The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld

by Justin Hocking

  Assessment: Something profound happens to Client that summer. For the better part of two years, he’s hated himself for moving to New York, for leaving his girlfriend and his less tangled existence in Colorado, for getting locked into a job he desperately wants to leave. For having, in his opinion, ruined his own life. Living in Brooklyn brings out the worst in him—he’s full of grievances, regret, spite. He is homesick and exhausted by the pace of life in New York, and now the trauma of the carjacking seems to have pushed Client over the edge.

  Client’s revenge fantasies are consistent with symptomatic patterns of post-traumatic stress disorder, as are his loss of spiritual faith and suicidal ideation. With no recourse against Advantage Rent a Car or Chrysler, Client turns his quest for revenge inward, against himself, whom he perceives as the cause of all his problems, his own white whale.

  Plan: Swim every day, hard enough to drown your feelings, if only for a few minutes. On the weekends visit the Atlantic Ocean, immerse yourself in salt water, let the waves scour away your troubles. Stay in motion—you need to be in the best shape of your life to survive this battle, to swim clear of this psychological shipwreck. Take yourself daily to recreation, tell yourself jokes, keep away from sharp objects and large bottles of pills, do what you can to keep yourself moving, upright, awake, alive.

  JONAH

  In Melville’s chapter “Jonah Historically Regarded,” he discusses some of the logical inconsistencies engendered by a literal interpretation of the Book of Jonah. According to the author, certain old-fashioned Bibles contained illustrations of a double-spouted whale devouring Jonah. Herein lies the problem: the only whales with two spouts are right whales—a breed also known for their baleen and mouths much too small to swallow anything as large as a man. Melville counters by quoting Bishop Jebb: “It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale’s belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth.”

  While studying an online swell chart, I notice that Long Island is shaped, to quote Polonius, “very like a whale.” Take a look at a map: the island runs east to west, the twin forks facing east like giant tail flukes. Apropos its reputation, Fire Island resembles a whale’s impressive phallus. Brooklyn and Queens constitute a battering ram of a head, very nearly bashing the diminutive island of Manhattan. Jamaica Bay is the gaping maw, and the Rockaway peninsula looks remarkably like the long, thin lower jaw of a sperm whale. So every surf trip to Rockaway is also a cool, collected dive into the very mouth of the beast.

  WHALING (2001)

  There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.

  ∼ HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick

  The situation you find yourself in: late twenties, low-paying job at the local skateshop, six years into a college education, no career prospects, and the only thing you feel you can do with any competence or enthusiasm is roll around on a piece of wood with wheels.

  They say you’ve learned a foreign language when you dream in that language. You dream in skateboarding. In your dreams, you roll through indoor shopping malls and ollie entire escalators.

  When you aren’t skating you pretend your fingers are two little legs—you fingerskate on everything, you do finger Smith-grinds on the edge of the dinner table at the fancy Italian place your girlfriend likes. You worry that the food’s too expensive, although you always seem to scrounge up enough money for new skate shoes every month or two.

  On the ride home Nicole wants to discuss the future of your relationship. It’s raining as you drive, trees dumping leaves in messy piles. She says the problem is that the two of you see different versions of the future. She wants marriage and kids; she’s not sure what it is you want. As she talks you look out the window for skate spots, even though the streets are all washed up with rainwater. You look for banks, slick marble ledges, handrails, old motels that might have empty pools. You notice yourself doing this and it isn’t that you don’t care about the person sitting next to you. She looks out the window and sees houses, yards, families, stasis. You’re seeking something entirely different: the possibility of motion.

  You hang out with a seventeen-year-old kid nicknamed Bronco because he used to ride junior rodeo. One day during your skateshop shift he writes the word scrotum on the TV screen with black Magic Marker. You put up with these minor annoyances and the fact that he’s ten years younger because he’s one of the few people you know who’s still down to skate at a moment’s notice. He ditches high school whenever you call.

  You and Bronco skate through the streets at night. You pay particular attention to the different textures of the roads and sidewalks as you roll: the cracks, rows of brick, tile, asphalt, each with its own vibrational frequency. Sometimes if you skate enough, your mind becomes less like a grease fire and more like a candle flame.

  One day you and Bronco skate an empty pool nicknamed Satan’s Armpit. You take a bone-crunching slam and your hip turns purple and black with yellow marbling, like a murky mud puddle with a gasoline rainbow. You can’t afford a visit to the doctor, where you know you’ll pay $200 to have some square tell you to ice it. All you can do is buy a pair of used crutches at the thrift store.

  While you’re hurt you sit around the house reading Thrasher, complaining to Nicole, and having imaginary conversations with an amorphous middle-aged businessman, a guy with two kids and a mortgage and a high-paying career in the tech industry.

  “You’re still skateboarding?” he says, straightening his tie. “You’re almost thirty. Why don’t you do something with your life?”

  “Let me ask you something,” you say.

  “Shoot,” he says.

  “Do you own a car?”

  “Of course. An Explorer and a BMW.”

  “If you think about it,” you say, “both cars and skateboards have four wheels and two axles. Both roll forward and backward. They’re both modes of transportation invented in America. Except that your mode of transportation has a combustion engine that spews thousands of pounds of pollutants, making the whole planet hotter and dirtier and shittier. And the fact that everyone drives your chosen mode of transportation is the reason a bunch of assholes from Texas struck it rich and bought their way into the White House so they can colonize the Middle East and secure our oil interests. So yeah,” you say, “I still skateboard.”

  He looks at you for a moment, clearly unimpressed. “Let me get this straight,” he says, “you don’t own a car?”

  You say no, though it’s a bald-faced lie; you’ve owned plenty of cars, including your current pickup, which gets bad gas mileage and needs $500 in muffler and brake work. And you’ve actually had this thought while skateboarding on balmy days in the dead of a Colorado winter: Maybe global warming isn’t so bad after all.

  You and Nicole break up. It starts in the furniture store, where she wants to purchase a sofa. After a decade this is what puts you over the edge: a $1,900 neo-Victorian couch. You can’t deny that skateboarding has something to do with it. Designer furniture and a wife and kids don’t compute in your head; skateboarding is the only equation you’ve ever been able to decipher.

  Nicole packs up and moves out, takes all the silverware but leaves the empty tray. This image sticks in your mind: an empty container, the outlines of knives and spoons and forks. You are the shape of your old self, stripped of all silver. You hang black-and-white skate photos and an old Consolidated deck with Neil Blender graphics on the wall in your bedroom; you do this the very night she leaves. You drape a strand of Christmas lights above the window and this is all you have to keep you going: images of your friends skateboarding and a few tiny points of light.

  The friends you used to skateboard with every day now have to make babysitting arrangements a week in advance just to meet you at the skatepark on a Sunday afternoon. You decide to skate by yourself but it star
ts snowing on the way to the park and it doesn’t stop for a week.

  You own a T-shirt that says Skateboarding Saved My Life and another that says Skateboarding Ruined My Life. You wear them on different days, depending on your mood.

  In the middle of a bleak January, Bronco finds you sleeping on your living room floor. He says a trip down south is what you need. Two days later you’re driving through a blizzard, snow swirling on the road like ashes. It warms up by the time you hit New Mexico and you skate a few dinky parks filled with pre pubescent kids on Rollerblades who keep asking Bronco, “Are you sponsored? Are you sponsored?” You feel ridiculous, a grown man hanging out with a bunch of kids. You decide not to skate—you sit in the car, trying not to think about how immature it was to let go of a beautiful intelligent woman for this.

  When Bronco drives, you read a dog-eared copy of Moby-Dick, the story of an old man who held on to something so long that his whole ship sank.

  Then: you drive over a mountain pass. On the summit there’s a sign that says Elevation 9,000 Feet. Bronco tells you to pull over. He gets out of the car—you’re not sure what he’s doing. He grabs his skateboard and bombs the hill, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. You watch as he leans into a sharp corner and almost gets hit by an oncoming truck. You drive a half mile down and pick him up. His elbows are dripping blood; he is breathing hard and smiling. He gets back in and the whole truck fills up with energy, like invisible steam. You hope that maybe he is alive enough for both of you.

  In Phoenix you sleep on your friend Brian’s living room floor. Tall oleander bushes, palm trees, and sandstone hills surround his house. The evening sky is bold blue. You sit on the porch drinking your post-breakup cocktails: AriZona Iced Tea Rx Stress mixed with crushed up kava kava supplements. You hope you can drink enough to fall asleep and not wake up in the middle of the night gripped with anxiety, regret.

  You speed across white Phoenix freeways listening to Hot Snakes, Minor Threat, Modest Mouse. You zip past twenty-foot saguaro cacti and green glass skyscrapers reflecting hazy sunlight. You hang your arm out the window and feel warmth on your hand; you’re almost to a skatepark called Paradise Valley; you have that loose buzzing feeling you only get en route to skate something epic with your friends.

  You eat lunch after skating every day at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint called Los Betos. You and Bronco like the bean and cheese burritos so much you consider getting Los Betos tattooed on the inside of your biceps.

  Bronco has no money and when you offer to buy him dinner at a sit-down restaurant he orders fried ice cream. You explain that fried ice cream is not an entree but he eats it anyway.

  On your last day in Phoenix you and Bronco sneak down an alley lined with one-story ranch houses, past a couple Mexican kids jumping on a trampoline. At first you think the backyard trees are filled with big golden Christmas lights, until you realize they’re real life, honest-to-God lemons. You crawl over a cinder-block wall and find a bone-dry swimming pool behind an abandoned HUD house.

  The pool is the shape of a whale, the shallow end like a tail.

  You carve over the pool light, your wheels singing across sea-green plaster. For a while there is nothing in your mind but rolling. You are sweating hard for the first time in months. You decide a frontside air is the thing. You try it four times, feet slapping on the cement as you run out.

  “Bring it home!” Bronco shouts.

  You do.

  But you sketch out on the landing and flop like a dead fish into the concrete maw, slamming directly on your bad hip.

  Here is your latest situation: you are twenty-nine years old and lying in a dirty hole in the ground, eight feet below the surface of the earth. You cannot move your right leg. Your palms feel like they’ve been stung by a whole hive of pissed-off wasps, and the Arizona sun feels hot enough to burn a hole through your black T-shirt. You’re praying you won’t have to go to the hospital because you have fifty bucks to your name and now that you’re living alone you have no idea how to pay next month’s rent. According to the imaginary bureaucrats in your head, you’re way too old to be skateboarding, though you’re still thinking maybe you can get up and try the frontside air one more time before the pain really sets in. But your already-arthritic hip hurts so bad that you want to just die right there in the deep end, to be sucked down the drain and swallowed into the sandy ground.

  Then Bronco slides down and kneels beside you. “Come on,” he says, grinning, “let’s get your ass up out of here.”

  THE POOL

  As my boss repeatedly reminds me, being an editor is not just a nine-to-five job, meaning that most days I’m expected to arrive early and stay late, making it hard to reach Rockaway before dark. As a substitute for surfing, some evenings I swim laps in a gloomy municipal pool on Bedford, just a block from our apartment. My therapist suggests I try something more social, like racquetball, but racquetball is not and never will be my style. He has a point about the social part, though. The exercise is good for me; I swim so hard that I actually sweat underwater. But swimming is an isolating sport. With earplugs and goggles and my head underwater, the Bedford Pool is akin to a sensory deprivation tank. Instead of getting me out of my head as surfing does, when I’m swimming laps there’s nothing to do but ruminate.

  In the second half of Moby-Dick, a curious thing happens. Though Ishmael is clearly the book’s narrator, and has been since page one, we hear less and less of his buoyant voice as the story progresses. We also begin to get glimpses into parts of the ship, including the mad captain’s quarters, to which, as a non officer, Ishmael would never have been privy. Moreover, the narration turns darker and darker as we get further inside Ahab’s splintered mind. According to D. H. Lawrence, “Something glimmers through all this: a glimmer of genuine reality. But it is not a reality of real, open-air experience. It is a reality of what takes place in the musty cellars of a man’s soul, what the psychoanalysts call the unconscious. There is the old double set of values; the ostensible Melville, a sort of Emersonian transcendentalist, and the underneath Melville, a sort of strange underworld, under-sea creature looking with curious, lurid vision on the upper world.”

  In the second half of Moby-Dick, it’s as if Ahab as a shadow archetype starts to seize control of the book. And my own underworld, under sea self takes over when I swim in the Bedford Pool, where I feel like I’m digesting myself in my own acidic regrets, in the stinging bile of my own self-loathing—for moving to New York, for giving up teaching and stranding myself in the Pit, for leaving Karissa, for not marrying Nicole, for deciding to be a writer in the first place.

  This manifests as physical pain in my chest and stomach—a slow chemical burn—and a panicky sense of constriction and loss as my former self slips further and further into the airless belly of the beast. The harder I swim, the more I feel like an emotional depth charge, my crudely soldered seams on the verge of ripping apart, imploding. But then again, the post-swimming exhaustion is the only thing that temporarily soothes the ache.

  Maybe this is just something that happens to writers and artists who move to New York: the White Death; the Melville syndrome. It’s common among those for whom, like Herman Melville, things don’t go according to plan, for anyone who loses his own life’s narrative. Maybe it’s similar to the Jerusalem syndrome, in which Western visitors to the Holy City wrap themselves in their bedsheets, then roam the streets raving, proselytizing, believing themselves to be Jesus or Moses. It’s such a common occurrence that medical providers in Jerusalem know exactly what to prescribe: a regimen of light antipsychotics and two days’ bed rest. This treatment is so effective that Jerusalem syndrome survivors are usually back on the tour bus within forty-eight hours.

  Unlike Jerusalem syndrome, the White Death has no known cure and many victims. David Foster Wallace had more than a touch of it. The poet Hart Crane—who was obsessed with Moby-Dick, and who eventually committed suicide by jumping overboard in the Gulf of Mexico—was a definite casu
alty.

  What we need is a treatment center for the White Death and the Melville syndrome; some day I’d like to start one. It’ll be housed on a replica whaling ship in the New York harbor, where residents will learn to tie knots and hoist sails. Instead of reading Moby-Dick or slaving away on their doomed creative projects, they’ll climb in wind-whipped rigging and shout out obstacles from up in the crow’s nest. The companionship, fresh air, sunlight, and physical labor alone will do much for their beleaguered constitutions. In the evenings they’ll lounge around down in the hold, eating healthy, balanced meals and discussing Moby-Dick. Although they will, very gradually, be encouraged to consider other books as well. During art therapy sessions, residents will create likenesses of their inner Ahabs from biodegradable materials—pieces of charred driftwood and crab shells and bull kelp. After embracing their own Ahab-shadows and the death of their idealistic dreams, they’ll ceremonially toss them overboard, releasing them to the sea.

  JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN

  While my job involves quite a bit of tedium and too many romance novels, I also get to work on some genuinely interesting projects, including a reissue of the famous antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo—the nightmarish story of a World War I soldier who’s rendered limbless, deaf, dumb, and blind by a bomb blast. It’s one of many titles on my company’s backlist, and this being the height of the Iraq quagmire, we decide on a fast-track rerelease. After weeks of sleuthing I contact the famous antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan and ask her to write a new foreword for Johnny. Though she’s busy with a major protest at Camp Casey—a tent city in Texas named after the son she lost in the war—she comes through with a very raw, heartfelt introduction.