Chapter 6
I woke up on Mary’s couch at eight the next morning from a deep sleep. Sleep was the great escape from everything. It was August 28, 1984, the fourth day of our journey. Mary had prepared fresh squeezed orange juice and sliced avocados in the kitchen and directed us to her outside patio table. Once we were seated, she brought out three plates of scrambled eggs, with bacon and thickly buttered toast. A large, potted, jade-colored cactus cast a shadow toward us from the far end of the wooden deck. My head ached from the day before. But the orange juice began to revitalize me. It was life to me. I wanted to swig it down so it would pour over the sides of my mouth and drip off of my chin onto my T-shirt.
“Nectar of the gods!” Declan exclaimed, downing his large glass of juice quickly, and then jumping up and instantly heading back to the house on the hunt for more.
From the kitchen window, Mary talked to us as we ate. She talked about wine-tasting tours in Napa, forty minutes north of San Pablo. “They make you take the tour before you can taste test at Christian Brothers,” she told us. That was a bad idea for Mary, for all she really wanted was to drink the wine.
Looking beyond the large, jaded cactus toward the smoky emerald city of San Francisco that hung like a mirage on the horizon, I thought back to all of the lonely souls down by Fisherman’s Wharf that we had encountered the day before. The sax man had said to Lucas, “God bless you,” when Lucas threw him his loose change. He called out to Lucas by name . . . like he knew him as if Lucas had been wearing his name on his shirt sleeve or something. Lucas and the sax man were brothers, two kindred souls in a chance meeting on the sidewalk of life.
“Do you think that the homeless are closer to God?” I asked Lucas.
“Some are, I guess,” Declan answered. “They have no one else to turn to.”
I ate my cut mango slices with the avocado before eating the scrambled eggs. This was a theory I had picked up on proper food combining from crazy Delores who I worked with at the Southern California circuit board factory. She was such an attractive lady for being over forty but was kind of nuts and always preached crazy diets; she believed in crystals, wind chimes, and the signs of astrology. She was an honest-to-goodness hippie girl that had been thrown forward out of the sixties simply because the sixties had to get ready for the seventies and the eighties. Poor Delores didn’t know how to leave that era behind. But her theories on food combining seemed believable, at least, and it had really helped me, I think, when I had to pass kidney stones because I didn’t have any health insurance. Dolores read that the key to good health was that fruits must always be eaten first, lest they ferment in your stomach on top of the rest of the stuff and never get digested properly.
She was a polytheist. “I believe in any deity but God,” Dolores used to say to me, “because that would give too many born-agains the excuse to talk to me!” She was high on herself, and I guess it’s okay to be that way if you are healthy and always practicing proper food combining techniques and you have lots of gods to save you.
“For the homeless, it is their only way out of this mess,” Declan responded to me again, coming back from the kitchen with a third full glass of his God nectar.
At the circuit board factory, Amid, the Palestinian engineer, would get into discussions with Dolores about how he wasn’t afraid to kill a person. He saw life differently than the rest of us. Life had been cruel to his people and his family in Palestine; they had lost their whole hillside farm full of olive trees when the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt ended. They had gone from wealth to poverty in one quick swat. Because of this, Amid was angry all of the time, and the rest of us were afraid. Even Delores was afraid of Amid.
But unlike Amid, I was one of the many who absolutely feared death; it would always scare me.
When I was a senior in high school, we saw a poor old lady get killed at the Bridge Street Bridge. It had been in the dead of winter when it happened. My old friends Gordon Scott, Billy Caldwell, and I were walking home, just coming off the icy bridge into Centralville, and we saw this car whack her. The hard impact sent the lady flying about twenty feet before she landed on the sidewalk in the freezing footprints of others. It was awful. Gordy, Billy, and I ran to her side, but she was lifeless. She was lying there with blood coming out of the side of her mouth. I couldn’t help but think as I stood there how she was someone’s grandmother and no one at this moment but us three strangers knew that she was dead. It was this chilling thought that stayed with me for a very long time. Just like that, she was gone.
In San Pablo, we sat in the beautiful California sun having breakfast, looking out over the lower hills of Berkeley, the glimmering mackerel scale water and the distant purple city across the bay. I adjusted my vision, like a TV camera zoom lens, with the spiny big-armed cactus first in focus and then out of focus as my gaze went beyond it and rendered it a blur. I was in and out of the conversation taking place on Mary’s patio. It was already eleven in the morning and Declan and Lucas were discussing our plan for moving on. Mary would come with us to Lake Tahoe it was decided.
Jeff Beck’s song, “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,” played from somewhere beyond Mary’s kitchen, and the sound actually stopped time to overtake me. It was a beautiful song, an electric guitar instrumental, with the guitar crying, throbbing out like a baby. I knew this song well, for I owned the Blow by Blow album. The song title alone said it all, and that was fine; for Jeff Beck’s version had no lyrics, unlike the original that Stevie Wonder had written for his sweet Syreeta. I heard Jeff Beck’s guitar try to sob those same haunting lyrics. Lost love was a crazy, winding labyrinth of emotion through the course of falling sand grain time that we all shared for someone different; it tore at the core of our very beings all in the same way. The pain kept us prisoner until we could find a way out.
I loved the sound of the electric guitar when it cried. Carlos Santana was another great, and his song “Europa” did the same thing to me. How did these guys write this stuff? Where did the inspiration come from? Beautiful music moved everyone’s soul, a common chord within us all.
All of my rock-and-roll albums sat packed up in an apple crate back in Newport Beach. I had a number of packed up boxes that I couldn’t take with me, the balance of my earthly possessions, all sitting at Ingrid’s house waiting for the UPS delivery guy to ship them back to Lowell. Ingrid had let the three of us stack all of our boxes in the pebbled entryway of her bungalow right there on the Newport Beach peninsula. Lucas had learned after calling Ingrid on Monday that the day had passed without UPS ever showing up.
“Maybe Jesse can help us and find out why the UPS driver never showed,” Lucas said to us. Jesse was another of our old roommates who stayed behind in Huntington Beach.
We had all lived next door to Ingrid in Newport Beach but moved at the start of the summer to Huntington Beach because the owners of our beach castle rental wanted the summers for themselves. When we had first moved to the coastal castle in Newport Beach in 1983, Declan, in his friendly way, knocked on Ingrid’s door and invited her up to our place for spaghetti. It had become a weekly thing where we would invite close friends over and cook up all of this pasta for mass consumption because it was cheap. Friends would bring beer and dessert. We got to throwing a new item in the sauce each time we made it; one week avocadoes, another week a little beer, a third week raisins, just about anything that was edible. Ingrid came on the night that Declan decided to throw an avocado pit into the sauce to see if anyone would find it. It was too big to choke on so, he assumed, it was all safe; and Ingrid found it. That night, Ingrid told us the great stories of her long life, filling the evening with the colors that spanned sixty-five years. After that, she was our friend forever. She was of Latvian heritage and had lived in Newport Beach as a professional painter. She sold in the local galleries after studying art at UCLA, painting beautiful local landscapes fused sometimes with industrial complexity. After years of painting on the Newport Peninsula, Ingrid developed some sort of respiratory condition from breathing in all of that oil-based paint and had to give it all up. The corridors of her home were lined with her works; the bright blues, the pinks, some landscapes intermingled with civilization’s mechanisms and gears; sharp lines against soft edges, turning wheels against ebbing tides, the faces of the Back Bay, the lonely oil derricks. Some of her stuff took me back to high school art history again with Jerry Russo and the cheerleader god Ra. Ingrid’s stuff was reminiscent of the impressionist works by Guillaumin. Some looked like the pond lilies of Monet. My favorite work of Ingrid’s was a painting of the old Newport Beach fish cannery sitting up on that rectangular pier with the boats docked in the foreground and the sunlight highlighting the Western Cannery Company logo in a large iron red circle, a circle high on the structure. I saw it clearly in life, the orange brown reflection off of the old tin roof and the mustard yellows of the building. Ingrid once gazed at it from the other side of the peninsula at dusk in a moment of time. She painted the greens and the light blues of the floating boats; a white yacht, the Juanaloa dwarfed a fisherman’s dingy in the foreground. The water in the bay was a green, white, blue, and brown reflection that appeared to be shimmering like multicolored ice.
Ingrid was a young soul in an old person’s body. I once imagined her in her beautiful youth, the wrinkles and the gray hair gone, a young Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman; it was a snapshot stolen from the past. She once had been young like us too, and we too would be old like her someday. Ingrid told us on the night of the spaghetti dinner that the mind is an eternal spirit and every day is another chance to live something beautiful for in the history of time; a life goes by quicker than the burning of a match.
Alan and Lisa lived below us at the coastal castle and complained to the landlord on the night of our big dinner. They cried that we were making too much noise. They always called the landlord on us. Declan called Alan “Mark” all the time. Declan told us he called him this because he looked like someone who should be called Mark. Alan had to correct Declan and tell him that his name was not “Mark” but “Alan.”
“Okay, sorry, Mark,” Declan replied.
Alan and Lisa called the landlord in Los Angeles just about every weekend after that to complain about us running up and down those back steps. Alan was a nurse, and Lisa was beautiful, and I never could understand how someone as toxic as Alan could ever be with her.
“Okay, sorry, Mark,” Declan replied each weekend until the end of May when we had to move to Huntington Beach for the summer. And here it was the end of August and, God-willing, we would never see Mark again.
I picked fresh mission figs from the fig tree in Ingrid’s backyard just days before we left Southern California. I had even brought some to Colette when we met at the Rusty Pelican Restaurant in Irvine that last time. I had finally gotten a hold of her and convinced her to see me. I looked into those big green eyes and wondered about it all.
Collette told me that night that she had a new boyfriend. It took me down. It made me wonder why I had ever come out to California at all. In my old vision where I had looked out toward the dark west through the screened bedroom window on those humid New England summer nights, the fireflies that once lit the bushes along the driveway below me were now nowhere to be found.
There was that very last vision of her. She was beautiful standing there, red plaid shirt and blue jeans, country like, the beautiful Orange County setting sun studying the perfect lines of her face. How I longed to touch those lips one more time just ever so softly with my index finger, to touch her beautiful cheeks as she closed her eyes gently, run the bridge of her perfect nose forever.
Back in the San Pablo kitchen, with her sewing machine, Mary closed up an armpit hole in the green long sleeve striped jersey that I had been wearing for three days now. I wore jeans, tennis shoes, no socks, and no underwear; I wanted to conserve my change of clothes for the long road ahead of us.
Lucas was firing up his Fairlane out in Mary’s driveway. It was time to move. Mary crawled into the backseat of the car, moving the gift-wrapped cookbook that was illustrated with Norman Rockwell’s paintings aside. It was a wedding gift that I needed to send from the road to Spooner and Bethany.
“That’s a wedding gift that I’m going to send to some people back East as soon as we find a post office in Reno,” I said apologetically to Mary.
“Ask Mike if he pulled it off of a wedding register,” Declan said.
“No, I didn’t pull it out of any wedding register! Everyone likes Norman Rockwell, don’t they?” I asked Mary. “Shouldn’t that count for something?”
“Well, I guess it’s the thought that counts!” Mary said with a very big laugh looking up to the front seat at Lucas and Declan with her big rolling eyes.
“I think that’s definitely one that might be regifted!” Declan chuckled, and then he rolled down the front window as we headed eastward on the freeway. “I’m on vacation,” Declan laughed and yelled out at all of the moving people around us. He cracked the aluminum stem of a can of Coors Light, taken from a small cooler of beer beside him in the front seat, and proclaimed to the wind, “You can’t fly with just one wing! We’re on vacation!”
Lucas paid forty cents for the toll at the Vallejo Bridge and from there, we pushed toward the majestic Sierra Mountains and the high California state line.
Mary talked on as we traveled the winding 50 Freeway through the California Sierras and the El Dorado National Forest. She talked about hitting the casinos when we arrived; she would play it by ear; roll with the moment; pull the slots and play blackjack, and then she would hop a bus back to San Pablo when she ran out of casino cash. Our plan from Tahoe was to continue north to Reno and then on to Salt Lake City, leaving Mary and her sweet California life of teaching school and painting ice cream parlor windows in the Sausalito summertime behind. Someday, she would paint canvases of scrambled eggs and sliced mangos and avocados in the patio foothills of Berkeley, foothills that had been weak for the lost set of the Summer of Love.
Mary laughed when Declan reminded her of Max from Ohio State; Max the teddy bear. He lived in San Pablo for a while but had returned to Ohio back in March. Lucas and I had met Max back in January. Burly, curly Max always had an open twelve-ounce can of beer in his hand. Declan even said it was that way back in college too.
“The guy just wouldn’t look right if he was empty-handed,” Declan said laughing. “‘You can’t fly with one wing!’ was his signature announcement every time he opened up a new can of beer! Good ole Max!”
Mary reminded us of Max’s incredible pot pipe, and its uncanny will to always seek out and find its rightful owner—Max. The story was that back in Columbus during college, Max was walking through some random meadow by the Old Mill; he was high, of course. It was a place that he had never been to before, and he stumbled on the lost pot pipe that he hadn’t seen since Akron (which was hours away) more than two years before. Max absolutely believed that this pipe had some magical will to find him. It was so powerful; otherwise, this random appearance never would have happened. So before he returned to Ohio from San Pablo in March, Max purposely left the pot pipe with Mary to test its will again. Mary now handed the pipe to Declan to bring it back to Max in Columbus. Declan laughed and tucked it away with his things, promising Mary that he would deliver the magical pot pipe when we got that far.
I looked out the backseat window at a single oak tree atop the huge, brown grassy hills of disappearing California while Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” played on the cassette deck. Just like those summer nights on Christian Hill back in 1977 when Richie’s eight track tape deck blared the sound out of the open windows of his green Mustang as we rolled the back roads of Dracut, the harmonica slowly opened that all-too-familiar tune.
Springsteen was on tour now. It was an election year; Reagan was on his second term running against Minnesota’s Walter “Fritz” Mondale. Mondale had selected Geraldine Ferraro, the first female candidate for vice president ever in our history as his running mate. “Fritz and Titz” was the conservative bark. I felt bad about never registering for an absentee ballot, but I had no idea where I was going to be on November 6th. Besides, none of the three of us (Lucas, Declan, and I) had a house key anymore.
Through the high Sierras I drifted in and out of my visions of Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise and wondered if Neal Cassidy and Jack Kerouac, with all of their back and forth, to and from San Francisco, had traveled this very same road we were on, maybe even in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.
More oak trees on grassy hills soon became pine trees on rugged mountains as we made our way slowly toward Lake Tahoe. On the approach to the beautiful deep lake, we looked down on it in all of its blueness from our higher ground, Tahoe was an Ingrid painting of just nature alone, frigid alpine blue surrounded by office calendar mountains. People were parasailing too, sky skiing over and around the lake. It was a real live Monet of a later day, with the freelancers’ orange chutes the only unnatural thing visible to my naked eye. Although it was now late in the day, the sun was still hot and the smell of the tall Sierra pines through our open windows took over my senses.
“What do you think the distance is across the lake?” Lucas asked us aloud.
“Probably thirty miles,” Mary guessed.
“Well, the lake itself is about twenty-three miles long, but from where we are all the way out to the tops of those mountains on the other side is probably about fifty miles,” Lucas said.
“The naked eye can’t see for fifty miles, can it?” Declan asked.
“Of course, it can,” Lucas said. “The moon is surely more than fifty miles away!”
“Are you sure about that?” Declan asked him. “You know, fifty miles is an awful long way.”
Declan had to go swimming in Tahoe. It was one of the many goals that he had penciled out for himself in his little notebook before leaving Huntington Beach. He had to swim in every famous body of water we drove by or crossed; he had to get in every tourist’s family picture he possibly could; he could never wear a tie again; he could never carry more than one key on his person ever again. And so his list went on and on.
We pulled off the road as we got closer to the lake and let Declan run down to the water like a crazy animal to do his thing.
“Aren’t you guys going swimming?” Mary turned to Lucas and me in the car.
“It’s too cold, Mary!” Lucas laughed in his characteristic big smile laugh that told you everything about why we both thought that her friend Declan was actually crazy.
When Declan returned about fifteen minutes later, we saw him coming up the road from afar with a pretty girl. He had met her on the raft about 100 feet offshore. Declan came up to the car with her and introduced her as “Gilda,” although I embarrassingly called her “Glenda” twice. Gilda was from Oregon; she worked in Tahoe as a waitress, and Declan told us that she would be going to school in Boston in January of ’85.
Declan had dragged poor Gilda off of the raft and back to shore and all the way up the small road to where we were parked just to get her to meet someone (me) from the Boston area. She had the look in her eyes of someone who didn’t know why she was there; she had been taken hostage. There was a lot of awkward silence. This crazy maniac had just talked her off of her life raft and up this long wooded road, and she had followed him.
“Hey, Mike! Meet Gilda! Can you believe she is going to school in Boston! Boston College in January! Mike’s from Boston, Gilda, I told you I was going to introduce you to someone from Boston! What do you think of that, Mike?”
Gilda stood there in the cold mountain air, shivering goose bumps, and after a few long minutes said to the three of us in the car, “Hi, nice to meet you. Good-bye!” and slowly turned back down the road to find comfort again on the cold floating raft out on the lake.
“Good-bye,” we all said to Gilda, turning to Declan and shaking our heads as if to ask, “Why did you make her come all the way up to the car?”
“Hope you win the big one!” Declan called after the girl. Gilda, already a good ways back down the road, courteously half-turned to wave to us one last time.
“Poor thing!” Mary laughed.
“I think I must have freaked her out,” Declan admitted, “But she sure was a cute one!”
We quickly found Caesar’s Palace; it appeared like a giant lit beacon in the panoramic Nevada sky. It called out to Mary and all of us as if to say, “Bring me your money!” Inside the casino, we watched Mary for a few hours go crazy playing the slots, sometimes working two machines at the same time, with her bucket of quarters and big frame going seat to seat, pumping the machines continuously, with Mary always putting in five coins at a time. Declan, Lucas, and I were resolved not to spend any of our own money like this because of the simple notion that we might lose it all.
When Mary grew tired of pumping the bandits, she had us drive her over to Harrah’s, where she was going to play blackjack for a few hours before catching the last bus back to San Pablo.
“Can’t you guys stay for a while and gamble with me?” Mary begged.
“Sorry, Mary, but I’ll send you a postcard from England!” Declan told her. “We really have to move on.”
“Good-bye!” We left her sitting at a blackjack table. Mary talked away to the dealer and the other patrons as we walked toward the entrance. Her voice went from clear conversation, to a distinct murmur above the laughter, to eerie total deafening silence as the rest of the world around us once again filled with mad noise.
Before I walked out the casino door, I exchanged two single dollar bills for two silver dollars at the cashier window. I found a dollar slot machine close by the cashier and threw the first coin in. Spin, Good-bye. Before dropping the second one, I closed my eyes and visualized bells going off and coins pouring out of its greedy little mouth. I focused and pulled the large lever toward me. Spin, Cherries, Cherries, Orange, Nothing. Good-bye. It was seven o’clock.
We gunned the Fairlane and headed toward Reno. It was my turn to drive. Lucas had me pull over right outside of Tahoe so he could scale a roadside cliff that taunted him. I leaned against the car and watched him climb, taking in the quiet night.
Outside of Carson City, at another stop, Declan jumped atop the surfboard of our parked car for a chronicled photo opportunity.
Spin, Cherries, Cherries, Orange, Good-bye.