Aside

THE CATS OF ENCINITAS

The cats of Encinitas have a little game trail they have worn into the bluff beneath the State Beach Headquarters of Elija.  

The old man standing on the bluff was checking out the surf between Swamis to the north and Salt Creek to the south when he saw a little flash of fluff in the ice plants below. There, staring out of the darkness beneath the plants was a little brown and white kitten. Its’ little face wrinkled, its’ little mouth stretched open and its’ little voice went “Meow.” Then it vanished.

He knew about the cats. Had seen them for years and had even sat apart from them watching the surfers even as they watched the surfers. He would see a good cut-back and say to the cats, “Good cut-back.”

They, in return, would turn their heads in unison and give him the ‘cold local stare’.

He had been coming to this part of the coast ever since he was a teenager. Before surfing was acceptable. Before the ‘heel of the jackboot’ had made its first prints in the sand of the California beaches. Back then his kind were looked down upon, despised, even ridiculed. They were the favorite subjects, next to the black man, of the police.  

When he was a teen the lineups were empty in the winter. The waves un-encumbered. Now the breaks were crowded and rude all year-long.

A cold winter storm out of the northwest charged down the northern California coast bringing with it days of wind-blown rain and dark low clouds that boiled overhead.  When the storm began to abate, the solitary old man drove his old pick-up with his heavy long board down to the bluff to check out the surf. It was big. The swell was running at ten to twelve feet and after hundreds of miles were about as clean as they could get with eighteen second intervals between waves. The waves were forbidding. Dark gray ranks that marched in from the ocean in perfect symmetry appeared out of the rainy mist. The nearer they came to shore the more they grew in their armor of chop on their faces and the gray beards on their crests. As they scathed the outside reefs and marched into the shoals they peeled with a ground-shaking rumble that sent the Adrenalin coursing through his veins.  

The core of surfing was out. The names in the magazines were in the line-up with hundreds of others all up and down the coast. Seventy-five percent were just sitting on their boards floating on the shoulders of giant waves, comfortable and secure with wet suits and leashes while others were paddling into fantastic waves that were made of dreams and happen only once or twice a year.  

He was not going out. The surf was too big, too far out and he was in no shape to wrestle the ocean and the milling crowd. His struggling emotion was squeezed into a painful knot in his stomach that had become the story of his elderly life.

While checking out an unusual six-foot shore-break tube in front of him he saw out and away from the exposed rocks in a foamy surging rip a soaked ball of fluff. High tide had inundated the rock barrier and the lower half of the steps near the bluff, where the cats live, and had captured one of the kittens. Then he saw the mother in the water and assumed she had been captured also. But, no, she was swimming away from shore. She was swimming towards her little kitten. The rip swept mother and cat swiftly out into the trough of a wave thirty feet from where he stood with the tide lapping at his feet. In the face of the pitching wave the little kitten was stuck motionless looking more like a smudge than a fluff.

Behind him two surfers stood higher on the bluff. He hears one of them say, “Look at that stupid cat, man. It ain’t got a fucking chance.”

“Not a snowball’s chance in hell,” said the other.

Then together they said, “Cool, man.”

Wave and kitten were thrown out into a dirty brown tube while the mother cat disappeared behind a curtain of sea. The wave exploded off the large chunks of concrete and rock that lay hidden three feet beneath the surface. The old man flinched as the grinder wound down the shoreline. Behind him he heard, “Cool.”

The soup foamed in toward shore while he searched the checkered white pattern left on the surface by the wave for any sign of the cats. His eyes traveled from one foam patch to another; around the swirls and small temporary currents he searched and while he searched his mind wandered into a senior’s moment.

He saw clearly in his mind a young man with long blond hair plastered to his head streaking along a six-foot wall of the same checkered white and dark swirls of foam and sea in a squat, his left leg extended into a cheaters five off the nose of his long board.

The memory was strong enough that the man’s heart beat faster. He almost smiled but then remembered the cats and focused his eyes and mind. The old man hunched up from a cold flash that traveled through his spinal column while rain water dripped out from under his ball cap and off his long gray hair. His eyes swept the coastline. He could see the swells firing off all the reefs. The two surfers behind him opted for an easier paddle out and head to Swamis. It’d take them an hour to get a parking spot and when they did make it into the line-up they would be numbers fifty-two and fifty-three. At the top of the bluff they yelled down to him.

“They’re done for, dude!”

Another shore-break tube came in. The wave pitched out over itself into a perfect barrel and axed into the shallow blocks and rebounded back out and into the air.  The explosion hung and formed a mist that the wind snatched and swept away. The dirty white surge swirled around his feet and he realized that the tide was still on the rise.

As another shore break wave formed he studied the stretched and smooth water in front of it for the cats. For some unknown reason he felt desperate. Desperate like the cat trying to rescue its’ young. Did it have emotions like love and worry?  

The wave pitched out and thundered into the shallows like a pile driver and he backed up the bluff a little farther.

He had given up hope but could not bring himself to leave. He was getting colder from his soaked trousers and shoes yet he still searched. Then he saw her. Twenty feet behind the forming shore-break.  He had been looking in front of the shore-break while the whole time she had been swept out. As she fought the fading rip he silently cheered and rooted her on.

As each successive wave traveled beneath her she slowly came closer to shore. He followed along the rubbled shoreline as she drifted sideways with the new current during slack tide. The ocean had quieted except for the swells and the mother cat began to make noticeable headway. Headway into the hard tubing overhead shore-break that was doing its’ level best to destroy the large chunks of concrete and rock at the base of the bluff.

The cat was just a barely distinguishable form when a fast-moving wave, larger than the others, grew up behind her, preparing to break farther out than all the other shore break waves. He put his hands to his head and clutched his hat. His mouth opened and closed without uttering a sound. Suddenly he had to pee and began to dance from one foot to another.

The wave continued to rise up behind the mother cat.  It was huge, at least fifteen feet from trough to crest. It was now that the old man saw a small bundle like a mouse, held hanging from her mouth. The mother cat had her offspring. She had actually found and recovered the kitten. But it was too late. There was no way that she was going to survive the wave that was now sweeping her and her kitten upwards into the mottled sky onto its’ gray-black face.

The pee ran down the man’s leg. It would have been humiliating had he not been soaked to begin with and on the brink of launching himself, clothes and all, into the cold swift ocean.

As the mother cat and kitten became vertical on the face of the wave and underneath the lip that was already in the process of leaping outward, she arched her back, dug her left rear leg into the face and made the drop, head-first on the soft fur of her belly. The wave fought to suck the cats back up its’ face but the mother cat barely skimmed the surface and controlled her position with her left leg and hip. She disappeared into the tube. And she surfed the wave down the shoreline.

It was a fantastic stand up tube of monochrome gray and black shadows and the man yearned to join with it, like that fantastic, bold surfing cat who, he thought, was now being smashed into the jagged edges and corners of concrete and rock. He stumbled along the bank, threading and climbing blocks that were inundated with surf.

The surge swept up around his knees and fell into the wash. He stopped and watched the wave section against the hard concrete bank. The soaked old man, his thinning hair plastered like dark gray thread across the top of his head, stood with his hat in hand waiting for the wave to end. Whatever had happened it was now over. He could see no movement, no objects in the wash of ocean and shore. He climbed out of the water and up the bank for a better view. Although he still hustled he was not hopeful.  

But, there she was. Her and her dangling kitten still alive not looking much different than a drowned floating rat. She was once again swimming against a weak current and amongst piles of sea-foam.

He was elated, and he moved as quickly as he could down to the water’s edge to stumble among the wash and rock. He stopped and watched as a chalk-streaked wave grew behind her. But the new current was moving her back out once more and the barreling wave smashed into the shallows and peeled off, thundering in front of her.  

She was moving very slow and struggling to keep her hind legs up, like a sinking ship going down by the stern. She was exhausted and on her last reserves. The whole universe knew that this was her last attempt to reach land.

He was tired of trying to run back and forth along the concrete rubble. It seemed like he had been doing this forever. But now he realized he and the cats had arrived at the climax. This was it: the last chance.  

He waded out carefully through and over the blocks, waist deep, where he hoped he could get his hands on the cats when the time came. He wedged his feet between blocks of concrete and stood with the water around his waist. Suddenly realizing what he was about to do he stripped off his jacket and threw it onto shore where the tide immediately claimed and carried it away. In front of him, fifty feet away, the mother cat with her kitten clenched in her mouth struggled with her last effort to stay up, barely making way against a soft ebb. Behind her another grinding tube began to peel off onto the blocks.

He waded farther out until the water was just under his armpits. He would watch and see what happened and at the last second he would duck down beneath the surface, find a block and hold on while the tube axed him. After that he would surface and find the cats. It was all he had.

Tqhe light rain that had been swept along with the wind, died. The brisk on-shore stiffened. The low scudding clouds thinned and broke up, revealing, thousands of feet up, flat lenticular wind-swept saucers. Beyond, thousands of more feet, wispy mares tails swept gracefully across a bright blue sky. The ocean turned blue and the foam a brilliant white while a flight of albatross sailed along the face of an outside wave.

Again, a wave lifted the cats, its’ lip pitched out and they made the drop. The old man, now in front of the approaching tube looked down the barrel at the cats surfing toward him. The mother cat looked at the old man from within the barrel and their eyes locked.

The surge swept out, pulling his legs out from under him and the old man as he went under looked into the vortex of the wave, seeing the cats travel over him. The wave sucked him up and he went over the falls losing his shoes and hat. He was driven into the blocks and amidst a million bubbles and flashes of sea and sky he tumbled until out of nowhere a hand grabbed him by the belt of his trousers. The two surfers had returned and while one rescued the would-be rescuer, the other rescued the cats.

He lay on the blocks above the wash of the waves with his head pounding and his ears ringing. On his chest lay the two cats, the mother with her kitten still in her mouth. He watched their chests rising and falling while the mother cat looked deep into his eyes and licked her kitten, perfectly content lying on his body.

“Dude, what were you trying to do?”  

The old man looked up into the face of the surfer standing over him dripping water and blood. His buddy standing next to him dripping oceans of sea answered for him.
“Body surfing. Man, that was some wave you and the cats had. Totally awesome dude.”
As the two surfers walked back up the bluff the old man heard one say to the other.  ” Unbelievable, bro. Cats in the tube.” and they started laughing.

Aside

THE ABCs of SATURDAY NIGHT

 

Saturday nights were for one thing only: getting drunk. Actually, it was for three things: A- Getting the liquor, B- drinking the liquor, and C- driving while drunk on the liquor. These comprised the one thing that Saturday nights were for. 

 

My role was getting the liquor and drinking the liquor. Others would be drinking the liquor and driving on liquor. Occasionally I would have to perform C – driving the car while drunk – and at this I was less experienced. Also, I did not appreciate this very much because then I was performing A, B, and C, which I did not think was very fair. I could do the one thing Saturday nights were for all by myself because I was also pretty good at stealing cars. This would be D of the one thing, starring a young man bent on self-destruction and taking anyone else along with him that wanted to go. The ABCs of Saturday Nights in nineteen sixty-six. Really, only one thing.

 

Saturday nights in the summer, in the Sacramento Valley of California, were intoxicating. The air was heavy with scent. An odor you could only find here. Two major rivers, the Sacramento River and the American River fed the growth that provided these heavier-than-air aromas. Flowers, shrubs, trees, and tons of tomatoes, cucumbers and hops all contributed to these unique smells. Then, to top it off, like the icing on a cake, was the estrogen odor of teenage girls. I really don’t know if estrogen has an odor, but if it did it probably would not be like icing on a cake. In any case, the summer air hung in a breathless state, sometimes so thick it was like swimming in perfume.

 

While cruising K Street in downtown Sacramento Harrison would ask “What is that smell?” Wrinkling his nose up while he hung his  head out of the drivers window of the maroon fifty-six Chevy. “Can you smell that odor?”

 

Every teenage male in Sacramento could smell that odor. That was why were cruising K Street, leering at all the girls in their daddy’s cars and acting like teenage gorillas.

 

“That’s the odor of sexually active women hunting for my young hard body.” I answer sucking up rum and coke through a straw.

 

A cherry red Apache rumbles up to us in the left lane and matches our speed of twenty-five miles per hour. Inside two hards stare at us, the driver pushes in his clutch and revs the big block. His glass packs and headers ‘crack’ and ‘growl’ as the RPMs wind down. “You wanta race or are you two nerds chicken shit?”

 

“Chicken shit.” I mumble only loud enough for Harrison to hear. 

 

The hard in the passenger seat drags a greasy comb through his jet black duck tail. “Look like a couple of frats to me.” He leans toward the window and while he slides his greasy comb into his stained back pocket he looks Harrison right in the face. “You guys a couple of mommas’ boys?”

 

I can see Harrison’s face turn red and without saying a word he slides the automatic into neutral and revs the flathead six until it screams. Behind us a blue black cloud of smoke engulfs K Street and a few of the valves begin to clatter as the engine idles down. Harrison puts the car into drive and we pick up speed. Ahead of us the Apache cuts over in front of us and we can hear the laughter as the driver flips us off outside of his window.

 

“I thought that went well.” I said around a liquored smile.

 

We were gorillas and we were frats. We wore the white tennis shoes with the rainbow stripe down the back above the heel that went well with jeans or kaki trousers. We wore button down shirts and white socks. Our hair was short and a lot of us thought Dave Brubeck was cool. That put us opposing the hards who whore black pointed boots, jeans rolled at the cuff, white T-shirts with a pack of cigarettes rolled into the short sleeve of their Ts and grew their hair long combed straight back into a duck tail. They listened to Rock and Roll music and were always ready to punch somebody. Especially frats.

 

We were also tennis players. When we left home at night to meet and drink we told our parents we were playing tennis. We called it ‘playing under the lights’. Some of us were actually on the tennis team. If you were looking at the photo of my senior years tennis squad I would be the one kneeling down, proudly holding a Tad Davis Cup tennis racket and in my team whites with an orange Panama crushable perched jauntily on my head. I went undefeated in singles that year and was one of two players who earned letters. The team came in second in Metros and won the school a large trophy of a tennis player serving. But without an orange Panama crushable. 

 

We would tell our parents that we were off to play tennis and then cruise around drinking. Our parent’s didn’t care. Some of them were getting drunk on Saturday nights themselves, but then they weren’t cruising around in automobiles smelling the heavy scents of Sacramento Valley filled with teenage girls spilling their estrogen all about, giggling and jiggling their lustful bodies like Jello with maraschino cherries on top. The ABCs of Saturday Nights worked out pretty good. Soon we were leaving our homes without the tennis rackets to play under the lights. Nobody seemed to notice.

 

One Saturday night we were ‘playing under the lights’ and, pretty much, giving the old game everything we had. While we cruised around serving up aces out of quart bottles of beer we would lean out the windows into the heavy and intoxicating summer air all the way to our belt buckles and yell and whoop it up.

 

“Yeeeeehah!” I yelled out the window clutching my quart bottle of beer.

 

“Yaaaaahoo!” Tom yelled  out the passenger side.

 

“Yabadabado!” Craig yelled while driving.

 

The malt liquor worked its’ magic while coursing through our blood stream pushing fresh teenage chemicals of hormones and along with it increasing our sense of invunaralbility and daring. 

 

This was an exceptionally bold night. We eventually left a main boulevard to cruise a neighborhood street that had its own tennis match going on, only without the C of the ABCs of Saturday Nights. They only had the A and B but were whooping it up just as boldly as we were. Yet, because we had the C of Saturday Nights, we felt superior and to prove our point we began heaving our empty bottles from our mobile court. Now, nobody likes to lose a match of any kind and these A and B players, probably because they were a few years older with wives of decreased estrogen without maraschino cherries on top, were not going to be outgunned by a bunch of C players. They came boiling off their court, without their tennis rackets, like a squad of crazed Romanian’s and Poles, pulling their tennis shorts down around their knees and tearing off their white polo shirts. I swear, it was like a whole team of Nastases. 

 

If you don’t know who Illie Nastase is don’t worry because I’ll tell you. He was a tennis player playing badly in nineteen sixty-six on the professional tennis circuit. He was an Eastern European of dark complexion and heavy build with a bad attitude and a worse temper. The only way he could compete was to disrupt the match and thereby break the concentration of his opponent. He earned the nickname of Nasty Nastase. I have seen him, on television, so nasty that he pulled down his tennis shorts around his knees and mooned the head umpire. He once tore off his shirt, climbed into the audience, sat down and refused to play for a full five minutes. It must have been very difficult to play against old Nasty. 

 

So now you know what I’m talking about when I say we were surrounded by a whole squad of Nasty Nastases.  They were waving their beer cans in our faces. Spittle was flying across the windshield and sticking like a summer shower. They were ranting at the driver by his door and raving at the passengers by theirs. There were A and B squad members rocking the auto while others were yelling and flashing their flashlights into the air like some used car lot grand opening or maybe even like antiaircraft search lights. Soon there was a huge crowd of neighbors, none who knew anything about the ABCs, wandering around in the estrogen-strewn night, like zombies trying to swim in the intoxicating Sacramento Valley air among the participants of some kind of weird nighttime tennis match beneath flickering flashlights. The Nasty Nastases were refusing to play the game according to the rules of the ABCs of Saturday Nights.

 

Not everyone was out exploring the madness. Down the street a dog and a little odd gray-haired lady with an old nourished bitterness peered from her darkened house through nearly closed, thick dark drapes, clutching a phone in one hand and a K-frame Smith and Wesson three fifty-seven loaded with dumdum bullets in the other and telling the Sacramento Counties Sheriffs’ office all about a big fight in the midst of a large riot right in front of her house. With this information, Misterly’s big chance to make news had arrived and right on time during a reelection. He was going to show these teenage punks who it was that controlled this county, and he sent enough men and equipment to invade Mexico. Of course, the county sheriff wasn’t the danger.  The real danger was the old odd one with a three fifty-seven praying that someone, anyone, would step just one inch onto her property so she could blow his ass away. She was ready to show these people a thing or two. Next to her, a tiny Pekingese growled through bared teeth. “That’s right baby. Mommas going to get some!” she said to her little dog.

 

The game under the lights became surrealistic when ten squad cars with lights and sirens raced into the midst followed by five paddy wagons. Citizens leaped and dove to safety. Dogs ran in circles barking and growling. Wives chased children between houses, tripping in the dark shadows while the sheriffs added to the confusion of yelling and laughing, by shouting contrary commands and waving unholstered weapons and batons. What a scene. The ABCs of Saturday Nights had reached new and unexpected heights, if not the ultimate climatic moment.

 

Five of the paddy wagons had to be sent back empty. The wagon contained three members of the ABCs and sat among the bright red and blue flashing emergency lights of the patrol cars. I felt like an object gift-wrapped and the blinking lights were the lights of a Christmas tree. Although, I admit, it did not feel like Christmas; it felt like the capture of Al Capone and his ruthless gang. I knew Misterly was going to be disappointed because the three of us were the only criminal teenage rioters and drunks his deputies could find and by the time they showed up we were sitting calmly on a lawn watching young adults running amuck and arguing with each other just like neighbors do the world over. If the deputy sheriffs had not found my quart bottle with two grams of spit at the bottom, they would have had anything for which to arrest us.

 

In the paddy wagon on the way to jail our senior class president, Craig, moaned. “Ohh God! What am I going to do now?”

 

“Whose beer was that anyway?” Tom hissed. “I finished mine. Who didn’t finish theirs?”

 

“Ohh God!” moaned Craig.

 

“Ohh God!” I moaned.

 

Toms’ eyes narrowed into slits as he stood unsteadily in the moving wagon looking at me.

 

“How was I to know?” I pleaded. “Craig is the one who drove us into that cul-de-sac. I

didn’t tell you  guys to throw your beer bottles. You didn’t tell me to throw mine.” The shadows of bar and screen from the paddy wagons’ window flitted across Toms’ angry face as the street lights outside marched by. “Anyway, they didn’t find this half pint of JD.” I announced jubilantly pulling it out of the back pocket of my jeans hidden by the tail of my shirt.

 

Toms’ attitude swung one hundred and eighty degrees. “Bitchin!” He declared loud enough for the cops in the front cab to hear.

 

“Craig gets the first chug.” I declared magnanimously reaching out to Craig with the half pint.

 

Craig pulled his face out of his hands and looking straight at the half-pint moaned, “Ohh God, what am I going to do now?”

 

“Forget that politician, Dave. I figure we have between five and ten minutes to finish that whiskey before we arrive downtown.”

 

I was already tipping the bottle to my lips and the liquid raced to my stomach where it crashed into the lining and bounced like a basketball. I struggled to hold a straight face as I handed the bottle to Tom.

 

“You know, it’s times like this when you know your real friends.” said Tom.

 

“Ohh God!” said Craig.

 

Now you would think that this would end the ABCs of Saturday Nights but it did not; it just ended ‘tennis under the lights’. Which was a shame because we were doing so well at doing no good. Now that the proverbial cat was out of the bag, the members of the ABCs of Saturday Nights resorted to outright rebellion and stepped up drinking to include the classrooms and school grounds of our esteemed high school. We drank at every occasion including the occasions that were not even occasions. We even got drunk, very quickly chugging a bottle of Chevis Regale, on the elevator in the courthouse en route to our trial for underage drinking. We became diabolical in the ABCs of Saturday Nights, extending the ABCs to every day of the week. After all, we were young, untouchable, indestructible and eternal. There was not anything that was impossible and we would, by God, do whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted and in any way that we wanted. The ABCs of Saturday Nights had become a beast with a life of its´ own.

 

The senior year was coming to an end and in nineteen sixty-six the early balmy weather continued. The ABCs of Saturday Nights had, by now, nearly reached legendary proportions as I expanded my job of getting the liquor (A) by stealing the liquor from my job at the country club to selling the liquor on campus to younger night-time drive-in movie partiers. This was a tricky business because some of these customers could not wait for their Friday and Saturday night excursions and began drinking their booze during lunchtime at school. The ABCs of Saturdays Nights had resorted to tapping holes in the seams of soda cans and then with a syringe drawing out the soda to be replaced with liquor. Carefully drying the hole we then dropped a spot of solder onto the hole to seal it. Voila! Instant mixed drink concealed as soda. No amount of locker inspections would reveal liquor on campus. Drunken seniors swaggered from class to class right under the noses of the administration.

 

The beast, true to its´ nature, took on an even more severe anti-establishment character by physically opposing the forces that stood as a roadblock, directly challenging our challenge of their laws. Mainly, teenage drinking and driving recklessly drunk. Now that Misterly was running for reelection on his campaign promise of cracking down on teenage drunkenness, reckless driving, the racing of cars and the cruising of downtown’s K. Street, the ABCs of Saturday Nights chose to respond by stealing Misterly’s garish reelection plywood posters that were orange with bold black letters, 

encouraging the citizens to ‘RE-ELECT MISTERLY FOR SHERIFF’. 

 

We had lost control of ourselves and were doing everything we could to self-destruct as the summer heated up and we became the monstrous teenagers of the ABCs of Saturday Nights, wheeling our vehicles sometimes on two wheels through the night, stealing the garish posters. It was on a Saturday night, two or three weeks before graduation, that three members of the ABCs of Saturday Nights demolished the ABCs of Saturday Nights and their campaign to end the reelection of Misterly for Sheriff. 

 

It started off like all the past Saturday nights. Get the liquor, drink the liquor, drive while intoxicated on the liquor and the new letter E; steal the campaign posters to reelect Misterly for sheriff. I had to skip the letter D because that was my personal letter; to steal cars and was independent of the ABCs of Saturday Nights. This night, with our vehicle loaded to the ceiling with reelect Misterly for Sheriff posters, we were drinking with the aim of obliterating ourselves. Somewhere past midnight, after I had passed out in the back seat of the senior class president’s Volkswagen bug, our secretary of plans and operations began puking onto the floorboard of the front passenger compartment which slowly made its way back to me, slumped down in front of the back seat. 

 

Regurgitated wine, gin, and beer began pooling around my young head and curly blond hair when I woke to Craig singing his going to San Francisco song as he weaved his car, filled with stolen Misterly for Sheriff garish orange posters with bold black lettering, back and forth across all three lanes of Interstate Eighty where it crossed the Yolo Causeway amidst the rice crop fields of Sacramento County. Now began a not-so-funny comedy of errors that would destroy the ABCs of Saturday Nights and nearly kill three of its’ members. From the back seat, filled with campaign posters, dripping vomit from my head and shoulders I managed to get the vehicle pulled over and the drunken president into the back seat.

 

Driving drunk, looking for the first exit off the Yolo Causeway, I was performing C, of the ABCs, and did not think it was fair. But this was not going to be the only unfair element of this Sunday morning and was going to prove that Sundays were the one thing Saturday Nights were not for. It continued when I couldn’t find an on ramp after I had left the Causeway on the first off ramp that I came to. There was a reason for this. Even though there was no frontage road, Sacramento County administrators had not considered it prudent to build an on ramp. Leaving an off ramp to nowhere. There was only one road that led to a tractor track high up on a levy, half a mile inland from the freeway and five miles from the small university town of Davis.

 

This is where I lost control of the car, chasing a long-eared jackrabbit as it bobbed and weaved its’ way in the headlights, tempting me in a way I could not ignore. The rear axle fish tailed as the rabbit left the levee. I brought the car back with a jerk on the steering wheel but over compensated and the vehicle fish tailed into the opposite direction. Now every correction brought an increasing loss of control until all four wheels were in a drift and the car left the small two-track levee and bottomed out between the axles as it slid sideways. I remember a jolt and then sudden silence except for the rock and roll on the radio. In very much like slow motion we rose into the air and slowly inverted until the moonlight lit the drive train for the first time in the history of this particular Volkswagen. 

 

The steering wheel pressed into my abdomen as the earth appeared to rotate perpendicular to the spin of its’ axis. I remember the popular song that I was listening to ending as, upside down, the vehicle crashed into the hard ground of the levy with an explosion of metal and glass, and then we were airborne again. I gripped the steering wheel, in drunken disorientation, not caring much about anything and observing the curious maneuvers of the flying automobile when the next impacts came in rapid progressions of detonations and splintering explosions. Then, once again, everything was silent except for the radio, as now the Mommas and Poppas sang about Monday, and the headlights tried to light the stars while in the distant silence a freight train cleared its’ crossings.

 

I don’t know how long I sat holding and peering through the bent and twisted steering wheel listening to KXOA until I noticed a wetness dripping down upon me from the ceiling. It was more puke and then, with sudden realization, I tried to sit up and collided with the crushed roof. Around me, stark reality crashed into my senses, sobering me instantly. The windshield was shattered and the driver’s side was peeled back outside until it overlapped the passenger’s side. I looked around and Tom, who had been sleeping in the passenger’s seat next to me, was gone. All the side windows were shattered and the back window was missing. I pulled the rearview mirror out from under my right armpit wondering about Craig, who in the back, was out cold. I had to force my way out through the ruptured driver’s door holding onto my broken elbow. The fresh morning air hit my system like a brick and I went to my knees with my head reeling. The air went in and out of my lungs clearing the smell of vomit from my system and I prayed to a God that I did not believe in that I had not killed anyone. Then I cursed the long-eared jackrabbit as if the fault was entirely his because it could not possibly be mine. But, really, I knew deep down where the blame lay. 

 

I stood up and, leaning against the wreck, found Tom lying at the bottom of the levy surrounded by reelection posters. I made my way down to him sliding on my butt in the wet grass. When I was near enough I could see that he was conscious and holding his head in a straight ahead fixed position. I sat down next to him expecting him to curse me but he just lay in the wet grass and said nothing. 

 

The early morning sky was brilliant with stars and planets and the car above us had the only light, piercing the black morning air. Finally, Tom told me to check on Craig and see if the car would start. More than anything, I just wanted to sit there and never move again. If I could have found a hole, I would have crawled inside of it and ceased to exist. But even if you do not want it, life continues so I got up and checked on the still breathing Craig, forced my way into the driver’s seat, and turned the key. Incredibly the bug started. I put it in second and pulled it back onto the levy track so that it faced the dim lights of Davis down the far reaches of the dirt road. 

 

Somewhere in the last moments, David ceased to exist and this new creature, within my soul, was spitting nails. I hated him. With a hate that consumed my lack of identity. While the bug idled, I went back to Tom and helped him back up the levy. I, literally, had to force him past the small opening of the bent passenger door while he carefully held his head in both hands. I wanted to ask him what was wrong but did not have the courage.

 

We had only two gears that we could use as we drove slowly towards Davis. Some where along the way, I noticed that the car was lurching along on three wheels and one rim. Tom said nothing. Craig was as silent as a dead man. I envied him. I envied the dead. I envied the jackrabbit that ran out in front of the car challenging my stupidity. I wished I had never been born, because now I was going to have to change the front left wheel with a broken elbow and hope the Davis police did not notice the smashed Volkswagen with puke dripping from the ceiling. 

 

It was worse. Far worse than anything I could have imagined because Craig’s bug did not have a jack to lift the car. Not only that, but the access for the jack was trapped beneath the bent running board. Now I was going to have to steal another jack from someone else’s Volkswagen and, somehow, pry the running board away from the access with my broken arm. No need to go into this any further. By hook and by crook, in anguish and remorse I got the bad wheel off and the good wheel on. Even returning the stolen the jack. 

 

If this God, that others prayed to, would continue to help me I swore that I would change my life for the better. It is amazing what humans will do when stressed and I was about as stressed as a human could get. All I had to do now was get the smashed car back to the other side of Sacramento, forty-five miles away, without the authorities noticing anything unusual. 

 

I asked this God if he was still there. Nothing. I asked this Jesus to come into my heart and save me from myself. I felt nothing. I felt no hope, no love. I felt just as alone as if the jackrabbits were my only friends and I knew better than that. 

 

So, we set off across the Yolo Causeway at thirty miles per hour, which was the top speed for third gear and the highest gear we had. It was two hours before sunrise and not a soul was on the freeway. It was as if we were the only people on the planet. We left the freeway as soon as we could and then we headed north to Rio Linda.

 

Craig came to in the back floor of the car lying in Tom’s puke and began yelling when he saw the smashed-in roof of his car. Suddenly he was quiet for a brief period and then began yelling about his broken ankles. He bitched and complained all the way to Rio Linda where we pulled over and drug him from the impossible doors of the car so that he could call his mother and tell her everything was all right and that he would be home soon. Only then would he shut up. I think he, finally, realized the jam that we were in. I was still praying because we were now in Misterly country and he knew, personally, who we were. I thought that by now God had made us invisible until we turned the corner and drove down to Craig’s house where his mother waited, standing in the front yard. As soon as she saw the car she passed out, and that is where we left her as we dragged her son into the house to wait for whatever was going to happen next.

 

That day the families converged on Craig’s residence and the vehicle while we were cleaned up and transported to the hospital. The fathers sterilized the car and prepped and bribed the insurance agent while we agreed on a lie to cover up the truth. Craig had his feet put in casts. I had my elbow casted, not realizing that my appendix had been damaged and would come close to rupturing days later. Tom’s head was bolted to a gurney with an eighth of an inch of bone left in his neck. A week later, we graduated, attending the senior class party without Tom who lay in traction in a Catholic Hospital. 

 

The drama continued to unfold as we committed a felony covering up the accident with a lie and staging another crash site with skid marks and spreading school books and glass onto the side of the road. Tom spent the rest of the summer undergoing surgeries. Craig hobbled around on his crutches while his mother smothered him with attention. And I, after my appendix operation, continued to sell my stolen booze to underage teenage drinkers until I was sent to jail. 

 

The ABCs of Saturday Nights never recovered. We left the ABCs in the field off that levee road with all those garish orange Misterly for Sheriff posters with bold black lettering. And Misterly? Well, of course he was re-elected but his campaign to end underage drinking and driving went bust when his underage teenage son was arrested by the Sacramento Police for drunk driving and disturbing the peace. 

I felt that, after all is said and done, that there really is some kind of justice in the world.

 

                                                                  

 

 

 

                                                              

Losing Eddie

 

As a child, I was king.  A king of lonely, hot, humid summer days where only the buzz of insects filled the stillness and storks stood fishing on one leg for hours on end.  I was a prince. A prince of a long dead bayou and kept cool within the muck and mire of black, stinking mud beneath the weeping yellow moss dangling from drowning giant Eucalyptus trees.  

Slinking noiselessly through this forgotten world I wore the slaughter of dead snakes draped through my belt.  Blood dripping from crushed eyes and mangled jaws ran down my tanned, dirty legs and into my burr infested socks.  I was also the duke of raving thirst in a sweltering, insect infested land of stagnate, green, mossy water and I had learned to suffer gladly like some tough guy in the movies.  My peers had no stomach for my savagery and no understanding of my remote madness.  I was wild and in this wildness I carelessly reveled.

Eddie was the exact opposite.  You might think him slow witted but he wasn’t; he was just very deliberate and careful.  Careful of everything he did and whatever he spoke.  He rarely looked you in the eyes, careful that others didn’t see the shyness, the longing or the softness that swam in the large cavity of his soul.  He would look down or over his shoulder talking softly with a slight smile playing around his full lips.  His hair was curly and like his eyes, lashes and eyebrows, dark.  Eddie had a handsome, almost pretty face with a dimpled chin and full cheeks.  He was never angry and always agreeable.  Eddie was a Rockwell painting of youth and innocence.

Eddie was fascinated with my audacity, my reckless wildness.  We would sit behind my house fishing in the drainage ditch for crawfish and I would tell him about the rodeo stock at the auction barn.  I painted the pictures of my stories while the humidity hovered in the mid nineties and cumulus nimbus rumbled above us as the billowing clouds climbed into the heights.  Eddie would look at me with large eyes full of wonder while crawfish drug his tied off bacon around the bottom of the drainage.  

The auction barns stood on the distant outskirts of our small urban development.  Its’ old wooden structures tweaked and bent under the blazing, southern, pale blue skies as the inhabitants, with legs splayed and heads hanging to their knees, took shelter within the shade of the bare planked walls.  The corrals were deserted as the workers took shelter themselves in the heat of the afternoon when I hiked the fence lines teasing the bulls and feeding the horses crab apples and flakes of stolen hay.  It didn’t take many days before the horses became used to my presence and I could slide from the fence to their dusty backs.  To ride these horses became Eddies’ greatest desire and to be his hero, mine.  These desires were so strong nothing else mattered and they created a destiny that was inescapable.

How could I have known the future, the extent of my actions or their consequences?  It seems so obvious when I look back.  But I was a child and a selfish, unthinking, careless child who was full of himself with no room to care for or about anyone else.  I lived within my fantasies where there was no room to think of consequences or room for disasters.  It was a blindness beyond naivety, beyond common sense.

Eddie was homebound.  Tied to his family as a dog to his house.  He was a treasure that was never out of sight or call.  His existence suited him like a pair of worn, comfortable slippers and his parents and older sisters doted over him constantly.  Eddie was never less than the center of attention.  His universe was his family and he was the center of that life, the one great hope and star of them all.  Now Eddie had was straying from their influence and was getting caught up in the gravitational lure of my life.  I had captured him like a plunging comet gathering a smaller rock into its’ orbit.

On this day we watched Egrets spear fish, hawks swoop on mice and snakes sun themselves on flat rocks.  Once we were within the shabby domain of the auction barns while, hidden inside a wild blackberry patch, we watched a cow give birth.  Eddie stared in unbelievable wonder as the huge sack containing the calf burst to reveal its’ miracle.  He had no idea where animals came from, no idea of his own origin.

There was no need to slink and sneak, peeking like thieves from my various hiding spots along the edges of the twisted fence line.  It was just my way.  I was an outlaw and all adults were the posse.  I pictured my wanted poster plastered on all the refrigerators from the border of Mississippi to Texas.  It read “WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE” for disobedience.  “If seen, contact the nearest mother.”  Although a fantasy, it wasn’t too far from the truth.  There were kids in the neighborhood who were not allowed to play with me.  My own brothers included.

The fact that Eddie was miles from home without his parents’ knowledge and with me was a hanging offense and the neck in the noose was mine.  So, there we were, Eddie and I slithering from fence line to fence line, working our way deep into the heart of the auction barn complex.  

Eddie was beginning to wear away like an old pair of jeans after years of hard labor. His hair was tangled with small blackberry thorns and sticks.  His face was smudged from dirt and sweat.  His always washed and ironed shirt torn from crawling under barbed wire fences. One knee of his jeans was torn from a shove from behind that had sent him sprawling, out of sight of the men feeding the hogs.  

By now he wasn’t having much fun, especially after seeing the dead piglets thrown into the wheel barrow and the pools of blood at the slaughter pen.  He really had no idea of the reality of life and death in the real world.  But I was here to educate him and he would have to learn.

I could tell by the look on his face that he was regretting this whole affair.  He was experiencing the sacrifice that comes with chasing dreams.  But it did not matter, we would not quit now.  We had come too far, or at least, he had.  Eddie had a dream.  He had confided in me.  He had confessed his greatest desire and had placed his destiny in my care.  I would not let him fail. Even though the effort would be great and Eddie would be weak I would see him through.  

The afternoon sun blazed down on all life with a vengeance.  It was an uncommonly hot day and the humidity climbed into the high nineties, sucking the moisture from our bodies like a dry sponge.  Not a cloud in the sky, yet the air was laden with water and a haze lay close to the surface of the land.  Distant trees floated above the surface behind mirrors of mirage that appeared as glassy lakes.  Not a breath of air moved among the motionless grass.  There was a silence everywhere.  It made us whisper in its’ presence.  But here in front of us was our destination, shimmering in the liquid air.  What was going through Eddies’ head you could read in his bloodshot eyes as he peered beneath the barbed wire?  Dust devils swirled and played within the corral, their short lives lived out in a dirty dance beneath a scorching sun leaving behind a settling curtain of brown mist.  The shadowed interior of the warped and sun-bleached barn was an inky black mystery with an equal ominous silence.  The moment of truth was upon him and the pressure was a palpitating presence as we crawled beneath the last obstacle and approached the horses hidden within the barn.

All of his life Eddie had been protected by his family like some kind of living heirloom, until now.  He had finally stepped out from beneath the umbrella and was, for the first time, confronting a kind of fate.  He was unsure and it was this that had slowed his feet in an invisible mire that was getting deeper and deeper the closer he came to that black opening. The first of his young life.

For me it was different.  I had been here, illegally, many times before.  I knew what to expect and even though these animals knew me they were, still, broncs in my eyes and I was there to ride.  We crossed the expanse, Eddie trailing as another dust devil whipped up, danced and died.  A horse’s head appeared outside of the deep shadow, framed in the doorway like a dusty picture and then disappeared back inside.  I waited for Eddie and, putting my arm around him, encouraged and reminded him how friendly the large animals were while I dusted him off as if I was going to introduce him.  I could see him relax a little and even manage a small Eddie smile as sweat dripped off his nose.  It would be the last time I would ever see Eddie smile.  

We entered the barn through the opening barely wide enough for the body of a horse.  Inside was a heavy, moist darkness with a silence that was punctuated with occasional snorts, a horse’s hoof striking or pawing the ground and the swishing sound of their tails as they stood head to rear whisking the flies from each other’s eyes, ears and noses.  I left Eddie below, climbed the wooden ladder to the hayloft above and cut away a length of bailing twine from a bale of hay to use as a halter.  From above I looked down at Eddie as he stood against the wall studying the sleeping huddle.  Not all dozed but those that did not had gone somewhere that time could not follow.  A thoughtless non-existence that should have been foreign to them. They were together in a void and in this vacuum their surroundings could be anything.  It would be no different then, head to tail, they stood in the cool shade under large elms in the midst of fresh spring grass bending in a gentle breeze with the nearby gurgling sound of a clean, cold brook.  This is where, I would like to believe, they dreamt of.  All but one.  The one that had poked her head from the door.  The guard, the matriarch.  She looked standard in her features and less famished than the rest with a spark of intelligence in her eyes as she lifted her nose to the rafters where I stood.

“Hi.”  I offered.

She snorted, showing me her profile as she looked out of the side of her face and watched me carefully as I descended the ladder.  I moved slowly, talking easily, flattering and cajoling, low and slow allowing my awe and love to creep into my voice.  Slowly I offered my hand filled with hay. The other held the halter.  She must step to me, no other way will this work, I thought.  Her neck stretched, her lips opened and, amazingly, she reached out to pull strands of hay into her outstretched mouth.  I told her how brave and beautiful she was.  She snorted and shook her neck and mane disturbing a cloud of flies.  I offered her more hay, and she accepted and took one more step.  Her brown coat was covered with dirt, her mane and tail matted with burrs and stickers.  She was a good looking horse that had some spirit left in her friendly heart.  It wasn’t long until she had taken the remaining hay and had moved onto checking me out with her soft nose and hard yellow teeth.

I scratched her between eyes and ears and messaged the neck muscles below the mane always talking in a soothing tone.  Easily I slipped the fashioned halter over her nose and around each side of her neck like reins.  She showed no alarm and only looked back at me as I stood at her side eyeing her back, whispering, “Easy, easy.”

While she watched, I jumped to her back, lying across her, stomach down and legs dangling.

Her head came up, and she snorted and moved off quickly into the midst of the awakened herd while I righted myself into a sitting position, holding my straw bale reins before me.  The herd’s reaction was surprise and alarm.

‘Something is happening!’

‘Man!  Man!’

‘Which way?’

‘ Follow the rest!’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Out the door!  Out the door!’

Then in mild panic we, all at the same time, made with a charge in the direction of the small opening that would barely admit one riderless horse.

Riding the top of my horse like a hunched down jockey in a tight squat at the beginning of the Kentucky Derby, I popped out of the opening of the barn like a cork out of a champagne bottle.  I was on top of the world.  We thundered around the coral for some time in a cloud of dust and snorts.  I waved an arm as if I was driving a herd of wild horses and shouted ‘Hah!’ until my mouth filled with dirt.  In a while a horse dove for the small opening in the barn and, in mass, we entered as we had left.  I was now as the horses around me.  Like the horses, I hacked the dirt from nose and mouth and sweltered in a rising stench of horse sweat while the dust settled in streaks of sunlight that filtered through the warped planked walls of the old dried up barn.  

Our breathing soon returned to normal and I slipped from the mare’s back.  I stood amongst the grumbling horse snorts and pawing hoofs as if the horses were saying,

‘What the hell?’

‘Are we done?’ and horse words that meant,

‘Damn!’ and,

‘Crazy ass humans!’

As the horses settled down I led the mare back outside through the settling dust to the fence line.  I urged Eddie as he climbed to the top span of the fence and once he was even with the mare’s back he slid into position.  I placed the bailing twine into his small, trembling hands as he looked down at me through large, round and frightened eyes.  This was nothing like his dreams.  It hurt to have his legs stretched so far around the back and sides of the horse and while he squirmed and tried to make himself comfortable the mare reached back and bit the calf of his leg.  Right then he was for giving up and dismounting, but like a fool I talked him out of it.  The mare stood with him on her back next to the fence with her ears rotating as she waited for some kind of command or signal.  I told Eddie to put his heel into her sides with a little kick, but this only moved her a few steps toward the center of the corral.

By the fence lay a stick.  There in the dirt, coated with dust, its’ bark peeling and revealing a fresh green shredded tip, a branch about twenty-four inches long beckoned.  A hand reached down and dirty fingers curled around, lifting it into the hot and humid summer air.  The stick, as if with a life of its’ own, rose above my head dragging my fingers, my hand and my arm behind it.  The stick hesitated at the apex of the swing giving me one more chance to change my mind and then descended with a swish onto the flank of the mare.  With a crack that raised the dust the horse’s back arched as she leapt straight up pulling her rear legs forward, kicking out and twisting, flinging little Eddie high into the air.  Like a large, flightless bird he soared, his body rotating, his limbs groping in the air for a non-existent purchase and then he dove into the ground, sounding like a sack of potatoes and raising the dust into a descending cloud.

Eddie was still, lying face down as the dust settled around his form.  The mare stood to one side with her head up and her ears flat, looking down her nose at the motionless boy.  

The seconds that passed were minutes of agony.  I willed Eddie to move with the superstitious powers of my need.  But as the air cleared and the mare trotted off he was as still as death.  I moved to stand over him and called his name around a choking lump in my throat.  I called again, louder, and begged him to get up.  I bent to my knees and touched his shoulder.  A trickle of blood ran from his ear.  Again I called his name and then sat in the dirt next to his still body.  I sat in a timeless state, empty of thought, incapable of action, feeling a remorseful eternity of doom and guilt.  Then Eddie moved, groaned and spat dust from his mouth, pushed his chest off the ground and stared at the dirt.  He rolled over onto his back, more blood trickled from his nose as his eyes focused.  Relief flooded through me as a great weight was lifted from my shoulders.  Time returned and Eddie sat and then stood, unsteady on his feet.

Without words we left the complex defeated and, in my case, deflated.  No more fantasies as we trudged back the way we had come.  Eddie was having a hard time walking and he refused to speak.  He didn’t know where he was or why he was there.  He would stop and look around confused with tears streaking his dirty face.  He was a mess.  Clothes torn and filthy, arms scratched and cut.  He looked like an escapee from a prison camp.  We made it back just before dusk, the sun’s disk a dark red descending into the horizon.  Eddie’s sisters ran from the house calling his name and taking him into their arms, casting furious looks my way.

Eddie’s mother descended from the porch beseeching God with tears in her eyes and Eddie disappeared into the womb of his family and home.

I remembered the first time I saw Eddie.  It was through a curtain of rain while I stood next to our mailbox.  It was raining on his side of the street while not a drop fell on mine.  A knife-edge curtain of rain that ran right down the middle of the street.  Eddie stood beneath his carport and raised his arm in a shy wave while I laughed and twirled on my side of the street.

Several days slid by while I astounded my parents by voluntarily mowing the lawn, sweeping the carport, cleaning the storage shed and doing numerous chores that allowed me to watch Eddie’s door.  But no Eddie.  Finally, I gathered my courage, crossed the street, that now had become a mill stone, a barrier, and knocked on Eddie’s door.  His sister answered and with venom informed me that Eddie was still in the hospital, no thanks to me.  I shrunk, and became someone I had never known.  I slunk back across the barrier that now separated me from my former life and withdrew into fathomless guilt.

The king, the prince and the duke had died.  The snakes persevered and the swampland was no longer trespassed.  The auction barns and the horses no longer suffered the solo attacks and the legend of a small boy evaporated into the thin air of a breath.  And Eddie?  He never left the hospital until his parents had sold the house and moved away.  To this day, I know no more about Eddie than the day I left him at his house.

 

Lost to everyone.