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HiT MoteL Press |
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from Thoughts on
Vacation |
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Table of Contents 1 Blood and fire and thunder. . . 1
The Man Who Glowed in the Dark Note: I am really embarrassed by this story. It expresses fears and feelings that are too painful to touch directly; they made me feel like a lowly character. So I invented Pharley Pizmo a character, (a garbage pail) into which to dump the feelings. The story is valid I think because it represents a man's efforts to de-sacralize the Goddess archetype for making him feel so abashed, sloppy, gawky, stupid, ugly and unworthy in her presence. Vacation. His wife was happy. His kid had been looking forward to it with such anticipation. Pharley Pizmo didn't know. What does he know, he works all the time, was straight from six solid weeks of night and day jamming with the programming as a mouse potato. His wife comes from a family where it is understood that you must take a vacation every year. Certainly before the end of August. So here they were at camp. Pharley Pizmo was apprehensive. It is not easy for him to spend a bunch of time with his family, and even more difficult to be in a large group setting of strangers. But he knew he must make the trip if only to help his wife take care of their little micro-hellion. They drove their little station wagon east from San Francisco, across the Bay Bridge, past Oakland, worked their way up from the lowlands of the Delta, up over Altamont Pass, marveling at the great windmills, up into the high country of the Sierras, across great bridges over rivers, working their way up past China Camp, up Priests Grade to the mountain meadows, then onto narrow roads winding through countryside and over cattle guards amid tall pines and the great massive rocky upheaval of cliff faces until they came to the camp and checked in at the window of the main office. The little family had to immediately unpack and get the car back up into the parking area off the highway because they locked up the roads down to the cabins at night. They carried their stuff into the cabin amid foreboding realizations: 1. They were right next to the dining hall--called the Lodge, and there were a lot of people making noise, enjoying long sophisticated California dinners with wine there; and 2. There was a peculiar odor emanating from the dining hall. They kept looking at their feet to see if they had stepped in something. Pharley Pizmo figured it was probably only the grease suckers cleaning out the traps and that it would go away. Besides, to raise a stink and change cabins was way too much trouble and there was no policy for it anyway. They decided to settle for what they got. Pharley Pizmo's wife was driving him nuts with her maniacal organization energy, and he just wanted to get down and look at the creek and let her passion for organization run its course. So he took the wee lad, and the boy and his father slowly walked the little creek just down the hill from their cabin. The creek wended its way amid rocks and boulders under the tall alpine canopy. The sound of flowing water was restful. Pharley Pizmo tried to interest the boy in the watercourse way but the lad's only desire was to drop rocks in and make a splash. The boy and his dad sauntered among little old dogpatch cabins situated here and there, every 20 to 30 feet or so through the woods. These little one room "shacks" (upgraded now to a single room dwelling) had once housed workers on the big public works projects--dams, railroads, tunnels--during the Depression. Pharley Pizmo just wanted to get himself down to the lake or the pool as soon as possible to cool off his stunned and jammed-up body, so he got himself back to the cabin to change. There he collected his wife and the wee bairn collected his mother and the three headed out to walk across the entire length of the site headed down to the lake. The camp is several clusters of one and two room cabins with the large communal bathrooms in each cluster. Walking among the little cabins and seeing people on their porches is like walking though an Appalachian Peace Corps scene, everybody is dressed loose. The whole place didn't cover more area than the site of a large shopping mall.
At the lake, children were catching tadpoles and chasing dragonflies with little nets. The way they swathed the nets back and forth made them look like little cherubs flapping their wings. Some of the little blond-haired angels were floating on rafts. Two enterprising young girls were hard at work blowing and blowing to inflate their raft. As Pharley Pizmo was walking to the lake with his wife and child in tow several paces behind him, the slim, gracile figure of a tall young woman emerged from a group of young women and walked straight at him. She made eye contact with them. It caused all around her to suddenly become arrested in their tracks. Some kind of recognition occurred as she came closer, along the road through the forest. As he watched her walking toward him, Pharley Pizmo suddenly felt sort of stunned, like a rabbit or other small rodent momentarily paralyzed in the headlights of a car. Her face had an aura of radiance about it. She was the picture of glowing health; here was the face of summer itself, smiling, tanned, carefree, on this lovely lithe young lady. Pharley Pizmo kept glancing at her. She looked up directly at him. Here was a personage truly touched by the gift of beauty. The flashing of her indigo eyes, set in whites against tan, belied the presence of some entity other than a human being - a goddess or some other perfection of animal deception - driving the vehicle of her body. It shocked him. She seemed to glow from inside. His pulse quickened, and a sudden emptiness was left behind as his stomach went for a free fall down an elevator shaft. He needed to get out of the way or be run over. His knees might get weak and he might fall down in adoration before her. He tried NOT to think of how beautiful she was as she confidently stepped right up, stood before them. She was looking past Pharley Pizmo toward his wife. He was surprised when she struck up a conversation. She shook her long flowing hair free in all her girlish wonder, and said, "Hi. I'm Shawn's daughter." He kept glancing at this animated young beauty as they spoke. He became painfully aware that he must have gawked for a second or two too long. She giggled. "Hi," said Pharley Pizmo, trying to a overcome severe speech-impediment suddenly brought on by his awe. It has never been easy for him to talk to beautiful girls, but he had to talk to her, not just because she was gorgeous, but because his wife would start to become suspicious at his awkward bashfulness and suspect something was amiss. Pharley Pizmo tried NOT to think of how beautiful she was. A brief animated introductory woman's conversation ensued. Pharley Pizmo tried not to appear tongue tied, awkward and ancient. She was only seventeen years old; her name was Lenore, she was the daughter of his wife's friend Shawn Greendraw. Her face had been graced, had been touched by the form of immortal beauty; it was beaming from her forehead. And her fraternal twin sister, Monica, waved shyly from a distance. She was equally beautiful in a more shy sort of way even though her hair was smoothed back in a more severe business look; her silky, peaches and cream complexion needed no make up. Pharley Pizmo tried not to be obvious watching them. The forward one turned on a dime and headed back to her tribe--the teenagers. He looked after her straining to see the shape of her chest, as she turned. Pharley Pizmo thought about losing twenty pounds, getting a flat muscular stomach and being able to talk to these young beauties. Then a deeper problem occurred to him: how could he slough-off twenty years. That night Pharley Pizmo's little family sat at Shawn Greendraw's table. Meals were served cafeteria style either inside or on the big deck at the central lodge, and were fantastic. It was packed at dinner. God, thought Pharley Pizmo, all these people from the same city fiercely recreating. They all hold secrets interesting and dull. The teenagers ran with their own crowd, and each of the twin daughters came over to the father's table to hug and tease brownie points out of their dad. Pharley Pizmo's heart skipped a beat when he was introduced to the twin's older sister, Diane. She was a couple of years older, very good looking with short red hair. And feeling, Clara Bow eyes.
Shawn, their great big old dad, said, "The girls are staying in tents across the creek." He was a kindly paterfamilias with a fastidious moustache and a good shave, like the old gent in tails from the Monopoly board game. "They have three seventeen-year-olds in one tent, and my oldest daughter, there, the one with the short red hair--she's a sophomore in college, don't you know,--is staying in her own tent right beside them. 'Because,' she says, 'these teenagers make too much noise.'" Pharley Pizmo felt uncomfortable around these young girls. He had always felt intimidated by beautiful young women. He found himself wondering what would it take to overcome that. But then too, he was a married man and therefore rendered, or grandfathered in as a family man. The next morning, Diane, the twins' older sister, came by to chat with Pharley Pizmo's wife. His wife introduced them. He tried to look nonchalant, yet he couldn't help trying to get a closer look at the young woman's eyes--were they really azure turquoise eyes, or were they contacts. Try to talk to them, Pharley Pizmo urged himself. You are a married man and a father, you shouldn't be any threat. Use your status of being married and therefore rendered inert, to talk to this young lovely. "Your father tells me that you're going to UC Santa Cruz." "Yeah." "Do they still have that History of Consciousness Program there?" he asked. "Yes," she said. She seemed excited that anybody knew about it. "I've even take a class in that department." "Oh, what was that?" "Well, it is called: The Presentation of the Self through the Body in Space." "Wow." "Yeah. It's about the localization of body image. We read a lot of Heidegger and stuff." "Incredible," he said. He sighed and thought: these young people are so smart. As she turned to leave, Pharley Pizmo watched the rising and falling of her behind as she walked back to her father's encampment. He found himself being amazed at how tightly her jeans fit her. Pharley Pizmo watched after her with a mixture of protective fondness and lust. Young. Attractive. Bright. On the way up to a splendid womanhood. His mind drifted into a fantasy about him having concourse with the goddess in the forest. She's a powerful, unforgettable, a devastatingly beautiful teenager who lures him--not against his will--into a grand indiscretion at a sacred place in the forest. Then she vanishes back to high school, never to tell anyone about it. Later as Pharley Pizmo was walking across the compound, he composed a letter in his mind to the advice columnist: Dear Abby, What am I getting myself into? I'm a 43 year old married guy. My wife's friend has two 17-year old daughters, and I'm unable to control my feeling of attraction to them. I find them extremely engaging and their older sister too. Although I'm many years older, I only look 37. I'd really like to bend one of these young lovelies over a picnic table and take her from behind. But what about my wife? My wife's friend?--their father! Many things worry me. What must I do to escape the torment of these longings. Doubtfully yours, Pharley Pizmo
Pharley Pizmo saw the proud student of psychology Diane again the next day. She was with her father's girlfriend, also an attractive redhead. Diane was sitting on the grass directly in front of him, sitting in her bikini. She was relaxed and she had let her legs fall open. It was very sexy. She had wrapped herself in a long beach towel and he was looking up a long sarong between the legs of a beautiful exotic woman in a southern clime. She was spreading her legs, for him, letting them loll back and forth innocently. He couldn't see her chest from here, couldn't tell if she had a large pair. While I'm at it, he thought, I'd like to inspect if she's a real redhead too. Christ if I could only think of some way to get closer. Reckless desire was sending Pharley Pizmo into insane paroxysms of lust, and he felt he had to do something to negatively offset the spell of the glow surrounding this young beauty. He countered with self-loathing. I would drag her down, he told himself. If only she had a flaw, some imperfection, something to catch hold of, something to commiserate about. His reverie was interrupted by a loud commotion coming from one of the moms out on the raft. It was a huge woman in a floral bathing suit, one of those truly large mammas, a vast panoramic mountain of flesh, an amazing Amazon of a woman--the size of a walrus. She was ark-arking at her children. She had a rubber swimmer's cap from under which long sprongs of unwilling curls spilled out and ran like snakes down her neck and face. Pharley Pizmo shuddered and watched in shocked amazement as she jumped up and down on the raft rocking it. She bellowed, admonishing one of her many children in the lake swimming out toward the raft, "Swim, honey! Swim! You can do it!"
Then another great large Amazon mother ambled past. Pharley Pizmo looked on in horror and dismay, unable to take his eyes off her ass, hanging out of the back of her bathing suit. Either the woman doesn't know or doesn't care, he thought. The way her asses moved from behind looked like a fat jowly man, with a moustache, chewing a bathing suit like it was a big piece of spinach.
Somewhere in between the pillar and post of being on vacation, Pharley Pizmo got a little time to himself swimming in the lake. Oh well, what the hell. Jump in and join them. He loved the white noise avalanche sound that the leaves of the tall sycamore trees created undulating in the breeze around the lake - a sweet skiffling staccato, each leaf doing little rhythmic drum pats in a great aeolian orchestra when the wind rifled through their spangling leaves. The next evening as Pharley Pizmo was coming back with his family from the pool and the lake, all four young women came sauntering, tall and tanned and young and lovely, by. He realized their attire went way beyond casual camp clothes, that in fact these beauties dressed down in the style of grunge - to de-emphasize their feminine beauty? Not possible. One of them was carrying a boom box on her shoulder and they were all dancing to some Grateful Dead tune. Jerry Garcia had just died the week before. That night after dinner Pharley Pizmo decided to take a walk over to their tent site and see what he could see. Now, Pharley Pizmo was kind of worried about bears. Do bears prowl around at night. No, they only came out in the morning, he told himself. Hell no, another part of him argued, that's all they do is look for food. They can kill you with one swipe. Males eat their young. He crossed the creek on a wooden bridge and walked along the edge of the tent encampment. A man can take an evening stroll, can't he? What was wrong with that? He hoped to perhaps see a silhouette of one of these tall young beauties undressing in front of the light from a lantern at their tent. Who knows (his fantasy went), maybe one of them might spy him, and order the others, "Have that soldier washed and oiled and brought to my tent. So that he may be presented to me." Pharley Pizmo lurked around the campsite, but began to feel creepy. Strange doing this, like a voyeur. He felt less than human, like some kind of animal looking through the bushes at people. He began to forget who he was. He was an animal of two minds running in the night, he had the night vision of the wolf or the cat predator. Looking at the scene lit by the moon, it was almost as bright as day, or like seeing it from inside a lightning flash, motion and movement leaped out and grabbed you as you ran by. He was on the trail of their scent; it was so strong he could almost see them by a synesthesia of scent for sight, see them standing, taking off their bras in the silhouette of tent light, their little sexual triangle hidden. He falls forward, he is running on all fours now, low to the ground feeling the grass like it was the hair on an animal's back, like there was no distinction between him and the being that was the earth, moving through the woods like a ballet dancer on point, soft as trout slipping through the stream. He came to the tent sight on all fours, tongue hanging out, hot on the trail of cunt. A great storm was fomenting to the north, swirling shadows and moving tree branches, but it was nothing like the push, the rush of energy in his body: it was the Infinite--needing to propagate itself through his animal seed. He crouched in the shadows, an animal on the earth in the great obscurity of night. The infinite must have their sex in order to penetrate space; we must procure sex so that matter can evolve into pleasure. And just as the body advances us through space underneath a sky that is like a skin around the world, we try to enter under the skin of the other. He oozed, he poured forth, he flowed, he elongated himself on the earth - became a snake slithering through the underbrush. What fun it would be, he thought, to just plunge into the middle of all that feminine pulchritude like a barbarian. Then he remembered the joke, about the old bull talking to the young bull while looking at a heard of cows. The young bull wanted to run down there and get one of the heifers, but the old bull said, Let's walk down there really casual and slow and get all of them. Yeah. That would be cool. Pharley Pizmo tried to formulate a plan. How could he sneak into one of the tents where the wild girls were; especially the one with the young college girl in it. This camp is a small tribal community. I'd have to use magic or some kind of ruse or both, he thought. But he was an old married man and she was a sweet young college girl, the daughter of a friend of his wife's! It was obvious that the only way he could do the deed was if he put on some kind of disguise. But then that probably would mean some kind of rape if not at least deception.
Maybe If I shocked her. . . Presented her with some archetypal animality. Like a bear. That would get her attention. I'd need to get something that would at once paralyze her resistance and, moreover, turn her on. What if I made them think I was a bear? How could he go about it. First he'd have to cover his body with pine pitch grease and stick millions of cinnamon colored pine needles to his body. Then burst into her tent and GROWL! Maybe that would stop her in her drawers, and appeal to the twenty-one year old libido. . . Suppose I had a bear suit and lumbered into her tent. She might just lie still, trying to feign being an object--objectivity. And before she was aware I was not a bear, I would have her curvaceous bod stripped bare and could put it to her. Pharley Pizmo went back to his cabin. A little later Shawn, the girls' father! came over for drinks and a visit. Pharley Pizmo was happy the father couldn't read minds; the father of the girls would have had him publicly horse-whipped for degeneracy. Shawn taught Pharley Pizmo how to tie a mantle on a Coleman lantern. That night Pharley Pizmo lay awake looking up at the ceiling of the little cabin he shared with his wife and kid. Thinking: Rather than be a bear, what if I were a Radiant Being. I'd need to shed twenty pounds and twenty years and get something to make my body glow. Glow like moonlight on water. Like the way he used to in those old black and white movies with Gina Lolabridgetta and Giselle MacKenzie. How could he make himself into a Luminous Being. Yes! With the phosphorous that they have inside TVs! TV screens glow because of phosphors that decay just slowly enough that successive pictures blend into each other. Yes, phosphorous. But there aren't any TVs around here. What about fluorescent lights? He could steal a bunch of them, break them open carefully, collect the little bit of phosphorus they contain and then paint his body with it! Maybe if he greased his body up in pine pitch, he thought. He'd wander through the night - the Glowing Man. Phosphorus. Light Bear(er). Yes, maybe if he greased his body up in pine pitch, and then rolled in pine needles until he had a big furry coat, a shaggy white coat like it was just out of the wash, washed with Wisk or one of those old detergents that his momma used to use that made shirts glow in the dark. The Light Bear. Yeah, right. I get all cut up from rolling in the pine needles, then the cuts would mix with the pine pitch and the ooze would glow. Yuck. This is crazy! he thought. And you'd need a black light to make it glow, wouldn't you? Well fire light might work, it has ultra-violet in it, doesn't it? Or the weird glow from a Coleman lantern. He could see it. An eerie glow wakes up Giselle Mackenzie from her deep woods slumber and she opens her eyes to find the man with glowing skin standing in her tent. It might end up in the news. He could see the video clip in his mind: Newscaster behind the desk looking up with abhorrence on his face. Sierra Occidental--Camp authorities and rangers heard reports of a mysterious "glowing man" who single-handedly seduced and /or raped a group of three young women camping in the Sierras. No one else except the victims saw the brightly glowing man slip into their tent and start talking to them one at a time, apparently putting each of them into a hypnotic trance with his voice. The man then calmly carried each of them, one at a time into the forest. "We were paralyzed and unable to move," they said. The Glowing Man carried off first the two youngest daughters, then the older daughter, of Shawn Greendraw. The three victims, emerging from the forest after the ordeal, non-plussed but safe, said they felt they had been put into some kind of trance. They said, "It was the most amazing thing we have ever seen." The Glowing Man is reported to be about 6' 3" tall, in his late 30s, white and of average build with dark hair. He was not wearing any clothes but his entire body was reported to be everywhere covered with pine needles; that glowed! The Bear/Man took them to his lair, a grotto hidden in the woods. It was a kind of altar, they said. The women said the glowing man carried them in the dark, up the draw, slipping down narrow deer trails until he came to what the girls all said they saw at first was a dim glow in the bushes. The oldest daughter said, "It turned out to be a small shrine built of rocks. It was totally abandoned. No candles. No pictures of saints with their haloes glowing, no swirling energy clouds of all known hue and brightness trumpeting the emergence of some tantric deity. Nothing but very, very old, lichen-covered, rounded stones, in a small arch, with an alcove-like space in the middle." The Glowing Man placed each woman on this stone alter one at time, as though making some kind of offering. On the altar he penetrated each of them. They could see him glowing there in the dark. "The damned thing glowed all by itself," the oldest daughter said.
Maybe. . . thought Pharley Pizmo. Wait a minute! His kid had some glow-in the-dark marks-a-lots. He could just color himself up with that! Maybe. . . In his mind he sought refuge from these elaborate insane fantasies by continuing the letter to Dear Abby: What about her father? Would he find out? He doesn't seem to be keeping that close a tabs on her. But of course if it was rape, even if by my alter ego, my double, my ulterior motive, what would their father do to me if she told him. But all the same, a man is allowed to have a life, supposed to get a little every now and then. It's not like I am some uncaring, carefree eighteen-year-old looking for a fine sweet piece of teen-age ass. Actually it is, Pharley Pizmo told himself, shaking his head sadly. I have no grounds for defense. He took up the design of a luminous being again. Maybe something like the way the mantle works on a Coleman lantern, he thought. Maybe I could make a sheath, tie it around my penis, and strap on a butane tank, onto my back. And just the skein of the sheath supporting the gas would burn, the way it does on a Coleman lantern. How hot does it get inside the mantle. Maybe it is just the fuel that burns, for the mantle is never consumed. You never know unless you put your finger in and light it. My penis could glow luminous bright in the dark, yet not be burned. Yes. The Man Who Glowed in the Dark. He imagined being in another news clip. Sierra Occidental --Firefighters were stunned to hear a story from four young women campers about an illegal pyrotechnical display from a mysterious "glowing man" who might have accidentally started a forest fire burning in camp vicinity. The four astonished witnesses, young women living at the camp, saw a glowing man with a very bright light blazing at the end of his erect penis calmly walk into the college student's tent. Seconds later streams of light were seen inside the tent, and jets of flame spurting out the door. The witness said, "The light emitted by the Glowing Man's light-tipped battering ram began to increase in both size and potency. The light got brighter and brighter until he let off an incredible blast and a stream of roman candles shot out like tracer bullets across our tent." The man then returned to the forest leaving a bright trail of light behind him. The Glowing Man smiled. Well. It was better then spending all that time sticking millions of pine needles into your skin, so that they hung like coarse fir. And waiting for the puncture wounds to scab over. Crazy. I must be losing my mind.
The next day Pharley Pizmo was feeling extremely alienated. Looking at the people at camp disgusted him. They all come from San Francisco. Almost everybody has a kid or two. People our age have teenagers. Our kid is just three. They walk around. Everything is taken care of: Meals, lodging. There is swimming. The lake. Horseback riding. All these kids have their bikes. It is a cool place for kids. You could let even the little ones run free. Everybody dresses in funky colors. Can't tell how much money people have. Because the place is not expensive. Very democratic. Everything seems to please these people, the food, the games, the pool, the lake. Rocks for the kids to climb, even the squirrels. Pharley Pizmo was going out of his mind with boredom. He was certainly out of his element. Vacation. Either he was losing his mind or trying to make the transition from being a wage slave to being a mage knave--a sorcerer's apprentice. Ah, to be invisible. That would be good, or to at least be immune from prosecution. How could he protect himself from other people knowing. What other people know about you and what personal information about yourself you seek to present to the world are two different things. The right to a private and a pubic self are only as good as your ability to protect your privacy. The kind of jobs you get and the ability to earn, to learn and to yearn are based upon the "perception" of your worth. Someone once said: Money is the sixth sense. Without it the other five are not operative. Pharley Pizmo thought about the job hustle he was constantly up against. Human resources, what a name. Give me a break. Why don't they just call you a machine or a stack of lumber. He pictured a human resource person going around introducing the new worker, "and here in this cubicle, sits a number crunching lawn mower." Pharley Pizmo recalled a recent program on NPR about this guy who worked as a temp at a desk near the laser printer. The guy was shocked to find out that the people he interacted with - some of the individual co-workers as often as forty to sixty times a day - didn't know his name. They were not curious to know even that little bit about him. From his vacation Pharley Pizmo wrote a postcard to Dear Abby in his mind:
Life here is so hard that I don't think I can make it through. Sometimes I want to cry. I want to escape... I want to go out. I thought again about killing myself. It's stifling here. I want to see my friends outside ... God please help me.
A party of his wife's friends, Mr. Greendraw and his lovely daughters, and others loaded up in several cars and caravaned to O'Shaunessy Dam. From on top of the great dam forming the Hetch-Hetchy reservoir they could see below a small brick pump-house, about the size of a small brick duplex, attached to the wall of the dam. And a huge spurting gush of thousands of gallons of water per second was blasting out of a two-foot wide duct in the face of the pump house. It was like a great wide mouth going O, spewing forth a torrent of water shooting 150 feet straight out with a great force of exhortation before it fell 500 feet onto the chasm below. It was weird. Pharley Pizmo had forgotten that he was one of those people that suffer from height-induced psychosis. It manifested in suicide fantasies. His mind got taken over by some elaborate suicide plot, in which he leaped off the top of the dam and fell the eight stories down onto the roof of the pump house. He saw himself trying to crawl, dragging his broken legs behind him over to the edge of the pump house, crawling painfully, while tourists pointed and screamed, saw himself lifting his broken self up over the edge of the pump house and throwing himself into the blasting gush of water, actually trying to straddle it like a horseman or like the guy in Dr. Strangelove riding the A-bomb down at ground zero. Whew. Pharley Pizmo shuddered at the thought. Where on earth did that come from? No particular reason really, came the answer. Just giving in--to the air. The air wanted to feel his body shoot through it. The air wanted to see if he would make a huge explosion of blood at the bottom of the long fall of the waterfall plume. Or maybe the air just wanted to see if the huge plumes of foam kicked up by the shoot would buoy him up. Ah, hah, not bloody likely. The facade of the pump house looked like a face with water gushing out of the mouth. Pharley Pizmo looked at the face on the dam. And looking down from that height at the gigantic plume shooting out of the center of the face of the dam, he was dismayed and shaken to find such a mad thought about what it would be like to commit suicide had inserted itself into his mind. Detached, he speculated: if, in the chute, in the fall (he could see himself leaping off the dam and his trajectory taking him into the gushing torrent spewing out from the overflow) would I struggle, would I scream for the brief moment of the fall: my mind accelerating at 32 thoughts per second per second as my feet walk across -- through -- an invisible door into a metaphysical world. There is water, I am falling into water. I might be able to . . . there might be . . . just enough up-splash from the falls, that the upward force would support me. I'd have to enter it just right, rotate and get to the perfect angle, the same angle light has to achieve in order to glance off of water and become a rainbow in the chute. Pharley Pizmo was able to turn this from dire to dry by seeing himself come up in an MTV bungie jump commercial and some young announcer gives me high five and says, "Way to go dude."
When Pharley Pizmo got back to camp, he started noticing how much his little boy was enjoying the camp. Pharley Pizmo started getting more into the swing of things. He enjoyed the cold lake with its green-plank, oil-barrel raft. He enjoyed the huge, marvelous, red dragonflies that patrolled the shores, hovering like helicopters or darting off like harrier attack jets to hoover up the mosquitoes. His boy was having a wonderful time, chasing tadpoles, playing in the pool with water wings, learning how to climb the many large boulders around the place. One was called Pride Rock and it was the place for children to climb in order to go from being babies to kids. Pharley Pizmo took a crafts class that afternoon and made a Dream Catcher for his son. It is a net of weaving, attached to a sapling frame bent into a circular mandala. There is usually a spiral nautilus shell, or a crystal in the web. It was first invented by the Iriquois, for capturing and banishing nightmares. Pharley Pizmo found a shell while walking in the woods. He understood this mountain too had transport with the ocean at some point in the deep aeons of pre-history.
Pharley Pizmo realized the nicest thing about the camp was how architecture informs community. The cars are left parked up on the highway and people use paved footpaths (wide enough for the garbage truck) or walk under the Alpine canopy forest on the bark covered grounds. After a while everybody starts letting their kids run around free, playing basketball, tennis, riding bikes, playing ping-pong, climbing rocks. The parents one by one were letting go a little, feeling a terrific sense of relief to be able to trust the community of parents. Pharley Pizmo's wife had them worrying about entrance exams to kindergarten for Christ's sake. The boy has wonderful language skills, thanks to his mom, and they were going to push him into a bilingual pre-school this year. Pharley Pizmo got him a little Mac plus, and was teaching him to mouse around on the PC clone. He can mouse around with the best of them, he'll be all right. Just buy him a bunch of CDs.
Pharley Pizmo thought he might use the momentum of the upswing in his mood, to carry forward his campaign to bed one of those teenagers, especially the co-ed, the older sister. What about talking her into appearing in an art photograph in the nude, he thought. I could tell her I could get it in a magazine. Women do have a lot more vanity for that. He practiced his spiel: --Hello. I hope you don't think I'm too forward but I think you're really beautiful and I'm a pretty good photographer and wondered if I could interest you ... in sitting for an art photo. (Pause, give her time to consider.) --Well there are some lovely old smooth trees that have half fallen down the hills over here, and they are all worn smooth and they look like legs and arms and I thought I might pose you near them. See, people would associate the shapes of the trees with the human body shapes better if they had a human body in the picture. --I was thinking of something like that famous Wyeth, of the girl crawling in the fields. The trees are like the girl in the painting. Only ours would have this obviously healthy girl --you--and she is nude. It's a statement. Yeah right. Instead, Pharley Pizmo gave himself another field trip, a walk along a stream that split itself over little islands or boulders. He was able to leap or carefully ford from island to island. He had his recording equipment and tried to do some recording. With his ears Pharley Pizmo could hear the burbling of the stream like tabla drumming of the water echoing and slapping over the rocks. But his recording just came out white noise. God damn, what I wouldn't give for a good portable DAT with digital I/O, he thought. He coveted that new Tascam just out for $1650. The folks at Lucas bought the first one from Bananas at Large in San Rafael. But I'm just a dilettante, a dabbler, and that's too rich for me.
When they got home from vacation, Pharley Pizmo helped his little son write a letter home to his sister, the boy's aunt. It went: We had a nice vacation. I liked climbing the rock best. I made a rainbow candle, in the wax and the water. I put on the water wings and I floated in the shallow water of the swimming pool. Can't go in the deep water. No sharks in the deep water of the lake. Frogs and tadpoles and bull frogs like that water, plain water has crocodiles in it. No sharks, no crocodiles Daddy is batty, he put a feather in the dream catcher and he put a big fat piece of moss on my dream catcher, to collect the nightmares so they don't bother me. I'm going to start at Little Star school. Because I'm going to study Cantonese language. We made sun angels when we got out of the cold pool. We lay on the hot concrete. It felt hot. Good. I slept in the sleeping bag. Wolverine Man had veins of blood on his body. His hands were like shredders. Wolverine Man fought with Batman. Batman lost and White Ranger threw his vehicle at Wolverine, and he tumbled to the ground. He knocked the bullfrog, he knocked the tadpole.
How I Spent my Christmas Break I was fifty-four and living with my semi-retired wife and our eleven year old kid. I was a dot. goner, the bubble had burst. I had not worked for two years, and had just brought out my fourth novel at the time. I was totally broke, run out of savings, run out of unemployment. (We were hoping Congress would give us the third extension but they had all taken off on vacation.) I was living off my wife and dreading Christmas. I was thinking man, I could use a break in life. I don't know when I started not liking Christmas. I guess I was a bachelor too long; spent too many a Christmas on my own, far away from family. And being a writer, I was always so broke. I couldn't make any dollar votes in this great Christmas popularity election either. My mood was swinging: at one moment I would be UP--just to hold this beautiful new book in my hands; the next moment, I had stepped into one of the worst post-partum depressions that I have ever experienced, from having given birth through Art. The writing of that book had been an enormous effort that I should be taking a rest from. And yet, when I don't write I start to thrash about. I hadn't fully realized it but I was coming to grieve over being dropped from even the working class. I'm in the Temp class, a slave of the information age. First to be let go, last to be hired back; no bennies, not perks, no options, no retirement. Being cannon fodder for the information age would just go on until I pitched forward at my workstation and my head crashes into the monitor. I was looking forward to just hanging with my kid on Christmas break; that certainly takes your mind off your troubles. He has so much joyous energy in his basketball dance, his pirouetting around, his insanely genuine, free-style house-aping, hip-hop jive demeanor. I had been to a job interview that morning, before I was to pick up the lad from school at noon to start his Christmas vacation. Me and the kid were going skateboarding. The job was for a network administrator at City College English Dept. I was sitting around the table with these swell-off department heads. They were like chameleons, turning their faces down to hurriedly read my CV for the first time, as I paced outside the glass cubicle, trying to figure out who I was. And it came out in the interview, (one of them had asked the usual question: What do you want to be doing in two years?) that I write novels and would like to keep on publishing them. We got tangential and one of them said, "Would you like to teach novel writing in college?" And I jumped at it, "Would I!" We ended the interview with them saying, "Well, thank-you for your time," in that kind of patronizing, inconclusive, non-committal way people have when they hold all the power and you are expected to know it.
The skateboard bowl is out in Hill Top Park, part of the in Hunters Point area, up above the projects that you often see on TV at night. I was coursing around, riding the concrete wave with a grin on my face. We were a father and son teaching each other stuff. The skateboard flew out from under me and I tried to break my fall by getting my foot under me, and sat down on the ankle--breaking it in 3 places. My boy was brave going into a strange, all-black school that was not out for Christmas yet, calling his mom to pick us up. The foot was hanging, moving independently from the leg. He thought of going back into the strange school to get an Ace bandage to hold the foot in place while we waited.
Well, I did myself in good this time. Wow, what an unforgiving sport. I just got back from the hospital, where they kept me overnight after putting 9 screws in to hold the bones together. So now I'm hobbling around on crutches or doing the low scuttling crawl, while keeping the right foot elevated as much as possible. (The low scuttling crawl with one leg extended is more like a scorpion than a crab). I'm writing you sitting up in bed, on an ancient Powerbook 280c with a humble 28.8 internal modem. It's kind of nice, and old fashioned: 4 meg System, 2 meg MSWord, 1.5 meg Eudora. Got 16 megs to spare! I am bothering my mind trying to uncover the meaning of this set of affairs, as there are no accidents in the Freudian universe. I feel like such an old fool, trying to be a sidewalk surfer at fifty-four. Where was my mind!? Trying to have some of the joy of my eleven-year old I guess. What does THAT mean? Now I am even more of an unwelcome burden on my wife, who's got her hands full with her ailing mother. Oh, how I would like to be able to walk around again and carry stuff. The operation was a success I think. Time will tell. I'll be setting off metal detectors for the rest of my life. My wife observed that my injury created a great deal of enthusiasm among the team of the famous osteopathic surgeon who was on duty when I arrived at emergency. They were excited to be going into surgery, to work on my foot with the master. I hadn't noticed until my wife pointed it out to me later - I thought it was just my own charm. I had a good intern, and he had a remarkably good assistant to do the initial bone-setting. When they were getting me ready for the operation they asked me how much I weighed. I thought for a while and said, "About 200 pounds." I told them about a calculation I had done recently comparing the weight of a ".1 ton man to the 6 million trillion ton earth." And how it is like a dust moat floating down on a city of skyscrapers--40 blocks by 40 blocks. The doctor twirled around and looked at me like he had been stung. He said, "Wow, that really makes you feel insignificant, doesn't it?" Something special happened between me and the doc at that moment, some kind of understanding passed between us. His assistant piped in: "And yet when we fall, look at how much damage it does." He told me, "You have good bones." He said that the team he was on was headed by a great osteopathic surgeon, and I was lucky to have this team to work on my foot while on his shift. Somehow upper torso strength was mentioned, and one couldn't help but take notice of this young doctor's hugely-developed torso musculature with their long-sloping shoulders. Then later he set my bones in preparation for surgery. He got my foot into all kinds of ferocious wrestling holds and manipulated it into alignment. All the while, an orderly was pumping the morphine into my intravenous tap. I teased the doc: "You know, they say that long sloping shoulders are a sign of lack of responsibility, of one who sheds responsibility well, like water of a duck's back." That cracked everybody up. "Give him another shot," the doc said, as he twisted from the waist. And this cool orderly by my side squeezed some of this fast-acting morphine into my drip. Then I said, trying to get an opinion from the medical establishment about certain alternative healers that heal by the laying on of hands, "What do you think of these osteopaths? He snickered and replied, "You mean in general?" I realized I had meant to say something else. I said, "OMYGOD I'm surrounded by a bunch of osteopaths." And trying to remember the name for those alternative healers I said, "What's the collective noun for a group of osteopaths, anyway?" Bone setters from ancient times. "Oh, I know! A setting of osteopaths." This had everybody snickering. They were telling me to relax. "I can't relax. I'm all tensed up!" Finally, they got the bones set and put on a temporary splint. Fervor developed to work with the famous surgeon on the ankle of the disgraced, elderly skateboarder. They were definitely up late by the time they came to get me, After waiting hours in pre-op I got some experience with the bedpan before they finally wheeled me into the operating room. The ceiling of the OR room was almost entirely taken up by two, huge, flying-saucer disks. These were filled with smaller, high-intensity, variously-colored lights, to make the lighting on the situation perfect. The crack team transferred me to the operating table. The Anesthetician had me lean forward separating the backward gown and gave me a spinal injection. When I lay back down, I quickly started to go completely numb below the waist. One of the team raised and lowered his eyebrows like Groucho Marx: "Can you wiggle your toes?" Another intern starting lifting and pulling my mundged-up leg in all directions. I couldn't feel a thing. Groucho fluttered his eyebrows again and said, "Numb below the waist. It's kind of a (flutter, flutter) out-of-body experience." I did feel cut off from my lower half. As the group of masked men congregated around my splayed leg I went into a panic. My mouth was dry and I was convulsed in a sweat. My eyes must have rolled back into my head because the Anesthetician thought I had gone into a faint and she slapped me and shook my face and she said loud, "Hey! Where did you go then?"
"Uh well, I think I'm having a panic attack. I've never had one before but I think this is it. Sweats, dry mouth unable to think." I was hyperventilating and sweating. And the heart beat was racing on the monitor. I asked her, "Would you just hold my hand for a minute?" I had seen before that she had strong, capable hands, when she was explaining to me the choices among total sleep, spinal block and epidural drip. And she said, "Yes." And I took her strong hand in my hot hand--my hands were warmer than hers--and squeezed pretty tight but not too tight. After a minute, and remarking that my heart rate had stabilized, she produced a swab of water to wipe my lips. And in my panic it tasted like mango. "Wow, that tastes like mango!" I said. I remembered: "It is one of my dreams to grow my own mangoes. Have you ever been to any islands where they grow mangoes?" "You mean like Hawaii." "Yea." "They grow them in the Caribbean, too," she said. "They do?" "Yes, and Mexico. . . Have you ever heard of the Island of Bimini?" she asked. "No, I haven't. Where is that?" "It's about twenty-five minutes by seaplane off the coast of Florida, in the Atlantic. It's part of the Bahamas." "Wow." "My family has a place out there." "Wow! . . . Ah the Bahamas I'd like that." Trying to find some place else to put my mind, I wanted to go on some kind of an island fantasy. For the amber color of tropical island sun setting behind the palm trees is kind of mango. As is, perhaps, the color of spinal fluid. Certainly the dark iodine-tainted antibacterial swab they had liberally washed down my leg with was mango, as was the numb-butt feeling, imbuing my lower limbs. And from that sea plane ride, I was coming into her world, a little bay, a cove, an inlet. The two large flying-saucer shaped light containers in the operating room ceiling with their multicolored lights--some green, some red, others warm yellows, got into by reverie as we were lofting in for a landing. The water changed color from the darker emerald shade further out in the open deep sea into an aquamarine hue, a shade of light reflecting the life of multicolored corals underneath, shimmering up from the shallows. I am going under; I am undergoing. The very loud whine of the high-speed meat-saw was like a jet turbine engine revving on a tarmac. With the help of this gifted Anesthetician, I was trying to escape into an island fantasy. I kept inveighing her with conversation leading to information about islands. "What's the first thing you do when you get down there after you haven't been there for a while?" "Go swimming in the ocean." We had set down in a little island community with funky roads, kind of schematic at first--like a corny map from the drug store or the back of a comic book--but gradually becoming more real with volcanic cones, all covered over with fine green growth. There were highlands and lowlands and beaches . . . To keep the fantasy going I asked her if she had ever seen the giant tree house on the Bahamas. And we got going on this tour of all the islands of the world; and it turned out that she actually had been to most of them. The jet turbine of the high-speed bone-screw gun whined as the pilot throttled back and we took off to soar over islands on our way to another bright oceanic jewel. Bali, Isla de Mujeres, Tahiti. Cloud forest in the highlands, that had little thatched huts overlooking vast primordial woodlands, on one side of a mountain. Then we talked about Salt Island of the coast of Vancouver. "Oh, yeah. In the Juan De Fuca strait," she said. "There's some nice islands there." I said, "I read about this one called Salt Island where they have these women who commune with the earth spirits, they have these pagan meetings in the woods. They claim to have been able to stop developers." I could tell she liked the sound of that. I told her about Deer Isle in the Bay of Fundy, how it was like going back in time, to be in the 1940s. She took me on a lovely island fantasy, for most of the operation. Soon it was over. They wheeled me into post-op recovery. Everyone was gone but me. So this cool old nurse was by my side attending to this, adjusting that, every 15 minutes it seemed. She had to use up her allotment of morphine and I was feeling no pain. When they were going to take me upstairs she asked me if there was anything I wanted. And I said, "I wonder if I can buy one of those bedpans at the pharmacy." She said, "Well here. Take one with you. Take two! Consider it a Christmas present."
Upstairs in my hospital room, I was pinching myself to make the numb-butt go away. The recovery nurse had said, "You won't be able to pee until you get the feeling back in your stomach. Don't worry about it. You'll feel a lot of pressure in your stomach, and if it gets too much, you'll feel the sheets getting wet. They'll just put a catheter in there." Man, I did not want the catheter. Anything but that! I kept praying for the control, and was thankful when it returned, and I did not have to have the catheter. I spent a sleepless night switching channels. Caught a little news about the impending invasion of Iraq and bombing in the no-fly zone. Next morning, I got some brief instruction in Crutch School from a physical therapist. Getting discharged took a long time. It was pouring rain when my wife picked me up. We had to wrap the cast in a plastic bag, and I sat on the back seat with my leg stretched out. On the way home, I saw the baseball diamond in the park resembled a large pond. At home, I slept as it rained.
I'm sad. Crazy old dad. Trying to be a skateboarder with my lad at fifty-four. Slowly it starts to . . . ever so slow it starts to rain. One day he'll say, My crazy father said to look for the rain drummer in the back yard. He only comes out in the rain. The drummer in the rain is a child of the Rain God. Every yard has one. He only comes out when it rains. You've heard him. At first it's like the sound of a popping camp fire, little spitting, splitting explosions. Put-tak. There is an upturned pot out back getting attacked. It's not just the rain beating on the trash cans. The drummer in the rain is really fast, he's like Flash, jumping all around the yard. He makes it sound LIKE the rain beating on cans but if you close your eyes and listen, you can get a sense of him moving around the yard. It is a kind of call and response: one starts up close, then a whole chorus starts drumming and percussioning further away. Bink: p-tock--burble, bubble. Is water boiling in the pot on the stove? No, it's the rain starting to strike the stove vent cover outside. The beating of rain drums. It frightens me. I think the puddles and accumulations of rain around the house are going to start breeding West Nile Virus mosquitoes. Is there some way they can get through the windows? Through the foundation of the house? It's hard to make an a-rhythmic drum beat like that - so that it sounds like the rain beating on cans. It's the aleatory beat. It's a little like the krickety crack that the wind makes cackling and clattering those little bamboo stick hangings. Dad got old all of a sudden. He'd open up the back door and, trying to keep his broken foot up, sit there and listen for the rain drummer to creep. Why? Because the rain makes him sad. It rained and it rained and it rained. The storms that year were so severe. In some suburbs the middle class citizenry were hunkered down like refugees in bunkers. Storm water channels spilled over gutters and runnels of rainwater flooded streets and entered houses. Construction workers were idled, and some went Christmas shopping. The freeways that were not flooded with water were flooded with cars. Motorists drove through the downpour on flooded roads. The havoc wreaked by the heavy downpour in the night coupled with the weeks of relentless rain, saturated the hills and weakened the roots of trees which fell crashing into cars and across fences, or slid away on rivers of mud. The Great Highway along the Pacific became like a river. While beyond, the ocean was crashing all the way up onto the sea wall, sending flotsam and debris way up onto the dunes. The Bay was another beneficiary of the rain gods. Rain swollen rivers flowing into it, discharged accumulated debris and garbage from the towns on its banks.
Time stops and gets all non-linear around Christmas. I started becoming a better Crutcher. The first time, standing at the top of the stairs on crutches, trying to remember how to do what they had taught me at Crutch School about how to descend stairs, I could see myself tripping--mistaking and slipping--off the top one and sailing off the edge, falling to explode in a rage of bursting and more broken and expensive-to-repair body parts, gnarled bones: my misery ending in a compacting, lifeless mound of pulverized bone and bruised flesh at the bottom of the stairwell. I opted for ratcheting myself up and down stairs on my butt.
It is amazing how much trouble it is to be hopping around on one leg, reaching into the freezer for a piece of fish, and then carrying it in the bag--because you can't carry anything except that it's in a bag, hanging from one of your crutch hands. And I get so jammed up in my pectorals (is it?) Or under the arms. The underarms are just to steady the top of the crutch, one is really hoisting the body up on the forearms, and swinging the body as in a dip through the pulley of the hand holds. I get so tired. I start to scuttle. At least you can drag stuff along the floor; you can empty your own pee bottles for example. Once while dragging my ass across the floor down below the book cases and the desk: I got this vision of being looked at by dust bunnies aligned along a downtown parade route. (I've gotten way behind on my vacuuming.) Looking up at the dresser, the desk, the filing cabinet from down below is like being down town looking up at tall buildings. And I'm a big gas-filled balloon bag floating down the avenue, tied to guide lines inexorably leading me. Dust bunnies are aligned / along the parade route, cheering.
One night, we watched the Nutcracker Suite on the Spanish Channel--Macauly Calkin in a little pink suit. I really appreciated the dancers. They spend so much time on one leg. Christmas day my wife baked a delicious chicken with stuffing and trimmings. With her moma in her walker and I in my crutches, we were settled down in the parlor out of harm's clutches. The meal was fantastic. What an accomplished person my wife is. Later that night I found some Rave music on the radio, or Techno, or Trance--whatever the young people call it. I couldn't help but be doing a little one-legged jig held up in the sling of my crutches.
I have to try and understand what happened. Was it even an accident? At first I thought that it was my Shadow pushed me. That is disconcerting, (to say the least). To be inhabited by and entity who is trying to do you in. One who seems to have control over the CPU. Between the thought and the action falls the shadow. Maybe I can absolve myself from my own stupidity with that ploy. But what if there really is more going on in the unseen world than is imaginable, and that from the subtle action of a thought, gross results are produced in our physical world. There must be some better way to come into maturity than to be acting like a decrepit pre-teen. What does the accident accomplish? I don't have to do Christmas. I can stop the endless disappointing search for a job. But it is a huge burden on my wife, who is the sole support of her mother. In an effort to slow the action down to its frames, I interrogate. What were you doing immediately before the accident? I was with my kid. I was being a father to my kid. What does it mean to be a father? We were two beginners trying to teach ourselves something--skateboarding. I try, when I'm with him, to, I suppose, offer an image of masculinity, though mine is quite skewed, having never been interested in sports nor joining well the camaraderie of men. But when I slow it down and look at what was going on before the accident I see that I was angry from the job interview. I was with my kid and feeling like I was overcompensating because of feeling like an inadequate father. Get to the Feelings! What was happening immediately after the accident. Well, I remember about feeling so awful about having to be more dependent on my wife. What was happening after the accident. I put my arm around my wife and she acted as a crutch and helped me hobble across the park to the car. What happened after that. Well, when I had gotten myself folded up and crumpled up and dumped into the car seat, and my wife was across from me driving, and my kid in the back seat, and we were weaving in and out of the strange neighborhood trying to get to me hospital, I was feeling wretched about all this dependency I was going to have to be into with my wife. But now as I think about it, I was thinking how I can trust these two. And I am getting a feeling, it is something centered right in my heart, a kind of joy and gratitude that these two were with me.
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