by Brad Listi
He died in his sleep on December 11, 1975, at the ripe old age of ninety-six.
26.
8 July 2000
Hot Springs, NC
Dear Mom + Dad,
I’m in Hot Springs, North Carolina, staying at a dingy youth hostel. Weather’s been bad lately, so regardless of the accommodations, I’m glad to be inside. There are some friendly people around, which makes it nice. Just this afternoon, I met a young married couple from Scottsdale, AZ. Chad and Katrina are their names. Chad owns a record store. Katrina is clairvoyant and expert at the art of palmistry. About an hour ago, she gave me a free reading and informed me that my life line is exceptionally long. She told me that I can look forward to an incredibly lengthy existence here on planet Earth. Was happy to hear the news, of course, but at the same time had to wonder if palm readers ever look at someone and say, “I’m sorry, sir, but your life line is incredibly short. You can expect an untimely and altogether unpleasant demise sometime very soon.” As far as I can tell, that scenario seems unlikely. Katrina tells me she’s well paid back in Scottsdale: $100 an hour, sometimes more. For that kind of money, I imagine people expect good news.
Life on the trail tends to be fairly interesting, as you might expect. A few nights ago, I wound up having a pretty surreal experience while camping on a hillside here in North Carolina. Had just finished pitching my tent on a little plateau when this guy named Dom walked up with his four young kids and introduced himself. (They were camped nearby, out for a long weekend.) As it turned out, Dom was a tremendous Civil War buff, a self-proclaimed expert on the topic. Without any provocation or encouragement whatsoever, he started explaining to me and his kids that the tents pitched on the hillside were reminiscent of the way a Civil War camp would have looked way back in the day, albeit on a larger scale. From there, he launched off into a detailed description of the battle tactics of the Confederacy, the sad and terrible demise of the plantation-based agrarian economy, and the fatal errors of Stonewall Jackson. The division between the North and the South, he let it be known, was still very much alive and well. He even predicted that the South would rise again and crush the North utterly—and sooner rather than later. All I could do was stand there and nod along. The guy was completely serious.
On a different note, time spent living out-of-doors has brought me face-to-face with the simple fact that I don’t really know very much about my natural environment. It stuns me to think that I have so little knowledge of plant life and such a minimal understanding of the animal kingdom. All day long, I find myself walking around out here, with greenery and wildlife in every direction, stupefied by the fact that I don’t really know what to call anything. I don’t know what anything is named. I seem to have lost all contact with animals and the land. Machines and concrete and air-conditioning and gasoline have made it such that I’ve never really had to interact with my environment in a meaningful way. And I suppose that’s why I’m out here: I’m trying to interact with my environment in a meaningful way.
So far, so good. (I think.)
Anyway…with that in mind, I’m gonna go ahead and wrap this one up and get off to sleep. Eyelids are getting heavy and the crickets are chirping and my body needs rest. Gotta make fifteen tough miles tomorrow, heading out of town over mountain terrain. Hopefully, the weather will clear up.
Will be sure to write again soon with more news from the outer limits. If things keep happening the way they have been lately, I’m bound to have plenty of good stories to tell. Give my best to Lorraine and Anne, and take good care. Until next time…
Your peripatetic son,
Wayne
27.
The Erwin Motel. Erwin, Tennessee. Room 13.
I’d been there for three days and counting, laid up in bed, spending my time watching television, eating enormous quantities of processed foodstuff. At that point, I’d walked three hundred miles.
Two days before my arrival in town, I had somehow contracted a staph infection in the wilderness. My legs had swollen up to twice their normal size. They had turned puffy and red and itched to an inordinate degree. It was a highly uncomfortable experience.
foodstuff n.
A substance that can be used or prepared for use as food.
Shortly after thumbing a ride into Erwin, I visited a licensed physician named Walter Redfield. Redfield was wildly obese, which unsettled me slightly. I’d always had trouble accepting the notion of wildly obese health care professionals. Nevertheless, Dr. Redfield was a nice guy and, from what I could tell, a perfectly competent physician. He gave my legs a thorough examination, diagnosed my condition, and prescribed antibiotics and an appropriate ointment with very little hesitation. Per his instructions, I had been ingesting the antibiotics and applying the prescribed ointment to my legs three times daily. The staph infection appeared to be subsiding.
I had decided that I liked the word “ointment” quite a bit.
Several times during my stay in Erwin, while lying there in bed, watching bad television, I found myself repeating it aloud, over and over again, just to amuse myself.
“Ointment,” I kept saying. “Ointment. Ointment. Ointment.”
It was mid-July in the arbitrary year 2000.
I hadn’t had much contact with human beings lately.
ointment n.
A highly viscous or semisolid substance used on the skin as a cosmetic, emollient, or medicament; a salve.
My motel room, I realized, had a certain miraculous quality to it. In there, I had access to a shower, a toilet, a telephone, and cable television, at all times. Before, I had never fully understood the glory of those comforts. Before, I had always taken them for granted.
I didn’t want to take anything for granted anymore.
In truth, I could have been back out on the trail, walking northward under the summer sun. Dr. Redfield had advised me that I could recommence hiking immediately, provided I apply my ointment with vigor, but I didn’t really want to recommence hiking just then. At that point, I preferred to stay in my motel room, applying my ointment in the cool, conditioned air. The plain truth is, I was kind of tired of walking. The concept wasn’t agreeing with me of late. Somewhere along the line, it had lost its luster. Before, I’d been obsessed with the notion of perpetual motion, but lately, I’d been satisfied with doing absolutely nothing at all.
28.
It should also be mentioned that my time in the wild had been a boon to my creative life. Hiking was good for the imagination. I had even managed to conceive a detailed plotline for The Grandeur of Delusions, my intentional accidental comedy, while navigating a particularly tough section of Tennessee hill country. Up until that point, I hadn’t been able to generate the levels of concentration and acerbity necessary to make the thing fully congeal. Out on the trail, however, everything crystallized in effortless fashion. The film appeared like a diamond in my mind. I envisioned it as a big-budget action picture, rife with stilted dialogue and spectacular violence, with a story line firmly rooted in the aesthetic traditions of guys like George P. Cosmatos and Michael Bay.
The Grandeur of Delusions. DreamWorks SKG, 2002. Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, executive producers. Wayne Fencer, producer. Janusz Kaminski, cinematographer. Michael Kahn, editor. George Costello, art director. Maria Rebman Caso, set decorator. Harley Jessup, production designer. Music by John Williams. Wayne Fencer, screenwriter. Based on the novel by Wayne Fencer. Directed by Wayne Fencer. Rated R.
Synopsis:
The year 2142. Malcolm Faltermeyer is a top-level government assassin grieving the mysterious disappearance of his wife and child, both of whom have vanished into the depths of space while on a holiday trip to the moon. In the wake of the tragedy, Faltermeyer retreats into deep cover, working as a stockbroker at a monolithic Manhattan investment bank. But his return to civilian life is short-lived, as he soon receives a covert order to eliminate Dr. Hansel Baird, a menacing paraplegic genius blessed with tremendous intelligence
and powerful clairvoyant abilities. Baird’s attempts to gain power over the global population through a cutting-edge mind-control process called “The Fear” are beginning to gain traction, and it is up to Faltermeyer to stop the evil doctor from succeeding in his diabolical quest. What Faltermeyer doesn’t know, however, is that his pursuit of Baird will lead him directly to the bottom of his heart’s darkest mysteries.
I had once read that the best ideas often come to us in a flood of information, when we least expect it.
I had once read that the best ideas are rarely the product of conscious, calculated thought.
Out on the Appalachian Trail, there were no tissues. There were also very few people. When your nose was running, you plugged one nostril and blew. This procedure is sometimes referred to as a “farmer’s blow.”
The plotline for The Grandeur of Delusions came to me during a farmer’s blow. Mucus sailed from my nose into the Appalachian wilderness. And a story was born.
My plan at the time was to write the screenplay and sell it to DreamWorks SKG for seven figures and a cut of the back-end profits. That right there was the fantasy. That right there was my new trajectory, just in case anyone asked.
So, Wayne. Tell me. What is your trajectory these days?
I’m going to write a screenplay about a bereaved assassin hot on the trail of a clairvoyant, paraplegic genius who is hell-bent on subduing the global population with a cutting-edge mind-control process called “The Fear.” Then I’m going to sell it to DreamWorks SKG for seven figures and a cut of the back-end profits.
Fantastic!
Thank you.
That’s one hell of a trajectory.
Thank you. I tend to agree.
29.
Amanda and I used to go to the movies a lot. Once a week at least. I was always taking her to the movies. I remember we went to see a post-run showing of Before Sunrise, the Richard Linklater film, up at the Flatirons Theater a few months after we started dating. We got into our first real fight that night. It was a Sunday, and we were hung over and tired. There had been a house party the night before. Amanda had gotten sick. Now she wanted to stay in and rest and make dinner, and I wanted to go see the film. It started as a conversation. The conversation turned into a debate. The debate turned into an argument. I told Amanda I would go see the movie on my own and come home afterward and we would make dinner. And if she didn’t want to wait, she could eat on her own and I’d order something for delivery. That way, I figured, we could both do what we wanted to do and everyone would be happy.
“I don’t want you to go to the movie,” Amanda said.
“Why not?” I said.
“Because we always go to movies. We go to movies practically every time we go out.”
“So what? I like going to movies.”
“Yeah. That’s fine. I like movies too. But sometimes we can do other things.”
“Like what?”
“Like talk.”
“What do you mean ‘talk’?”
“I mean talk. Hang out. I mean we go to the movies and sit in the dark theater and watch the movie, and then we come home. We never hang out and talk, just the two of us.”
“We’re talking right now.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I just want to go see a movie.”
“Why can’t we just relax and stay home for a night?”
“You’re welcome to relax. I said that already.”
“I want you to stay here with me.”
“I will stay here with you. I’m gonna be here all night. I’m just gonna go see a movie first.”
“Well, why can’t you just stay here and not see the movie?”
“Because I think that’s ridiculous. It’s Sunday night, and I wanna go see a movie.”
“I don’t feel well, Wayne.”
“So why don’t you just stay home and take a nap, and I’ll be back in two hours? We’ll make dinner and we’ll hang out.”
“I’m tired.”
“It’s not like I’m asking you to strain yourself.”
Amanda waved a hand in front of her face and walked out of the room. I followed her down the hall.
“What?” I said.
She stopped and spun around. “All I’m asking you to do,” she said, “is stay at home for once and hang out with me in a room with the lights on so we can actually have a conversation.”
“We have lots of conversations.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Yes, we do.”
“No, we really don’t.”
“Yes, we really do.”
“I think you’re being a jerk,” she said.
“I think you’re overtired. All I’m saying is, if you don’t want to go, you don’t have to go. I’ll be back in two hours. And we’ll hang out.”
“Why can’t you just go another night?”
“Why can’t I go tonight?”
It got to the point where we were yelling. I finally caved in and told Amanda I would stay home. Fuck the movie, I said. Let’s cook dinner. Then Amanda got pissed off and insisted on going to the movie. I told her no, it’s fine, if it means that much to you, we’ll stay home. No, she said, we’re going to the goddamn movie. She completely reversed field. Demanded that we go. Put her shoes on, grabbed her purse, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was miserable. I tried to open my mouth to apologize. She walked outside, angry, and slammed the door behind her.
So we went to the show.
The movie wound up being pretty great. Offbeat entertainment. A genuine romance. The stuff of collegiate dreams.
The story was pretty straightforward. An American drifter named Jesse meets a French grad student named Celine. They’re on a train in Europe, Hungary to Austria. They get to talking. They wind up spending fourteen hours together in Vienna. They have an incredible, nonstop conversation. Everything is magical. The city is alive. They bare their souls. They connect. They revel. They meet fortune-tellers, actors, benevolent bartenders. They go to a music shop. They drink wine in a park. They have sex under the stars.
The movie ends with the two young lovers saying good-bye at the train station. Standing on the platform in the morning light, they promise to meet again, in the exact same spot, six months later.
Amanda and I sat there in the theater, stunned silent, and watched the credits roll. We didn’t leave until the houselights came up.
“I loved it,” Amanda said.
“Me too,” I said.
We walked back to my apartment in the chill of the night, holding hands. Not a word was said. Upon arriving at my place, we tore each other’s clothes off in a frenzy and went directly to bed.
30.
I was surrounded by Christians. There were approximately twenty of them, junior high school kids on a weeklong camping trip. They were led by four college-aged, deeply devout counselors, all of whom, unbelievably, were named Matthew. One of them informed me that they hailed from a Baptist church in Boone, North Carolina.
Strangely enough, I’d seen these people before. We’d crossed paths a couple of days earlier just outside of Grayson Highlands State Park in southern Virginia, famous for its large herds of feral ponies. The Christians had been sitting in a meadow, eating lunch, and I had blown right by them. A friendly wave of my hiking pole. Little to no conversation. Now somehow they’d gotten ahead of me. They must have had wheels…vans or a chartered bus. I descended a hillside, emerged into a clearing, and there they were again, sitting Indian-style in the tall grass, eating lunch.
The Four Matthews recognized me and immediately stood to greet me, making their introductions, one by one.
“Matthew,” said Matthew #1.
“Matthew,” said Matthew #2.
“Matthew,” said Matthew #3.
“And Matthew,” said Matthew #4.
“Jesus,” I said.
Everyone chuckled.
For some reason, the Four Matthews seemed to be impressed with me. The fact that I’d been
wandering around in the wilderness by myself for a while seemed to have earned me a certain level of respect. They were treating me like some kind of exhibit, like some kind of special guest lecturer. They were using my presence as an opportunity to teach their young charges a valuable lesson. They were giving me far more credit than I deserved.
“Wayne here has been at this for more than six weeks,” Matthew #1 said, pointing at me. “You guys think about that for a second. You guys chew on that. This guy’s out here every day, on his own, hauling all of his own gear in this heat. More than forty days. Solo.”
The young Christians groaned.
“Next time you guys think you’ve got it bad, you chew on that a little bit,” Matthew #2 said. “Some people out here are going all the way to Maine. They got six, sometimes seven months lined up. More than two thousand miles. Now, you just imagine that for a second.”
One of the young Christian campers asked me if I was going all the way to Maine. He was a smallish boy with buckteeth and glasses.
“How far you goin’?” he said. “You goin’ all the way to Maine?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I doubt it. I haven’t really planned that far ahead yet.”
“But it’s a possibility?” Matthew #4 said.
“Anything’s possible,” I said.
“You hear that, guys?” Matthew #1 said. “You hear what Mr. Wayne just said? Anything’s possible.”
The young Christian children stared at me.
“Your beard ith huge,” one of them said. He had a slight lisp and a severe backcountry accent. It made for an odd and unsettling combination.