At the other end of the steps, ten or twelve feet from me, near the glass door of the museum’s entrance, sat a couple smoking and talking, taking stock of their lives as if they were about to make an essential decision. I wasn’t trying to listen but for nearly an hour I could hear them. She was a Boulder native and worked at the museum; her father had deserted the family for a younger woman; her mother recently had a mastectomy. He hailed from New Jersey originally, had a father killed in a crash of some kind just a year earlier, and was trying to be a novelist, of all things. I almost broke my reverie to advise him against such a wobbly occupation.
But they were young, in their early twenties, and although they were speaking about the bad luck that had found them and their families—tallying, it seemed to me—they loved each other. I could tell that not so much by their language or the way their arms touched ever so slightly—hair to hair—but by the way they sat and smoked together: in comprehension, in camaraderie, as if they shared a solid history and had made notable progress away from a goodly amount of pain. A move was on the horizon for them now: they were about to relocate somewhere, begin a new installment of their life together, and I think I heard Boston, but I couldn’t be certain because I had Gillian’s imminent Boston arrival with the squid trapped in my mind like a body under ice. Why would a couple move away from such a magical place, even for Boston?
If they had sought my instruction just then, what would I have recommended? You youngsters don’t have a prayer? Your love will perish as per the designated shelf life of all young love? Or would I have told them thus: Be sweet to one another. Stay in this beauty and brawl against the world’s power of pulling apart. Recall Old Testament terminology: covenant, sacred, sacrifice. And mind always that Adam wasn’t a schlep fruitily duped by Eve. He turned his back on God because he knew that a paradise without her was no paradise at all.
7. BODIES IN MOTION
THAT ASTRONAUT CALLED Ahab, on the wavy trail of his own white sparkle, once bellowed thus: “All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.” Well, at least he had means, which was more than I could say for my own sick self at this juncture. Send me some signal, Captain; this is your story, too, methinks, your whale replaced by octopi and a girl but with details no less religious and wild. Okay. Something new and not altogether toward was about to happen here; my marrow and other pulpy liquids told me so.
No more than a blot from neck to belt, I had this exchange with myself on Interstate 80, somewhere between Colorado and the East Coast, driving at a slug’s speed in hopes of being socked with something reminiscent of a concept or clue:
—So, Charlie, what now, you colossal, colossal incompetent ass?
—Oh, I don’t know, just thought I’d mosey my way to Boston to meet Gillian by month’s end. You know, get her back. Woo and whatnot.
—Brilliant, brilliant! Bravo!
And that was as far as my dialogue reached. Mostly the radio spoke and sang and I simply shrugged in agreement with whatever pundit or pop song happened to be espousing a view. All that American airport flatness out my window, entire football fields of swaying soy, many hours of miles indistinguishable from the last many and the many more to come. What did people do out there with all their infinite sky, real estate, and John Deere tractors? And those barns half in ruin, half in use? Was I in any position to say that it all appeared a maddening abidance, cut-off and antiquated? You might know the answer to that one.
It took eight days to drive cross-country because I kept collapsing at forty-dollar-a-night motels, cocktailed on the mattress and morphed into vegetation. Employed some credit-card porn when I could not conjure semicolons and commas never mind sentences and paragraphs. Spent much time on the toilet with a malarial Amazonian waterfall, such was the highway’s nutrition, the fried and the fast related to food by an f only. My heartburn was so Szechuan I could have drunk from a fire extinguisher. All around me the heat of summer was a blazing fact. Every time I stopped to let the brontosaurus SUV gorge on gasoline—every few hours, it seemed—guilt gnawed me in its molars.
Somewhere in the nil of Ohio my cell phone falsettoed to life—it hadn’t rung in ages and I’d forgotten I had the thing, shocked it still had some jingle left in it. Friend was on the line, his voice aloe for poison ivy or some stovetop burn. We exchanged the compulsory opening chitchat of every phone conversation between two chums who haven’t talked in untold weeks.
And then he said, “Charlie, you’ve been stumbling. I’m worried.”
“Friend, I’ve been afraid to call you. I have some sour news about Romp. Sasquatch ate him in the woods and I ran the other way.”
“I read that. But don’t worry: Romp is in Canada at a nudist colony for Negroes. He’s vicar there and thriving. I spoke to him yesterday. He sends his love.”
“Oh, thank necromancy, what a relief. I sat six hours on a plane with that man, plus pitched a tent with him. We were close. I’ve been humiliated, my honor shat on.”
“And that’s not all, from what I hear. Mom just called me. She’s been reading your memoirs every week, Charlie. I’ve been in Iraq making dead bodies or else I’d have read them myself. What’s this I hear about a UFO, a midget, and some Hebraic astronomer battered by a lesbo?”
“Oh, that. Well, Friend, I went in search of wisdom from two separate sources and came out none the better. Morris Hammerstein thinks I should have focused more on Gillian. You know, prostrate myself before her, join her cause. He thinks I should have given her children, become a man who wears an apron. He himself wears an apron. I’ve seen him.”
“That’s a negative. He wants to turn you into a female. Charlie, I have one last mission for you, should you choose to accept it.”
I was beginning to understand that Friend was to missions what Zeus was to lightning. The manicured rest stop I veered into seemed not a half-bad place to have a conversation.
“Friend, I need your aid, but I’ve failed you three times already. I believe I am what you call helpless.”
“I nearly concur. But you need to be reminded of manhood, of how the hairier of our species keeps appointments. I’ve been thinking: Jacob Jacobi is nothing if not man, and perhaps sweet Gillian set sail with him because you, alas, were not man enough.”
Huh? Me not man enough?
I said, “But I shave my face sometimes and leave the toilet seat up. I grow erect at the sight of feminine products. I resorted to gunfire! What do you mean by this terrible suggestion?”
“Women want muscle and male stubbornness, also square jaws. This I’ve seen firsthand, and I’ve heard stories from reliable sources. I want you to steer towards northern New Jersey to see an ally of mine named Richie Lombardo, a virile Italian and human anomaly that will give you lessons. And not those useless quips so glibly given you by the stargazer, but lessons you can use to earn back Gillian and then keep her once you do. Keep in mind that his last name contains the word bard.”
I mumbled sounds of acquiescence and ache, saw that I was almost out of gas again.
“This is my last resort,” he said. “After Richie Lombardo, I have nothing, and perhaps will not again appear in your narratives. Besides, what else were you planning to do? Just show up one afternoon in Boston and beg?”
“Something akin to that, yes.”
“Negative. You are going to New Jersey, a town called Ridgewood. Do you copy that?”
“Affirmative. I copy.”
But what’s that term mean exactly, copy? What was I supposed to be replicating?
“And Charlie,” he said, “I’ve been considering something else.”
“And what would that be, Friend?”
“The possibility that you shouldn’t even try to win back Gillian. Bachelorhood, orgies, multiple ninteen-year-old gals without inhibition or ethic creeds. Girls with bad fathers and talented tongues. Could be quite a rodeo, just the balm you need for a throbbing ego.”
“Come again? Not get Gillian back? Did you say orgies?”
/> A family from Pennsylvania, American Dreamed to the hellacious hilt, exited their SUV several spots in front of me: the mother looked exhausted, the father miserable, the children obnoxious, and the dog indifferent. Where were they going? And why? Did they really require all that plastic junk stuffed in the hatch and strapped to a rack?
“Just think on it, Charlie. You’re still fertile, and Gillian is almost past breeding age, her tubes ready to retire. And honestly, I never understood what was so wonderful about that woman anyway. Forgive me that. Richie Lombardo will set you on the proper course. Prepare yourself for revolutions of mind and groin.”
This was all a bit overbearing for me: flush my plan to retrieve Gillian? What in the name of Moses had got into Friend? His suggestion seemed Calvinist and pagan both. I had always known he didn’t approve of Gillian, but did he really expect me to forgo my heart’s hunt? And what would I report on if not my Gillian quest? A publication was relying on me; I had deadlines. A person requires a quest in order to doodle yarns; Odysseus knew that much and more. Fighting battles and fashioning cadavers had obviously turned Friend into a libertine. I suppose that’s understandable. We must support our Armed Forces.
And so I let Friend provide me with numerous directions and numbers. I had to check the road atlas to see where in the hell I was and where, gasp, I was going. Apparently ten hours, give or take, separated me from this lady-killer Lombardo, about whom Friend would tell me very little, and this I thought confounding. What awaited me at the end of that highway, where the pavement met New Jersey, and what price passion? All I knew of the Garden State were Bruce Springsteen, Walt Whitman, and a mythical creature going by the name of Jersey Devil. Considering the manner in which my recent days had proceeded, I simply hoped that my newest task would not have me confronting the hornéd and light-of-foot ambiguity others hound through mist.
And so I rolled on for those ten hours, abiding by speed limits to avoid the notice of state troopers intent on tickets or other forms of boredom-inspired butting-in. I was scarcely a hygienic human behind the wheel—my scent feculent and almost damned—stopping for coffee when I required what it does to the brain, for almost-edible items, and for the relief of my bladder in littered weeds. Plus now I had to worry about not being manly. Didn’t I take the bona fide manly actions when attempting to thwart Marvin Gluck and the sailing of The Kraken, or when I rescued Sandy from mind control?
At one rest stop, as I held my disliked urinating penis, I found myself trying to will it into expanding an inch or two. But what of Gillian’s multiple orgasmic splendor, and several times a week at that? Surely only a genuine male product could bring such a lady to those heights of carnal exuberance. Surely. My Lord, but what if she had been faking it? There was that movie, remember, with the appalling, mousey thespian Meg Ryan and the even more appalling Billy Crystal, the one with that scene where they perched in a diner, she explaining to him how a woman apes orgasm, and for reasons that sounded to me explicable at the time, though I was youngish when I saw it. Christ—I had a potent enough plague upon my house; I didn’t need masculine self-esteem issues, too, all that modern malaise that twists a man into a figure from Camus.
At that rest stop, in the backseat of the SUV, I got slain by somnolence and slept for three hours straight with the sounds of mammoth engines snoring around me. For a time I hovered in that peaceful dreamland where nothing at all works properly but everything is okay.
FAST FORWARD THROUGH about ten hours of asphalt, green signage, and the silent ponderings of a hobo polluted by gloom, and you will find me trying to navigate the circles and switchbacks of northern New Jersey’s highway system, which appeared to have been planned by elfin pranksters wanting mutilated metal. I was about to ring the bell of yet another stranger but had ceased to care about my obvious frailty. The town of Ridgewood off a highway numbered 17 was one of those upper-middle-class suburban fairy tales we and foreigners daily fall for. I do not subscribe to the cynical, bohemian, anti-bourgeois rants of certain sets and so I found it lovely, a place to live and spread seed, even in my bedraggled state brought on by insomnia, travel, toxic food, and all the you-know-what that defined the yours truly I had turned into. Instead I subscribe to the need of normality and regimen, am not nettled by cosmopolitan objectives, think fondly of naps, backyard cookouts, and family time on the sofa.
That’s what Friend failed to grasp: excitement caused me anxiety, stimulation caused me sweat; I wanted tedium and vapidity, a settled-down matrimony that made a man only the tiniest fraction of what he was at eighteen and eager. Traipsing around the continent in search of dispossessed souls to aid me in my campaign was fine to fuel several months’ worth of yarns, but sooner or later a seeker must get dull or else risk rapture, must be henpecked and housebound. I believe I was this way, or beginning to be, before Gillian bailed, and I yearned for it again. The exiled in other lands know my feelings precisely.
Just as I was trying to maneuver through (across? over?) New Jersey’s psychopathic highway system, I received a distressing call from Morris Hammerstein. I wasn’t even going to answer the phone because I didn’t recognize the number, but the part of me that was love-rent and rapscallion—that would be all of me—wanted to believe that perhaps Gillian was using someone else’s phone to call me and apologize.
“Charlie,” he said. “Asshole. You are a very bad man. This week’s issue of New Nation Weekly arrived an hour ago. You gave me your word you wouldn’t write about my family.”
“Umm” and “Uhh.”
“I will sue, Charlie! You hear me, I will sue!”
“Morris, wait a minute. Do you think you should be disseminating stereotypes? Really.”
“I will sue you and that magazine, Charlie.”
“For what, Morris?”
“Defamation! Slander!”
This was illegal in the Garden State, driving and talking without a hands-free headset, and that made sense to me because it indeed felt homicidal and suicidal both, trying to scream into the phone, use the blinkers, stay in the lane, and watch out for my exit, the number of which I had forgotten. Hang up and drive before you kill someone, stupid.
“I didn’t defame you,” I said. “You come off looking quite well. All of you. Not the lesbian, naturally.”
“For invasion of privacy, then. For misrepresentation! I don’t speak that way, Charlie. No one speaks that way!”
“Yes you do! Yes I do!”
“You can’t get away with this, Homar.”
His spittle came through the line and wet my ear hole.
“Morris, a long time ago some gents wearing wigs got together and started scribbling in a notebook. They called their ditty the Constitution. There’s a bit in it called Freedom of Speech. Look it up. I’m about ready to crash this tank talking to you.”
“Good. I hope you crash and get maimed.”
“Morris, be a gentleman.”
Some huffing and puffing and wanting to blow my house down. Then some silence. A tractor-trailer with a hundred wheels salivated with thoughts of running me over.
Then Morris said, “Charlie, how much do they pay you for those memoirs?”
“It’s rude to ask about money, Morris.”
“No one is ruder than you, Homar. How much do they pay you?”
“Depends on the word count.”
“How much did they pay you for this new one about my family?”
I told him.
“I want it,” he said. “You will donate that money to Mocha’s college fund and you will be glad to do it. Send me a check, Charlie, and send it right away. If you do it, I won’t sue.”
“I think this is blackmail, Morris.”
“No, you asshole, this is the right thing to do. That money belongs to my child because you used her and us for your own gain. Sandy, by the way, is never speaking to you again.”
“Oh, Christ, Morris, you brought Sandy into this?”
“No, Charlie,” he said, “you brought Sandy into t
his.”
I had to pull off the highway just then to avoid zooming SUVs, each one boated by a shrew on a warpath to the mall, she the sole passenger in a behemoth made to carry a clan. (But so was I, alas.) Horns hollered at me, middle fingers flipped because I was going too slow or else swerving. There, in park on the shoulder of some God-forgotten Jersey freeway, I sat with the phone to my ear fending off an anxiety attack I could feel gathering momentum somewhere inside my sternum. For some reason three r words occurred to me in quick succession: rampage, ravage, repugnance. And then I couldn’t hold the dam any longer; roughshod cries burst free from me as if they had been fomenting in there since the Iron Age. Some kind of cardiopulmonary event felt possible. Bawling, wailing, unable to ease my disgrace, I sniveled into the phone how sorry I was.
“Forgive me, Morris,” I said. “Please forgive me. I’ll send you the money for Mocha. I’m so sorry.”
“What were you thinking, Homar?”
“I wasn’t thinking. I can’t think. You saw me. Tell Wanda how sorry I am. Please. And Sandy, too. I’m a mess, Morris. A chimpanzee without abstract thought or empathy. I mean, I can no longer decipher the gradations between innocence and irony or irony and insult.”
A sigh indicating the pitiful joke I was. “Just send the check, Charlie,” and he snapped himself gone.
LOMBARDO WAS EXPECTING me; Friend had phoned him many hours earlier. His Colonial home looked out onto a wide front yard trimmed around the edges, the kind that allows a person to love his lawn mower and perhaps polish it, too. Those towering oak trees: ancient scabs. One so angry-looking it seemed ready to say something. That U-shaped blacktop driveway: smooth. The shrubbery: Edenic. The day’s weather: eighty-two and sun-filled. My interior: trembling. Why? I’ll tell you.
Busy Monsters Page 16