She doesn’t get it. He ponders another approach, for tact and good taste. “I had a girlfriend once who yelled, ‘I’m coming!’ when she came. I said, ‘You are?’ She didn’t hear me, didn’t see me.”
“Maybe you were being used,” Heidi says.
“Maybe I didn’t mind. Maybe I don’t mind,” Tony says. “I think we might give the guy a break.” She gets up, shuffles to the bathroom and enjoys another relief. He wonders if comprehension is lost on diplomacy. “Maybe it shouldn’t bother me. Maybe Kensho likes it.”
She pulls the door back so they can see eye to eye. “I had a boyfriend once, couldn’t come in me. Had to pull out and whiz on my stomach. Now that was weird. I didn’t make any noise with him.” She reaches back for a flush, cleans herself and shuffles down the hallway.
A short time later Tony asks Kensho if the, you know, noise bothers him.
“What noise?” Kensho asks back. Tony smiles, because he knows that no man meditates into deafness. Kensho smiles back. “We are waking up,” he says.
Tony wonders what the wonder boy is waking up to on a hazy, dry afternoon when he walks in from the street and sees Kensho in the courtyard doing his brick impersonation by the fountain. He heads up to find Heidi on the bed, diagonally, leaving the couch in the parlor to the guest who stays too long. Maybe she also wants a wake up, so they can chase the love yodel down the street and he and she can score another dose of relief, and Kensho won’t mind. He watches her for indications of need, perhaps contemplating, reflecting and meditating, in the end realizing he’s being used. He doesn’t mind. Expendability is like mobility, like freedom in a way, like another loose characteristic of the place and the time, like the dust and shadows stretching slowly toward cocktail hour. All that stuff goes away too.
He takes the couch, because sleep is the best medicine for depression. He’ll feel better waking up, or he’ll leave. Personal resolve is all he needs and will be a good thing to wake up to. Sleep comes easy with resolution at hand.
Or easier without the doubt and indecision. In simple knowing you can swirl among the images of simple being, into the eddy and down the whirlpool, where you can blend with images of what was and might have been. Like a dreamy margarita, frothy and tangy and tasting like the meaning of things, he comes to knowing he would leave, could leave, should leave. Like Kensho but different, Tony Drury never turns away until things go away before him. He’ll fly farther south as he flew far south. He’ll migrate again like a sensible goose to newer times, fewer hunters. Isn’t that what resolution comes to?
He dreams of his flight to Mexico, of the warm feeling below the border when the old jet stops every few miles, like airplanes are trains, and a few people get off, a few more get on. Coming in to Mazatlàn the little runway looks fresh cut through a bog. Steam rolls everywhere, like in a dream. Ah, but this is no dream, he thinks.
The mud-brown river flows swiftly, its bank crumbling near the runway. A boy runs between the two, stutter stooping at full speed. The boy stoops and reaches and stands and runs and stoops and reaches again until he sprawls into the mud. He’s up quick and proud with a rope longer than he is, coiling round his arm, muddy brown. Stepping down the bank to chest-deep, he sinks to rinse clean. Maybe they eat snakes here, but the boy is easy with the snake, and it takes to him. Maybe this boy is Adam, and no one here knows how much can go wrong. Or maybe it’s Tony boy, upstream in a familiar tributary.
Stockwell Pond is a rumor. Nobody knows where it is but Lonnie Millman, and he won’t tell. He’s four years older and smug about the frogs, tadpoles, crawdads, lizards, snakes and snails he can get there; he only says, “Stockwell,” when the younger boys ask where.
Lonnie is goofy with his fish-eye specs, and he rides a rusty old bicycle when kids his age drive cars and wouldn’t be seen on bicycles. He doesn’t even know he’s goofy—nonconformist is the word of the era. Lonnie wants to be a veterinarian. He’s so good with animals that school will be a formality.
Tony Drury and Pauly Werner follow him one Saturday to Stockwell Pond, which is no pond at all but an overgrown ditch off a spillway. They reveal themselves as Lonnie stoops in the center of the bog with his dip net dipping mud minnows into a jar easy as carte blanche at the Walgreen’s Pet Department. Lonnie doesn’t flinch but only says, “Not as many as last week.” He rock-hops over to Tony and Pauly, smiles and stoops again to pull a snake from the water.
Lonnie knows how good he is. The secret is out; so what? Tony and Pauly can’t find the nose on their face. Who cares? The snake entwines fingers on warm vibes from a natural player.
Pauly Werner says, “Lemme hold him.” Lonnie complies, but Pauly jerks. The snake bites him. Pauly shakes his hand and screams, “This is creepy!”
Lonnie takes the snake. “He lost a tooth. He could die from that.” He puts the snake inside his shirt, where it will be more comfortable, dark and warm. Then he rock hops away. Tony and Pauly leave because they brought no nets, bags or jars.
Lonnie stops the bleeding and hand-feeds the snake to recovery. He shows Tony a week later at Stockwell; Tony goes every day for the salamanders, mantises, a hog-nose snake of his own, camel worms, katydids, tree frogs and crawdads big as baby lobsters. Lonnie doesn’t mind, but don’t take Pauly Werner there. Pauly doesn’t get it. Lonnie understands potential.
Tony Drury is sixteen when Stockwell Pond gets paved like the prophecy. Lonnie Millman can’t pass the entrance test for vet school but finds a girl and marries, and everyone agrees: There’s someone out there for everyone—until she shoots him dead and pleads self-defense. He was crazy, she says; the place was infested.
For the first time in thirty years Tony realizes in a cold sweat: Lonnie Millman is gone, and for all that remains of Stockwell Pond, Eden never was.
A gunshot is only a skillet cracking the brick floor.
But I left. I hung around and then left. Tony wakens in the dark to a scent of home, grateful for deliverance to nowhere in the hills and sorry for Lonnie Millman, who could have learned to drink and live beyond material gain on the crumbling muddy banks of the third world. He went away like we all went away, and now we want to come home again. And we can’t, because we’re dead or … He lies still for the knowing, but it’s over. Sleep spirits dangle their legs from the eaves and stare down on him.
The scent is more than dinner-by-Heidi. Her old family recipe is cucumber salad—slice one cucumber longways, squeeze lime over top, sprinkle cayenne over all, serve with large tequila. She can make tortillas and beans for those holiday occasions when you want something extra, if she has a cookbook.
This is different, wafting through the library and into the parlor, filling the courtyard and pulling the dreamer up with a promise that life is good. Kensho cooks tomates, frijoles, tortillas, arroz, chilies, poblanos, cebollas, champiñónes, cilantro, cumin and cayenne. Tony rubs his eyes and waits for the funk to fall off. He listens; movement in the kitchen is soft with no questions, no comments. Pungency wafts in silence.
He washes his face, pops a beer, pulls up a chair and joins the living. Dinner is served in the next little while, and when it’s over Heidi pours cognac. Kensho leads the silence, and it becomes a night to remember for those who live in a town where nothing happens. Here they are letting it happen without jumping in the way and yakking it down. They eat. They drink. They savor a consciousness altered by the simplest means. It seems a milestone. “In town,” Tony says. The other two smile and blink. “They fear losing a single night. I think they fear the time to realize how much has been lost. This is better.”
“You’ve been thinking,” Heidi says.
Kensho pours another little spot. Tony smiles; a few drinks, some chitchat and bedtime shape up peacefully and foreign as a tea dance in your mother’s living room. They sip. They pour. Serenity flows freely with fine cognac. It feels good, staid in a way, marginally stifling, but not bad, until the buzz stiffens up and hints drunk again. It gets aggressive, not exactly hostile but menta
l, pointless, restless, sexless and dull—like last night. It’s a milestone all right, a deeper notch on a vicious circle.
It begins with an honest question. Heidi gets defensive, calling Tony nosy when he asks Kensho about his money, where it comes from, because he drinks so much but hardly ever pays. Tony says he doesn’t mind. Kensho is the best freeloader you could imagine, with his style and indifference. Tony is only curious about the money and he wants to make a point. Because Kensho has another habit in his monkish kit of habits, of talking around a thing instead of directly at it. Like a politician caught with his pants down, Kensho can come up smiling and talking about honor, virtue, better lives for the people. Tony asks, “Where does your money come from?”
“Where all money comes from,” Kensho says. All tolerant of all ignorance, Kensho views the world as transitory, like a bus station stopover we all spend time in before heading along. Tony likes the idea, except when the bus station stinks on account of the bullshit piling up in drifts and smelling like what turned Kensho ass backwards in the first place. Because Kensho seems to be burdened by something and Tony suspects it’s bullshit and wants to help clear a little bit of it away. Heidi smiles at Kensho’s reference to the universal source of money. Then she chuckles.
Tony doesn’t think it so clever. How long can you fool yourself, loitering through middle-age in the Mexican hills? We all have our private delusions to deal with, he thinks, and if we’re lucky our friends help us spot the bullshit we miss, so we can clean it up, so to speak. Like sponging up the top-drawer sauce with a blissful smile; now that gets to be some bullshit. “Who had it just before you got it?”
“That’s not the kind of question asked here. I think it’s rude.”
Kensho sighs. “I have what I have. It’s enough. What else do I need?”
“What else could you want?”
“I could want as much as anyone.”
“Let’s keep it simple. Suppose you want to take a woman out to dinner, buy a bottle of wine, you know.”
Kensho ponders then reaches for Heidi’s hand. They make eyes. He casually sucks up three more fingers of Heidi’s cognac and says, “I never thought of that.”
“You don’t need to,” Heidi says. “I know women who’d take you out and buy the wine too.”
“Yes?”
“Wait, wait, wait. What if you wanted a slug o’ this thirty-year old sauce after a nice twelve-hour sit or something. This juice takes some dough, you know.”
“I’m grateful for it,” Kensho says. “But if it wasn’t here, I would try to be grateful for that too.”
“No, no, no. Kensho, buddy. I’ve seen you. You like the sauce, and you especially like the good sauce. And I know you understand the spirit of giving and why the world evolved the way it did, with cash dough and all that, so people can buy things from each other and share them with other people. I’m not pressing you to come up with anything. You pay as much rent here as I do. I’m just curious is all.”
Kensho presents his biggest smile, now that Tony has called him a freeloader bordering on the mooch. “I have a resource, I think. I’ve been sharing it with you. It’s not the same as good whiskey, but it took as long to distill, and I pour it freely for you.” He sits back, all done. Heidi shifts and puts Tony in her cross-hairs.
Tony tops off the drinks. “I guess that will have to do for now.”
Kensho drinks his slowly but nonstop as if decanting to the boda bag in his stomach. He sets the empty glass soundlessly on the table. “Twenty years, I had one beer per day, one sake per weekend. Do you know what that kind of discipline can do to you? It can make you strong in all things, until it makes you weak. I think my training was so pure it was a perfect culture for infection. I have another direction now. I include moderation in my moderation for all things. Moderation was different before. It was separate. It kept me in a separate place. I clung to it. My life was modulated on a beat like a metronome. So now for awhile I want to be like you—shit-ass drunk. That’s not moderate, so I’ll try it for awhile. Maybe sometime I can share with you what I have to share. I don’t know that you will always enjoy it, but you might sometimes. In the meantime, if you see me take what I find in my path, it is because I have chosen to see what comes to me and to take it.” He tops off the drinks and drinks again.
“Moderation in moderation,” Tony says. “Taking what comes to you? You’re a mind-fucker, Kenny.” And that’s the end of it. Kensho sits back with another idiotic smile. Heidi gets up and makes tea, fed up with macho bad manners. That’s okay. A little sauce makes decisions unnecessary. A paragon like Kensho makes non-attachment a breeze. Tony can fly out by noon, or by sundown anyway. She leaves the mess and goes up to bed. Tony finishes his drink and would follow to close the deal and maybe squeeze in a farewell screw, for the sentiment of the thing.
But Kensho pours another. “Enough for me,” Tony says. Kensho smiles as if to ask, enough of what? But he doesn’t ask because he doesn’t need to, because the point is already his. Tony would ask how anyone can act like a blithering fucking idiot and charm the women, but that would be obtrusive. So he only accepts defeat and drinks.
Kensho smiles again over another pour, and he and Tony get shit-ass drunk to prove another point. Tony thinks him uniquely alcoholic, to get this drunk with absolutely no chance for peripheral thrills. Kensho sits up straighter as he gets drunker, still and silent and happy as a clam filtering cognac like it’s marsh water.
From the depths of undevelopment, Tony wants to go upstairs and have sexual relations with his ex-girlfriend. But this will not be the night. A long time later Kensho speaks, opening his voice on cat feet. “Good,” he says. “You do good.”
“Mm.” Tony’s voice drags over gravel.
In another hour or so Kensho says, “You can know anything you want to know. You don’t have to ask it. You never have to grow old. Did you know that?”
Tony laughs, because he knows differently. He knows that all-night drunks twenty years ago led to tomorrows with moderate pain. He knows that a young man bounces back, and then he’s not so young and doesn’t bounce at all, and all-night drunks at middle age are like glass on concrete. He knows that daylight and hangovers are real, and a blazing doozy, one for the record books, is in store for him and his generous pal. Yet he also knows that Kensho has taken him beyond point and counterpoint and the whole scoring process, has answered a stupid question with commitment.
Tony knows that Kensho craves the questions and the unstable approach to life. Tony doesn’t think him wrong; just look what he can do, how he can be. No one in town is consistent as Kensho. But something is amiss, not that Kensho grieves over missing a life on Elm Street with 1.7 children and a station wagon. A deeper grief hangs on the perfect student like a perpetual mourning for the ultimate death in the family.
Kensho wants good liquor and sexual amusement. He wants to live on the margins with oddballs. He wants out; he wants in, American style—cowboy style, out on the lone prairie, down-in-the-dirt and upside-down style. He struggles, breaking in, getting down, and in spite of all he’s let go of, he cannot let go of the rock inside. He tries eroding it with liquor and can pour a cabinet load down his hatch and pass out or not pass out, but he cannot rise to the spirit of anarchy, cannot cut loose with a war cry, cannot voice his need. He smiles again sadly like he knows that Tony knows this about him.
In the quiet time before first light, Tony thinks him more honest—honestly confused, birthing with difficulty from the womb of perfect stillness. Here is a man unencumbered by the common lust, a man reaching for encumbrance. The guy has heart but can’t feel it, because he puts the pain elsewhere, inside the rock.
Yet a tear rolls down Kensho’s cheek, as if he reads these thoughts in the eyes across the table, the eyes that see him wanting out, wanting in. Tony wants to help, but Tony can’t help himself.
The fountain man comes near sunrise and goes to work like a good servant. Kensho stands, chair screeching, bones creak
ing, soul grunting. “Enough,” he moans, floating on air and rubber legs to the parlor, where he lays himself down, closes his eyes and continues.
Tony pours another drink, a day cap, but doesn’t drink it, because after awhile even the posh sauce tastes like shit. So he lumbers up and hits the sack.
VII
After the Dream
Waking up is hard to do when today is the same day you went to sleep on but is far from the first light of it, the knees knock, the head wobbles and the feets fail left right left. Who knows if it’s still tomorrow or already the day after? It’s day; same day or another day. So?
Tony wakes up, sits up, gets up, drops into drive and eases back down, not yet ready for the eternity between a space walker and his capsule. On the edge of coherence, he realizes that a gathering of wayward souls, colorful outcasts and fuzzy burrs on the great cog is a mirage. This charming hideaway and its demanding habits are not normal, ordinary or synchronous. It’s merely alcoholics unanimous, fluid finding its own level.
He wonders if Ron Popiel ever considered a Handy Home Oxygen Tent for those bothersome days of living death. He doubts he will move again, ever, but fears that he must. Solid food seems phenomenal and cruel, another unnatural demand. Here it is daytime again, needs swarming like flies on muck—toothbrush, aspirin, soda water, bladder relief, a drink, a short one, just up to the edge of the ditch.
Tony Drury waits, and soon the miracle begins again. Nearly vertical for a shuffle off to Buffalo, he wishes for Buffalo instead of Mexico. He’s never been to Buffalo, but he saw it on TV, with its low scoring, its bitter cold and mortal grays. They didn’t genuflect in the end zone, but who could seriously pull for the Bills all-the-way?
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