of cocaine into his ass crack to smuggle them up from Mexico. I liked Richard, but he could be mercurial. Sometimes he’d spend three hours with me and Eli, letting us fire his hunting rifle at water jugs. But other times, he’d kick me out of the house, brusquely: “Josh, you gotta go home now. Hit the road, man.”

  Back home, my mother told me she was sick of cleaning up after Alzheimer’s patients. “I can’t wipe another wrinkled bottom, Josh, I just can’t.” But what to do? Until the Revolution came and people didn’t need straight jobs anymore, she had to find a way of pairing her artistic talents with a paycheck. Ideally, she should be able to use her art to help heal all those zombies out there who had covered over their third eyes with Society’s lies. Maybe, she thought, going to college for an art therapy degree could be the path forward.

  With this in mind, Claudia applied to Seattle’s Antioch University, a progressive adult school with a social justice focus. A few student loans later she was a college student, poring excitedly over the course catalog. When she announced that her class schedule would require her to spend three nights a week in Seattle without me, I felt the mountain tremble. She was leaving me behind? This was a foul betrayal of her maternal oath.

  “Joshey, you should be happy for me.”

  “But you’re basically going to abandon me!”

  “Are you kidding me? You’ll be having so much fun with Eli you won’t even notice I’m gone.”

  She told me she’d arranged for me to stay with Eli while she was down in Seattle, but the arrangement proved to be less than formal. After the second week embedded with his family, Karma told me she felt like Claudia was dumping me on the doorstep like an orphan. Richard continued sending me home whenever the mood struck him, and even Eli began telling me he needed some time to himself. I received the message like a door slamming in my face. Fine. If they didn’t want me, I didn’t need them. Imposing myself where I wasn’t wanted was worse, I decided, than the specter of loneliness. The result was a lot of time home alone, improvising to take care of myself. I learned that paint thinner applied to kindling was a real time-saver in firing up the woodstove. A handful of brewer’s yeast could turn a can of minestrone soup into a rich and hearty meal. And the darkness wasn’t as scary when I pretended to be a samurai warrior, slashing at the shadows with my white plastic sword.

  My mother was off on a new journey, but this time I’d been left behind. She had her destiny, but where was mine? Was this my fate, to be imprisoned in a temperate rainforest reading the same books over and over again? No, my mother had told me a warlock could shape his own future. If she was going to abandon me now, maybe it was time to give my father another chance.

  I shared the idea with Claudia when she came back from Seattle, and she chewed on it slowly. Why not, she concluded. My father had never come through for me before, but maybe he’d be willing to spend some time with his boy now. After a few phone calls from the food co-op pay phone, we found Claude living on the Lower East Side of New York, trying to make it as a musician. I breathed very quietly, trying to shut out the noise of the freeway to overhear his response. His baritone crackled back. “How about for the summer? That would work.”

  When summer came, I packed my bag and grinned at Ms.Ms. “See you later, cat. I’m gonna go stay with my dad in the Big Apple.”

  Claudia put me on the plane to New York with a list of ten must-see destinations, including the Empire State Bulding, Central Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Claude dutifully promised to take me to all of them, but we didn’t make it to any of them. Instead, we spent most of the summer in the apartment, where life followed a regimented structure. We woke up every day sometime after noon, fried hamburgers for an hour or so, and then ate them on bagels for lunch and dinner. The rest of the day I split between sitting on the toilet, looking at the Playboys and Penthouses that were stored in the bathroom, and watching Batman reruns on TV. In the evenings we went to band practice in a windowless basement walled with black foam. My father played bass, a heroin addict named Johnny played drums, and an assortment of guitarists and singers cycled through, joining a
nd quitting the band after each failed gig. I usually sat in a corner, stuffing cotton balls into my ears and playing with guitar pedals. Once the novelty of indoor plumbing and meat-eating had worn off, the days blended into each other with tedious sameness.

  At the end of the summer, Claude looked at the list of places he’d promised to take me and realized he was 0 for 10. He hustled me uptown and sent me alone into the Guinness World Records museum in the basement of the Empire State Building. “Well that’s one we can check off,” he said. I flew back to Washington the next day thinking that New York was the most boring place on Earth, even worse than Cultus Mountain, where at least I could wander around outside by myself. I’d spent years thinking about my father, hoping that someday I’d get a chance to spend time with him. Then he’d get to know me. He’d see what a smart, funny, amazing kid I was. How could he not? Having proven my worth to him, he’d start his life over again. He’d choose to be my father in Washington instead of wasting his time in a dark basement in New York. But, after our summer together, he didn’t choose me. He preferred, instead, the most boring place on Earth.

  NINE

  Decepticon

  When I was nine years old, a little ray of normalcy came shining my way. My buddy Eli got a television set. I still struggled with chores, like hauling water and chopping wood, and boredom for most of the day, but here and there, windows of opportunity opened up. If I raced down the mountain at the right time, and if his parents weren’t watching the news or meditating in the living room, I could watch cartoons with him. Sometimes for hours.

  Our favorite show was The Transformers. We’d stretch out on his soft green carpet and get transported away into a galactic struggle between evil Decepticons and heroic Autobots. A place where there was always more than met the eye. Where a car or a stereo or an airplane could suddenly transform into a robot warrior. A place where boys were never left alone to fend for themselves, and goodness always triumphed.