Chapter 19
It was Thursday, September 6th, the thirteenth day of our mad adventure across America. I woke up that morning, stood up beside the bed that I had slept in at the Coppens’s Topeka home, and immediately noticed that the weird feeling in my lower back that had lingered there before had now returned. The numbness was coming from the area of my back where my kidneys were. I had suffered painful kidney stones back in California the year before; it was all those ice cream cones that begot the kidney stones, the emergency room doctor had informed me. But I had no health insurance to take care of it back then (or, for that matter, even now), so I had to deal with the excruciating pain of having the stones leave me the hard way. I remembered screaming in the bathroom when they hit, and now I feared that all of my drinking on the road might have somehow brought the stones back again.
But after working out with free weights at Luke’s sister Anna’s club in the morning, the sensations all of a sudden dissipated and I forgot about them once again.
We had lunch at Anna’s club, where Anna ordered up all of this food for us; there was sliced turkey on pita bread, stuffed potatoes with cottage cheese, chef’s salad, ham, lots of sliced roast beef, and then a small whole wheat pizza that we all split. Decky quietly slipped a ten-dollar bill to the pretty girl behind the deli cash register as the food came rolling out. He was careful to not let Anna see him do this, for she wouldn’t have approved of it for sure. Anna insisted that the three of us keep what money we had for our long trip ahead.
While eating lunch, Lucas announced to us all that he had read in the morning paper that Jane Roberts, the author of Seth Speaks, had died the day before, on September 5th.
“Really?” Anna and I said in unison.
“Maybe she went to another plane of existence, another life somewhere else, perhaps to another planet,” Lucas wondered.
“Maybe she just went to heaven,” Declan added.
“Maybe her spirit now sits in a Pacific Northwest bookstore! With burning incense and new age crystals dangling from the rafters, with distant tapes of whale sounds playing in the background,” I pictured Trent (who wasn’t there) saying to us all.
“But what about Seth? Where did he go? Or is he still floating around out in the cosmos, jumping from body to body (like that crazy gypsy in Anaheim) in order to channel more books to the masses?” I wondered again.
“He didn’t possess her; she was just his spiritual medium. There’s a big difference between channeling a spirit and a spirit possessing someone,” Lucas assured me.
“With Jane gone, what will come next?” everyone wondered.
After lunch, we went to Anna and Laird’s (Anna’s fiancé) new house for a quick tour of their one-story ranch, with Murphy, their German shepherd barking at us from behind the screen door as we pulled up in the Fairlane. I assumed poor Murphy only saw us in his dog life shades of gray. To him, we were three strangers in a big crazy machine with beautiful, annoying rubber tires that spun in slow, dizzy circles as the car turned the tight corner into his driveway. This was Murphy’s domain that we entered; he had carefully pissed out the parameters of his yard, marking the bushes in the corners, and we had intruded.
The bungie cord that held our surfboard down hadn’t been adjusted for days; everything was still tight, of course, but for us, the stationary surfboard was becoming a permanent part of the car. We didn’t even notice now; it was a rudder in the darkness of night steering us a little left of normalcy the longer we kept it up there.
We had kept close enough to the masses of normal, working humanity to be entertaining to them, though. We needed them, and they needed us. Perhaps our mere presence was a welcome escape for some, but not for poor Murphy.
From Anna and Laird’s, we drove to Washburn University to meet up with Laird where he was a defensive coordinator for their football program. We toured Washburn’s field house under his guidance. He showed us the indoor pool, its vapors of chlorine gas rising off of the surface in the large open room like the morning fog off of New England’s Berkshires. From there, Laird took us into the weight room, where he introduced us to the head football coach who got up off of a bench to shake all of our hands. And then, Laird shuffled us down a side hallway toward the back door of the facility, where a freshman lineman in workout grays rounded the corner and almost ran into us.
“Hey, Coach, did you hear the news?”
“No, tell me the news,” Laird responded.
“The landlord sold our apartment. What’ll I do? Do you know anywhere that I can live?”
“Sorry, try the newspapers, Bub . . . I’m sure you’ll be able to find something,” Laird smiled. Laird turned back quickly to us and waved to move forward, like a quarterback that had just avoided a tackle. He moved toward the exit sign end zone.
“Better yet, why don’t you just break someone’s legs?” Laird yelled after Bub as he pushed the heavy metal handle of the exit door.
Before the door slammed shut, I saw Bub looking back at us sorry and confused. I could tell that he didn’t know if Laird was serious or not; I could see the gears turning in his head. He wondered how breaking someone’s legs would get him a roof over his head. I felt bad for the kid. I wondered if he would end up breaking the landlord’s legs because Coach Laird had told him to.
That evening, we went with Anna and Laird to The Green Parrot, where Kenny, Luke’s younger brother, worked as a cook. Gathering around the bar, we had lots of drinks while we waited on Kenny to finish his shift in the kitchen. It was right at that time when this guy named Tad strutted into the bar and came right over to the five of us, all warm and welcoming. We all assumed Tad was Kenny’s friend. Anna and Laird kept on buying us all drinks, even Tad. And when Kenny came out of the kitchen at the end of his shift, Kenny assumed Tad was with Anna and Laird, for by that time, Tad had his arms around the couple, hugging them both, and kissing Laird on the head.
Into the parking lot we all went, out into the Topeka night where the cicadas buzzed everywhere. It was dark now, and I imagined in my delirium, walking from a crowded bar into the shift of night that the cicadas were talking to me again, but I didn’t know what they were trying to say. We were having the time of our lives, all headed to a friend of Anna’s, a lady named Kathryn, who lived on the other side of Topeka, past the golden dome. Tad rode with Lucas, Declan, and me in the Fairlane, while Kenny rode his motorcycle, a Kawasaki Kz1000, behind us. Anna and Laird were in their own car. It was at Kathryn’s place, after we all got to talking amongst ourselves, that we soon realized that Tad didn’t know a one of us. He was from Canada.
Kathryn was tall, about five foot nine, and appeared to be in her thirties. She had short blond hair and was vice president of marketing at a company that made shoes. Her condo had puffy white cotton ball carpeting throughout all of the white-walled rooms. Declan and I nicknamed it the ivory shoe palace. I wanted to just lie down on the fresh carpet and make snow angels in the middle of the room when we first walked in. My socks rubbed against the soft carpet comfortably, for we all had to take off our shoes at the door. Into the night, Kathryn told us that she was about to go on a two-week vacation to Italy the following morning and had invited us all over to her house for this happy get-together in order to help her stay awake till the morning. She thought Tad was traveling with Luke, Decky, and I and began to talk to him intensely about Europe. In the white-washed night, Tad put his hand on Kathryn’s shoulder where she didn’t appear to mind. I secretly wondered if Tad would fly with her clear to Italy and marry her on a moonlit night on the gondola waterways of Venice, where they both would live happily ever after.
As the night wore on, we began talking about religion. The volume in the room slowly increased. Everyone was talking at each other and talking loud, but no one was listening. We talked about the Roman Catholic Church, for some of us were still searching for answers, and even though this was the religion that most of us had been raised in, we still had our doubts. As children who grew up in the church, we were never allowed to ask the difficult questions that now harangued us: why no birth control, no premarital sex, no abortion, no divorce, and no free thinking? What about reincarnation and extraterrestrials?
“Because it is a sin,” was the answer I had become accustomed to when I asked those same questions growing up.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I had once confessed to Father Downs back at St. Matthews.
“And what is it that you would like to confess, son?”
“I think I believe in extraterrestrials.”
“You believe in what?” Father Downs asked through the dark cloth in the confessional booth in utter disbelief. He always seemed so confused by my confessions. I wondered if anyone else had confessions like this.
“Is this Michael Hogan again?” he would ask aloud. “For the love of St. Peter!”
At Kathryn’s house, as we were all loud and talking at each other, someone proclaimed, “God is not only within us, but we are ourselves God!”
“Come on, people can’t be God!” Declan raised his voice. “That way of thinking is wrong!”
It was one of those rare serious moments that I ever remembered Declan having. He was upset with the rest of us for our drunken, blasphemous ways. Why must we always slam religion?
“Jimmy Carter’s a Baptist, and he believes in extraterrestrials!” Declan screamed. “How do you explain that?”
“There have been many freethinkers through the whole course of history that have been Christian,” Tad jumped in to Declan’s rescue. “Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, comes to mind.”
“If the church preaches to do good, what’s so wrong about living your life to do good?” Kenny backed up what Declan and Tad believed.
“What if Decky is Jesus in disguise?” I whispered to Luke, who laughed and whispered back.
“No, I think it is Tad that is Jesus in disguise.”
“God bless Tad!” I yelled out to everyone in Kathryn’s white apartment. At this, Tad suddenly got all smug and took my sarcastic praise as a sincere compliment. He nodded in my direction and hoisted his beer to salute me. I decided to salute him back.
“God bless Tad! God bless Tad!” we all screamed.
But then Declan, Tad, and Kenny began to talk about sunglasses. They broke off into their own little group, moving to a corner of the living room in the brightness, moving away from the rest of us heathens who were all still gathered in the burning hot kitchen.
We talked and talked all night. The minutes became hours and before long, morning arrived, and Kathryn boarded a taxi for the airport. Tad got into the taxi with her. Just like that, they were gone.
In the stillness of this moment of night, right before dawn, I rode on the back of Kenny’s Kawasaki Kz1000 as he blurred through the rural Topeka streets. We were headed back to Luke’s mother’s house to sleep; it was so late now it was early. The last of the cicadas were wrapping up their diminishing chorus before the morning arrived. “God bless Tad!” they all said to me.
That morning I had a dream about a beach. It felt good; it felt warm, like all of the dreams where I lay on the beach, basking for as long as I wanted. I didn’t have to worry about a sunburn or skin cancer for I somehow knew that it was just a dream. The warm and inviting beach had large waves that consistently crashed on the shoreline, but I wasn’t afraid of the water. The little sandpipers ran back and forth again, like in all of those other dreams, but they didn’t need food; they simply chased the waves. There were no worries left in the world. My body drank in the warm, healing sunlight. In my dream, I feared nothing that was ahead of me in life. It all made such perfect sense to me now. The light was exhilarating.
The warmness began to slowly leave me. In my dream I got up to walk to the shoreline. Declan surfed on a long, wooden board out beyond the breakers as I stood in ankle-deep whitewater writing blurry, incomprehensible words in a wet journal. The journal was falling apart and dropping to the water. Decky, floating on his board out in the water, pointed to two other surfers in the ocean beyond him. The journal had disappeared, and I was on a board in knee-deep water, trying to surf now, but I wasn’t able to stand and could only hold the tip of the board. My shaky legs slipped on the fiberglass, and I fell into the abyss. Suddenly in my dream, I sat in a wedding boutique that my sister Kate owned. My brother Steve, my father Frank, and my mother Theresa, all sat with us around the kitchen table that was right in the middle of her store. Elton John came into the store bucking in a wheelchair, doing wheelies; he had a Mohawk haircut.
Maybe the wedding boutique thing came to me because my sister Kate had gotten married in Lowell a few months before. Frank went crazy at Saint Matthews right before the wedding because we ushers couldn’t roll out the plastic runner correctly for Frank and my sister to walk down. He pulled out his pocketknife in a mad fury and got down on his hands and knees at the back of the church in his tuxedo, all the while muttering “Jesus Christ” under his breath. He cut off the runner at the back pew just so it would roll right.
And then in the dream I was taking a test back in high school. Time was up, and all of the answers were wrong. It was finals week, and I forgot what classes I needed to go to next ’cause I had skipped them so many times during the semester. I didn’t know what I would do to turn in my final papers. I had forgotten my school schedule. I couldn’t finish the test I was taking, and the answers were all wrong, and I was crazy frustrated and anxious. I was always in school. It seemed like forever in these recurring dreams where my number two pencil was always breaking. I tried to erase my answers with sweating hands dripping all over the paper. Indiscernible words . . . I couldn’t read my answers anymore, and with my fading vision, I suddenly was blind, and everything was so frustratingly incomprehensible.
Then I woke up, breathing heavy, exhilarated, feeling completely happy to be awake and back in Kansas and away from that crazy test once again.
I grabbed my notepad to write down as much as I could remember. The dream seemed like I had been in another plane of existence with another Decky, Kenny, and Tad from Canada. Maybe Tad really was Jesus in disguise or maybe an angel. They were all wearing sunglasses, surfing long boards in heaven.
Tad had said at the bright ivory palace, “To have faith without question is truly a gift.” He said this to us right before he disappeared forever in that taxi.