Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

  Facundo is in the way back with his legs canted, hugging his stomach. The last text message to Kate looms there on my phone, the promise it held now frozen in time, a spit of information preserved in the cloud. We end up at a divey sports bar called the Silver Dollar Pizza Company in Northwest Portland, right on Twenty-First Avenue. It’s game seven of the NBA Finals and the place is packed but we find a spot up by the entrance, near the Ping-Pong tables. We order pitchers of beer and cheers one another and toast “To Facundo” and drink. We watch the ten or so TVs that line the walls. They’re all playing the same channel, so the images dance a synchronized dance on the screens. The incessant plink-plink of the Ping-Pong ball puts me back in the basement of my childhood home, the ranch house, where I skated on rainy days and where we had a table and a running round-robin, a prime source of so much family fun. Dad would keep a tally of the wins and losses and goad us, talk his waggish and goofy shit, hoot when he hit a winner, when we hit a winner, and he’d cavil at shots that nicked off the back or clipped the net, bitching histrionically, laughing and calling out “chip-chip-chipper,” and all of this is to say that it was eminently clear then that there was no place in the world he’d rather be—as heart-hurty and as clear as it is now, actually. Given that the family has fallen apart, it’s difficult not to imbue memories like this with a sense of foreboding, to fight off the fatalism of the present and preserve the joy they’ve always held. To not search them for signs of where the train may have jumped the rails, not ask how in the world this present could have possibly developed from that past. One of the knocks against nostalgia is that it glosses over whatever was difficult about the past and focuses only on the good stuff, leaving a spiced gumdrop of sentimentality. But my question is something like: is there any difference between a simple good memory and doe-eyed nostalgia?

  After the Heat win the championship we make for the sushi place, which is on the same block. This is my old neighborhood, where I lived when I was twenty-five, and ghostly traces of significance haunt the streets. I’ve had enough to drink that everything has begun to take on a fuzzy stereoscopic quality, with impressions coming in pairs, like a double exposure. There’s the shitty bar where I once had my heart broken. Up this street is where a friend used to live, where one time, drunk at a party, I made out with his girlfriend, in his pantry, feeling smugly vindicated because I believed he was hooking up with another girl I was in love with then. (I found out later he wasn’t and that I was just being paranoid and an asshole.) We walk by the bar outside of which Alexis and I first kissed. Down the block is the arty movie theater where we went on some of our earliest dates and a couple streets the other way is the bakery we can thank for the weight we put on during our honey-moo phase. We’d sometimes get takeout from this very sushi place and eat it in my living room while watching Blazers games. Is it a defect of my personality that I can find regret in even my most joyous memories? Joy in my most regretful?

  Sparrow’s Tinder-brokered date meets us at the restaurant. Her name is Ashley and she’s in her midtwenties. For some reason I’m relieved to find that she’s more cute/pretty than sexy/hot, although given the run-up to tonight, I’m wary of making any sweeping generalizations about Sparrow’s taste in women. She’s brought two friends along, Rachel and Nicole, and neither seems that psyched to be there. Rachel has thick and wavy chestnut-brown hair—it’s straight out of a shampoo commercial. But she’s shaved the whole left side of her head and I catch myself in a Mitch-moment, trying to get my mind around why she could’ve possibly wanted to do that. Sparrow and Ashley waste no time. They’re holding hands and kissing before our table’s ready. This has got to be a record, I think. And half of me wishes this app had been around when I was twenty-five and single. The other half, though, is exceedingly grateful it was not. Sparrow is so amped up that when the hostess seats us he orders a round of sake bombs from her, too eager to wait for our server. When they arrive he gives us a tutorial on how to do them and checks the table to make sure everyone’s got the ceramic shot glass balanced on the chopsticks properly. Then he makes a toast: “To new friends and beautiful women.” He’s so earnest and genuine that Rachel rolls her eyes, but this has got me second-guessing myself. Maybe I’ve figured Sparrow all wrong. Maybe he’s simply a yes-sayer, a man who welcomes with open arms all that life currently has on offer. Maybe he is, indeed, our culture’s version of the nesta. We all hit the table and our sakes clunk in our beers and we drink.

  And from that moment on the night begins to feel like it’s speeding up and slowing down at once. Time’s gone viscous and slippery both and I get caught in its web.

  Chinatown. I’m in line for a small club with Sparrow and the girls. Apparently annoyed, the other guys have ditched us without letting us know where they’re headed. I text them but they don’t reply. James has gone to take Facundo back to the Adult House. He’ll drop him off and turn right around to come pick us up. As he was leaving, I promoted a spliff from my pack of cigs and presented it to him with a face like vaya con dios and he took it and thanked me and pulled away, the copy of Nevermind I got him playing on the stereo.

  Sparrow slinks up and lets me in on the angle he’s been working: we’re pro snowboarders, in town to shoot part of a video.

  “Cool,” I say, feeling like this is my chance to make good on the promise of reinvention I passed on during the week’s introductions. “I got this.”

  It’s not yet crowded inside and we spot a table in back against the wall. On our way we pass the DJ. He’s playing house or techno or trance or dubstep or whatever—I’ve never bothered to learn the difference. Two muscled Asian men whose short shirtsleeves are tourniquet-tight and who have their hair gelled into dorsal fins are cruising around the bar, taking pictures of people partying and then handing these people business cards. Rachel has to tell me that the cards alert folks to where they can buy the images online. That’s a business model? When did Portland get this scene? Further still, can Portland have this scene and still be considered Portland? How much about a place has to change before it is an entirely new place, only nostalgic for the old? Sparrow takes our drink orders and dances toward the bar, grooving to the music’s aggressive pulse. His arms do like he’s shaking imaginary maracas. Big red fireman suspenders dangle (fashionably?) from his pants like a torturous sling. When he’s out of earshot, Ashley turns to me and says, “Okay, the truth. Are you guys really here for a snowboarding video?”

  “Yeah, for sure,” I say without a moment’s hesitation. “It’s called License to Shred.”

  She looks at me a long while, reading my face.

  “But you gotta keep that on the DL,” I add, hoping people still say that. “Hasn’t been announced yet. At least not officially.”

  They all seem to buy the story and start peppering me with questions about life as a snowboarder.

  “It’s pretty sick,” I tell them. “But tough. Lot of travel. I mean, I’m twenty-seven and I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up.”

  “God. When did we get so old?” Rachel asks.

  “I know, right?” I say, and feel I’ve made great strides in winning her over.

  Sparrow returns and we drink our drinks and then he goes to get more. I’m drinking like I’m both running away from and chasing something. Whatever it is, it’s a doomed and contradictory state of consciousness that I conceive of as a place, a site inside me. If only I can run far enough away from the place, I will at long last arrive at the place. The two Asian guys sidle up to our table, dancing their own version of the groovy bobbleheading maraca dance, and I pull my orange trucker hat down low and am firm about not wanting to appear in any of their pictures and this seems to win me an obscure cred around the table. It’s a forceful coyness that suggests I really am known. Sparrow approves and then Sparrow dances. The girls and I watch. He gets up and dances on a chair until he’s told not to. Conversations dissolve into other conversations. Rachel complains about how all the guys she meets are assholes and I’
m sure she would also mean me if she knew the truth. One Bible verse I still have down: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” I have a beautiful wife I love at a home I own not five miles from where I sit playing wingman to a Pirates of the Caribbean–looking guy I’ve known all of five days, letting a lovely and sad young woman with a third of her head shaved believe I’m a single pro snowboarder and letting her talk openly about her life, knowing full well I will not reciprocate. While I’m listening to Rachel and thinking about Alexis, my contact lens tears, probably dried out from being exposed to all the day’s chlorine. It’s still in my eye and I’m winking, trying to work it free, but I only get half of it out. The other half continues to float around and every so often its jagged edge jolts my eye and sometime in here I finally hear back from Ben. His text reads, simply, “Spyce.” We seem to arrive at the strip club around the corner without having to leave the first place. It’s like we’ve morphed there. The place is PG-13, topless only, and I have to explain to the others that this is an oddity in Portland. That going to a topless place in this town is like driving a Countach in second gear. Zach spills his drink onstage and is asked to leave. He disappears. Ben offers me a beer from his cargo shorts and explains that he bought a case of PBR and has been smuggling them in because, duh, it’s cheaper that way. Then James returns and it’s after one in the morning and the stages we’re watching become the stages of a different strip club across the river, an all-nude outfit called Sassy’s, where I came for friends’ bachelor parties and no special occasion whatever back in my twenties. Zach has reappeared as mysteriously as he left and we have lost all the girls but Ashley and there may or may not have been an awkward parting with Rachel and my vision is blurred and my depth perception’s all off and the contact-half is still in my eye like the prick of conscience and I’m worried that the dancers think I’m winking at them as they summit and leg-lock the poles and lean back and corkscrew listlessly down them, or as they lie on the ground and spread their legs wide so one and all may survey the inguinal folds of their depilated hoohoos and then scissor their legs back together so that their platform heels clack over the music like a woodblock. The sexiness of this theater, so thick with impassivity as to be practically opiated, remains beyond me. I can’t ken it. And after a long while, I think that I’ve seen maybe a baker’s dozen hoohoos and like thirty-seven nipples today and none of them my wife’s and whatever marriage is about it isn’t this.

  Mo’s ex-boyfriend comes to mind, flying all that way to pick her up. Mitch comes to mind, out in some hotel by the airport playing Yahtzee or Uno or Sorry! with his wife and her family. And though I’ve never had one, what I think I could really go for about now is a nausea pop.

  Outside the club at night’s end and Sparrow is waving us off and we leave him with Ashley to figure his own way back to the Adult House in the morning. The van, now, is on its way. Zach passes out almost immediately. I ask James how the spliff was and he laughs and says it was among the worst he’s ever had and he’s had his share of bad spliffs. Truly.

  “So what you’re saying is that you want to run it back?” I ask as I promote another one from my pocket, and we both laugh as I light it.

  In the way back, Ben keeps repeating that he’s had his age in beers tonight, nineteen. “I might have to yak. Guys, I’m just sayin’. I might have to yak.”

  He and James bicker about whether he should throw up out the window in the back of the van, which cracks open maybe two inches max.

  “I’ve done it before,” he says. “Get your lips up in there like you’re you-know-what if you know what I mean.” A raspberry sound then issues from the way back and Ben can then be heard laughing and laughing.

  We leave the city behind us and it’s two thirty and there are no other cars on the road. Without being prompted or asked, James puts on another of the CDs I got him, Third Eye Blind. I drum the dashboard and sing the first verse of “Losing a Whole Year.” But as the spliff begins to work its sort of shitty work the excitement bleeds into something more muted and complex. The music is turned up loud and I can’t stop my mind from replaying the day’s events. They roll over me: the rain and the water park and the strip clubs. “I come back eternally to this same, selfsame life, in what is greatest as in what is smallest.” We Pac-Man the highway’s dotted yellow centerline. The darkness beyond the reach of the van’s headlights seems almost unnaturally dark. It seems to enter the van, the windshield becoming a viscous, sticky membrane, and then it enters me. It blooms and spreads, envelops. The van shrinks and the air goes out of it and I am sure I’ve become part of some black box experiment. I tell James I have to pee. Then I tell James to pull over, I have to pee. He does and I hop out of the van and hurry over the gravel gully beside the highway and into the grass at the edge of the woods. The darkness is in me then and I am the dark. It’s the wild and loamy dark of the sea at night, strange and frightful and unfathomably deep. There’s a thickness to it and I am aware in a way past words that the shroud of darkness is a glut of gunky time. It is where I’ve come from and where I’m headed and is this impossibly alive and imbricated moment between. It is the love of my father and my father’s pain and the embrace of his weakness because his weakness and his pain are my weakness and pain also. It is the pity and sorrow and compassion I feel for him and myself and the fear that pervades and subsumes me, the beautiful and doomed sadness of this life, the gift of its long leave-taking and the splendid and awful ache as it passes through us. It is the hurt and hardship of family and the beautiful futility of joy. And it is the vain hope that it all doesn’t one day have to end.

  I piss for what feels like forever and when I turn around, I discover that the van is farther away than I remember scurrying. It’s glowing there against the night and is both blurry and in focus because of my contact situation and looks a little like a UFO, like something from an ancient and primordial dream. In either direction the highway stretches into textured darkness. And the stars, I don’t remember the last time I saw so many or when they meant so much. The sky’s bedazzling, the Milky Way a stark blur above me. I’ve left the van door open and as I approach I almost can’t believe my ears. It’s the chorus of “Jumper,” everyone who’s still awake in the van singing along. “Maybe today / you could put the past away . . . You could cut ties with all the lies / That you’ve been living in.” And if someone tried to tell me this, I don’t think I’d believe it. It’s too perfect, too neat. But I don’t have to believe it. I just have to live it. And as I climb back up into the van and we pull off down the highway, I add my voice to the others’ and sing so loud that mine’s the only one I can hear. The words have been alive inside me for years.

  XIII.

  Four hours after we get in, after we carry Zach to his bed and take our places in our own, James barges in to wake me. I’m still in the grips of a soul-nullifying sleep and it takes a second for me to remember where I am. I wave him off and text Jamie, saying that I’ll meet up with them later, that I’ll drive myself to the day’s park. He texts back saying that’s cool and tells me where they’ll be. He wishes me a Happy Go Skate Day, a holiday I didn’t know existed but that Congress has apparently recognized. The Situationists had a word for when the official culture of capitalism takes an idea from the avant-garde and incorporates it into itself, and in the process neuters whatever was once radical or powerful about it: they called this recuperation. And a Congress-approved skateboarding holiday held at eunuchoidal skateparks the nation over is about as good an example as any you could dream up on your own.

  I get up out of bed and look around the room. My dirty jeans and T-shirts and socks are piled on the floor of the alcove and I now have to confront the fact that the smell of the Yellow Room can no longer be attributed to anyone but me. I shower and dress and after that I fold up the rest of my clean clothes and pack them in my suitcase and toss my dirty gear in a black plastic trash bag. As I do I get an image of the guys at the beer
pong tourney that night and at Disorientation tomorrow. Will they wonder, with the same speculative tone we used to talk about the others, “Remember Cheston?” And if so, what exactly will they remember? I doubt very much. And yet memory and imagination have already started to work their obscure magic and I realize that even though I’ve had more than enough of skateboarding camp and am leaving early, I’m already nostalgic for my time here. Can that be possible? With my car packed, I do a final walk-through of the place and on my way out, I leave my last spliff next to the half-eaten package of Double Stufs on the kitchen counter.

  The campers are at a park in Newberg, Oregon, over an hour from campus. I’m not there for more than ten minutes before Jamie begins rounding everyone up to head to another park in Forest Grove. I follow the vans out of the parking lot and we cruise north. His question comes back to me then: what am I doing here? At the beginning of this week, I think I wanted to reexperience the salvific aura I’d always associated with the language of skateboarding, to return to a time when I hadn’t yet been disabused of the notion that talent or skill could save me, when identity was something other and more meaningful than a pose. In a certain sense, the genius of skateboarding’s language is that everything that can be imagined can be said. And be said clearly, denotatively. If a new trick comes along, room is made for it. It is named, codified, made part of the parlance. As much as I’ve been wanting it to talk about something else, though, it cannot. The language collapses in on itself. There is no metaphysics in skateboarding. At least not for me. Not anymore. One writer defines nostalgia as the “repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetitions and denies the repetition’s capacity to define identity.” And this calls to mind one of my favorite passages in Faulkner, one of our most nostalgic writers: “There is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.”