2. Desert

At that point in the future where contemplation and reflection have led to a new level of consciousness and understanding, sometimes you realise that your actions were not right after all. That was last night. No sooner had I started moving the more dextrous and heat-seeking parts of my anatomy into her space, then my moves were scuppered by Jane removing the offending fingers from between her cold legs within a nanosecond or two of laying them on her knickers. She didn't have to say the word.

The small hours inched towards daybreak as I tossed and tumbled on my side of bed, as if I was conscious of Jane’s irritability while lying on my stomach and her coolness while lying on my back. Turning from each thought to the other pricked me into wakefulness. The tension was getting to me in other ways too: sleeping on the toilet might have saved time spent scuttling to the bathroom and back. Finally, I must have got off because the alarm roused me at seven twenty to an uncertain morning. I was hoping that all of the previous night had been a particularly unpleasant dream, that I would awake to a coffee brought to me in bed and a long, probing kiss good morning. Jane didn’t comply with this part of today’s hopes. She slid silently from the bed. I lay motionless, paralysed with anxiety, waiting to find out what my fate was to be, hoping against hope for a reprieve.
Not long after, Jane came back into the bedroom.
“It is absolutely disgusting in there,” she fumed, pointing towards the bathroom, “what the hell happened last night?”
I had no idea what she was talking about but couldn’t speak. I stared back at her, standing in the doorway naked and wild-eyed. An erotic combination under most circumstances, but for now I was frightened and resigned, like a rabbit cornered by a righteously hungry fox.
“The bowl Adam! The bowl! It is covered in shit stains. You’ve made a terrible mess in there.” She waggled her extended arm for emphasis, sending a tremor across her low-slung, pointed breasts.
“Me?” I replied, finally getting some air up to my vocal chords. “Why do you think I did it?”
“So how do you explain it then?”
“I don’t know”, I ventured casting around for an explanation, “the shit fairy?”
“The shit fairy?” All the anger in Jane’s body immediately disappeared. She appeared calm, though unamused, her breasts motionless. “I see,” she continued, turning her back to me as jerked open a drawer at the base of her wardrobe and began rifling through her underwear, “that you have a highly plausible argument if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me. Ah-hah!” Jane had obviously found a matching pair of bra and knickers amongst the chaos and began clambering into the latter while balancing the former on her arm.
“Shower?” I asked meekly.
“Not today:” she replied tersely, “gym.” She continued to dressing, gathering her kit and a change of clothes for latter in resolute silence.
“Anyway,” I said, essaying a change of subject, “I may go for a beer after school.”
“Who with?” Jane didn’t look at me when saying this, preferring to rummage through the laundry basket for a pair of white socks (damn, I thought, forgot to tumble dry yesterday’s washing – another low mark).
“It’s with…” I paused. This was a dangerous name to conjure with.
“Not Kevin Leary again?” she said, turning towards me, her face stern. I nodded sheepishly.
“You know I don’t approve of your friendship with that person,” she continued.
“Why?” I knew why but asked nonetheless.
“Because he’s a boor, a fool, a misogynist. I wouldn’t put racist past him either.”
“His girlfriend is Asian-American!” I exclaimed. Jane shrugged while tying a sweatshirt around her waist.
“Okay, but I still have my doubts. The thing is…” I zoned out at this point as Jane listed examples of Kevin’s bad influence, a list I got to hear most times I mentioned his name or “the Yorkshire Arsehole” as she most often referred to him.
Jane’s opprobrium wasn’t entirely undeserved, but preferred to think her antipathy more of a cultural one. Cultural and intellectual. She was unconsciously southern and proudly middle class, while Kevin was proudly northern and…actually I wasn’t sure about his class background as being northern tended to cover it up. He was from Leeds, but I assumed where he grew up - Headingley - was rather pleasant. Also, as I could understand his accent perfectly it tipped my opinion towards him being comfortable. The major difference though was of the mind. Jane was fiercely bright whereas Kevin wasn't what might be termed an "intellectual" despite being a teaching assistant at the university too. The reason for this was his subject: sports science. He’d entered the country on some kind of sports scholarship at the back end of the eighties and managed to hang on in there with his dubious H1 status for what was now an impressive amount of time. Having started out somewhere in the Midwest, he made great play of the handful of games he’d played for one of those short-lived soccer teams whose names littered the annals of the equally short-lived leagues. This experience became somewhat embellished as time went by so that playing for the Kansas City Stiffs, the Oklahoma Roughriders, the St Louis Streakers, or somesuch team, miraculously became linked to a wholly fictitious Football League career involving an ever-changing list of teams. For college applications he’d play up his Manchester United youth team experience but, when it got serious with Immigration he admitted to a couple of reserve games with Rotherham United and a spell in Belgium. Both of these were plausible but only one true. The Rotherham story was fine, but his three months in Belgium had been on remand at King Baudouin’s pleasure “for nutting a gendarme” while on a football tour. The name of the team he swore he was with for a season and a half, Genk, sounded oddly descriptive of the story.
“Are you going?” Jane finally asked, kit bag in one hand, car keys in the other. The sternness of her expression, the lips clamped shut and the eyelids narrowed, the cheekbones frozen and the forehead tightened, made up my irresolute mind.
“See you tonight?” I questioned pathetically, as she turned and left me alone in the room.
-------
The next morning I thought everything would be fine. Following a night in watching TV and eating the remains of doggy bags from our favourite Thai, Cuban and Ethiopian restaurants, after several loads of laundry and a session in the bathroom on my hands and knees disinfecting the toilet, Jane and I maintained equanimity. While Jane showered, I lay in bed congratulating myself on retrieving the situation after the previous day’s shit incident. There were no unpleasant stains on the bowl, no stealthy germs beneath the rim. All appeared to be going swimmingly. I felt like a floater calmly about to negotiate life’s u-bend.
The calmness lasted about another ten seconds. That was when Jane came back into the room in her pink bathrobe and let loose with a mighty avalanche of hatred, pummelling me with vitriol. “You this, you that, you slacker, loser, self-abuser, half-man, half-adolescent, self-contained and self-obsessed, on and on for what seemed like an hour. Then she was mild again, blown out. Only this felt the eye of the storm and more spit and swirl was about to drench me. Hesitantly she began to speak. "I can't...I can't keep up the pretence.... any longer. Then she spat out my name: "…Adam", with added spittle followed by a flourish: "I’m not sure I can stay anymore. It’s… maybe it’s time. I'm leaving you."
"But you can't be serious?" I shrilled, as my brain wove together the fragmented sentence to reveal a too-comprehensible message. This must have overloaded it though, as I reached for a hackneyed line.
"This can’t be it. Don’t the last seven years mean anything to you?”
“It’s eight, Adam, eight years”, she said icily. “Eight and five months.”
“I guess it just seemed like less.”
With that, Jane closed her eyes, her face a blank, a pale mask. She waited. And waited. Then, in complete serenity she spoke.
“What colour are my eyes Adam?”
I was about to say blue when I stopped cold, a sudden icy blast whistling up my spine. Blue? Are you absolutely sure? Weren’t they a sort of greyish tinge? Or maybe green with a hint of blue? But shit, weren’t the odds on either being blue or brown? I could say blue or brown and stand a fifty per cent chance of being right. But then, I knew they were blue, really blue.
“Blue of course.”
Jane opened her eyes as wide as they could possibly be.
“I’ve got brown eyes Adam. Hazel to be precise. I rest my case.”
Looking straight into her, I saw the resignation, mixed with defiance that cut me dead. All the mounting anger that I seemed to be building up whooshed out of me in a pitiful refrain. "Fuck it, I’m sorry I’m just not attentive when it comes to that type of thing. It’s not a real failing. Not enough for this anyway, this…this… tell me it can't be, can it?"
"Well, yes, Adam. I’m afraid it can."
"But why – apart from that little mistake?"
"Perhaps it’s like this. People have to develop, have to change. People who don't see that, who don't accept the need for that, they calcify - eventually they become statues. They seem human, but they're not. They've solidified, in human form, but not truly human, not truly alive. I want to move before I become like a statue, like..."
"Me?"
Jane didn't reply. She looked me directly in the eye, a fatal look of confirmation. Then she moved away towards her bedroom closet, opening a door very slowly as if to emphasise her seriousness of purpose. The drama was appropriate this time as the tragic proportions of this scene were now sickeningly apparent. Inside the closet were stacked three suitcases, below an empty and forlorn rack. I wanted to ask what this all meant, but my throat refused to give voice to a question whose answer I didn’t want to hear. Into the silence, Jane eventually entered.
“Yes. Sorry. I packed the other night, you know, when you were doing all that arts and craft stuff?”
“Oh, that was lucky. If I’d have known I wouldn’t have been fiddling with a lamp, I would have been in here begging you to stop.”
“You don’t need to beg.”
“Why? Because it might stop you?”
“No, because it wouldn’t be any use. I’m tired of listening.”
“What am I a cracked record?” By now my voice was cracking.
“No. But you are like a record. Like a favourite record. You can’t get enough of hearing it, play it again and again, then suddenly one day – nothing. It’s got no power over you, doesn’t make the back of your neck tingle. You just can’t listen to it anymore. Now, excuse me I have to get on with this”, and she brushed past me towards the front door, with a suitcase in either hand. I stood still, silently waiting for her return, desperate ideas and words drumming through my head. But when she got back to the bedroom, there was nothing much more to say.
“Why are you doing this? You know this is killing me. Feel my temple, it’s thrombosis time.” Jane stopped with the final case in hand and looked at me for a few seconds.
“I don’t know”, she said, re-fixing her gaze on a part of the floor far-removed from where I stood. “Perhaps the instinct for self-preservation will always beat consideration of another’s feelings.”

“Shit, that’s a bit epigrammatic. Is it a quote?”

“No, I constructed it myself.”

“Must have taken you ages.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” I wasn’t entirely sure what her epigram meant, but I took the message that my feelings were not the ones being considered. “So, there’s no other reason than that?”
“No.”
“So why then?”
“Look, I just have to alright?” Jane raised her voice and her gaze to address me square-on, projecting despair and anger and equal measures. She was supposed to be the one doing the fleeing, but she was playing the cunning fox to my frightened bunny. Perhaps sensing this, she softened her approach.
“It’s not been right you know Adam, for awhile. You do know that, don’t you? This feels like something I have to do. For my sake.” I look crestfallen and feel about to cry. Jane moves a pace forward to comfort me then, realising this sends the wrong message, steps back.
“Look I’m sorry. I need to get some space that’s all, sort myself out.”
“Why can’t you do that here?”
“Because…. Just because. I think it’s best for me, for us. You may find it does you some good too, get a bit of perspective.”
“Perspective on what? Is this all over?”
“I don’t know, maybe. Things need to change.”
“That’s funny,” I said through tightened lips. “I want things to stay as they are.”
“We – I – can’t. For my own sake, I need to grow. I need some space, a pause. Just to give us time to think”.
I didn’t need a pause, I needed her, but there was no going back for Jane. All the momentum was with her, I was all reaction. And so, not much later that morning she went, piece by piece moving the remnants of herself from our house to our car, carefully placing her luggage and possessions with Jane-like precision onto the backseat and in the front trunk.
"Don't try to find me", she said slamming down the hood on her final suitcase she was cramming into the car. "I've, somewhere to stay and I'm going to do some thinking, then... well, look, I'll be in touch...." I didn’t quite catch the last bit and asked her to repeat, shouting at the top of my voice. For some reason, there was an incessant screeching blocking out this vital information.
“Look Adam, I’ll be in touch, I’m staying at...” again the screeching.
“What?” I cried. “Where?”
“Damn that noise,” she cried. “It must be those parakeets. They’re nesting in the fucking palms.”
“That’s normal, though, isn’t it?”
“Parakeets in LA?” she replied. “I don’t think so. Vultures maybe, but not parakeets.”
“So how did they get there?”
“From the pet shop, the one three blocks from here. You know, the one that was razed to the ground last Friday?”
“Oh,” I replied. “So, how…” I tried to ask another question but my voice trailed off dispiritedly as I saw the final item, the peach-coloured Nike sports bag I bought for her last birthday, being laid to rest in the back of the car.
A nod, a wave and then she was gone. Leaving me where she left me: standing in the road looking on as our bug diminished in size. Seconds passed before she disappeared round the corner of our street out into the continual drift of traffic. "I'll be in touch", I’m sure she said it again for the third or fourth time, before moving out. But the more she said it, the less it convinced. Oh, and there may also have been a final “goodbye”, but this was a goodbye that carried the sincerity of a Gap assistant trying to close the deal (“that sweater really goes well with rejection, sir”), or the counter hand at the El Pollo Loco at the neighbouring strip mall (“would you like fries with your bitterness, senor?”)
So, she was going “somewhere”. But where the hell is “somewhere”? I figured was way too quick, too calculated too pre-planned for Jane’s destination to be so vague. She was out the door before there was any chance to collect myself, argue, whine, and wheedle her back from the brink.
In this sick and impotent agony, I stood there waiting for something eloquent to summarise this final parting. Something Shakespearean perhaps (always Shakespeare, one of those now-clichés like "parting is such sweet sorrow, blah, blah", those four-hundred year old sincerities). Nothing came. Not Keats nor Shelley, not Yeats or Blake. Nothing. Not a word a dull sour dough word from Manley Hopkins. Certainly none of my own words were formable. At last I reached for a few remembered ideas from the day before, that might somehow have helped if I only could have articulated them in the right order and at the right time with the right pitch of sincerity, anguish forlornness. But no, this, the coldness of her leaving indicated it had been coming for so long that no words would have stopped her. It was building up, uncertain, precarious, difficult situations passing silently, unspoken and unworded to the point where ill at ease thoughts weren't even being formed. Silence absolute.
What does this shock really feel like? It’s as though the temperature in the room has shot through 100F, that someone has taken a gas station pump, shoved it down your gullet and inflated your lungs in a split second to double their normal size. Your heart is pulsing frantically and has expanded to fill your entire chest cavity. There’s a wall of hot salty water about to break over your eyes and your lower lids are inflamed. Your face is second-degree in intensity.
You are not well.
Eight years disappearing in an exhaust trail down this unremarkable city street, a vapour taking it's leaving and merging into the greater Angeleno smog. Los Angeles: the world city of vaporising relationships. As this thought condensed in my brain, a sandpaper tongue scraped itself unseductively along the back of my despondent, knuckle-scraping lowered right hand. Shit. I called after, "hey! What about Arnold? Arnold! He’s your…" But it was too late; her car was just another distant, metallic speckle.
I wasn’t exactly sure what to do next. I kept looking at the end of the road but I was in trance rather than expecting her to re-appear. This felt very, very unreal. An hour before: relatively happy, partnered, successful. Now: absolutely unhappy, single, failed. I may yet have been standing there but for the intervention of the street cleaners. Trundling past in their truck, a spray of cold water splashed against my calves. Back in this world, I realised that, apart from being wet, I was standing in the gutter in a Lakers shirt and a pair of tartan boxers. So that was why the cleaners were whistling me.
I retreated back up the pathway and into the bungalow. I went to the kitchen to locate the Tylenol, knocking three back with a slug of Doc Peppers before trudging back to the living room to slump in the sofa. The sense of betrayal was too immense for me to focus. I couldn’t work it out now, so quickly. She might even come back, the whole thing a hideous mistake or joke. No, it was too unreal to have real feelings yet. Better to follow my usual instinct when faced with catastrophe and carry on as if nothing had happened. I got up and started doing things around the place: tidying the living room; making the bed; selecting books from the overloaded shelves and skim-reading the introductions; arranging papers and notes from my side of the office desk, only now I was allowing them to spill over onto hers. I sat down, got up, went out into the yard and looked at the broken slats in the fence, wondered whether I should mend it now as a present to the about-to-return Jane as she’d nagged me about it for nearly a year, decided not and went back into the kitchen and sat down again. Nothing about this made sense. Nothing about my reaction made sense. Why the hell did I call after her about the cat? Where was the fucking cat in my list of priorities, in our shared existence? I may as well have asked her if she’d packed her toothbrush or her hairdryer for all Arnold mattered in this situation. No, I know what I should have shouted, screamed from the treetops with my Parakeet pals: what about the rent! What about the fucking rent that’s due in a fortnight! I’ll never make the vig (I have no idea what “vig” is but heard it in a Mob movie once, maybe they meant the “fig” as in figure – I digress). I am expectantly homeless. I… was at least getting our money’s worth by staying stock still letting this crap percolate through my damaged brain.
I was staring ever more intently as the slim shadows of early afternoon crept across the living room. My eye fixed on the back wall, the light and dark patterning the his-n-hers diplomas and the blown-up framed photo of us celebrating our success in Hawaii. . I wondered if it was time for lunch. I didn’t have much of an appetite. So I didn’t eat. I kept looking. It really was beginning to kick in. I half expected Jane to call and say sorry or at least tell me where she was. But she hadn’t – yet. The feeling grew gradually. From my stomach the nausea built, rising from deep until a sudden presence of bile in my throat. I didn’t know whether to puke or choke. My body felt entirely permeated with defeat. Even my blood might be blackening. Inside my cranium, nine-tenths of my mind was numb, but the rest (call it the insecure lobe), was already starting the search of memory and imagination for a reason. She must have someone else. What was gnawing at my cerebellum was that first conversation in the morning, the weariness in Jane's voice, the distance, as if she were already in the car and on the freeway. It was like having a conversation on a cellphone: no matter how close the proximity, the crackly line broke up any intimacy. Someone else must be to blame. But who?
The main man popping into the frame was Lyall Sorensen but, no, it couldn’t be him. How could he have gone out on a double date so close to the event and kept so cool? He couldn’t have kept it up a whole night. Someone from the department? She was quite pally with Gunter Ludwig but he was, at best, ambiguous. Erik Hacht? No, surely not. He only got married last December. Her office buddy, Ralph Clifford? Nope. It was obviously a platonic thing they had. There was also that guy at the bar in the Brown Derby a couple of weeks back, making her laugh while I was in the restroom throwing up the Bolivian sea food platter that I’d wolfed down earlier that evening. They looked mighty furtive when I came back and wasn’t she pocketing something, a piece of paper? I’d been too sick to make a scene, but maybe… No, it was useless. If there was someone else, I couldn’t find a name. Despite that, I could not stop myself from furthering my mental torture. He may not have a name, but I could imagine someone. Jane always made a great fuss about Keanu, going to great lengths to profess the hots for him, renting The Matrix so often that I even began to understand the plot after awhile. With Keanu playing his part, I began to further explore the scenario a mite further. Jane with her Keanu-headed lover, off to Vegas to get hitched, or driving up the PCH in a hot, sporty convertible, the wind rippling through their respective coiffures, while she necks a glass of champagne. I can see them both laughing hysterically, having left poor me back in the city to suffer. Or they’re on their way to join a bizarre religious sect, a sacrificial goat lying patiently in their trunk awaiting ritual slaughter to seal their love in blood. Or simply to the desert to commune with nature, swig mescal and cavort naked amongst the cacti and rattlers. Or there were three of them, unborn Keanu-like bean growing inside her traitorous womb. Then, the worst one that didn’t require a name: Jane just wanting to be free of me.
All scenarios bleak, there was nothing for it: take alcohol, the choice for temporary amnesia. Retiring to bed at three in the afternoon with a three-quarters full bottle of Jack Daniels, I swigged morbidly as darker thoughts came on. It did not help any, but there were a couple of hours of unfocused, scrambled thoughts, approximate to dreams only without even the most elementary direction. Being in a zombie-state awake predictably made for sleeplessness, with me flapping around in our modest double bed, now seemingly the size of Texas, an occasional flaccid right arm lolloping across and round the spare pillow on Jane's side of the bed. During the night the pillow somehow turned parallel and formed itself into a fantasised but irresistibly Jane-like form, a cuddlesome accompaniment that felt more responsive to my touch than Jane was these last few months, save for the last time.
At six-forty next morning I woke to find myself fully-clothed and on Jane’s side of the bed contorted around her pillow. I felt as wrung out as a narcoleptic sloth, drifting in from what seemed like ten minutes sleep after a night of pin-eyed wakefulness. Not that there was ever any chance of rest. The reverb of loss was constant in my wakened mind, pounding away with the incessant rhythm of a baseball bat hitting home runs on my forehead, the facts was bashed into the bleachers behind my eye sockets.
What the loss meant in more practical detail was also sinking in fast. I was right about getting the bum deal from the car or cat settlement. To get into the campus for my 10am class I would have to take the bus to work. God knows what time I was expected to leave, but I was aiming for eight, giving me two hours max. I was also feeling the loss in terms of prep for class. I had no idea what I was going to talk about and Jane’s usual assistance/borderline nagging the night before was sorely missed. I showered, shaved and chucked on my favourite Old Navy sweater and beige cargo pants before breakfasting on a bowl of meso soup and a bagel, washed down with a viscous mug of Java. Sustenance and caffeine were the order of the day, because I needed a hell of a pick-me-up to get past my front door. As well as being dumped by Jane, I was also being dumped in with the masses of the city, the car-less and the unpossessed. I made three lightning visits to the crapper, each one an explosion of fear and anxiety about the day to come. The last time I was this scared of going out of the door was the day we flew into LA. Between the time we got places at the University and getting there, I lost count of the number of riot-based dreams that had woken me in terror. The ’92 riot wasn’t history. It was the very recent past and its images haunted me. I fully expected to walk out of the arrival lounge fully and be mown down in a drive-by gangland slaying. Fortunately, my fears proved groundless and we were picked up by university transport and driven to our allocated apartment within site of the campus. About a fortnight later, I was already feeling like I was street.
Not now though. I finally summoned the courage to leave at 8.05 and was halfway down the path when I remembered: no lecture topic. I dashed back in, went to the bookcase in the living room and grabbed a video case. I was in too much of a hurry to look but, I reasoned, if it was in our collection then it had to have something to do with literature or culture in some kind of way. I ran out back out, through the bungalow complex and hit the road. At least the video would give me a chance to sit back in class, say as little as possible and let the suckers watch the whole thing through. If I was lucky it was JFK or somesuch – three hours long and no time for discussion.
It was looking to be a beautiful March day, sun-lapped with the faintest hint of Pacific breeze struggling east from the coast, as I hurried up the street. The bus stop, alien concept that it was, I figured to be right a block, then across the intersection. At the speed I was going, it took no more than five minutes to complete this leg of the journey. I was like a wildebeest, a springbok, a Thompson’s gazelle, detached from the pack and afraid, afraid that my own shadow gave cover to urban predators. I was out in the open. Alone. I tried to look nonchalant and inconspicuous amongst the small scrum of people hanging around the stop, but I was too twitchy, too young, too white. Dammit! I looked like someone who owned a car, who drove that car every day and who could not live without in-car stereo, aircon and central locking.
After a ten-minute wait, I found myself standing on the bus as it wound slowly southwards through the surface rush hour. My boundless self-pity reflect on every known cruelty ever inflicted as I suffered this further reduction in status (partner, lover, car co-dependent, singleton, pedestrian, passenger). Looking out onto the sidewalk of the cross streets, bus-stops manned by Mexican gardeners waiting for the RTD to take them to Hancock Park, Beverly Hills, Brentwood and all stations west. Around my snooty English attitudinising, doddery oldsters kept quiet and wished themselves invisible, their handbags clamped tightly under bare liver-spotted arms. Imperceptibly, I started clasping my knapsack closer to my chest and averting my gaze too. It was catching.
From behind me I was aware of a heady admixture of dried-in sweat, grease, personal cheese and acrid coffee and gut-rot breath. From my left side emerged a scrawny, tatty guy, burnished a lobster-red redolent of gutter living, dressed in olive combat gear of unknown origin, once-white sneakers and topped with a battered and dusty Dodgers cap. He also carried with him an exclusion zone of about two feet, so that no one else was anywhere near him apart from myself (crazee recognition being a sixth sense that came with regular bus usage). As I considered his dishevelled form this, the worst thing possible, happened: his eyes turned and I was locked into a conversational embrace.
Shit. I did not have the patience or the conversational skills recently honed by travel on public transport to deal with any kind of crazed etiquette. The stare, the stroking of the unkempt grey-brown beard, the nodding of the head, the few words (perhaps of encouragement) to himself, before the launch into the dark unknown of their next thought.
Look away. A few mumbles. Look at one of the books in my briefcase. I fumbled. Shit: On the Road. It was bound to be this guy's favourite. More silence. Another fumble in the bag: Down and Out in Paris and London. This was getting silly. He must be thinking I'm talking to him in code, plucking books out and string them together as top-secret communication. Finally, I found something non-controversial: a visitors Guide to London (well, it's been a long time). Nothing in it for him, I thought confidently as I flourished it directly in front of my face, six inches or so away so as to block out my travelling companion.
A few words, garbled, something like "Davy Sparrow" is that his name? Mind, you it could also sound something like "do you have a spare dollar", concertinae'd to incomprehension.
"London." He was now coming through loud and clear. "Say, you’re a Brit? Am I right?"
Of course. Silly me. Taking a London tour guide on the bus as light reading was a dead give-away to someone whose thought processes stopped at the obvious. I nodded quickly and feinted a burning interest in Shepherd’s Bush. A silence passed over which I tried to grab hold of and keep enveloped around me for the duration of the journey. It didn’t last. My companion was taking his time to accumulate thoughts from the various parts of brain before assembling them. Sadly, he failed.
"Yeah. Been to England. Many times. Love it there. The Queen. Fantastic lady. ” Davy looked wistfully into mid-distance for a few seconds, then swivelled his head sharply in my direction.” Say, you hear me, fella?" The change in tone of the question, serious and slightly hurt, opened up all sorts of possibilities of sustained and brutal attack.
"Oh, yes. Yes I am. Sure, I love England. The Queen too."
"That's real good. Yeah, went there on a scholarship way back, before I joined the Marines.” In the Marines? They could only mean one thing looking at the age of this guy. Even without the street crust and sun-seared skin he was pushing fifty. It had to be: Nam. I felt sympathy and anxiety as one. Why were they all in the Marines, getting shot to shit in Hue? Why couldn’t he have been a clerk or the head of the motor pool in the Embassy? No, he had to be a Marine. And there was I thinking everyone in the sixties was a hippie. Turns out, they were all Marines.
“I was studying, you unnerstand man?"
"Why, er, yes. What...." I replied, just stopping myself from committing the fatal error of asking another question and opening up the conversation.
"Yeah, like physics but y’know, like the quantum kind? Least, that's what I got my first Nobel Prize for."
"Oh, really?"
"Yep. Changed the world, man. Without quantums we'd never know what really matters. Matter. That's what matters. But, then I moved over to studying the stars, y'know for the ast-er-o-logical significance of how this world, this universe is influenced by the planets, the starts, that kind of shit. Cosmology. Unnerstand?"
"Uh-huh." I was now nodding furiously, the cold drip of fear now running down the back of my neck, right over my yellow streak. Noxious waves of grease and caked-in shit rose up into my nostrils and I start to notice my fellow passengers quietly moving upwind.
How many more stops to his cross street?
"Yeah, when I discovered the new planet, it felt, kinda, like I’d been saved, like summon was up there looking aft' me. The Good Lord. You know what I called it, my planet? Well, I wanted to name it Noah, after my favourite biblical guy, but they said it should be a some kind of god, not just a character in the Lord’s book. So, I guessed there’s only one thing I could name it.”
Davy stopped and looked out the window, lost in contemplation of his own star and the banal sidewalk. I waited for many seconds in suspense, then he turned abruptly and eyeballed me severely.
“Know what I called it?”
"Er, no. What?"
“Jimmy.”
“Jimmy? Any reason.”
“Not just Jimmy man. Jimi. Jay-Aye-Em-Aye. Planet Jimi, man. Up there is the sky man, bee-yond the purple haze. The voodoo man, man.”
“Arr, yeah. Now I’m getting you. Jimi Hendrix…”
“Amen. Yeah, got me through it all y’know, never forgot and then I had a chance to thank him. Course I’m from Galveston myself.”
“Are, are, are you?” I stuttered, set back by this sudden diversion in topic.
“Sure. You being from London England, I thought I’d better explain where I was coming from.”
“Really?”
“Yep. Home man. Planet Galveston, Texas. That’s my home. Galveston. Well, it was anyhow.”
The vet moved his head away from me and bore his penetrating, unblinking eyes into the back of the woman in front. For a few seconds he said nothing but stared intensely. Finally, he spoke again.
“It sure seems a long way away, but so does Texas these days man. I still hear your sea winds blowing.”
“I’m sorry?”
“She was twenty-one when I left Galveston”.
“Who?” (God, I’m not going to get his life story am I?)
“I clean my gun and dream of Galveston”.
“Oh.” (He has a gun?)
“I am so afraid of dying before I dry the tears she’s crying.”
“Really?” (I’m afraid of dying too. How near am I to the exit?)
“Yeah man, I used to clean my gun and think of home.” I liked the past tense at the start of his sentence and started to relax slightly. “Yeah, Suzanne – well, actually she was eighteen but it wouldna kept to the song otherwise.” Of course, Glenn Campbell. How stupid of me not to get it. I felt really sorry for him now.
“I was eighteen too. I loved her, but life couldn’t stand still for me. Couldn’t go back home after all. You can’t go back man. Can’t go back.” After a wistful stare towards the front of the bus, Davy’s head sank back to his chest. Although some of the wires in Davy’s brain were unplugged, unfortunately the smoke and fog this released did not obscure the memory of life’s big defeats: they remained crystal clear. My initial fear, paranoia and scepticism now seemed churlish and I surprised myself into feeling genuine sadness for the guy, the confusion, the emptiness, and the absolute inability to return home.
Then he lifted his head and turned to look me straight in the eye, fixing me with a sane stare. “Say, you wouldn't happen to have some spare change? Just for my fare back man."
Shit, I thought; I may just have been suckered. Course, this came to me after I’d said “no problem” and reached into the back pocket of my jeans for the loose couple of dollars I always kept there for emergencies. Davy immediately stood up and pocketed the money in his rust-flecked cords.
"Venice!" the driver shouted.
“My cross street, man. Off to the beach. Grabbing me some rays. Hope it’s still there when I get there though. Can’t be too careful, if you know what I mean?” He gave a conspiratorial wink as he stood to get off.
“When we all fall into the sea, you’ll see. Maybe again - in another life?” I nodded as he got up and made for the exit. At the door he turned and fixing me with a sane stare shouted back:
“And remember man: Life is short but it is also mighty long. Adios!”
Relief tinged with confusion. Had I just been taken? Bilked by a clever, if slightly rancid conman, rather than a brain-twisted Vietnam Vet? What the hell, I figured, he must need the money bad to go through that to extract two dollars from a quivering Brit on a bus. Besides, he genuinely smelt of the street, the maturing aroma of dried urine. As I sat there, waiting for my cross street holler, I wondered why in the sixties there weren’t buses full of Korean vets riding around the country expressing their dismembered selves. There were probably a liberal sprinkling of Post-Traumatic Stress cases from Korea, but cranking it up with drugs, the anger of a more privileged generation that it shouldn’t have happened to them and the ignominy of defeat, made it loom larger after Vietnam. Instead, most of those Korean veterans went home to a GI bill education and immersion in fifties consumerism, to a Pontiac as big as a bungalow in the drive and all mod cons inside. Only when they woke up sweat-drenched and shaking in the middle of the night, next to a nervy and uncomprehending wife and homemaker did they betray their fears, their agonies.
It took almost the same amount of time heading east, long enough to spin another couple of passenger life stories, but I kept my eyes firmly on the mini-malls and gas stations that perched on every corner as I counted the route east to the University intersection by intersection. I never thought I'd miss the freeway quite this much, the joy of on-ramps and car-pooling.