“Jerry!” Lazy-eye said. “That’s Jerry,” he said to the hitchhikers.
“Hi Jerry,” said the sleeper.
“These two are...” Lazy-eye made an exaggerated walking motion with his index and middle fingers. They went inside and sat on milk crates around a big slab of hand milled wood resting atop more milk crates.
“Got any papers?” Jerry asked.
“He was supposed to buy some.” Lazy-eye gestured at Dog-face.
“I got one,” Long-hair said. He took out his pack of cigarettes and removed the interior wrapping. He then very carefully separated the tin coating, producing a zigzag thin paper, which he proffered to Jerry. Jerry pulled a big bag of shake from behind his milk crate and rolled a joint. They passed it all around and the smoke sat perfectly still in the room with them. The sound of someone splitting wood pushed faintly through the thin walls. Lazy-eye said something in the mysterious Ahtna to Jerry, who got up and rifled through yet another milk crate full of what looked like garbage.
“What language are you guys speaking?” Dog-face asked the room.
“English. What language you speaking?” Long-hair replied, and winked.
Jerry sat back down with an empty peanut M&Ms bag and filled it with shake, stems, seeds and all. He handed it to Lazy-eye. “You like it here?” he asked the sleeper.
“Sure. Can’t improve on the work of the almighty.”
“Almighty,” Jerry repeated wistfully, seemingly to himself. He let out a long sigh.
Just as they were pulling away Lazy-eye jumped out with a beer and ran up to hand it to Jerry, on the trailer steps.
“Good luck,” Jerry said, but they couldn’t hear him, only read his lips through the bug stained rear window. They regained the asphalt and Long-hair scanned the radio again. This time a crackling news station came in, albeit faint. Lazy-eye turned around and faced the hitchhikers.
“So whaddaya think?”
“Of what?” the sleeper asked.
“The car.”
“Oh. It’s nice. Is it yours?”
“Pretty smooth, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Pretty smooth,” he said again, and ran his hand over the dash abstractedly. “Guess how much.”
“Two grand,” said Dog-face.
“Fifteen hundred,” Lazy-eye said. “Not bad eh? Fifteen hundred.”
“Pretty good,” the sleeper said. “How many miles on it?” But Lazy-eye didn’t answer, he’d pulled out the M&Ms bag.
“Got any papers?” The hitchers shook their heads, nearly laughing.
“Fuck the papers.” Lazy-eye opened another round of beers for everyone and smacked his lips. “Wanna try her out?”
“The car?” the sleeper said.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“OK.”
Long-hair pulled over and traded seats with the sleeper, who eased down the road.
“So whaddaya think?”
“Nice.”
“Pretty smooth?”
“Pretty smooth.”
“Not bad for fifteen hundred.”
“How much?” Dog-face asked, losing control of his laughter. Lazy-eye was undeterred.
“Fifteen hundred. Make a paper,” he said to Long-hair, who produced his cigarette pack and started separating the tin strip as before.
“Fuck the papers,” Dog-face said. The sleeper laughed. They smoked.
“Good homegrown,” Lazy-eye said.
“That’s shake,” said Long-hair.
“You wanna drive?” Lazy-eye asked Dog-face.
“Hell, yeah,” Dog-face said, his eyes bloodshot. They stopped in the middle of the abandoned road and switched.
“Whaddaya think?” Lazy-eye asked when they were rolling again.
“Pretty smooth, man, pretty smooth.”
“Guess how much?”
“Maybe fifteen hundred?”
“Fifteen hundred.”
“Not bad for fifteen hundred.”
“Good homegrown.”
“That’s shake.”
“Take a left,” Lazy-eye said.
“Where?”
“Here.” He gestured toward a dirt road. Dog-face turned off.
“What’s here?”
“Baseball game. Chistochina.”
“Out here?”
“Yes sir.”
“Pretty smooth.”
They dropped though some tall pines and crossed a little creek onto a big green flat. Thickets of cottonwoods bordered the road and the air was replete with fluffy white puffs. Hemlock, cedar, spruce, and birch trees dappled the ground which looked so soft and warm the sleeper imagined curling up on it like a housecat. He remembered his aunt’s tabby, who always slept through the afternoon atop a wrecked old upright piano she kept on her front porch in Atlanta. He at once felt he’d come a long way and gone nowhere at all. Rounding another corner, the baseball field came into view and the hitchers felt they’d journeyed back in time to a fantasy land. Old trucks were scattered all around, many of them looking custom made. Beautiful blonde wooden bleachers contained the infield. A game was in progress. The pitcher tossed the rosin bag and eyed a runner on second.
“Park anywhere,” Lazy-eye said.
“Roger that.”
They got out and Long-hair and Lazy-eye disappeared among friends. The hitchers realized they were the only white people there. People watched them, but always with a friendly countenance. Chistochina was historically an Ahtna fishing village and an outpost for traders and trappers. There was some gold found in the surrounding rivers and streams, but the region was never overrun by miners. The local Cheesh Na’ people call Mt. Sanford Kelt’aeni. A grip of kids played tag, weaving in and out of the trees, beneath the bleachers. Their shouts melded with the cracks and hollers of the ball game, the dull thump of the catcher’s mitt, the stout pronouncements of the umpire.
Then the hitchhikers experienced a blinding flash of the obvious. They were very far away, had become true strangers, and yet in the same moment they identified a sameness, a unity. Babbling brook, whispering pines, baseball, tag. The air filled with floating cotton. It the stands the crowd chewed tobacco, couples sat close, old folks felt the sun on their face and closed their eyes. They’d seen it all before. The hitchers wandered around and came upon Long-hair, shoulder deep in the hood of a pickup, grease smeared on his cheek. He winked at them. Just as they approached to observe the work being done, three honks turned their attention back to the Lynx. There was Lazy-eye at the wheel, yelling for all of them to get in with a note of frenzy in his voice. As they piled in a woman came bounding up to the car. Lazy-eye put it in reverse, backed up, turned the wheel, put it in drive, but she was standing in front of the bumper, her hands on her hips. Long-hair said something in Athapaskan and laughed until a look from Lazy-eye quieted him. The woman’s stare bore into the driver. Slowly, deliberately, he lay on the horn.
“I ain’t getting mixed up with no more Northway boys,” she shouted, and vanished into the crowd, which ignored the game, finding the quarrel more intriguing. Lazy-eye eased back toward the main road without a word.
“You don’t need a woman, or any money, or anything really, if you got the love of the land.” Lazy-eye sped to forty as they hit the highway once more.
“How can the land love you?” the sleeper asked.
“You gotta court it. You gotta love it back.”
“Then what?”
“Then it lets you in on its secrets, gives you something can’t never be taken away.”
“Not all its secrets,” Long-hair qualified, “only some of them.” A black Range Rover with shiny chrome spinners sped alongside the Lynx. A woman was driving. She said something to Long-hair, something lost in the wind between the vehicles. He laughed anyway.
“We’re goin to Tok Lodge,” she yelled. Long-hair replied with raised eyebrows and the SUV sped ahead and disappeared. Long-hair brought in a country station on the radio. Something old. Doc Wa
tson. Followed by something new. “Redneck Yacht Club.”
“You know Dances with Wolves?” Lazy-eye asked.
“The movie?” Dog-face replied.
“Yeah.”
“You like that movie?”
“Yeah.”
“What about it?”
“Tatonka.”
“What?”
“Tatonka,” Long-hair said. “Their word for buffalo right?”
“Oh. Yeah.” There was an odd silence, everyone thinking.
“Are you mad at white people?” the sleeper asked.
“What for?” Long-hair responded.
“For fuckin everything up, not loving the land, I dunno.”
“I ain’t mad at nobody.”
“You got any papers?” Lazy-eye asked.
“I’ll buy you some in Tok,” Dog-face said.
“Ah fuck the papers.”
“Yeah,” Long-hair said. “Fuck the papers.”
The Range Rover was parked at Tok Lodge. The hitchers went into the gas station and bought Zig Zags and coffee. They sat in the town park and Lazy-eye rolled a joint. A pair of burly mountain men types walked up, one fat, one bald.
“You guys headed for Yukon?” the fat one asked.
“We are,” Dog-face said. “Hitchin.”
“Us too. Thing is, woman picked up a hitcher down Northway Junction couple days ago, he attacked her, she fled into the woods, he stole her car.”
“Fuck. Did they catch him?”
“Yeah. Someone saw the rig in Dawson. Then they got him at Manly. But the point is, nobody is pickin up hitchers now.”
“Shit.”
“And,” the bald one said, “black bear are everywhere, that’s why I got this.” He pulled a two foot long machete from a scabbard at his side. The hitchers’ eyes went wide, the Northway boys looked unimpressed. A pair of women pushing a stroller and smoking Marlboro 100’s walked up and started talking to Lazy-eye. Baldy and fatty walked away with a good luck solidarity fist in the air. The six remaining shared the joint.
“Come see my new rig,” Lazy-eye said to the women. “So long boys.”
“So long,” said the sleeper.
“See ya in the funny papers,” said Dog-face.
“Fuck the papers,” said Lazy-eye, stretching his arms above his head, reaching for the sky.
They spent the night in Tok. Sometimes an RV would pass, but they never stopped. It never got dark. The gas station never closed. The next day a troika of Chilkoot Tlingit guys picked them up. They said none of them could speak more than a few words of the old language. They rode in an open-top horse trailer so only the sky and tree branches were visible. It rained. They passed fatty and baldy, who were singing and playing guitars on the roadside. Dog-face read some Ecclesiastes, and thought how he always enjoyed the wisdom books more than the histories or the prophets. They passed the turn off to Northway. They entered Canada, surprised that the border patrol wasn’t more suspicious of them. They sped along the shores of Destruction Bay and Kloo Lake, the wind cleaning their faces. The ride turned south towards White Pass, leaving them at Haines Junction. Only 150 kilometers to Whitehorse. 2000 to Edmonton. 3500 to Winnipeg. 5500 to Toronto. Swiftly moving clouds, flat and black bottomed, with billowy white tops, cast shadows on the rolling hills of big timber before them. The road was coarsely paved, the yellow line fading.
“We should make a sign,” Dog-face said.
“You have to know where yer going to make a sign,” the sleeper said.
“We could write home.”
The temperature dropped dramatically as a cloud shadow fell over them, and then rose just as swiftly as the midday sun returned.
“Do you think we have the love of the land?” Dog-face asked.
“Yeah man, we ain’t not scapegraces. Look at us. How else could we live this way?”
There was a crackling in the woods across the highway and a small black bear lumbered out onto the shoulder. They were silent and it pawed the gravel and then, seeing them, stood on its hind legs, its nose aquiver in intense sniffing, its ears erect in intense listening. After a moment it dropped back to all fours and retreated into the trees.
Your Siren’s Running on Empty
By Abigail Grindle
Last night an ambulance wailed outside my window. I ran to his side, wrapped my arms around his hood, squeezed him close. I told him he was safe. I said words I could not prove, words that could build a house but not a home. I clasped his rearview mirror between my fingers and led him through my front door, removing his tires, setting him on the floor. His bumper was too big for the futon.
The lady in the ambulance’s belly cried through his walls. She yelled, MY HEART IS BROKEN, and I said, MAYBE YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE CUT YOUR HAIR. I pried open his jaws, birthed the woman onto solid ground, head first, screaming. In the process, her arms ripped from their sockets but I don’t think she noticed. With purple nail polish I painted a dotted line down her chest. Instead of marching ants, they were fairy footprints because she was afraid of insects. I cracked her ribs along the guide. I unclogged her arteries with a plunger. I sewed her ripped valves with shoelaces and whiskers. I knelt on the floor, hands dripping blood, her organs exposed to air like a lizard belly-up to the sun. THERE’S NO WARMTH HERE, I told her. It was shut off months ago.
The ambulance watched, wails growing louder and louder. I smacked his taillights with my bloody hand to shut him up. I smacked him so hard the plasma separated from each blood cell, staining his skin with sticky blotches, more yellow than red. YOU DON’T KNOW, he said. YOU CAN’T FEEL THIS, he said. YOU CAN FIX THINGS, he said. I made him go wash his windshield in the bathroom, dim his flashing lights. YOU’RE CAUSING A SCENE, I said. CLOSE YOUR MOUTH, I said. PRETEND I’M YOUR MOTHER, I said.
Last night, you wailed outside my window. I ran to your side, wrapped my arms around your neck, squeezed you close. I told you that you were safe. Your heart was rattling in your bones, its motor stuttering, idling. I begged you to turn the key and step out of the broken vehicle your body created; I begged you to see the grace that lined my open palms. I said words I could not prove, words that could build a house but not a home. Words that could cover, but could not fix.
Landscape With Young Gourmand
By Ben Miller
The Mandarin
For my twelfth birthday (12 going on 42) I demanded a “sit down” dinner at the Mandarin restaurant in Moline, Illinois. The Mandarin for many mistaken reasons: pagoda façade and emerald interior glow, Samurai sword décor and piranha aquarium, dragon wallpaper and Buddha shrines. I first heard tell of the place during Grandfather Miller’s annual holiday Festival of Slights and White Chocolate Pretzels at Steepmeadow condominium complex, the glass tuber of development overlooking (overseeing?) riverside slums. Uncle Frank, walleyed doctor, the Burn Unit czar and harness racing aficionado, bragged of going to the Maundering in Moooliiiine with Geeeeeeri, hip-swinging chain-smoking nurse and all around evil Aunt. Now, normally I would not want to be seen at any spot favored by my father’s relatives—snobs who mocked our flailing support of socialized medicine and the Equal Rights Amendment, tuning out passionate poor relative ripostes and witless misquotations of Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Hart Crane, Upton Sinclair, Charlie the Tuna, Gilbert, Sullivan and Lillian Hellman. AND YET: extensive newspaper/Yellow Pages research on my part indicated the Mandarin experience was The One for a fantail shrimp idolizer and overly receptive attender of Lincoln Park Mikado productions starring 30 or more paper kimonos. Damn if I’d let the snickering devil children of William F. Buckley Jr. deny me a trip to the crass Illinois orient! The swiftest route to the Mandarin from our feral think-tank in Davenport, Iowa, involved the towering I-74 bridge—aggressively artless, bureaucratically lurid lumination of threadbare metallurgy. (Like a typical perpetual escapist, I became emotionally entangled with bridges. They were second in my cosmology only to Doors to Heaven. Bridges were main players in feverish family library runs a
nd thrift store hops and relative visits across the unchummy chop of the Mississippi River. They got you to the next Steepmeadow insult or Goodwill rack “find” or pretended to intend to do so. That they were weaker than the great river was always evident. The river stretched like an endless sentence the hapless parenthesis of the bridge floated above. Bridges, no matter how familiar, came out of nowhere, always. Whistled in many languages. Mid-air weather corrals rocking in high wind; slick piers in rain. The high or less high launching pads for the post-partum depressed. Sometimes their bereft gray Gretel toll baskets did request, and obtain, our nickels. Bridges cheered hard for us to reach the other side or hissed, rooting against our scrofulous tenure on Planet Midwest.) “DAD! RESERVATIONS ARE AT SIX AND IT’S A QUARTER TILL!” and we were still at home. Would the babysitter show? Trouble dressing—all three of us. The right clothes kept changing into the wrong clothes. Little hands grabbing our ankles, pleading: “DON’T GO!” Did they have a point? We feared what the meal would cost and the bridge to be crossed. Under wheel, the I-74 Bridge thundered threats. It fed the eyes many ways to die—low railing, no shoulder, denuded emergency call boxes, constant semi-truck traffic and toxic monoxide back-draft. Such a bridge could give a child cancer. Merrier were those creepily photogenic covered bridges with a clap-trap ambiance of spacious coffins for horses, bonnets. The I-74 Bridge was the big challenged baby of local spans. It lacked the bleak historical gravitas of the iron Government Bridge and lyrical smog-strung arches of the Centennial Bridge. 1960s budgetary blasphemy had birthed the I-74 Bridge. It was cost-cutting on a grand scale but even so, I was sure someone had gone hungry to fund its construction. Had bones been stirred into pilings? The gigantic span for all its spanning appeared haunted by a lack of substance, a bare minimum of what a million rivets and tons of concrete could amount to. The night of the Mandarin outing spot-lights spidered over drooping cables bearing a disheartening resemblance to an astral girdle come undone. A bridge apparently committed to disconnecting shores! Then again—look at those sore shores. Were they connectable? The clueless bricks, rusty fences, sagging roofs—they belonged where, and to what, and to whom? From the wind-scoured deck of any Mississippi River bridge you beheld to the East and to the West, no so much East and no more West—as if America had here drained out of America, into a storm grate—long-to-haunt-me cities of shaky solidity, rasping and ungraspable. The lightning teeth of Time had done quite a job, sawing sawing sawing away at a defeat already complete, like a madman in a workshop disassembling out-moded chairs and tables and china cabinets, creating of objects the objectlessness. Doubt evident in every urban angle (they all looked incidental now), contentious silence block after block, pangs of the empty park benches and desolate bank plazas and cobbled litter-strewn pedestrian malls, the confounding convoluted civic clench of floundering downtowns below unelevating elevations host to the aggrieved platoons of homeowners counting on their border gardens of petunias to protect them from evil. It was so laughable as to be serious, this ephemeral metro area that could not be named and so had many names—Tri Cities and Quad Cities (if Bettendorf was counted) and Quint Cities (if East Moline was added to the tab) and “Illowa”—a tragic Chamber of Commerce attempt to improve on the off-color echo of “bi-state region.” In this region you were continually looking for The Region—and if you were stupidly imaginative or a serial compromiser (and I happened to be both) you settled for Theme. Bee Gees or Mexican or Chinese: The Mandarin. Baby-sitter instructed and hands pried off ankles and false promises made about return time—we were free to go—and did go, demons in tow. Off we flew down River Drive, nothing to the right, nothing to the left, nothing behind and nothing ahead (not yet), junker’s pillowy tires spiraling up I-74 on-ramp, bounce-sway-rattle-bang-vroooooming too close to the too low guardrail, father’s butch at the wheel, mother’s helmet hair dented by wind bypassing shut windows, entering via hood cracks, door cracks, roof cracks, scathing hiss of a Bronte moor, the mind-crumbing but in no way dumb howl, sensate if indecipherable echo of ultimate knowledge which did not fit in any skull or car. How could we live so dumb while over our heads in truth? We could barely hear ourselves yell on the I-74 Bridge. As usual I was better greased than the car, creases high and low lathered in trip-tension run-off. I picked shirt off my tits, wiggled in vain to re-align askew underwear. (Off-kilter underwear was akin to molting like a rattler.) I considered clothes almost as disturbing and deadly as flesh. In car wind my thick bangs raged like a brain blanket getting the crumbs beaten out of it with wooden spoons. I felt highly filtered—distilled to fine foul swamp water—everything blown out of me, the useless sludge left. I was being eaten by the teeth of the wind-currents like a plump salty prawn! I smiled. It was some introduction to maturity. It would make the newspapers, wouldn’t it? For all the placeless place muck I had slogged through and nameless name dread I walked with on my many wanderings down strange empty streets which seemed to anoint me oldest child and only heir of Dystoopa I later discovered was pronounced Dystopia—for all the adult-grade isolation, there remained—still!—a pinafore shred of a child very determined to turn twelve, scrap culinary charm off asphalt. Food was politics I had ascertained. I had chowed my way to this epiphany. Cans and boxes tossed taste buds in prison for no reason other than your economic status. I had to blast my way out with extravagant Birthday Dinner requests. If that did not work I might even have to fast. Almost impossible for a blubber-butt to conceive of, but with morbid interest I followed accounts of hunger strikers everywhere. I knew food—or lack thereof—was an escape as sure as any Door to Heaven. I knew what I had in The Mandarin. Unlimited access to soy sauce, and in the briny beany savor of soy sauce lurked a continent where I could own an ox, and sing to it. But lacking Heaven’s Door to knock on I must think that. Sweet and sour Jesus I was gung-ho to reach The Mandarin of Frank and Geri! And there hector their favorite waiter, and spin the contraption my mother had been wailing about for days—THE LAZY SUSAN—and inhale the good Green Lantern light and request tea and find out what an egg roll really was (the frozen kind being crust around a puff of beef-flavored humidity) and taste chow mien that did not slurp out of a can like graveyard goop, packed with maggot white bean sprouts and bamboo shoots akin to rubber tongue depressors. But would we get there? Survive Nostradamus I-74 lanes? The highest bridge. Stacked cruise ships could pass underneath a structure that need only provide clearance for tire-slung tugboats, coal-heaped barges and dredges raking the silt, searching for drowning victims. I-74 Bridge shook the most too. Whenever you were headed, it stole the show. Over a half mile long, busy 24 hours a day, and yet there existed not one D.O.T. caretaker, day-glo vest and stubble and pipe snug in a booth equipped with a walkie-talkie. Break-down and you’d be wise to leave a will on the dashboard before trying to change the tire or tend the ruptured radiator hose. Gusts belted the chassis, pushing us toward guard rail oblivion, center- line semi-truck apocalypse. But I was calm, suddenly. This was what I had asked for, wasn’t it? It was what I wanted too. Somehow it was. I had the time for all feelings: seconds passed like millenniums. I was calm because I had been here many times before; knew I would be back—or thought I knew it. Sad soft sons and sad smoky fathers and sad poetry-quoting mothers were not as easy to kill as they looked. (Before I fled the area and its ghosts in my late teens, during a manic “fitness” phase, I would BIKE OVER this bridge—handlebars jumping bronco-style in the gale—and JOG over it once also on the tight rope of the pedestrian walkway, not wanting to die but rather to enter more deeply into the bridge mysteries—commune with them, and yes, I did, coasting intimately along on an ultimate city edge.) River could not be seen but it was felt in the relentless deafening blasts of air—deadly tug and swirl of currents, leviathan humps of scrub islands, mud heavy like wool and sleeving levees. Hillside lights flickered in the distance without disrupting Stygian murkiness in which they were arrayed like a hot coal buffet. Red winks, orange winks, Illinois relative hell: Dr. Miller’s crystal palace
of prejudices and dry roasted peanuts and the Verna he married after Rose died and an expensive uncooperative poodle failed to address his need for a compliant companion—Grandpa Stanley’s small brick castle of booze, fireplace pokers, Nixon worship and the cell at the end of the hall containing the four-poster bed and Granny, stroke victim who had regained her Crittenden County Kentucky drawl, and some mobility, but dare not venture into the hallway without protection, subsisting each night on a little wooden salad bowl of peppermints, and whimpered prayers. Other brighter (but no less freaky) torch-like lights of parking lots and strip malls and gas stations that appeared to be moving up or down the hill as if marching to different locations where business might be a little bit better—as if there could ever be a new start in a place where history happened everywhere equally, whether it seemed that way or not. I thought of restaurants that had not even made the list of thirty I had cut to twenty then ten then five then two, where the decision process stalled as I waited for a Sign From Above as to whether this was truly the year to pick The Captain’s Table, a perennial finalist and bridesmaid. Fast food restaurants of course received no consideration, and nor did the beastly Bring ‘Er Inn with its cave façade and sign depicting a caveman dragging his mate by the hair. I wished I was bald—no hair for the wind to whip me with. Father screamed at mother and she screamed back, sound pouring into sound and fading deafeningly. Truck ahead, truck behind and always a truck passing on the left, always the longest fall of your life on the right, and mid-bridge a fleeting exhilarating feeling of participating in the Big Bang, riding an earthly shard into obsidian firmament where raw matter had the leeway to expand and expand and expand into a glittering new galaxy with a life span just short of eternal... “Rail, Dave!” “I see it! Shaddup, will ya? Let me drive!” As if it mattered a whit who was at the wheel! As if there was a wheel—could be a wheel—on a family situation like ours! “TANKER, DAVE!” “I see it!” “You TOUCHED the rail!” “What’s it there for?” Family of hurtling smithereens with nowhere to land but back home after each careen, as nowhere but our own strange home could contain our dire contradictions. Family of one toothbrush gnawed to a nub and many starving cats and sheets but no blankets or blankets but no sheets and stained pillow ticking and too many advanced degrees sitting around unused—his law degree, and her own law degree, his college degree, and her college degree. Family of father by himself in the recliner. Family of mother and me tossing the tennis ball back and forth in the street at midnight, she threatening: Let’s run away, Benny. Leave the others! I’ll take the Illinois bar. Family of me and my Marvel comic books. Family of me and Elizabeth, second oldest, also a budding poet of gothic darkness—Edward Gorey our agreed upon model, Chas Addams a close second. Family of middle children partiers—Howie and Mitzi. Family of stoic thumb-suckers Nanette and Nathan. None of it could be! It just WAS. A domestic cell diseased, dividing to live, dividing to die, spreading poisons. Ask the quaking babysitter back there at 15 Crestwood Terrace, head in hands or oven, cooked, another sacrifice to the Godless roil of fur, diapers, cans, boxes, bags, mags, butts, nubs, crusts—new wreckage tangling with ancient, an ever-evolving gnarl of unfulfilled needs, right dreams turned wrong, terrible choices, weird role reversals! What were mother’s instructions to the babysitter? Something along the lines of: Put yourself to bed at nine, it’s easier that way. And how did Sacrifice respond? “But I don’t understand, Mrs. Miller...” Good point! How to get straight a story that was anything but straight? Our dank inept momentum was lateral, none of us ever really moving forward, only out out out out thus further in in in in into an abyss of our own making, with its glaze of river mud and smokestack haze. A family unit—if no unit—was the most powerful engine of disunity—destroyer of imposing social structures assembled carefully, over many generations! Behind I-74 wind howled our own stronger and longer wind. Two hundred pounds I weighed—as if eating could keep me anchored, make me hold. It had not—had not at all. Like the world’s most portly lint I clung to the mother clinging to nothing and we had few moments of peace, hearts stumbling and minds lurching in a futile effort to align identities with a perilous situation on the ground neither of us could completely perceive, being always in flight, cataloging blurs. Ridiculous people! who wanted, secretly, to get real. I knew that about her—if she did not know that about me. But there was no reset button on the madness. It had its own momentum now, and even our bravest attempts to make the disaster make sense resulted only in more absurdity. We snatched at THEMES—Copland or Cuban or Chinese—and in them attempted to package our thickest simple human desires. We were all riding shot-gun on a calamity clearly of no bother to anyone else, yet to me, at least, of such concern that I would be willing to spend the next thirty-five years trying to figure out the missing how, and why, and who, and what, and where. (Let go? Go on? The advice, though delivered out of genuine concern, can be harmful, engendering the illusion that the past is some unsightly clod of crap on life’s path to step around or “overcome.” It’s a sickening mess, all right. But a mess of paramount complexity, and importance to identity. No, the past cannot ever be changed, what is done is done, but the vast and imperial drag of childhood on a personality is impossible to wish away. It catches up, always. It informs, always. To “let go” of the dialogue with personal history because the history is difficult or murky is to free the hands for all sorts of misguided mischief that comes of glad ignorance—or failure to respect—one’s own elaborate wiring.) Back then, though, there was no figuring out anything. There was the fight. We were fighting—each on our own way—the same battle each day and each night and reaping the same results which only seemed different because duct tape was not always in the same place on the discount bag of nuts, and the time of arrival at the old conclusions varied. There was no law of the land. There was barely land, and the law had been sent to a rest home or died. Without law, attorneys are not much use. If I was caught in the middle of a dissolved marriage, they were caught in the middle of lives that seemed to have no start, and no end. The eyes of my parents asked one thing in unison: What is natural about me? “SPARKS! BUMPER HIT THE RAIL! SPARKS! WE’RE GOING OVER!” She could see it. I too—our imaginations had something sick in common. Corroded car-feather wafting into chasm, skeleton fingers dialing the Ma Bell chasm phone to cancel dinner for three at The Mandarin. “RAILINGS ARE MADE TO BE HIT, BUMPERS BUMPED! CLAM DOWN! I GOT THE HANG OF THIS BRIDGE!” And off that sticky wheel hung but two limp fingers! RAIL ANGST did not subside until we were funneled over train yards and warehouses, rumble-clunking down a ramp jammed like a stent into the dust-clogged heart of Moline. Stoplight! Screeeeeeeeeech. Tailpipe fumed under the I-74 interchange, a tangled sluggardly matrix as gloomy as those crepe webs mother spun across the cracked living room ceilings each birthday, tape marks remaining for years, turning mustard yellow. (At home the fresh web awaited—green and blue, my favorite colors.) Rush hour up there, no car but ours below, Stonehenge pillar shadows, the stillness. Illinois Orient? “Drive!” I pleaded with the pilot. Time would keep spooling backward until we went forward—back to the Ice Age, back to the Big Bang. Match flared, Camel embered, inhale, exhale. “The light is red, Benny.” Having let so much else slide away—career, family, health—it was vital to idle at deserted intersections to show me (and suspicious spouse) that he remained careful, introspective, an ample serving of moral fiber. I pitied him—I did— “IT’S GREEN! GO!” Vroooooooom. The Hotel LeClaire existed in downtown Moline (a favorite spot of Dr. Miller and Wife #3), but I did not see a maroon awning with the elegant Twain-era lettering. Perhaps the lobby (and restaurant salad spinners) had retracted into the earth so no tourist made the mistake of sightseeing following cherry flambé. At night hints of civilization departed from unrented blocks of real estate in the Mississippi River Valley. Neglect ruled. It was all because of the death of such-and-such department store, claimed the female minister in the sticky pulpit of the front seat, and she bowed her head and said a prayer for Parker’s,
and Grant’s too, and I bowed my head, mourning all that department stores were—chiefly, to us, an kinder place to get lost than K-Mart. So many interesting nooks! And working step-stool water fountains (water so cold it tasted like magnesium ice cream) and plush lounges instead of restrooms... palaces of merchandising open late into the night, except on Sunday. Without a department store a downtown could not hold itself together after the P. O. closed. See! Gutters sprouted vines, graffiti curled across walls: incubus language—incubus rage, pointillism of the alley glass glitters, umbrellas of street light glow isolating the sparse parade of parking meters, phone booths, mailboxes... Then—just ahead!—green-lit red pagoda pillars! Genuine mirage. Corporeal hallucination. Spice trader outpost afloat in a hole lightening teeth of time had sawed sawed sawed. Inside steam genies rose from tea pots, a just few tablespoons of golden oil kept the kitchen temple lit. “THERE IT IS! THE MANDARIN!” Green glow closing in on us, it seemed, rather than us closing in on it. My next base station from which to launch a short-lived but viable war against isolation. I’d ask for extra Fortune Cookies to bring home and open on rainy days! We parked in front, hot tongue of the hood not liking it: ping-tick-knock, ping-tick-knock. Usual anxious parental stalling tactics: he lit another cigarette, she combed spit into her hair, he yawned, she moaned. Dandruff brushed off shoulders, poetry anthology consulted, one front door sticking then the other, Moby Purse puking onto curb the rich detritus generated by the daily explosion of possibilities—tissues, coins, expired library cards, toothpicks, coupons. I tried to help my mother in every way I could, but drew the line at purse management. She stopped, gathering articles, then straightened and looked around for prostitutes. Father limped around to the sidewalk. Like me, he aged in decades. A decade a year. (Methusela, move over.) Fingers pointed at the depth to which Moline had sunk. Deceased dime store noted, shuttered saloon, broken windows, too-close-for-comfort pariah dog yowl, Cannery Row phantoms crowding loading docks, and a lot where trucks went to die like old white elephants: KEN’S HEATING OIL SERVICE, P.M. CATERING BY PAM. We had come so far... but the carved door, just across the sidewalk, never seemed more unreachable. My father paused to pat a pocket, pockets. Mother, a stunned expression on her face, yanked purse straps like a paratrooper discovering the ripcord is a dud. This was typical. (When at sixteen I read the classic time-stretching drama The Iceman Cometh I considered inmates of Harry Hope’s rooming house—Larry and Ed and Pat and Willie and Rocky—to be close relatives of ours—they suspended forever in the tick-tock 1912 gloom—while we were locked in our skulls dusted with misbegotten dreams and coasting by halting— stopping, starting, stopping—through the gritty nadir of our American era.) With my own squealing potent mixture of despair and faith, I urged reluctant (indigent?) dining companions onward. We were “all in this together.” We had to be—didn’t we? Two more years went by in a minute... then a watchful waiter in a red vest opened the hollow dragon door. We lugged emotional baggage further. He jumped out of the way to avoid giggling grunting yapping Entrance Hysteria. Green Lantern Green Hornet glow gushed like a wild runny mysterious sauce over cow brown stool legs grazing at the short bar, over a myriad of tiny brass upholstery tacks—lime light, Go light, nuclear scare. This was our treat. The reward we had earned. It must be loved because we had gotten here the hard way. No doubt about that. The I-74 Bridge was the capper on a brutal journey that had begun, according to my calendar, 365 days prior: the day after my last birthday dinner on November 5. Since then I had chewed my way through a year’s worth of mangy gray peanut-butter-and-cracker mouth mud, and cottage-cheese-Miracle-Whip muck, to at last! be basted in the sweet otherworldly light sauce of green grass and moss trickling down (and also up) clicking beaded curtains. Dimness bathed and cleansed my senses. We had entered a spectral grotto of absolution—a cabiny culinary retreat perfectly suited to serve the unbalanced, undone, unholy. Ghosts of garlic. Hints of E.S.P. and reincarnation and Tarot. I smelled Uncle Frank’s peppery Christian Dior cologne in the foyer. He was not inside. Hangers were inside—the coatless coat rack poised beside the cash register like a complex musical instrument waiting to be struck with collars. Early November, but uncommonly warm, I realized belatedly. Odd how appreciation of, or upset with, the weather, was most intense indoors. I took ten steps with my eyes. Wilted tree next to a parakeet cage next to the jade fat man! Oh, I could see why tacky Frank and Geri loved The Mandarin. It seemed as if Charlton Heston, in silken beanie and pantaloons, might any second sidle from behind a curtain, distribute tablets instead of menus, talking with a Moses-Chinese twang in the stew of green light. Things were off—way off—as only America can make them off. Irish light and Chinese food and the Illinois tax code. Hollywood. It was as if we were haunting a film set where every object consisted of light, and us too. Various small dining areas on slightly different levels: step up to reach horseshoe booths. At one table a solitary man was stuffing his mouth with green-tinted dumplings right out of Soylent Green, the smoggy sci-fi classic about a global food shortage, corpses ground into protein wafers. No wonder Heston remained off-stage. The Mandarin was not his meal-ticket. It was our late late show. Gallons of eerie light washed the stains and wrinkles out of our clothing. We were clad in the same goofy starched green jump suit as the rest of the customers—all five. How socialist! I had the bad feeling that told me everything was going to be fine. I was already receiving much of what I had come to get: a scene, an event. The true Birthday Dinner consisted of a Wonderfully Horrid Florid Disorienting Extravaganza, the fancy food but an odd precious afterthought! I loved the tricky idea of gourmet cuisine (luscious entree centerfolds glimpsed in magazines from the library free box) but preferred reliable honest cafeteria fodder like pecan pie and corn fritters and rhubarb pie. And being that rare gourmand who hardly dared to develop his palette, I was relegated to feasting wholly, with nervous gusto, on the Mandarin’s flavorful swaggerings of THEME—tantalizing tidbits of non sequitur decor temporarily (and gloriously) displacing destructive ingrown craziness with the harmlessly insane flamboyance of the Illinois Orient. Skinny tie manager glided forth leprechaun-like. He was worried: we were looking around too much. I squeaked: “Party of three! Miller! We have reservations!” “Lots and lots of reservations.” “Where’s the aquarium? I called! You said there was a piranha aquarium!” At least I thought about calling. My research was never as involved as I wanted it to be. “But honey!” gurgled mother, sucking ulcerated gums. “Look at those vases!” I did not look. She was playing another joke—it helped soothe the ache in her mouth. The gums and teeth were untreated. She did not trust dentists or doctors, and their billing practices. The cave under the pug nose had a dark existence separate from the rest of the tired but antic face. She washed down the candy she loved with hydrogen peroxide. The cave had seen more nastiness than even her dark eyes, I thought. She saw me not looking away from her at the nothingness of decorations and she did not like that. She did not like to be appraised. She rightly feared it. “Look over there!” Porcelain pork barrels, the “vases” were, next to a dribbling fountain next to a bamboo booby-trap next more jade obesity next to a dragon lady totem pole next to a patch of empty red carpet. Had the Lincoln Park Mikado company unwisely neglected to return a Great Wall screen, or Bay of Shanghai junk, rented from Mr. Skinny Tie? A tough thinking dude, hands on hips—elbows and cheekbones and hair mop. We were boring him as everyone bored him. He inspected the floor. Lunar eclipse eyes, stark unenterable circles. Mother kneaded my shoulder as she kneaded my feet at night, making love to the heels, toes, arches, while re-counting details from her favorite books like Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and other true crime masterpieces. “THE BIRTHDAY BOY!” The manager’s mango Adam‘s apple glided greenly above the olive tie knot: “My breast congratulation.” Tone ungenerous, clipped. At The Mandarin I would not get a special dessert on my special day, but fortune cookies were better—sealed in plastic and less likely to be stale, thinly frosted. “Come writh me.” We went writh
him. Our darting eyes and lumbering steps and ill-fitting clothing and tons of grief following the tailored Hong Kong suit into the spooky Chow Mein chamber. He walked. We lollygagged in our noir slapstick fashion, lubricated by surrounding illusions, fending off paranoia. Mother, like a scared child, grabbed my hand. Was the reservation podium equipped with buttons controlling trap doors under throne chairs? “Writh way,” the manager chanted. “The toidy! Where is it?” Her “ninny” voice—she going on the offensive as she always did when on foreign terrain. Mouth eight times the size of her bladder! Scissored fingers jabbed in the direction of a curtain beside the seaside village mural. “Don’t need to tinkle! Just getting my bearings!” Manager glared at Husband wearing grief and scuffed shoes. Husband shrugged. He dragged the bad leg, broken when he was a boy, and set wrong by Dr. Miller. The severity of the limp varied from hour to hour. It was worse —like now—when he attached the pain to history: my father maimed me. Quack incompetence? Godly malice? No one knew. No one dared demand answers of The Doctor who vacationed in London and wore French smoking jackets. Wife backtracked to keep pace with arthritic Husband. She was much shorter: her shoulders crested at his mushy chest. For a few slow motion moments they were a definite pair, bumping empty tables. And I was a boy again, not her pawn to deploy as protection or a sponge to absorb her excess anger and loneliness, but simply a son, no more, no less. I felt blessed. Already the dinner had worked a bit of magic. Going out—roaming far from the house and the other kids—was a gamble, and if the gamble paid off, it could be fine like this. Gong music. Rugs for various bugs to be snug in. Warrior wall paper, snake-framed mirrors, more porky porcelain barrels depicting dancers and fishermen, their 16th Century stories stored secretly inside. “LAZY SUSAN!” Mother pushed past the manager, bum-rushing a corner table of hemispheric girth. pointing at what looked like a roulette wheel with soy sauce bottles in the middle.. “You put dishes on and spin!” For a fool, she knew scads. “HERE WE CAN SHARE!” No sharing charge, she meant. Maybe it was the cool veil of lantern light, but she looked happier than she had in a long time. Cough, cough, father caught up. Green menus slipped from the owner’s jacket and he headed for the Himalayas while we wedged into throne chairs surreally less roomy than folding chairs, Chairman Mao’s revenge on elitists. Only Moby Purse got comfy, sprawling on the petrified cushion of a fourth chair, drooling Band-Aids, pen cap, receipts. “Three green waters!” cried mother at a young nervous waiter 25 feet away. He did not move. “AND” I petted her so she would not lustily request a green bread basket, forcing the kid to search an alley for rolls left over from an end of Prohibition celebration. “GREEN COFFEE FOR ME!” carped father in his faux-superior office voice. Black tea came; charred taste buds could not differentiate. He liked the coffee. He called me “my boy.” Slithering snake mirror reflections got everything nicely backwards—vanquishing old realities. Chinny chummy glimmers of latent authority amended each scattershot “my boy!” Glimpses of what might have been if... only if... Family around a table like allies who worked together, solved problems, learned. I spun that Lazy Susan hard for good luck. It was more than a roulette wheel. It was a flavor gyre. Gyrating compass in a Northland with no purchase on NORTH. I folded up a cocktail list placemat to take home and study. The drink names were fantastic—Stinger, Grasshopper—and accompanied by aqua cartoons of charismatic glasses. Boxy Chinese letters on the menu cover. Inside, enough English to for us to identity categories of dishes involving chicken, pigs, military titles, emperor egos, mandarin oranges, oyster mushrooms, roast everything. Flipflipflipflipflip mother turned the two page menu into a Dickens novel of deprivation: Oliver Lo Mein. She moaned to see tea was not free. In fraught situations she moved faster and father, slower. He froze, neck a pudding pop, lips stuck in the dismissive sphincter position. Dr. Miller’s shadow all over him. Grandpa Stanley’s five o’clock shadow all over her. Millers always looked like who they were—bland and dismissive; Stanleys wore flesh masks over vaporous identities—owl brows, whiskery cat lips, bilious jowls.“Benji! Order pork fried rice so I can have some!” I would, I must accommodate her phobia of ordering anything other than more free water or bread, otherwise she would go hungry. But what else? What for me? Choice paralysis. I wanted it all. I might die on the way home, victim of the I-74 vortex. Who knew? And if I could not have it all—I must order perfectly or righteously—I had dragged poor parents here for something good, something divine! But no divine hand guided my menu tracing fingers. Whatever I ordered, it was certain to be a misguided choice. I would only succeed in wanting what I had not ordered. “General Cow’s... no, the sweet and sour... um—Bird’s... Nest soup! With... Shrimp!” “Beef!” father brilliantly settled on, ahem, sniffle. Merely “Beef.” But the waiter knew exactly what he meant. And we waited in our loud queasy way, and the plates came soon enough, and the Lazy Susan wobbled under the sloppy weight, spinning slowly, a waltzing whirlpool or dolorous casino game—egg rolls, ingots of meat, shrimp tails, velvety sauces sprinkled with green light sauce, and the sum shimmering like a revolving surf-wet sand painting of tribal travails—gruesome and erroneous choices kaleidoscopically mixing and spreading debacle blame around until who ordered what hardly mattered—what mattered was keeping the flimsy disc moving on its secret axis—throbs of spice in the air, tilting rivulets of oil—enough for six for the three of us—theme-drunk, slouching around the big divide of the table.