Lost Joy

by Camden Joy

  “Where is he?” I say, alarmed because suddenly I can feel Rojo’s fat foot in my face.

  George shrugs and at last exhales. “You need help?”

  “Guy,” I explain. I don’t need to say anything more, just like a murderer doesn’t have much to tell a cop who arrives too late except, ‘In there.’

  “He’s your responsibility.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You killed Guy.”

  “Yeah. Only I didn’t kill him. Wait, now. Wearing his jacket is not killing him.” I know George means this nicely, he’s repeating things I’ve told him, he means that I have to get this to truly truly penetrate the packing pellets that now comprise my styrofoam brain, but I seek to clarify this point: “Wearing his jacket is wearing his jacket.”

  “It’s all in your head.”

  “That’s not so. You saw him. You know he’s genuine.”

  “I saw a motorcyclist. This is true. You said, hey’d you see me talking with a motorcyclist just now and I said, sure. I agreed with you at the time. At the time I said, I suppose there was a motorcyclist, yes. He seemed to know you, yes. But now . . . I can offer no guarantee for the state, you know, of my condition then.” George lolls his head back, musing, cracks his neck. “It might be I saw giraffes, too.”

  “Giraffes are good. Giraffes don’t haunt me.”

  “Guy was good, you used to say.”

  “When was the last time you got to pet a giraffe, man, with those furry little horns on their heads, what are those?”

  “Bring him over next time he visits,” George advises. “Perhaps I can talk him out of bothering you.”

  “He wants me to tell the world about Creedence.”

  “I know.”

  “Between the blah-blah-blah popularity of their music, the integrity of their approach, their high standards. Giraffes, now I could tell the world about giraffes, their spots. Those necks. But Creedence, enough already.”

  Old Man George studies the side of a Yoo Hoo carton like it’s great literature. Frowning, he clears his throat. “Before, yesterday or day before it may have been, let’s go back to . . . you were suggesting we make this habitat a historical landmark.”

  “It would keep the cops out, yeah. That’s all I was thinking. Fire and Rescue wouldn’t be allowed all their goddamn poking around, Sanitation trimming our trees.”

  “It’s an interesting thought, a little legislation to preserve our homeland here.” We look fondly at the storage cans with the orange metal shavings in them, at the contents of every nearby dumpster which have been placed around us like an expectant feast. Important leaves, old coupons, tobacco butts, coffee cups, plastic shopping bags catch the freeway downdraft, skipping, leaping merrily for us. George’s fire smells like a ghost story as it pastes our shadow heads up on the roadway’s big concrete underside, snatching them back instantly. A tour of our landmark begins here, where—with unexpected grandeur—a rise of loose earth meets a spacious cement curve. Does life get any better?

  I go, “Did my trees need trimming? Tell me that. Of course not. It was happy how it was, my tree was.”

  “It seems the enforcement of landmark status might require the assistance of a full-time staff person.”

  “Hunh?” I’m completely proud of myself for not—as before I would have—pretending to understand. I take this as a sign of how far George’s and my friendship now has progressed.

  “Just a thought.”

  An ambulance rushes by overhead, slicing an emergency path through the unspooled cassette tapes and shatterproof pebbles that decorate the oil-ruined, rubber-skidded freeway. Its siren provokes a cat fight somewhere out near the grocery carts in the parking lot. We can see none of it but it sounds pretty nasty.

  “Some,” George goes, “people, you know, get songs stuck in their head. It’s just that you got a whole band.”

  “A whole band and their like goddamn cheerleader mascot, yeah. Who just won’t shut up.”

  “Apparently he can’t rest in the afterlife until these few certain things are seen to.”

  “It’s like that.”

  “I saw this in a movie. Bring him by, I can speak to him.”

  “He won’t come,” I whimper, suddenly beyond consolation, tears welling up. “You think I haven’t thought of that? Tornado said the same thing, we tried it with him. The mighty Tornado, ha! Guy will do what Guy always does. He’ll get back on his motorcycle and ride the fuck off until I’m alone again.”

  “That is because he appears in your head.”

  “Fuck you, in my head. That make you smart? Fuck you!”

  “I’m just saying.”

  I leave Old Useless George then and get back to my tree, where I used to sleep, back when I could sleep, a couple hundred yards away, still within landmark reach but enough distance that it usually daunts Rojo and his lazy ass and I am pretty much unmolested except when—as happened a while back—some thief loses control, swerves from the fast lane all the way across, skids around the off-ramp sign, slams hard into my barkwood tree, then flees on foot, his vehicle stopped two feet from the bed where I sleep, used to sleep when I was allowed to, but no longer sleep. Unmolested except when Guy comes by at midnight and keeps me up, declaiming, which is all that really happens anymore.

  “J.C.,” murmurs Guy, “was the darkest of les existentialistes.” Time has passed but maybe not, who can tell, here we are at it again. Guy smacks his lips most uncharacteristically, raises a gloved finger, and, as he speaks, weaves it dramatically through the air as if from the ocean floor he were stirring dangling threads of kelp—“Let us take ‘Lodi’ for example, a song known by tout le monde—vainly one inquires as to its meaning. A gent gallops forth to keep his appointed rendezvous with Messrs. Fame et Fortune, and ends up mired in Lodi—by the way, Camden—” he has taken to addressing me as Camden though he knows it is not my name—“one finds Lodi a pleasant enough village, encamped ’twixt Modesto and Sacramento, a stone’s throw beyond Stockton, rich in leafy green trees and small-town kindness—quelle ironie!”—and here Guy bangs down his cane for emphasis, startling the other patrons (am I missing something?)—“ironic that the town will now only be remembered from this song, which implies it is a mucky tar-trap of a place, hell-hole USA—why stuck? What has happened? ‘Things got bad and things got worse’—we are in receipt of no clearer explanation than this—‘looks like my plans fell through’ he observes. ‘Somewhere I lost connection’—‘looks like they took my friends’—there is the dim awareness of a conspiracy of circumstance.”

  Guy shuts his eyes. “And let us not dismiss the added suspense of the song running a slight bit longer than one expects, the wishfulness in that extra verse when one surmises the song is concluding and instead it climbs a key: ‘If I only had a dollar for every song I sung.’ Ah, such obstinate drama! In short, we learn nothing of this singer but for the abstract qualities with which we identify! And the community Lodi—in this song—becomes but a state of mind! And that—” and here Guy’s pince-nez glimmers fantastically in the freeway headlights and the salon gas lamps—“C’est la poésie existentialiste, mon ami.

  “Creedence (which was the name of their friend) Clearwater (a word taken from a beer advertisement) Revival (a statement of their musical aims), or (as they shall be periodically referred to herein) Creedence or CCR were first and foremost a band belonging to Fantasy, as in Saul Zaentz’s Fantasy Records, and ironically of all the musical bands of their day probably the sound of CCR least deserved to be on a label called Fantasy—more they should have been signed to Reality Records or Authentic Ditch Recordings and bands like Simon & Garfunkel or Crosby Stills Nash & Young signed to Fantasy—although in the end maybe working for Fantasy was apropos; for Fantasy bilked them out of royalties, led Fogerty and Co. into an involved Bahamian investment plan which lost them all their profits, laying siege to all copyrights, and incessantly repackaging the same Fogerty material under new names (1968-1969, 1970, Creedence Gold, More Creedenc
e Gold, Chronicle, Chronicle II, Chooglin’, The Movie Album, Rollin’ on the River, &c.)—and when Fantasy tiptoed from the bank vaults, arms laden with certificates and private securities and pots of gold which once rightfully belonged to the band—well then, who was it who was living in Fantasy? (The band, sad to acknowledge, the band!)

  “Let us turn now to address the Climatic Interrogatories (as they have come to be called), a pair of them, the question at first in early 1970 phrased somewhat laconically as ‘Who’ll stop the rain?’ and then later the same year, more desperately (as though having perhaps been asked ‘What rain?’) rephrased as ‘Have you ever seen the rain?’”

  Jesus I’m thinking how I’ve gotta get Old Man George to help on this, I’ve gotta get him to talk to Guy and get him to stop bothering me like he said he would but “Not now!” is how I imagine George will greet me. Except it’s not my imagination, that’s really George right in front of me there, and I’m somehow back beneath the freeway, and this is what he’s yelling at me: “Not now!” How did I get here? I cannot possibly grasp this, but you know, who knows, here I am, indisputably.

  Rojo is circling Tornado with another brawl plainly in the offing.

  “Go away!” George yells but shitty luck has glued my feet to the earth and I cannot move.

  A snapshot taken at this moment would reveal the following: bats and cats and rats and squirrels in eternal interplay, a fleet of state vehicles upstairs, an armada of thieves really, doing their machine-of-the-unconscious stuff, the flecking lightstorm patterns from Old Man Fire going yellow, yellow, then white, words I never had much time to fully digest before looming in giant spraypaint on walls around us—“MUFTAH DESTROYAH!” “I luv you Janine baby” and—of course—“Creedence hopes you are quite prepared to die”—and a few fabulous feelings, not a lot of complaints really, this memory, that memory, the cold dirt which surrounds us, it tickles underneath my toes, and a pretty good life it’s been all told, let me add, as these things go, this is what the snapshot would conclude.

  Rojo spots me, and Tornado—sensing what’s to come—attempts one of those purely spectacular tackling dives, a feat of utter heroism, the quiver and flexing of comic book muscle, though in the end his attempt falls short. There is the glint of something in Rojo’s hand, it first blinks at me in the firelight than can no longer be seen, and then Rojo stands over me, pissing, and where he has opened up my chest it stings. Another snapshot taken at this moment would tell us nothing. Tornado’s questions sound iced, strange, and I’m unclear on how much time has elapsed.

  “Guy,” I call, because there he is now, he’s finally followed me beneath the freeway. It’s an unexpected pleasure, his sudden presence, despite his appearing very upset. He uses the back of a palm to paint his face all around with tears. “Oh hey, I’ll be fine.”

  Guy nods like it’s the last thing he’ll believe. “Come on, man.” It’s an invitation.

  “Nah.” I don’t feel like going anywhere.

  “Yeah. C’mon.” Then we’re moving.

  “I’m cold, Guy.” He leads me by the arm. As we walk, I feel I’m leaving the greater part of me behind but that’s okay.

  “Here.” He drapes his jacket about my shoulders. I try to shake it off. “Fuck.” Not the jacket. “Not your jacket,” I mumble. Makes me feel like shit and now I’m also crying. “Oh man. I’m so sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about.”

  We walk to his motorcycle. He kicks it to life, sets me snug behind him on the seat. “Now hold onto me,” he says. “Friend.” And off we go at last, down the road, and up around the bend.