Chapter 13
September 1st came. It was the eighth day of our memorable journey. I woke up with my face buried in Kerry and Sam’s shaggy condo carpet. My rib cage hurt from lying on my stomach all night on the hard floor. I rubbed my eyes feverishly, trying to focus, for in the distance across the room I heard Declan snoring wildly but couldn’t quite see him yet. Declan snored in rhyme all of the time; the loud gasps sounded almost cartoonlike to me now. I saw Lucas, asleep, faceup on the couch, beyond the coffee table. My head hurt from apparent alcohol dehydration; there were loud pulsating knocks inside my reeling lobes screaming for some liquid nourishment now. I slowly became aware of where I was. I quickly recalled how I had come to be here.
I sensed the bright daylight filling the room, sunlight showering in on floating dust particles, and reflected on Lucas’s own funny observation—“Oh crap, I’m back here again”—when he first woke up to the working world back in Huntington Beach. That seemed so ever long ago. We were in Aspen now with no more regrets about our choices in life; we were living out our dreams and searching for purpose again. Yeah, hah!
I heard Jeff Beck’s “Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers” playing on the turntable in the living room; it was a different version of the song. Sam had put the album on amidst the morning stresses of having several people in his tiny condo waking to this new day. After pulling myself up for a moment to look around at all of the empty beer bottles on the coffee table, I focused in on the album jacket, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. It was a cartoon cover of a guitarist in a pink dress and pink top hat. I had never heard Jeff Beck play this piece live. There was a sudden ringing sadness in my head as the weight of the labyrinth of life fully came back to me.
Zane had first introduced me to this song in Paradise Beach, New Hampshire. He said that Stevie Wonder had written the song for his once-true love Syreeta, but Jeff Beck always did the piece with no lyrics at all. Beck just wailed on and on with his electric guitar from beyond that Aspen condo coffee table now. It was truly beautiful. I could only imagine what the lyrics were like as the guitar spoke to me.
Lucas’s sister Anna had stayed up late talking with us the night before; all of us had been seated around the coffee table after the mad bar scene. We talked about the crazy times we had in Southern California when Anna came out to see us. We lived in the Newport Beach house then, right next door to Ingrid. We talked about that crazy night that all of us ran down Thirty-sixth Street and dove into the ocean, with Lucas shrieking as he often did—screaming in the winter’s night, with the stars all out over Catalina and Jim Morrison singing “Moonlight Drive” from the lonely turntable back at the empty beach house after we had left it. In Newport, I had showed beautiful Anna the poetry I had written and all of my screenplay drafts. I showed her Fourteen Lines, a screenplay idea I had. The title was a play on words, a sonnet. It was the story of a cocaine-addicted businessman; it was a hit-rock-bottom-and-recover story about the lonely perils of life. I had written the feel-good ending first, how a beaten man can find the good in life again.
We talked of all of the school courses that could help prepare us for our future no-ceiling careers: Emerson College, film editing at UCLA, TV production at Fullerton, the screenplay courses at Orange Coast College, and the dreams that wouldn’t stop bombarding us. Everyone’s life was a story, and every story had a lot of good in it. But there were so few storytellers to realize all that good and find a way to touch us with it—to remind us to just have a good time, to change our lives, even though the good was evident everywhere. Life was a beautiful gift that needed more storytellers.
Here in Aspen, my thick journal lay among my things by the coffee table. As I leafed through some of the pages the night before, Anna saw where I had written . . .
A life and a song
The comparison wrong
To realize
To finally see
When a song ends
It can be played again
A life can’t be
“What does it all mean?” she asked me.
“I don’t know. The complete song is about life and death, I guess,” I told her. “You see, we are all rolling through our dog days now, and in your dog days, you never think about death. Not that thinking about death is meant to be a somber thing, though,” I said. “It’s just nice to be reminded that every waking moment is another chance to make a difference to someone; for life is so finite. We can never relive the past; we can visit it perhaps, but never relive it. The power, you see, is in the free choice of the present.”
And it was here at the coffee table that we had crashed.
Another morning hangover haunted me while Bob Geldof and Johnnie Fingers sang from the same Policeman’s Ball album that Jeff Beck and his guitar had just wailed from. Luke tried to explain to Decky, both of them now awake, the story behind Geldof’s “I Don’t Like Mondays” as it played.
“It’s about this real-life teenage girl who walked onto the campus of a San Diego elementary school one sad Monday morning, right across the street from her house, to blow away two teachers and injure several kids. ‘Why did you do it?’ the cops asked her when she turned herself in. ‘I don’t like Mondays; this livens up the day’ was her only response,” Lucas said.
Think about all of the sadness in a song like that. And it was something that really happened. Was the fate of the two teachers already predetermined when they went to school that day? Where was the choice? Born into a time and born into a space on the pavement of life, they were.
“But the murderous girl was given free will to choose,” I could hear my father’s arguments at the kitchen table.
“But what of the innocent that were hurt or killed?” I would ask him back. But there never was an answer. Bats flew through our kitchen.
Declan poured himself a large glass of orange juice from a gallon of the stuff in Kerry’s refrigerator. “Nectar of the gods!” he exclaimed, downing his large glass of juice quickly, and then jumping back to the container again to pour himself more.
It had only been a few short weeks since the three of us had quit our daily working world grind. The people we worked with, that steady paycheck, that stable career path, the white starched shirts, the crazy ties, the morning cup of necessary coffee . . . All of it was behind us now. No more real jobs, not for me! Back at the circuit board factory, forty-year-old Don White sat on that break room table with a cup of coffee and a stick of that burning tobacco in his hand with his scuffed up JC Penney shoes all over a hard chair. Don White announced to everyone in the room, all my coworkers, that I was a fool to leave the good job that I had in Southern California. “How many kids have gone to chase their dreams, only to wake up one day to find that their money-earning careers have truly passed them by? What a fool you are to leave our circuit board factory!” he said. Meanwhile, he’d go on sucking on his cigarettes and pounding his martinis in the crowded nightclubs of Newport Beach where everybody wanted to be seen, with his rolled-up sleeves and loosened tie. You see, he was living out his dreams—whatever dreams even were.
“America needs people working like me to make it run right!” Don told me.
“Don’t forget us when you make it to the big time!” the others said to me on the day I left the factory (everyone except Don White, that is) . . . Some of them wishing they could come along with us, but too afraid, too responsible to truly realize it.
“Making movies, huh?” they said.
“Maybe just telling stories,” I said.
Telling stories with the heels of my feet, I scraped the hardened beach sand of Newport Beach. I was always dreaming, writing words and hearts of “I Love You,” with the small sandpipers chasing the waves all the while in the background. They ran back and forth as those very waves brought the foamy wash that eventually took all my words away. But the advancing tide also brought sustenance for these tiny birds, and that is what they were after. They kept sticking their long beaks into the wet sand, their heads dipping with indifference, accepting their blue-collar roles, seemingly not caring, not wanting to ask why as they sucked the food out of the ground below. As long as there was food and a job to do, they would never leave. God would always provide. Why couldn’t I think this way?
I remembered playing “Giant Step” and other little kid games in our backyard growing up on Eighteenth Street; every kid in our neighborhood would be there. And there was “One, Two, Three, Red Light!” which was kind of like “Giant Step” in that in both games you had to be the first to make it to the cement and granite foundation of Polly Town’s centuries-old garage wall that sat beyond our rusted swing set. With “Giant Step,” everyone started at the other end of the yard and was granted steps by the “master” at the wall if a question was answered properly. In “One, Two, Three, Red Light!” the kid at the wall would put his closed eyes against the wall and count “One, Two, Three, Red Light!” before turning around quickly. If the children at the other end of the yard were caught moving forward, they would have to move back to the start. In both cases, the first one to the granite wall was always the winner. It seemed that life was no different than “One, Two, Three, Red Light!” or “Giant Step” after all. But why were we always trying so hard to get there, and what was really beyond that wall—something better?
My mind was always a freeway, with every thought another car going by; and every thought held different occupants . . . back and forth; back and forth. These thoughts were always going places, trying to get to that final destination, wherever that may be. So just like that, in a matter-of-fact freeway moment, we had all quit our jobs, for they were jobs that didn’t make us happy . . . and we hit the road in order to try to find it all again. Yeehaw!
Ingrid said to us one night in her living room in Newport Beach, “Don’t take life too seriously because in 100 years, who is going to care? Everybody’ll be gone!”
She was right. Think about it. Every single human being born in 1884 was dead, save for maybe a couple of them. Whatever it was that happened in those great thinking minds of that wonderful year, if not written down or told to others, was now gone forever. I wondered about my second great-grandfather Patrick. I was always putting together the one great story of him that I heard with the stories that I never heard, how he must have worked those rocky fields in rural County Clare, Ireland. What was going through his mind as he toiled? In the 1890s, he was pushed off his land by his English landlord. His wife had passed a few years before in a cascade of sorrow, with many of his children also passing over the years before and after her from malnourishment and disease. So he had to leave his land and head to a strange place called America, an America where his four surviving sons had already gone to live. Paddy landed in the mill city, Lowell, to join the last of his living children in 1898, only to survive a few more years and die on South Street. He was buried at St. Patrick’s Cemetery in the family plot with all of my other grandfathers and granduncles after him, lots of them. His name wasn’t even on the headstone where six of them were buried; it was just a big stone that read “HOGAN.” And think about it, poor Paddy’s wife remained in an unmarked grave in the cold rocky ground in a burned down churchyard somewhere back in Ennistymon. There were no stories that any one remembered of her. We only knew her name. Had Paddy taken life too seriously? Perhaps he had little choice. But did anyone now care? All we knew of Paddy was the one great story that had been passed down from my grandfather. That was all that was left of Paddy’s life now . . . one great story. There wasn’t even a photograph of Paddy, for Paddy was too poor. Just one wonderful story from his distant life. Soon that would be gone too.
“You only fail when you stop trying,” my father used to say to me. It was something that maybe someone had passed along to him, perhaps even passed along by Paddy. Frank Hogan had other crazy sayings too. “He’s as Irish as Paddy’s pig!” he’d say. Did Paddy have a pig, I used to wonder. Or was it something that all of the Irish said? How Irish could a pig be? Was an Irish pig different than a German pig? It was sort of funny how those old Irish hated the English almost as much as the Red Sox fans hated the Yankees. My grandmother said it was genocide, you know, what the English had done to them, making them send all of their meat to England and leaving them to eat nothing but potatoes. I figured that all of that hatred for the English wasn’t at all good for our family’s well-being in the long run. It had made us all angry people.
Paddy and his sons Michael and Thomas died in that house on South Street in Lowell; it was the same house where my father grew up. And Frank’s childhood home sat right next door to the huge beautiful granite structure of St. Peter’s Church. My grandmother, Frank’s mother, attended Mass every single morning at six. In the pews of St. Peter’s Church, she burned through her rosary beads, round and round, rubbing them between her fingers, always clutching them, ever so faithfully, day after day. She even had pictures of the bleeding Sacred Heart of Jesus in every room in her house.
Lowell was always behind me and forever before me, like one big raceway loop that connected my future to my past. As a teenager, I used to go on long runs through the farm fields of Dracut; the same country roads that my father Francis had burned through on that Indian motorcycle in the late 1930s. I had heard this story from him many times . . . The day he flew right by my grandfather on Bridge Street while my grandfather was out on his city inspections, with my grandfather not even knowing it was Frank at first. You see, Frank had kept it hidden for so long, the motorcycle that he had squandered his paper route money for. Frank bought the Indian motorcycle when he was fourteen years old and hid it away in Uncle Arthur’s carriage house.
“Tom, isn’t that Francis?” my grandfather’s assistant asked him from the passenger seat on that very day as my father buzzed by them going the other way, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, hunched forward like Jimmy Dean on his final lap of one of the great races of life. “What a boy!” the assistant laughed.
“What! Such a sin! He’s supposed to be in school! Are you sure that was him?” was my grandfather’s angry response.
Such a sin! Just like Decky and Luke streaking through the Born-Again Christian revival tent in the big open lot right next to our house a few months before we left Huntington Beach! Declan told me they ran right down that center aisle and took a left right at the face of Jesus. They ran out the side of the tent and across our lot, right by the grinding oil derrick and right in through our back screen door before any of the revivalists knew what had hit them.
We always loved to judge those Christian extremists who recruited everyone in those weekend tents—the ones with the beautiful homes with the manicured lawns and the BMWs in their driveways—the televangelists on TV. I felt that they looked down on the rest of us. This was such a contrast to the vision of my own grandmother tearing through those rosary beads clutched so tightly in her hands in the silent pews of great St. Peter’s Church.
So back and forth it was for me, always asking questions under the big tent. But I needed to get it right; for if I wandered down the wrong path, like the path of the Moonies, for instance, eternity was forever.
“Krishnamurti said that religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples,” Lucas proclaimed.
“That’s a sin to have been running through that tent like that with no clothes on!” Frank Hogan proclaimed. “Such a sin!”
I often wondered where Krishnamurti would go when he died, and if he was wrong, who was going to tell us?
Consciousness was energy, and energy could not be either created or destroyed. It was physics too, so we had to go somewhere. Even the San Francisco jazzman knew about that. The San Francisco jazzman had even said, “God bless you!”
On the stereo at Kerry and Sam’s condo, someone had swapped out The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball to Christopher Cross, a Top 40 artist, who had just made it big with his song “Sailing.”
“Who put on the elevator music?” Decky asked after coming back into the room from brushing his teeth and moving over to his corner of the living room to fiddle with his pile of things.
The television set was on too, with the volume down low and no one watching it. The Wheel of Fortune, a game show for prizes and money, aired in the background of our lives. Although I could hardly make out the letters they were guessing, I laughed at the three eager contestants. How silly they looked up there spinning that wheel, smiling, clapping, cheering each other on. Pat Sajak, the host, was standing up there with his Decky-Brady-Crest-Toothpaste smile. I thought about how this whole presentation mirrored the great contest of life itself. Pat Sajak knew we all would do anything to be up there with him; we’d act silly just to be seen on TV. We all wanted a chance to spin that wheel; we all wanted to win lots of prizes and money; we’d follow the rules; we’d smile; we’d wait our turn and falsely cheer the other contestants on. Why did we cheer the others on? We all wanted to be famous, even for a sweet five minutes, if that’s all we could get in this life.
I quickly pulled myself away from the TV set now, shook my head, and broke out of the trance, to simply pace the floor and wait my turn to shower in the bathroom. I splashed water on my face in the kitchen sink and brushed my teeth while I waited. After showering, I tossed on yesterday’s clothes; a maroon sweater, jeans, and a baseball cap I had been wearing with the Olympia Beer logo on it. It was time to step into the morning mountain air again and immerse myself into cool, refreshing, sober Aspen life. As I stood on the stairway and took full breaths in through my nose, I felt the pain in my sternum that had been with me for over a week now, the pain from the kick of the drunken beer thief who had run down the alleyway of night.
Out in the driveway of the condo, Lucas was under the hood of the Fairlane, frustrated that he couldn’t get the engine to turn over. You see, I was never really mechanically inclined and selfishly relied on Lucas and Declan to tend to the upkeep of the car. Walking toward him, I sorted out what I needed to do in my day; I had postcards to be written. That’s what was on my mind (it is funny how the postcards that I wrote that day fell behind the couch at Kerry and Sam’s condo and didn’t arrive in Lowell and California until 1985).
My car was still in Huntington Beach, my 1984 Subaru GL, sitting on a dealer lot on consignment, waiting for the next someone to find it. I didn’t have the money now to make another payment on it, so I prayed that it quickly be sold. Oh, if it could only sell quickly, how life would be suddenly beautiful again!
San Francisco seemed so far behind us now. I wondered if the black saxophone man on the street that looked like Springsteen’s Clarence Clemons, with his wide-brimmed hat, might be playing his same song of life at Union Square today. Or perhaps he stood on another crowded corner in the city where so many had passed before him.
“If you want to take a picture, you’ve got to put some money in the case on the sidewalk!” he had shouted at the tourists. “Because in life, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. It defies the laws of physics, right?”
“Yessir,” Lucas had replied back to him.
“Was the sax man quoting Krishnamurti?” I asked Lucas who was still frustratingly buried under the hood of the Fairlane.
“What?”
Even the abandoned castle pavilion we encountered on the changing desert floodplain of Great Salt Lake, all of it, everything from yesterday was deep in the past now. Bugs had smashed against our windshield all across those desert highways of Nevada, huge bug splatterings. I remembered pulling over repeatedly just to wash them off, with water and a rag, like the poor street urchins I had seen at the Mexican border town of Tijuana, who used dirty rags to wash the tourist windshields, just for some gringo coin. We used to dig in our pockets for some change to turn over to them on those Southern California day trips, in a hurt of pity, even though the windshield always appeared worse.
Lucas couldn’t get the Fairlane started; he believed the wires from the distributor cap to the spark plugs needed replacing. So from the condo, we walked into Aspen town in the rain. As we walked we again heard the echoes of distant valley thunder throughout the quaint cathedral town.
Once we were in town, the weather cleared. We asked a few passersby where we could find the closest auto parts store. A small variety store cashier, dark haired and hazel eyed, gave us directions to a hardware store a few blocks away. She hypnotized me while she gave Luke directions. I thought about her all the way to the hardware store. And then the clerk at the hardware store directed us to the auto parts store. I thought about the hardware store clerk all of the way to the auto parts store.
On the way back to the car, with the parts now purchased, we stopped for a while to watch a local rugby match. The players scrummed on an Irish green field with beautiful Aspen Mountain as their backdrop. Amongst the spectators lining the boundaries of the field, I noticed a small bearded man with beady eyes studying the three of us as he sipped on a Coors draft that he had bought from the beer tent behind us. An olive-skinned girl stood behind us; she was beautiful. She watched the beady-eyed man study us as I studied her. Her violet sweater and khaki shorts were a dead giveaway to the granola lifestyle she lived and so believed in. She caught me studying her and looked into my eyes. Embarrassingly, I averted them quickly. Another few minutes passed and when I turned again to look for her, the Siren was gone. Maybe I had imagined her.
The Aspen team seemed to be dominating the Boulder team on the field. Lucas had played club rugby and tried to explain the intricacies of this foreign sport to us; the passing, the kicking, the scrum. We saw the teams push as a collective group, the yin and the yang of sport, groveling for possession of that funny-shaped ball. Another small, pretty girl was beside us, her arm locked tightly around her boyfriend. She wore a striped rugby shirt and whispered sweet passions in his ear, but he just looked forward. He seemed uninterested in her. He breathed heavily and was entirely focused on the game. He had a beautiful girl, and he didn’t even appear to care. This kept her closer to him, for she was totally entranced in his distant gaze. Love was so complicated. You show someone you care, and they lose you; you show someone you don’t care, and they want you. Why did it have to be this way? I thought of my own fall from grace. Colette was lost, and I was locked in my dungeon now, with Jeff Beck’s “Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers” playing forever in the soundtrack of my mind.
After a while, we headed back to the car where Lucas and Declan set to work putting in the new distributor cap. Luke jumped in the driver’s seat, turned the ignition key, and the engine turned over easily. Vroom, vroom! Declan and I hopped in for the short trip back into town to now look for Lucas’s mother, three sisters, and brother Kenny who told us they’d be at “Little Annie’s,” a small little wooden restaurant named after the daughter of a silver miner back in the late 1870s. As soon as we got there, we ordered up a few pitchers of sweet lip-smacking draft beer and a taco pizza to split amongst the eight of us. Luke’s mom didn’t have any of the beer, of course. The older, heavyset waitress at Little Annie’s, her hair all pulled back and bunched atop the crown of her head, seemed put off by the lot of us as she took our order. Her hair was pulled too tight, I thought. It pulled her eyes out hard and stretched the skin all of the way to her nose. We were eight tourists splitting one measly pizza. I looked out at a wooden caricature of three miners and a lady, presumably “Little Annie” herself, on the wall across from our weathered wooden booth. I thought of “Little Annie” way out here in that crazy West in the 1870s. How Paddy hadn’t even made it over to Lowell in 1870, yet this town was here in all of its glory and all these ripping mountains even then. And was this little Annie, the supposed daughter of a silver miner, a real-live person or just a make-believe person because it made for this great story? Stories were the essence of life.
In the booth, Lucas’s sister Faith pulled out all of her pictures that she had taken at the Los Angeles Summer Olympics that we all had attended with her just weeks before we left California. She also showed us pictures of the San Francisco Marathon that Lucas and our roommate Jesse competed in on August 9th. Crazy Jesse had run the race without even training for it; he figured that just by riding his bicycle everywhere and playing tennis constantly, that 26.2 miles of pure pavement wouldn’t be that difficult to weather by foot. He was always like this. Jesse finished the race in about four hours but really didn’t feel too well after that. He lay down at the side of the road at the finish line ready to die; people passing by actually thought he did die. Lucas finished a good bit before Jesse because he had trained to run in the thing. Faith showed all of us the pictures—Luke smiling at the glorious finish line. I noticed that it was a finish line so unlike that childhood memory of Polly Town’s wall that I had. Luke’s finish line was a magnificent finish line with lots and lots of people behind it. In Faith’s pictures, all of the people were happy at that finish line; they all had the appearance like they had been there for eons, all of the people who had gotten there before Luke. Everybody was waiting with warm and open arms. Faith was at Luke’s finish line.
As we all began to eat our taco pizza, I now heard classic rock-and-roll music coming from somewhere in the recesses of “Little Annie’s Kitchen,” from beyond the swinging kitchen service doors, but the sound was ever so faint.