Chapter 12
Lucas’s sister Kerry told us the night before that Clint Eastwood had once come up to her while she was working out at her Aspen health club. She was bench pressing free weights, flat with her back on the bench, pushing the bar up off her chest, when she looked up and saw him standing there. It was then that Clint said to her, “That’s an awful lot of weight to be lifting for such a little girl like you.”
Clint Eastwood—the American Matador, Dirty Harry, and Josey Wales—just standing there in the flesh above her, wearing that characteristic, cool, quintessential tough-guy persona. Crazy!
But this was Aspen, mind you, the Rodeo Drive of the Rockies. Everybody big was here, so why be surprised? Why wouldn’t we just end our quest right now; settle down and blend into this local community forever?
All three of us knew without even asking that this wasn’t our final stop though; it wasn’t our call. Decky, Luke, and I had to get somewhere else before we could ever end up in a place like this. We wanted money and fame, lots of it; and happiness, lots of it; and the feeling that we finally found our purpose in life, the reason why we had ever been born. Aspen is a town that is there for people who have already arrived, I reasoned. Just like Clint, Kerry, and Sam. But me, I had to keep on driving; I had to keep on searching . . . pushing for something that only my future self could reveal.
Lucas told Kerry that she should have responded to old Clint with one of the lines from one of his classic westerns. Like the line the bounty hunter who waited outside the western saloon in The Outlaw Josey Wales blurted out right before Clint shot him dead. Or maybe say even something more original back to Clint with a macho drawl . . . “Well, a pretty girl’s got to stay strong too, Mr. Eastwood!”
“That was so funny when Clint spat on the dog’s head after he shot the bounty hunter!” Decky laughed.
We all loved Clint Eastwood movies: High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. They were all classics for the ages. And then there was Dirty Harry grinding serial killer Scorpio’s leg into the turf of Candlestick Park, the playing field of America’s football gladiators, where so many battles are fought. Scorpio’s back was pinned up against those yard line hash marks. Dirty Harry was crucifying him with his grinding foot while Scorpio begged for his life, just lying there helpless on that chalked off cross. This was American film filled with symbolism and artistic expression for everyone to interpret as they saw fit. This is what I wanted to do some day.
This was why we couldn’t work eight-to-five office jobs anymore. Destiny awaited us in film or video. We made our plans to hit the road again after the wedding, for each of our bleeding savings reserves had to last a whole lot longer if we were really going to push that Fairlane and her surfboard across the rest of the country searching. We had to board that plane in Boston bound for London in twenty-four days. I dreamt of finding that sweet sleep somewhere where the sun didn’t burn my skin and that beautiful warm light shined inside me forever.
Back at Kerry’s apartment, family members were beginning to arrive from Topeka and Chicago. Luke’s mother came with his two brothers, Kenny and Trent. Sam’s parents and two sisters came in from Chicago. For dinner, Kerry made turkey. It was just like Thanksgiving in August, and it absolutely reminded me of that . . . with wine, beer, potatoes, green beans, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and the room filled with incredible people. The table was dressed with everything as if it was a late-November day.
Elton John sang “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” in that little condo just before Sam’s dad said grace, and when Elton John voiced those words of thanks for his friends, everyone smiled warmly and looked around at each other as if that moment had been meant for us all.
The thunder raged outside during dinner; God was talking to me again, with lightning lighting up the mountaintops and valleys as the voices roared throughout the hollows of the Aspen night. One crash was so loud that everyone in the kitchen jumped wide-eyed in a moment of sheer wake-up shock. It was a break in the sound track of humanity; it cracked the sound barrier of a glorious life to remind us all of a certain eternity.
“Wow!” Declan was outside in a matter of minutes. He fiddled with the shutter speed on his 35mm camera. He wanted to record the streaks and crooked lines in our night sky by leaving the shutter open. He propped the fragile camera against a rock under the cover of a carport roof and ran back inside. The camera sat there alone, registering a long ten minutes of the fantastic light show.
When the storm cleared, we all cleared the condo. But Declan had to run back inside to put his camera away. After this, we all headed into the night to celebrate. We stopped by Sam’s bachelor party at first, but after about twenty minutes there, felt slightly out of place amongst strangers, so we abruptly left. Sam and Kerry had met in Aspen after Luke had moved to Huntington Beach, so Luke didn’t know any of Sam’s friends who hosted the party. We decided to join up with Lucas’s two older sisters, Anna and Faith, beautiful girls who had just arrived from Topeka and Kansas City, who were anxious to explore the crazy night life with us in this surreal moving-picture town; a motion picture happening in real time with plots and twists yet to be uncovered.
In the nightclubs, we drank beer after beer. It wasn’t long before I was feeling wrecked again; the music got better as the night went on. Everything was beautiful and mellow, beautiful rock-and-roll music in America’s mountain pearl. We screamed to each other on the dance floor just to talk above the din; but in this strange nighttime place, our voices were all at once lost . . . and so were our souls.
Looking around, I saw that all of the people in this one club seemed to be on their own individual islands; they talked in small groups. Some stood alone. They gregariously drank cocktails and puffed cigarettes as if the beer and the tobacco were fuel, sustenance; their lifeblood streams. I watched dust devil spirals of cigarette smoke climb above us to form a huge, mushroomlike cloud that hovered over the dance floor. Below the overhanging fog, the trail of funnels swirled up and around each other to join the ominous cloud; funnels that polluted each other with brand nonsense as they blended together. I watched a girl turn her head sideways from a forgetful conversation; she looked like a lost debutante, blowing her smoke into the air with boredom. Her face told me that she didn’t want to be here. The toxic smoke above appeared to be the materialization of our very spirits; for after all, it was the air that we all had breathed. It contained parts of us all. I watched this dreadful cloud continue to grow as it just hung there above the huge room. I watched the stacks of smoke continue to braid around each other below it like dirty licorice, climbing and swirling in the air and finally pushing the cloud out the entryway door . . . moving the mass outward from the club into the narrow alleyway, the mass now trying to find its way out of the madness so it could spread out and pollute the clean Aspen night.
There was a dark-haired guy standing on the far side of the bar silently observing the crowd; he was off on his own. To me, he looked like someone from Lowell’s Pawtucketville section. He looked like a young Kerouac, the writer in his prime. I wondered if Kerouac had ever gone through Aspen. What was Aspen even like in the forties? Perhaps it was just some small mountain mining shantytown. Where had I seen this guy before? Maybe he was a friend of Jackie Hillyard’s. Jackie was a chef who had lived in Aspen in the ’70s, but had long since moved back to Lowell. Maybe I had seen this Kerouac lookalike in the Lowell Sun. Maybe he was a celebrity.
“That guy at the end of the bar is from my hometown, I think,” I screamed above the din to Decky.
“What’s his name?” Declan asked.
“I’m not telling you.”
“Why?”
“’Cause you’ll make a fool of us all in our drunken stupor,” I pronounced.
“The guy’s from Lowell, and you’re not even going to talk to him?” Declan laughed in disbelief.
“Hey, Lowell!” Declan yelled in Kerouac’s direction as the man narrowed his eyes for a moment from across the room to look back at my crazy Ohioan friend. Kerouac now moved in the opposite direction of the room, against the crowd, after he had locked eyes with Decky. He moved to a new vantage point; he appeared off by himself in a different world. He had wanted to go unnoticed, to avoid interaction and conflict, as if he was studying the room for the same reasons that I was. The guy wanted to be invisible.
With Declan’s repeated screams at the poor guy, I finally had to duck out of sight. I was terrified of an encounter now. Who was he? Was he watching us? If I knew him, what would I say to him, anyway? If he was a real person, only uncomfortable conversation would be the outcome, I knew it.
“Lowell, Lowell, Lowell!” Declan screamed into the wild Aspen night as we now exited the bar. We had to move on. The mysterious Lowellian never did acknowledge Declan, though; he paid him no attention, casually watching the rest of the room as we all left. Once out in the night and into the clear air again, I began to wonder if the man was ever there at all. Maybe I had too much to drink. Maybe he just looked like someone I thought I knew. Perhaps he was the great ghost of the famous author himself in another plane, a superimposed one . . . another layer of time itself.
But alas, just like that, he was gone.