American Purgatorio (20 page)

2.

So here I am. So okay. Man of adjustment and all that. So what do I do? There's nothing I can do.

I look around.

I happen to be standing by a light pole, bleached by the sun, in a town (Gila Bend) that could hardly be called a town, and wouldn't be except for the several gas stations and the bend in the road. I too am bleached, standing without sunblock, without direction, and also without the belief I'd spent so much time believing. If my world was one thing, and now that world is gone, there's still a world, but it's not my world anymore, and certainly not a world I care very much about. I still exist, still have what seems like existence, but the reason for moving is gone. So I'm not moving. I'm not hitchhiking, not walking, not watching the occasional passing car. I'm just standing there, between two nearly identical gas stations, one red, one green. And that's when a white sedan pulls up along the shoulder on the road, ahead of where I'm standing. I don't know if the car is stopping for me, or for some internal reason that has nothing to do with me, but when I walk to the car, the car doesn't drive away. I look in the open window and there's an old man, healthy but old, looking at me.

“Where are you going?” he says.

“Yuma,” I say, pulling a random name off my memory of the map.

“That's where I'm going,” the man says.

I throw my bag in the back seat, get in the front, and off we go. There's some minor chitchat as we drive across the burnt flat desert but the man doesn't spend much time beating around the bush. After only a couple of miles he asks me if I would like to have my dick sucked. I decline, as politely as possible, and that's about it until the man casually mentions that he's not really going to Yuma, that in fact he's getting off at the next exit.

“You said you were going to Yuma,” I remind him.

“That was a mistake.”

“What do you mean mistake?” I say. “You said you would take me to Yuma.”

“I could,” the man says, and leaves the rest of his thought just dangling.

Then, holding the steering wheel with one hand, he reaches over to the glove compartment and takes out a round piece of plastic. He puts this plastic to his mouth and begins talking, pretending that he's talking to some other car, as if the piece of plastic is a radio, a wireless radio, and he begins asking if there's anyone on the road going to Yuma. Then he places this object, a brown piece of Bakelite, against his ear and cocks his head as if listening. After a pause he tells me that there's a car behind us going to Yuma and that the driver is willing to give me a ride.

“Are you kidding?” I say. “What are you trying to do?”

“I'm arranging a ride for you.”

“With that?” I reach for the small faux microphone, but the old man is quick. He pulls it away and stashes it between his legs. He explains that it's a special device, that he used to be in the secret service and it's a high-tech gadget that not too many people know about.

I don't care about the gadget or about Yuma; I just want to stay in the comfortable car. I'm like a powerless country with one natural resource, and this man has his eyes on that resource. And because there aren't many cars traveling on the road, and because the radio isn't playing, I start talking to him a little provocatively, coquettishly even, saying for instance that I have nothing against the
idea
of oral sex. And I can see that this excites the man, or distracts him, enough so that he passes the exit, and I think I can keep the man going like this for the next whatever odd miles.

And they are odd. Because the man has a goal, he's persistent, holding his imaginary microphone between his legs, talking occasionally to imaginary agents, listening to me, as the exits go by, as I wonder aloud about blow jobs, trying to walk a line between interested and not
that
interested. But the man is interested and as he's saying it, I'm wondering if his teeth are real.

Gradually, my initial disgust starts to wane. I wouldn't say I'm titillated, but the wall of resistance I had in my mind begins to crumble, partly because it's a perversion of my normal mode, and partly because my normal mode has done nothing for me lately. I'm ready to tell my normal mode to fuck off.

The landscape we're driving through is spotted with cacti and sage and the tentacle stalks of ocotillo rising out of the sand. It's just the four lanes of the highway, two going west, two going east. A few small junkyard shacks pop up now and then but basically it's flat desert and barren hills. However, at one of the shacks, as we pass, I notice a compact station wagon. Just the one car, and I think that I can see, sitting in the driver's seat, a lone head with the hair of a woman. Not that it matters. It's not Anne's hair, but because the car, which may not even be a station wagon, is more interesting than the horny old man, I tell the driver to let me off.

“Only if we do it,” the old man says. He's got both hands on the steering wheel. I mention the shack and the man says he'll take me there, but “only if we do it.”

So, okay. “Fine,” I say. And this “fine,” when I say it, is the “fine” of surrender. It's not that the man is omnipotent or anything, it's that I'm willing to abdicate my own potency in deference to his. I'm letting him decide what will happen. We don't shake hands, but the man agrees. He drives to the next exit, a crossroads without building or tree, and he pulls off the road and parks the car on an incline overlooking the highway. He puts his plastic microphone back in the glove compartment and tells me to take my “thing” out.

You wouldn't call it coercion because I know I'm not trading my services for anything. I'm pretty certain the man isn't going to drive me back to the junkyard shack, and it doesn't matter. I sit there, staring out the windshield, and the man leans over and does what he does. And it's wetter than I expected, but I try to imagine something, not Anne because Anne is dead, but something like Anne, something to make the event seem a little more normal and comfortable. But as the act continues, I begin to feel slightly uncomfortable, and then more uncomfortable, and my reaction is to concentrate on something else, on something alive and real. But there's nothing I want to concentrate on.

We're given a life and we have to do something with that life, and at the moment I'm letting the man decide what my life will be doing. And by resting my eyes on the maroon mountains in the distance, and by not looking down at the man's white head in my lap, I am able to imagine that life, and pretend to lead that life, and to bring myself, in not much time, to a climax.

There, I think, that's the bit done.

But not quite. As I zip up my pants I notice that the man is doing something with himself under the steering wheel. And whatever it is it's not working out.

“That was too fast,” the man says.

I say something about there being, as far as I could remember, no time stipulation. But the man is unfulfilled and with a raging unfulfilledness he tells me to get out of the car. This doesn't seem completely fair, especially since I've already settled into my seat, but when the man tells me again to get out of the car it seems like probably the easiest solution. So I grab my pack, close the door, and notice, as the man drives away, that he's driving in the direction of Yuma.

As long as I had my need I was able to move forward, but now I've lost what I want, forgotten what I'm doing and where I'm going, and in fact, at the moment, I'm not going anywhere. I've stopped moving. I look down at a desiccated plant beside a gray granite rock and I don't know what I'm thinking, probably not thinking anything, because my body has taken over. My body is feeling like a rock, the heaviness of a rock, except a rock that once wanted something.

The junkyard is out of my mind by now. The heat of the sun is scorching my face, and my shoes, which had always been comfortable shoes, are bothering me. My socks are slipping into my shoes but I don't pull them up. I would stay where I am on the crusted sand but walking is habitual. So I walk down to the overpass, and under the shade of the overpass I wait. Not wait. I'm not waiting for anything. I'm looking at the overpass support columns and behind them to a cool and dirty ledge of cement, and I'm planning a night on that cement.

But the night is a long way away. I wait under that overpass the rest of the day. No food, no drink, not even a mandolin to play. I could take out my notebook and jot down my thoughts, but I don't want to notice my thoughts.

I hardly notice the cars passing by on the highway, and I don't try to recognize a recognizable driver.

There's nothing I can do.

Except walk.

Walking is habitual for me but now I don't even want to walk.

Why walk, I think. Is any spot on the pavement, or any destination, better than any other? No. I actually say the word out loud. “No.” And partly I'm saying no to the lack of hope, and partly I'm saying no to hope itself.

It's not that I can't go on, it's just that I don't feel like it.

And you might call this a low point, and I might have called it that, but in calling it that, I would have made it a thing with a name, and since I was a thing with a
different
name, I would have separated myself from the thing I was naming, in this case the quicksand of hopelessness. But I didn't separate myself. Instead I went to the low point, and in a way embraced the low point, and fueled by the feeling I was having, the low point sank even lower.

3.

Evening descended on the desert. After a while I found myself in the middle of darkness, literally. Looking up at the night sky beyond the overpass I could see the stars, which would have been considered beautiful, and the moon, having already set—that was also probably beautiful, but I was a thing apart from beauty or the recognition of beauty.

That was when the car pulled over onto the edge of the highway. It was an old brown Mercedes with two guys sitting in the front seat. The passenger window was rolled down and a stubble-faced man was telling me to hop in, hop in, so I did. It was a four-door and I got in the back and off we went.

The passenger was a big guy with stringy, dirty-blond hair. He swung his arm over the seat and said, “Where are you going?”

“Where are
you
going?” I asked him.

And he answered, “All the way, man, just like you.”

His name was Jimbo, and the driver, with dark hair, was Craig. They were both drinking from cans of beer, smoking cigarettes, and they seemed extremely friendly. They asked if I could contribute to the gas fund, and when I said I couldn't, they didn't seem to mind. Jimbo passed me a beer and it seemed as if we were all good buddies.

Since they didn't have gas money either, what they would do is pull into gas stations, and Jimbo would go into the store, begin to seem to buy a few bits of food, and then, when Craig had filled the car with gas, Jimbo would run back to the car and they'd drive off without paying. “Living off the land,” Craig said. He took the role of the level-headed, intelligent one. Jimbo was wilder and prone to small but detectable fits of anger.

But they seemed to like me, and they convinced me, after a barrage of pointed questions, to tell the story of Anne, which I did, and when I did they told me not to worry. “We'll catch her, man,” they said, as if they hadn't heard that she was dead. Although we'd been driving fast enough before that, we drove even faster, as if we might possibly catch up with her.

And I didn't mind.

At a certain point I offered to buy them some real food. I'll pay with my credit card, I thought, and so we stopped at a roadside café near a place called Calexico, sat at a booth by the window, and had some eggs and coffee.

A rotund waitress set paper place mats in front of us, with drawings of desert flora and fauna. Craig and Jimbo ordered a lot of food and they advised me to do the same. “Might be your last supper, man,” Craig said.

I nodded without quite knowing why. The waitress wrote the orders on a pad. When Craig said to her, with a lewd smile, “I bet your eggs are the best in town,” she tried to smile back. The food came, we ate, I presented my credit card, and when the waitress returned she had bad news. The card wasn't responding. I gave her another and then another and they all turned out to be invalid.

“You're maxed out, man,” Craig told me, not upset about it. In fact he went ahead and ordered a pie, to go.

I said something about washing dishes to pay the bill, and Craig said, “Maybe we won't have to.” His smile was full of yellow teeth.

“We have to do something,” I said. “Wash dishes or…”

“Like in a movie, right?” Jimbo said.

And when the pie arrived, all boxed up and tied, Craig announced that he was getting money from the car, and he got up and left. And when the waitress went into the back part of the café, Jimbo got up. I reminded him that we hadn't paid the bill but he kept walking, past the cash register, out the glass door. First Craig, then Jimbo, and I was like a prisoner. I felt like one, and so I surrendered. I unbuckled my watch strap, left my watch on the table, and then I walked out to the car.

They wanted me to enter their world, to join their club, the club of not doing good, and for no reason other than the reason of least resistance I resigned myself to membership in that club, and to whatever and wherever that resignation led. They supplied food and drink and travel, and although I didn't like the idea of stealing everything, I didn't see any alternative except getting out of the car, and since I was in the car I didn't want to get out. And they didn't want me out. They wanted me to be one of them.

“You're staying with us, man. The three amigos.”

The beer Jimbo drank was barely cool, the ice they'd once had in their Styrofoam bucket had long ago melted, but they wanted me to drink. It was implied in their encouragement. They were almost demanding that I keep drinking beer. When I asked them to stop at the next bathroom they insisted I pee out the window. I didn't want to pee out the window but I was too tired or too weak, or more likely, I couldn't see what difference it would make. So I knelt on the seat, leaned out as far as I could, and of course I peed all over myself. And the funny thing was, I didn't seem to care. I sat back down in the leather seat and they told me I needed to rest. “You need your energy, man, if you want to find your girlfriend.”