Lights Down

 

It’s funny how life turns out

The odds of faith in the face of doubt.

Camera one closes in, the soundtrack starts, the scene begins.

I’m playing me now.

The wan light seems more fitting for a Sunday. The kind of dim gloaming that tells you your plans are best left for tomorrow. Except it isn’t a Sunday, and it’s barely nine in the morning, so something is definitely wrong. It’s a nice five seconds when I can’t think of what it is. Like I’m lost in some Dylan song, or an eclipse of the moon. But I’m too young for dementia, no matter how high I am. Which is plenty. For the past ninety-two days I’ve been dreading this more than anything. Well, almost anything. There’s another countdown going in my head that’s still weeks out, and even more untenable than this. And this is quickly moving from unbelievable, to unthinkable. I’m sitting on the top step of the dorm porch, tucking a smoke into the corner of mouth, and watching the beginning of the end. It’s 1995, I’m just twenty-four years old, and I’m already on my third identity.

Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park, elevation 6,239 feet. We’re a mile high and the air is unbelievably thin here. Even after one-hundred-twenty-seven days at altitude, my smoke still hits me like a ton of bricks. And I smoke two packs a day, mind you. I get every inch of every one of them, too. I’m the guy that’s got your next smoke lit before you even know it. Now, if I could only work a bra strap as deftly as I work a lighter the world would be a better place. Sitting here on the porch of the old Lodgepole dorm, looking down Juniper Street, and surveying the compound of pre-war buildings, the campus spread out in a quad before me, I see the taillights of half a dozen cars tracing their slow motion retreat down roads that were carved before our grandparents were born.

Things have been thinning out for the better part of a week, as the last vestiges of a summer-long celebration of youth, becoming, and adventure are now evaporating before my eyes. Everywhere you look you see a world daring you to do something. Anything. The soaring granite spires, the lush valleys, the rolling green hills, the crazy-quilt of trails through roiling sulfurous vats, the birds and snakes, moose, elk, bison, and bears; everything raw and inchoate, uncivilized, untamable, and utterly perfect. All at your fingertips, and in your face. Seriously, you could get killed by a bull Elk on the cafeteria lawn after breakfast, if you wanted. Unless you are paralyzed from the hair down, you cannot remain unchanged by this place.

When the first western explorers returned with reports of Mi tsi a-da-zi—Siouan Crow for Yellow Rock River—they were discounted as madmen. A wild-eyed fur trader named John Colton, who dropped out of the Lewis and Clark expedition, wandered out of the wilderness in 1808, wounded and half-raving of a mystical land of fire and brimstone. None gave credence to his claims of boiling mud, petrified trees, steaming rivers, and tar springing forth from the ground. It took another few decades of similar reporting to make it sound less insane. The Shoshone Nation wouldn’t go east of Lake Isa, and the Crow Nation wouldn’t go west of it, both for reasons supernatural. Today we call that reason the continental divide, but even with a comforting scientific name like that, it’s still unnerving to see the same river flowing in two different directions, believe me. So naturally, when Americans discovered the world’s largest super-volcano—capable of splitting the continent from the Gulf of Mexico to the Bearing Sea—their first thought was to call it a park, build hotels, and sell T-shirts. I mean, hell, why wouldn’t you?

Juniper dorm (or Jupiter, as we called it) with Lodgepole in the distance

The quad is laid out such that the outside of the square is all for the tourists—the hotel, the cabins, and trailheads—while the interior is bungalows, Quonsets, support buildings, and staff dormitories. And the employee bar, let’s not forget that. Presumably, the beige everything is painted came from a government surplus overrun of that color back in the 30s when the place was built, and last painted. The layout is surprisingly effective at keeping us separate from the “Touron”—a hybrid of tourist and moron, and completely apt. More than once I’ve overheard Touron saying “I can’t believe how many employees here have the last name of states.” Employee nametags have our first name, and the state we hail from right under that. For example, mine reads:

Lawrence
Oregon

My last name is not Oregon. The first time you see that, you have permission to scratch your head. When every single employee you lay eyes on has an identical name badge, all of which have states listed under their names, you need to spend the dollar and buy yourself a clue. This is one of many reasons that the Touron must be kept separate from us. Even the wildlife seems to know this, as they hang out almost exclusively on the inside of the quad. A bull elk and his harem make camp on the lawn outside the cafeteria almost daily, though the Touron still venture in to try and hand-feed them like pets. It’s only a matter of time before one of those idiots gets themselves killed. I’ve never seen anyone die before, and it would only be a Touron. I mean… it wouldn’t be the worst thing ever. Just sayin’.

But the Touron are just a daytime nuisance, a necessary evil that generates the dirty laundry I collect and filthy toilets that I scrub as a means of singing for my supper. Others wait tables, make reservations, conduct tours. Whatever it takes to sustain ourselves for the real reasons we have come to this Mecca. Those reasons are as varied as the souls that find themselves here. Many are just on a summer adventure from college; some find themselves here, looking for themselves; still others are in real need of life-saving transplants of… something. Together this eclectic mix of stoners, English majors, hippies, divorcees, and metalheads makes an incongruent and unlikely melting pot that works for all the reasons it shouldn’t. On any given day at this time, I would ordinarily be sharing the porch with three or four other smokers, and maybe a guitar player. Lots of shorts and Birkenstocks. But it’s uncharacteristically crisp this morning, and I’ve got the place all to myself. A harbinger of things to come.

After having lived in six states, and sojourned through forty more, I can attest that this is a place like no other. Like the Shoshone before me, I’ve learned that it is a land of visions, of omens and portents. I mean sure, my sixteen-hour robo-tripping vision-quest might have been caused by altitude sickness and a double-dose of Nyquil, but whatever. I know what I saw, man. The casual miracles, in nature and in ourselves, will not be denied. For example, when I first arrived I got a crippling case of laryngitis and lost my voice for weeks. When it returned, my voice was two full octaves lower. Permanently. So if I found a secret cave in the back-country where gravity didn’t work, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. This is a world within our world. Planet Yellowstone we call it.

The inexorable siren song of this place is felt far and wide. I’ve met people from all fifty states, and six foreign countries working here. Mostly we’re a college-aged outfit, although several of our number are finding themselves here after deaths and divorces as elder statesmen, both lending counsel and surrendering to the whimsy of our terrible choices. It takes all kinds. No one here has a TV. There are no newspapers, no radio stations come in. It took us three days to find out that Jerry Garcia had died, which did not go over well, I can tell you.

My head is on a swivel now, left to right. Starting to see people popping their trunks, tossing stuff in. Long lingering hugs, and even from a hundred yards the pantomime of tears being wiped is unmistakable. No matter how inevitable these waning days were, even from the beginning, nothing can prepare you for the end of the epochs we spent here together. These are the seeds of drunken phone calls ten years hence, the scars of nostalgia. The word “nostalgia” is Greek, it literally means “pain of old wounds.” But the way I figure it, if you’re nostalgic for a moment that you’re still in, you’re doing it right.

Which brings us to those for whom the bell tolls.

That nice five seconds of amnesia was a shroud to protect me from this thing that I can no longer put off. And did I say “unbelievable” or “unthinkable”? Try unbearable. From this point forward it’s all nostalgia, the pain of old wounds. To the casual observer, they wouldn’t seem that old, how could they be? After all, barely three months have elapsed. But Einstein said that time passes differently in different places. Extremes of velocity and gravity create elasticity; photons and black holes know no passage of time. So while our family and friends had barely enough time to miss us, we passed a year of blue moons and Sundays tucked away in the quantum looking glass of Planet Yellowstone.

There’s no stopping the dissolution of it all now, as almost everyone but me is going back to their real lives. But there’s nothing left for me to return to. That’s why I came to this place, and why seeing it all disintegrate is so unbearable. This is my real life now, and soon this ground will have disappeared out from under me as well. I’ve read that a moment is all you can expect from perfection. If that’s true, I’ve been living on borrowed time for months. If you were walking along and looked down to see that the winning lottery ticket was stuck to the bottom of your shoe, you’d begin to know how I’ve felt for the last three months. All of that is going away today, and I have no idea what I’m going to do without them.

Looking back, all I can see behind me of the life I was living before this place is a heap of broken images. A beautiful, but damaged girl who led me from the safety of home into adventures and follies I hadn’t dreamed existed. Lying next to her in a bed because neither of us can afford to live apart, even though we’re already miles apart inside. The tragedies of our natures dovetailing together perfectly for stratospheric highs and abyssal lows. Her destroying everyone that loves her, and me seeking only that destruction at the cost of all else. Neither one seeing the patterns, believing instead in the dramas we write for ourselves to fulfill, each one playing the part to the hilt. Until finally, the thing can only disintegrate under the weight of its own dysfunction.

But a beautiful girl will always be rescued from the disasters of this life by the next hero around the bend looking for a damsel in distress. So in almost no time she is swept away by a Steve into what I can only imagine is an Avalon of exquisite nectars and carnal pleasures unknown to mortal men. I’ve never had good luck with the various Steves of this world, so as a massive stereotypical generalization, I’d hereby like to issue a blanket “fuck you” to all of them.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

And this was before Hep A struck me

Having been struck down by Hepatitis A, I lose my job and am laid up on my deathbed. If you’ve never known the joy of having your liver shut down, here is a primer: The chemical byproduct of every cell in your body is called Bilirubin, and it is the chief colorant in urine and feces. As soon as your liver stops filtering and expelling it through those avenues, it builds up in your body until your eyes and skin are a vivid Crayola Yellow. The extreme pain this causes in your joints is like having all cartilage in your body replaced with crushed glass. The persistent and inescapable nausea makes death seem like a pleasant alternative. Seriously, water makes you sick. The unstoppable dry-heaves are violent enough to break capillaries in your eyes so that they fill with blood. The upper half of the whites is dayglow yellow, and the lower half are bloody crescents. I look like a reanimated corpse. And speaking of blood, only a doctor can tell you for certain that you are not, in fact, urinating blood. It only looks that way. And finally, the extreme exhaustion causes sixteen hour a day naps that leave you more tired than before you slept.

This ordeal goes on and on for a month, easy, before you even start to get better. When this plague struck me, I was already whipcord thin from a failed experiment in communal hippie living. The wasting has taken me, a 5’10” guy, down below 120 pounds. I'm absolutely sepulchral. I look like death on a cracker. Having lost my job from all this time off, and needing help just to stay alive, I’m forced to move in with my Aunt and Uncle, a saintly couple who never offer a word of judgment on my ridiculous lifestyle and patiently nurse me back to health, asking nothing in return. Which is good, because that’s all I have to give them. So in full view of all my friends and family I’ve lost my girl, my job, my home, my health, and the last shreds of my dignity. Hell, the driver’s-side door of my truck is being held shut with a rope. It’s like a bad country song. Or a good one, I guess. Like I lost a bet with God.

Looking around at the burnt ruins of what used to pass for a life and, at my wit’s end, I lash out in frustration. Having been raised in a religious home, I sure as hell know who to aim my “it’s not fair” tantrum at. But then something very rare and strange happens. I actually got a response. From God. Or, if you prefer, fate, destiny, the universe. Whatever. In any case it wasn’t like Moses or Noah. No burning bush or numinous revelation. It wasn’t some voice in my head, per se. Or at least, not any more than any other thought in your head is, and who knows what dark well those arise from to begin with? But imagine if your thoughts were being read to you by Morgan Freeman. Still your own ideas, but much, much better. So much more gravitas and profundity. This is like that.

“Maybe you’re not supposed to be here.”

To anyone else the thought might seem obvious. But in all the hours of this madness of descent, it has never once occurred to me. To leave. To quit. These things are not in my nature. I grew up in a military house, my dad is a twenty-four-year Naval Veteran. I can drop and give you twenty, make a bed a quarter will bounce off of, and I can shit, shave, shower and shine in ten minutes. But quitting? Not so much. So it’s no burning bush, and I have no Ark to build, but I have a new thought in my head. One so unexpected, so alien, that it feels like a virus or foreign body lodged inside me. I think to ask where it is that I should be, if not here, but if there was ever anyone in there, aside from me, they are silent once again. One subversive thought and then gone.

That question hanging out in my head with no answer, and with my Ex off in Steve’s arms, there’s no one left in my life to ask what it might mean. Most of our friends have always been her friends, and the ones that aren’t all have jobs and money to go out, relationships to come home to. It's like I'm cursed, and nobody wants the whammy to land on them. It’s true what Otis says, “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.” So when the phone rings at my Aunt’s house and it’s actually for me, I’m ready to say yes to whoever is on the other end. Turns out, it’s Doug the Slug.

Doug Brabham is the worst guy I know personally. At least out of anyone I’d actually be willing to spend more than ten seconds with. We met as temp workers on a ditch-digging job where we were the only two smokers, a built-in fraternity. And they say politics makes for strange bedfellows. We never had much in common, except a penchant for chain-smoking and getting high on our respective vices. I had wheels and he had some cash—although never much because he was a small-time Meth dealer who constantly got high on his own supply. Neither one of us had anything else going for him so we kind of fell in together. The asshole job foreman referred to him as Doug the Slug, because he was lazy, slow, and sucked at digging—really, at work of any kind. Eventually I shortened it to Sluggo, because it seemed apt.

Sluggo was a washed-out rail of a lad, who looked for all the world like a baby-faced version of the singer Beck. He swam in his Dad’s oversized Viet Nam-era Army jacket, and was a bit apprehensive of everything, exuding a nervous, frenetic air. His unkempt brown shag was more a nest than a hairstyle. His tics and mannerisms made him seem guilty and on-edge at all times, even when he wasn’t spun out on Meth, which was rare. So it says something about how far gone I was to say yes to hanging out with him outside of work. But beggars can’t be choosers, and every minute spent in a borrowed home is a reminder of how you don’t belong anywhere. So a parking lot in the middle of the night with a hacky-sack and a six-pack of Rolling Rock actually seems like an improvement. Surprisingly, it is.

So we’re in the Alberston’s parking lot in the two o’clock hour and I’m four beers in—already one into his share—when Sluggo says, “So I was thinking about getting out of here.”

I look at my watch, thinking he means out from under the sodium-vapor arc-lights that make it noonday in the parking lot.

He catches the gesture and says, “Not here, here. Out of this shit town.”

It’s a freezing cold February night, so stopping to talk is ill advised, and damn well better beworth it. The subject of Sluggo leaving lands firmly in the category of “Not Worth It.” This shit town is literally the per-capita Methamphetamine capitol of the world right now, so one less tweaker actually seems like a good idea. But it’s after two in the morning and I’m in a supermarket parking lot drinking cheap beer with a Meth-head because this is my best option, so I say none of those things.

Instead, I ask, “Where would you go?”

He fishes around in his Army coat pocket and pulls out a crumpled wad of paper and hands it to me. He tells me it’s some kind of job application for a company called TW Services, and that they ran the hospitality concessions at a bunch of National Parks. He worked the North Rim of the Grand Canyon last summer and wanted to go there again, but it was already too late to apply, so he was settling for Yellowstone. All very interesting, but it’s a little late in the evening for me to really give an Academy-level performance of giving a shit about in this. Until…

“I got two applications. I thought you might want to go.”

There is only one spot on Earth that no matter which direction you face, it’s north. This is, of course, the South Pole. Where I’m at, any direction I look is up, because there’s nowhere else to go from here, the bottom. Even if I have to go there with Doug the Slug, it’s still upward. I take the offered wad from him,  press and fold it into a semblance of something other than garbage, and tuck it into the breast pocket of my Dad’s heavy, gray wool Naval Academy trench-coat that I wear on bone-chilling nights like this. He wouldn’t let me keep any of his rank insignias on it, which seems fitting since I have no rank at all anymore. Everywhere is up from here.

We start to talk specifics of where’s and when’s, but we don’t get far before some Flatfoot pulls up in his squad-car and wants to see some ID. I guess two shiftless no-accounts hanging out with open containers in the parking lot has finally drawn the wrong kind of attention. My trench-coat isn’t helping anything. It doesn’t lend to my credibility at almowthree in the morning. Or maybe it’s my recently-shaved head, my emaciated appearance, or how much I resemble a concentration camp survivor. But given a choice between me and Sluggo, there is no choice. Sluggo is the one The Man wants, always will be. 

I slip into Deferential Charm Mode, handing him my ID. Sluggo, in turn, tries to slip away while Officer Flatfoot is grilling me about open containers, public drunkenness, loitering, etc. So I don't mind so much when the Flatfoot gets out of the cruiser in order to grab Sluggo as he’s slinking off. He hauls him over to the car where he has him assume the position, frisks him, and runs his ID. The Flatfoot turns to me and says, “This is your lucky night. Your friend is going to jail. Go home.” Turns out Sluggo has a bench-warrant out for his arrest for failure to appear on a shoplifting charge. He doesn’t go to Yellowstone with me. Mere minutes after handing me my ticket to ride, Doug exits Stage Left.

Submitted for your consideration: the questions is asked and answered, with only a sixteen hour turnaround time on the inquiry. Has to be some kind of record.

Lights down. End Act One.

 

Thursday, April 27, 1995, 9:47 AM. I love the sound my tires make as they go across the metal grill of the Seattle Ferry dock. It always means I’m headed beyond the dull confines of my ordinary life. I’ve made a pilgrimage down to see my oldest friend Sean Blake in Long Beach, and to my folks’ place in rural Washington. Now I point my hooptie toward the Cascade Mountains that I have no confidence we’ll make it over. Still, I’m strangely buoyed by this sense of the unknown, secure in the knowledge that there is nowhere to go but up. In the two months since I got my ticket to ride, the radio has been stolen out of my truck, Sluggo has made bail, Timothy McVeigh has blown up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and my Ex, Shannon, has gotten engaged to that Steve. But I’m outrunning all of this in headlong flight, both toward the unknown and away from the leading edge of a shockwave sure to obliterate everything in its path.

It’s a short hop from the ferry to I-90, even in mid-morning Seattle traffic. There are seven-hundred sixty-two miles between me and my destination. Assuming a buck-fifty of assorted change in the seat cushions, I have twenty-eight dollars cash to my name, a pack and a half of Camel Wides, and exactly that much is right with the world. I replaced the missing car-stereo with a five dollar pawn-shop boom-box of dubious provenance, now sitting on the seat beside me. I have a mix-tape all cued up for the occasion, but I wait until I’m officially on the onramp to hit play on the box. I want everything to be perfect. The song I’ve chosen as my theme is an obvious choice for me, “Where the Streets Have No Name.” But it’s the live version from “Rattle and Hum” since I’m very particular about these kinds of grand romantic gestures, especially when they’re for no one but me. I have no idea how prophetic this choice will turn out to be, the beginning of a causal loop that will conclude in the company of the Angels themselves out on Highway 89.

It’s about a twelve-hour drive from here, assuming the truck survives. If my calculations are correct, I should have just enough gas to coast into the parking lot at Mammoth and immediately begin singing for my supper. Every single thing will have to go exactly right for this to happen, and I already know the clutch and brakes are about shot. I have no plan for how I will get home six months hence. Hell, I don’t even where home will be. All of that sounds like a problem for Future-Brien.

Growing up a military brat, I’ve moved every thousand days of my life. I’ve lived in six states and one foreign country and attended eight schools from elementary to high school. And while that certainly implies a level of familiarity with change, the military is excellent at manhandling you through all of these things. This time is different. I am completely on my own. No one goes with me, there is no back up plan, and no one to consult for guidance. I have a paper map and my wits as I stab eastward into uncertainty. It’s terrifying, and I’ve never felt better in my life. Like the man said, sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.

Twelve hours is a long time on the road by yourself if you’re headed away from everything and toward nothing in particular. Long stretches find me totally alone on barren miles of blacktop. No one ahead, no one behind. I have nothing but all the time in the world to think. About how I’ve never been truly on my own, never truly accomplished anything without the aid, support, and safety net provided by family and friends. At this point, I have no real idea what I can and can’t do, or what I’m really made of. Twenty-three is too old to be finding that out for the first time, but I’ve always been a late bloomer. Someone has always been there to tell me which way to go, what to do next. To tell me who I am. It’s in these long, lonely hours on I-90 that I come face to face with the fact all of my life has been defined for me in the reflective surfaces of other people’s opinions.

Where the streets have no name. Highway 89 through God's country

At some point, the people around us have formed opinions of us, assigned roles and duties to us, and adopted patterns of speech and behavior toward us that have somehow created permanent definitions of who we are, of what we can and cannot do. Much of that is what we have consented to, as we teach people how to treat us every minute of every day. But when enough people come around to form a consensus of who you are—nerd, jock, shy, popular, funny clown, stoner, loner, weirdo, loser etc.—then by popular opinion you must become that person. Here is your personality, your mask, your identity. And there are penalties for unauthorized changes or failure to conform to your assigned role. But where I’m going, the streets have no name, and we all have zero history.

With no frame of reference, and a blank canvas constructed entirely of first impressions, anything is possible. There’s no résumé, no permanent record. It’s a vast, featureless landscape, devoid of landmarks. Nothing has ever been so beautiful to me. The ravages of extreme sickness and the utter obliteration of everything that has constituted my life thus far, have contrived to leave me stripped to the elemental essence of who I am. Every corner swept clean and sandblasted, scoured of all residues. Now no one is with me, and no one is waiting for me. No one ahead, no one behind.

There’s only me, and what I believe. That could still be a problem, though. We teach people how to treat us. The clothes we wear, body language, tone of voice, posture, vocabulary. And these things are only a few of the thousand cues, the subliminal giveaways, and instinctive reactions that we all pick up on, but no one can account for. Was the guy that I’ve been a result of how others perceived me, or how I perceived myself? All I know is that I can’t go back to being the nice guy doormat. The funny nerd, too cool for the geeks, too geeky for the cool kids. If that sticks to me, even here, I am doomed. That guy, the one I’ve been till now, Brien, has left my life in ruins. Come hell or high water, I’m gonna kill that motherfucker.

So for the second time in my life, I change my name. I don’t need anyone’s permission this time, which is such a revelation that I laugh aloud for way too long. Brien died somewhere on I-90, west of Livingston Montana, and Lawrence was born at that same spot. It sounds so foreign to my ears, I have to practice saying it for a while. I’m Lawrence for the better part of two days before I say the name aloud to anyone else. I kept expecting someone to call bullshit on it, but they never do. Why would they? It’s on my driver’s license. I’ve just never used it before. It has zero history. The orientation people at the Park issue me an employee ID and nametag that proclaim that I am, in fact, Lawrence. Lawrence Oregon, to be exact. And that’s how it all begins, that’s the aggregate around which the new me accretes like a pearl around a grain of sand.

With Jason Kentucky at Yellowstone Falls

Following that business model, the rest falls into place with surprising ease. I’m here weeks before the rest of the crowd, so I have the advantage of familiarity and experience when they arrive. I’m already an old hand at the cafeteria, the dorms, and with management. I help people find their way on their first day and the RA’s and managers refer people to me for help getting settled in. I’m Lawrence, the laid-back guy who’s always got a song on his lips, a smoke in his mouth and never, ever takes his shades off. I stroll the campus with an easy gait, twirling my work keys on their lanyard, endlessly whistling the riff to Led Zeppelin’s “The Ocean.” Quick with a joke, or a light of your smoke, I call the guys “bub” or “brother” or “pal." The ladies are all “dollface” or “angel.” I say things like “Tell your story walkin’, pal” or “Sell it somewhere else, sister” and everybody laughs. And, my hand to God, I swear I invented the phrase “It’s all good."

They totally buy it. This pastiche of mock 30’s gangster-speakeasy-rumrunner, surfer dude, and Buddhist Monk goes over completely, and I’m just easy like Sunday morning. People believe what is presented to them with casual ease and confidence, and this persona quickly achieves the critical mass of consensual reinforcement until it takes on a life of its own that I don’t even have to work to maintain. My identity has been endorsed. It is fact. Perception is reality, and all I need is to see it reflected back at me in others’ opinions to believe it myself.

Planet Yellowstone: Day One. Atop Capitol Hill with Walt Washington, Mammoth below us.

Those opening weeks were truly wonderful. The place was empty and the work was light since there were no Touron yet. We played hoops and kicked hacky-sack for endless hours. I got a prime parking spot for my truck in the gravel lot right in front of the dorm, and I never moved it for fear of its spontaneous death. The emptiness of the streets and dorms felt like pure potential. Like anything could happen. How the universe must have seemed the moment before “Let there be light,” in some uncreated space just before the Big Bang. I had my station in life and I was ready for anything that came down the pike. Or so I thought. But like the Shoshone before me, I was to learn of visions, of omens and portents of things to come. The changes had only just begun.

At the altitude we live at here, 6,239 feet above sea level, there’s almost no air in your air, and if you remain at altitude for more than a few hours you begin to experience the symptoms of altitude sickness. They warn us about this at orientation, along with the rules for the proper care and feeding of all the cute animals that will kill you as soon as look at you. The effects don’t seem that dire, really. There’s some shortness of breath if you’re really active, but I’m a two pack a day smoker so I’m used to that. The place where it really gets you is metabolizing food and drink. Your blood is about useless, so it takes hours to digest even a piece of lettuce. If you’re used to drinking a six-pack to get a good buzz on, welcome to the thimble-full it takes now. I really wish I’d remembered that before I took a double-dose of Nyquil to deal with the tail end of that laryngitis I mentioned.

I just hadn’t been able to shake the disease, but in the past Nyquil has always been a panacea for what ails me. Usually, I sleep like a rock and wake up all better in the morning. But on Planet Yellowstone the consequences of this dosage at altitude are felt immediately and to devastating effect. I barely make it to my room before I collapse. It’s so hot in there it may as well be the surface of the sun. I get the window open and then just plop down under it, my back to the wall. The next thing I know, three hours have passed and I’m in a complete flop sweat, in a heap on the floor like a sock monkey. In my time, I’ve taken some truly heroic quantities of benzos, acid, shrooms, and other psychotropic compounds. None of that can hold a candle to the sixteen-hour robo-tripping Vision Quest I’m in store for now.

I never make it to the bed, I never actually got to sleep, though I’m certainly not awake. I lay there on the floor for the rest of the day and all through the night in a delirium, hearing all the conversations out on the porch under my window as they weave themselves into hallucinatory dreams. Whenever I’m not looking, the ebb and flow of people coming and going is as constant and inexorable as the tides. The times when I’m coherent enough to pull myself up to the window to scream at everyone to shut the fuck up because they’re driving me mad, no one is ever down there. Thanks to whatever mix of peyote and Kryptonite was in my Nyquil, there remains no division between my subconscious and the outside world. I’m forced to take it all in.

The Angels themselves

Their conversations, plans, schemes, jokes, singing and guitar playing, all part of an unending carnival of souls parading past. Through that hazy filter of my altered state, their subtextual interplay of needs and appetites, all shot through with vivid bolts of vanity and insecurity, form a tapestry of non-rational, sensory divinations. Like a Druid rolling the bones as totems against the unknown, I see all of their futures so clearly. All but my own. For when I turn the all-seeing eye upon myself, all I see is two Angels sitting on the flat-topped boulder in the lot, smiling, glowing like the sun, their brilliance occluding all else. When I wake up, I’m just in time to hustle off to work in the same clothes, no shower, my mouth tasting like something crawled in it and died. I feel like a copy of a copy of myself. I must have worked, although I have no memory of it.

When I drag myself back to the dorm, there they are.

I can tell right away, something is different. At first, I chalk it up to the metaphysical hangover from my out-of-body experience. There are too many people in the lobby for this time of day. The porch is where you gather to hang, the lobby is where you go to meet people when you are headed somewhere else. Why is everyone in this hot, cramped little space? All I can think of is getting upstairs to wash the residue of augury and bad decision making off in a scalding shower. When I come back down, the little conclave is still in session. I am at a loss to understand it, until I see who is in attendance. I know all but two of the faces. Those two are why the rest are here.

There’s a certain kind of beauty that's held up to us as unapproachable, perfection. A sort of homogeneous, Stepford-strata of natural selection, enhanced with makeup, haute couture, and photoshop, then set upon a pedestal so the rest of us can aspire, desire, and hate. Our eyes slide over them in covetousness and lust, jealousy and insecurity. But if the magazine covers were changed the second we looked away and completely different Fembots took their place, we wouldn’t even notice when we looked back again, just so long as their replacements were of the same caliber of unapproachable beauty. That is the exact opposite of what I mean when I say these two were beautiful.

They are the reason the term “girl next door” was coined. The kind of women whose affable grace prevented them from truly grasping how pretty they are. But the rest of us knew how rare and exotic these blooms were, hence this unusual cluster of people in the lobby. They weren’t exactly staring at the girls, but there were too many of them, and it felt contrived. Chatty, friendly, but forced. Everybody was looking for a reason to be there, reading a magazine, way too casual. The worst approximation of nonchalance I’ve ever been witness to. I knew how they felt, just like some hapless moth following blind instinct into the flames. But I also knew that this approach was not going to work, so I kept moving.

I stop in the doorway on my way out and pat my pockets, miming a search for my lighter. Of course I have it. I believe I’ve mentioned what a smooth criminal I am with that shit. But in feigning its absence I have my in. I call to Ben Wisconsin (not really his last name) for a light. The whole room looks up and toward me in unison. Ben gets up to fish for his lighter, and the collective spell of this room is broken. And doesn’t a smoke out on the light, airy porch seem nice right about now? So much better than the dark, cramped little lobby? And like the Pied Piper I lead them to the porch in my wake. I hop up onto the rail, leaving the two benches open, and kick my feet up along its length with my back against the post and chase the tip of my Camel Wide with Ben’s light, just chillin’ like a villain. And wouldn’t you know it?

“Can I get one of those?” The most disarming Southern lilt you can imagine.

Her name is Lang South Carolina. I doff the hardpack and shake a smoke loose, then provide the light, and toss the crappy little Bic back to Ben. Lang rejoins her friend on one of the benches. The crowd has thinned considerably, since the non-smokers no longer had pretext to hang around. The two of them make a great pair, and it’s obvious that’s just what they are. Their proximity to each other is almost a huddle, semi-protective. Hard to believe they’re smokers, as they seem too good to be one of us. I surmise that this is their first day, and the dorm room wasn’t quite ready to move into, hence their wait in the lobby and the ensuing ogle-fest.

Snow-shoeing in the Tetons

Lang is all verve and magnetism, with her freckles, huge brown eyes, and unstoppable russet curls. If the vivacity in her eyes and smile could be harnessed, the world’s energy problems would be over. Her easy grace and confidence are a passport to anywhere you could possibly want to go. Her companion, Kristin Illinois, was equally arresting. Long, spun cornsilk locks, warm sienna eyes and what could be described as an aristocratic definition to her. She’s taciturn and reserved, which I initially mistake for conceit. Oddly, if she had been less attractive it would’ve been my first instinct to say she was shy, which turned out to be the case.

The evolution of a friendship is funny if you look at each individual component. One bummed smoke is the aggregate for everything that follows. One shared moment creates a context for a nod or a wave across the quad, then sitting next to them in the cafeteria at dinner one night. Next thing you know, a little brown Subaru pulls over on its way out somewhere one afternoon after work. Lang leans out the driver’s-side window and tells me they’re headed for coffee down in Gardiner, and do I wanna go? From then on it’s all over, Baby Blue. It’s a smoke on the porch before work, at lunch, after work. It’s coffee down at Yellowstone Perk four and five times a week. Hikes up Beaver Ponds, Bunsen Peak, Sepulcher, down Osprey Falls, out through the Lamar Valley. Weekend parties out at Bear Creek. Anywhere and everywhere it was the three of us, just solving the world’s problems and BS’ing about anything.

Yellowstone Perk, and the Blue Goose. Home to many a shenanigan

Lang’s little brown Subie was our home away from our home away from home. I’d never heard of Dave Matthews, or Blues Traveler, and those little speakers blared all through the campus and everywhere. Under the table and dreaming, indeed. We saw Braveheart in a single screen theater in Livingston. And they had an intermission! We saw Widespread Panic in Bozeman. Went snow-shoeing in the Tetons. Over my Birthday weekend we took extra days off and went to Red Lodge, Montana via the scenic route, camping for days all along the way. And I’m pretty sure we actually saw God one night under a full moon out on Highway 89. Just sayin’…

L-R: Sean Pennsylvania, Lawrence Oregon, Jesse Utah, Lang South Carolina, Kristin Illinois, Eddie Arizona

As our days passed, Lang fell for a beautiful sociopath named Jesse Utah. Kristin broke up with a long-distance guy named Paul and cut her hair, a declaration of independence, and a fetching one at that. They go together like cookies and milk. Lang the extrovert and Kristin the introvert. They aren’t so much opposites as they are complements to one another, like a hand and glove. Each filling in the recesses of the other, strong where the other is weak and vice versa. What in the world they’re doing with me is anyone’s guess, but I’m smart enough not to pull on that thread.

It’s easy to know and to love Lang. So ebullient and outgoing, energetic and open to life. And although she is the youngest of us, she is the freest and probably the best at living. That feather in Forest Gump has nothing on her. She is the opposite of a planner, the essence of the moment, the very definition of spontaneity. If we have a leader, it’s her. The day that she moves on to the next world—may it never come—she will have exhausted this one and there will not be an inch of ground she has not seen, owned, and painted red. And the world will be bereft of an inimitable light.

The introverts are always a little different though, aren’t they? For as lovely as she is on the outside, Kristin is a fathomless well of treasures on the inside; one which I suspect no one will ever find the bottom of. A surprising wit, subtle and dry, and immovably loyal. I can’t count the times I’ve seen people blow by the sublime complexities and nuanced pleasure of a taciturn gem like Kristin, just writing them off as shy. I’ve had the privilege of really getting to know one or two, and I can say there is nothing like it, and all time and effort are completely justified. The locking mechanism on the front door is complicated, as you would want it to be to guard something precious. She surprised me more than once with what I can only describe as fearless vulnerability.

I spend every waking minute with literally the two most beautiful women on Planet Yellowstone, and our days in the quantum looking glass stretch out until it feels like they couldn’t possibly end. What develops is a camaraderie as familiar and natural as your favorite pair of jeans. It breaks and wrinkles in just the right places, becoming a well-oiled machine. When one of us sees the others headed for the porch, we light three smokes and pass them out without a word. We run the joint, calling the plays for hikes, parties, coffee klatches, and open mic nights. You need VCR and a blender to make margaritas at nine in the morning on a Tuesday? We got you covered. Other people come and go, rotating into the fourth spot like a guest host on a TV show, but it’s known by all that this is a trifecta and the work is seasonal, thanks for stopping by.

On our way through the lush Lamar Valley

Mi tsi a-da-zi—otherwise known as Planet Yellowstone—is the place that God saved for last. When He’d worked out the kinks in Canada and France, He brought His A-Game here, and I am right in the middle of it. But no matter how much I loved all the outdoors stuff that we did—which was beyond amazing—for me it’s all wrapped up in the coffees at Yellowstone Perk, the awful cafeteria food, smokes on the Lodgepole porch, hours-long bull-sessions in our dorm rooms, and chilling at the employee bar. At some point a great guy named Dave Michigan convinces me that his face-melting guitar-god instrumentals at the employee open-mic nights could use some accompaniment. I’ve never sung in public in my life. Brien never would, so Lawrence does.

Dave Michigan and I on stage

And as we’re tearing through what turn out to be exclusively Pearl Jam songs to a standing-room only crowd, there are my Angels right down front, screaming out support and encouragement. That first night, “Hunger Strike” brings down the house, the whole room on its feet calling the second ringing harmony back to me at the top of their drunken lungs. And although I’m well aware that this cacophonic response and standing ovation are owed mostly to Dave Michigan and the rest to Jack Daniels, it still feels like a win.

It would probably be the most natural thing in the world to wonder when this tale will evolve into a love story. It’s not fair to say that it doesn’t, just not the kind you’re used to. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t moments. The most telling of which—and therefore the only one I need relate—came when I was with Kristin one evening in her dorm room, and when holding her hand, our fingers interlaced, I notice how she has these long, elegant fingers that any concert pianist would kill for. Instead of marveling at the fact of my ridiculous luck at even being here with her, my mind begins comparing them to Shannon’s muscular gymnast’s hands. Right away I know I’ve got a problem.

Rock Creek Vista Point, Hwy 212 outside Red Lodge MT. Possibly the most beautiful spot on Earth

When you’re still making comparisons, you aren’t done with yesterday. That’s when you stop if you really care for the person you’re with in the moment. The right thing at the wrong time, is the wrong thing. You don’t rebound with a girl like Kristin. You aspire to her. To go one more step would have been to dishonor her, and probably destroy the delicate alchemy of whatever is being worked out here between all three of us in this ephemeral dimension. It’s entirely shocking to me to find these unwanted remnants of my old life. I actually thought I was completely done with Shannon, having somehow magically circumvented all the usual bullshit that goes along with breakups. The bereft mourning and the irrationality. The insanity. But that moment with Kristin showed me that I was still back there, and that the countdown to September 22nd was ticking away whether I knew it or not. Disturbing.

If it weren’t for Lang, I’m sure I would have fucked everything up. Not knowing what to say, or how to explain what it’s taken me eight thousand one hundred eighty four words to tell you now, I backed way off without so much as one word of explanation to Kristin. If I’d had her fearlessness it wouldn’t have been an issue, but I don’t and never have. But I had Lang, and with that came the whole kit and caboodle. She never takes sides, any more than any of us could. She listens to Kristin, conversations to which I’ve never been privy. She listens to me, chiding me gently when I fully deserve to have her break her foot off in my ass. In the end, she saves me from myself. I give the best explanation that I can to both of them, apologizing to Kristin, whose understanding and forbearance are the very hallmark of graciousness. We not only resume where we left off, but become closer still as the summer moves toward its inevitable conclusion.

So the love story is this instead, no doubt just as it should be: All three of us giving all we had to give, and taking all that we needed. I suspect that everyone who came to Yellowstone that year received a deposit of some unique magic. But I know with an utter certainty that beyond even the ineffable power of that hallowed ground, the three of us were drawn into an singular alignment of serendipity where we became a whole so much greater than the mere sum of its parts.

Lang found kindred spirits to adventure with, but different enough, careful and conservative enough to offer a degree of stability, caution, and counsel that still favored her boldness of spirit without becoming an anchor to hold her down. As if anything could. Kristin had her first taste of freedom from the weight of everyone’s expectations, including her own. Whatever name you give to the benevolence that knit us together, it found a way into closely guarded places of sorrow in her, and began a healing process that nothing else could have accomplished. So, maybe for the first time in her life, she purposefully chose to let people in, taking down her guard as far as she ever had. And Lang and I loved her to pieces.

As for me, I was quite simply reborn. When all the component elements of my life had been stripped clean and blasted to pieces, they were melted down in a crucible, a layer of dross and impurities were skimmed off and the whole mess was poured into a new mold to be re-purposed entirely. That mold was made of equal parts Kristin and Lang. The conservative planner, the carefree adventurer, with me in between. And in the end, the thing I was pretending to be, I became. Because of them. They believed, endorsed, and generally held together the tenuous mess that was me, until it could coalesce into something permanent and real. I can truly say without a trace of exaggeration, I would not be the man I am today without the best parts of both of them always with me.

Which is why, now that the sands have run out of our hour glass, the weak gray light and the deserted streets feel utterly apropos. I make lame assurances, try to only mist-up in manly fashion, and watch their tail-lights recede to the vanishing point. And if I’d had any idea how much of me they were taking with them, I’d have broken my contract and left with either one of them, or physically restrained both of them. Anything would have been better than what I did, which was simply watch them leave with parts of my heart I would never get back again.

Now there is only September 22nd. And I have not run far enough.

Lights down. End Act Two.

 “So what are you going to do, Oregon?”

The question hails from the bartender, Bob Minnesota. If you gathered all the men in the world together and voted on the one least likely to be named Bob, it would be this guy. A chill, Hippie-hipster with the best ponytail I’ve ever seen on a dude. Now that the A-listers have decamped, it’s all supporting characters and subplots, and Bob has taken a leading role in Act Three. He’s been here almost as long as me, and stayed because he’s done with college and not on to whatever the next thing is yet. For some reason we call each other by our “last names,” Minnesota and Oregon, which beats calling him Bob, I guess. He knew Kristin and Lang pretty well, so he has some sense of why I’m in such a freefall now.

He doesn’t usually ask questions, just pours drinks. He makes ‘em stiff and they’re always free for me. The bar doesn’t serve Jaegermeister, my new favorite, but he makes a very agreeable Long Island Ice Tea, especially for how caustic the mix is. You could de-grease an engine with this stuff. It takes me a second to realize he’s not being existential with the question, but asking me what song I’m going to sing for karaoke tonight.

“No Excuses,” I answer, also not being philosophical, but meaning the Alice in Chains song.

“Want some harmony?” he asks, and it's just too rich for words.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” is all I say.

Minnesota’s voice has a soulful rasp to it, and his harmonies are always on point. We make for a decent duo at the mic, although we’re not exactly playing to a full house, maybe a dozen people who all uniformly ignore us. It’s hard not to draw parallels between this night and those nights on stage with Dave Michigan with my Angels down front. Or for that matter between what empty streets felt like in April versus late September. The former was all promise and potential and the latter may as well have tumbleweeds and dust-devils blowing down the street. What had seemed to be vintage buildings before, now felt like dilapidated shanties being held together by their paint jobs. Just another ghost-town in the American west.

We’re running a skeleton crew of second-stringers on every shift now, and with the sparse population everything looks different. When the bar is full, you don’t see the dust bunnies in the corner or the cobwebs that hang from the light fixtures. The parking lot has plenty of room now; my hooptie pretty much the only car in front of Lodgepole these days. A month ago the parking spaces were like Manhattan real estate. The gravel lot is barren as lunar terrain now, and I’d never even noticed that there was an actual Superman-style glass phone-booth in the lot, not thirty feet from the porch where I’ve consumed literally thousands of smokes. It’s like I’ve never been here before, except the lawns are still trampled where the ghost that I once was lazed away in hacky-sack circles for endless hours.

Not even the dumbest thing I did that day

They’re consolidating all the dorms now, and next week I’ll have to move into the Juniper building. Or Jupiter, as we all call it. I was the second guy to move into Lodgepole at the beginning, right after Pete Rhode Island, and the last hold-out at the end. They’ll be locking the doors right behind me, on September 23rd. Things have taken on an air of desperation with management, as they scramble to fill shifts and keep the Touron happy with nowhere near enough resources or personnel. They put on employee appreciation lunches, give us free drink coupons for the bar, and even stage magic shows for our amusement. Anything to keep anyone around for just a few more days, even as they load more and more work onto us, and lengthen housekeeping shifts out to twelve hours with six day minimums. I choose a seven day schedule just to kill empty hours. I’m exhausted all the time now. It's cold, it feels like Independence Day, and I can’t break away from this parade.

The nitwits and ass-hats they get to come in and help us limp to the end are just the worst. A trio of Lotharios who only came to score chicks and videotape themselves having sex with them; middle-aged divorcees, and pretentious Emos who use their hands while playing hacky-sack. Like that's an accomplishment. Just when it seems that the banal cavalcade of douches has reached the lowest possible common denominator, the death-knell of Western Civilization shows up. Doug the Slug, done with convict roadside clean-up and here to see how I’ve been living.

Except now, his name-tag reads Doug Oregon. My brother in arms, apparently. Somehow that connection with the ruins of my old life, and him of all people, just makes it all so much worse. I just about have to kill him to get him to stop calling me Brien. Hearing that hated name is like sacrilege here. There was no explaining to Sluggo all the ways I’d grown and changed, or all the insecurity and self-loathing I’d shed like a hateful skin. He makes it less than two weeks before he gets fired, practically a new record, especially given the crippling labor-shortage going on. He goes to live down in Gardiner, where all the castoffs and losers end up. Somehow he connects with those Lotharios to run their sex-cams and sell Meth full-time. All these hustlers and their schemes.

The hours we work are so brutal that I wind up scoring some of that Meth from Sluggo, and spend several days buzzing with so much energy that my teeth feel like they’re singing in my head. I do the same amount of work—which is to say virtually none—but in half the time. I spend lost hours of sleep on the porch in the most ungodly hours of the night, smoking and watching the bull elk watch me right back. Seeing their monstrous racks swivel and bob as they mill about in thick evening fog, under the sickly yellow light from the street lamps is surreal. I feel like I’m the one being observed in its habitat, instead of the other way around. Weird.

It’s not all bad. Some good times are still had, a few of the fill-ins turn out to be pretty awesome. Dave England and Monty Scotland for example, whose Cockney and Scottish brogues are virtually impenetrable and leave me wondering if we are all really speaking the same language, or if they’re just fucking with me. I never actually find the answer, but it’s fun trying to figure it out.

I get to see a Touron try to hand-feed one of the bull elk, so she can get close enough to it to pet its nose while her friend takes a picture. The bull dips his head and flicks his antlers up with the most casual, offhand gesture, catching the Touron in the shoulder with one of the tines, goring her and slamming her down on her back in the middle of the street. He steps up to stand right over her and looks down at her, nose to nose, his rack of tines like bony knives bracketing both sides of her terrified face. He’s snorting, and contrails of steam jet out of his nostrils in the biting September air, and I’m just positive that I’m about to see someone die right in front of me. Instead he walks off like he can’t remember what he was doing there in the first place. She lived. I’ve had worse times.

One of the longer running guys, Sean Pennsylvania, and I have some unexpected adventures as we each try to push the other guy to his breaking point. He’s a good boy just like me, only without the benefit of God, Kristin, and Lang to fix him. We steal the laundry service truck and take it for a joyride down into Gardiner for lunch and a couple of beers at the Blue Goose, still on shift. We get caught instantly upon our return, and if Flo—the grand dame battle-axe housekeeping manager—didn’t have such an inexplicable affection for me we would’ve been fired on the spot, employee shortage or no. Another day we goad each other into crossing the bridge over the Yellowstone River down in Gardiner, but from underneath on the ironworks substructure, fifty feet off the water.

The bridge over Yellowstone River in Gardiner

None of these things impedes the passage of time or the countdown to my own personal apocalypse. It’s amazing how much falling feels like flying if you drop from high enough. I’ve been from Death Valley to the stratosphere, but no matter how high, the ground rushes to meet me as the day finally arrives. September 22nd.

The sun comes up, just like any other day. I feel hungover, even though I haven’t had a drop in over a week, and haven’t done any Meth since I got rid of the post-nasal-drip the last batch gave me. I debate calling in sick to work, but decide that I’ve pushed my luck enough lately. I have just over two weeks to go to finish my contract, and I have no more points to spare for tardiness or absenteeism. I’m already on last-chance probation and my next misstep will be my last. But if I make it all the way through my employment contract the bonus will be over two grand, which is the only way I’ll be able to fix my hooptie to make it home. Wherever that is.

I’ve been hanging on by a thread for the better part of a month now, staying half a step ahead of the John the Administrator—who has hated me since day one—and Flo, my boss. Pulling flim-flam double-whammies on them with my time cards when I’m late for my shift by “forgetting” to punch in or out for an entire day. Or by changing the schedule on the whiteboard when they’re not looking, so that it shows I was scheduled for 8:00 AM instead of 7:00, and am therefore not late. Their mistake, not mine. I’m actually a pretty terrible employee, come to think of it.

Stately Bunsen Peak, my absolute favorite vista

So I go in to work, but cut out about 5:00 PM, serving only a ten hour shift. I head back to Lodgepole and see no one on the way. I look up at stately Bunsen Peak—long my favorite vista—the whole way. It’s covered in snow now, and the frost-line seems like a threat, descending on us by the hour. The world feels like every Bob Seger song ever written, and Juniper St. like some long and lonesome highway, east of Omaha. Tomorrow is the last day Lodgepole will be open, and all my stuff is already packed for the move to Jupiter. I don’t even bother with my customary smoke on the porch. I’ve been smoking in my dorm room for a week now, which is totally illegal. There are beer bottles filled to the top with butts, and I’ve put more than a couple out on the carpet, because in addition to being a pretty terrible employee, I’m also a bit of a jackass.

I stand there for a while, toking on my Wide and staring out the open window and down at the parking lot where only my truck and that flat-top boulder sit. For some reason I think of that Nyquil hallucination of the Angels on that rock, their smiles beaming like the sun, and I realize that although I know the date and time at that moment, I have no idea what day of the week it is. It’s equally comforting and disconcerting to be so completely adrift like that for a moment. I wonder for the millionth time what Lang and Kristin are doing. I feel a strange sense of jealousy that they might be talking to each other on the phone while I’m standing here staring out a window on a world that has ended. An irrational sense of betrayal sits heavy on my chest, and it’s hard to breathe. I’m insanely jealous of every person who gets to see them, talk to them, to smoke and drink coffee with them, like it ain’t no thing. Like they’re just people. All those times I moved as a kid, state to state, school to school, I had no idea what the ones left behind felt like. All those friends in the rearview as I kept moving. Not until now.

But even that is an evasion, a way of not seeing the whole truth. Because it’s September 22^nd, the day that Shannon gets married. The day that the person who has most defined me and told me who I am, who led me from the safety of home into a world of adventure and follies I hadn’t dreamed existed, endorses another guy as The One. And he’s a fucking Steve, at that. The sense of anger, and betrayal—every minute of mourning that I have put off—comes calling. Inflation adjusted for the previous eight months wherein not one tear has been shed. And no matter what name I call myself, nothing can change the sense of permanent rejection and inadequacy that expands to fill every space in me.

It starts small, a heavy sigh that hitches in my chest. I swallow hard, unsure what is going on, but filled with a growing sense that whatever it is, it’s going to happen to me, like some force outside my control is about to land on me with a vengeance. A little laugh escapes me as butterflies dance in my stomach. I definitely can’t breathe now. I shudder like a chill has gone through me and that’s all it takes to destroy the last of my composure. I begin to shake and hyperventilate, horrified by this thing that has gripped me. My mouth opens, and when I hear the alien sound that comes out, I realize that we’re doing this, there’s no stopping it now. That first sob opens the mother of all floodgates.

On average, I cry about once every two to three years, whether I need to or not. Compared to this, all of the other times put together are like me getting all misty at the Star Spangled Banner. My legs unhinge and I drop to the floor like a sack. I hear myself begin to sob uncontrollably, but from far away, like it’s happening to someone else. There is no sense of decorum, or self-control. Gone is any semblance of composure or adulthood, or even humanity. I howl like every dog that’s ever been abandoned at the side of the road by its owner. Every muscle in my body contracts like spring-steel to push out the wails of anger, sorrow, pity, and self-loathing. All of me convulsing and straining to the limit, like I’m trying to turn myself inside out to expel whatever this hateful thing inside me is.

And this goes on and on with utter abandon, sobs wracking me head to toe. I stop only after sheer exhaustion makes it physically impossible to continue, lying on the floor in my now frigid room. When I come to my senses and try to sit up, I get about five minutes of stunned vacancy in its aftermath, before it all starts up again. I’m utterly incredulous at this. On an on it goes, stopping briefly on occasion so that I can gather my wits and strength to martial the resources to begin again. This literally continues for more than four hours, and there is no one to hear me at all. The building is totally empty except for me, and the grounds outside my window are bereft of all life. I might as well be on the moon. No one ahead, no one behind.

Somehow, after those long hours, I find the bottom of a sorrow that I first believed wasn’t there but, once discovered, thought would never end. A man left to die in the middle of the desert might be slightly more dehydrated than me right now. It’s actually below freezing in my room, since I never bothered to close the window, and really dark since I hadn’t bothered with the light either. I find that I’ve wrapped myself in the rough wool blanket from the bed, although I have no idea when that happened. I have a raging headache. I get up off the floor, feeling utterly withered and impossibly spent. I've lost my shirt somewhere. It’s after nine and the cafeteria is long closed, so I opt for a smoke out on the porch. I know that I can smoke there for the rest of my time here if I want. No one will shoo me away, even after the building is closed for good. But I won’t. I like clean breaks, not loose ends. When it’s done, it’s done. So I go downstairs for the last smoke I’ll ever have on the porch.

Appropriately, the porch is empty. I park on one of the benches and then notice that I have no shoes or socks on. At this point I don’t even wonder how the hell that happened, I just tuck my legs up under me and wrap the blanket tighter around me. The pale street lamps flicker like gaslight guttering, and the elk are milling about on the cafeteria lawn. I’m more exhausted than I’ve ever been, which is really saying something since I’ve had Hep-A, and used to dig ditches for a living. I tuck a Wide into the corner of my mouth and do the slap-snap trick with my Zippo that has impressed so many young ladies over my time here, and bring the light to the tip. It’s blinding to my dark-adapted eye and I tug on the smoke, enjoying the satisfying crackle as the first drag fills my lungs and my head goes light.

I’m maybe three drags in when the phone rings.

It’s an analog sound, that ring. An actual striker hitting a bell-housing and resounding out loud into the night. Scares the hell out of me. I sit bolt upright, recognizing the sound but not in this context. I’m literally the only human life I’m aware of in a fairly sizable radius. I turn to see that it’s not coming from the payphone in the lobby behind me, where I first met Lang and Kristin; that conduit sits in stony silence, and has for weeks. The ringing just goes on and on in the thin, brittle air. It’s unbelievably shrill as it screeches into the Mammoth emptiness of 6,239 feet. I finally figure it out. It’s not just my truck and the Angels’ Boulder in the parking lot after all. The Superman Phone Booth. It just rings and rings. The person on the other end is patient as Job. Fifteen rings. Twenty.

Just because it’s what Lang would do, I get up and pull the blanket tight around me and, shivering in the freezing air, pad down the stairs toward the ceaseless ringing. No shoes and no shirt, wrapped in a hobo’s blanket, I pick my way gingerly across the gravel lot like a tenderfoot, the whole time expecting the caller to give up. We’re at thirty-plus rings and counting before I even get there. I step into the phone booth, lift up the receiver, and perhaps the single most preposterous event to ever occur in human history happens right then. On my very soul, I swear this is literally what happened, no embellishment.

I just say, “Hello?”

“Brien?”

Are you fucking kidding me with this?

Sean Blake aka Sean California

My breath leaves me entirely. I can’t say a single word. I recognize the voice of my oldest friend immediately. Sean Blake. Or Sean California as he would be known here, the high school buddy I went to visit before coming here. To this day I have no idea how he got that number. My exile here has been virtually hermetic. I’ve made one phone call in the past one-hundred-forty-eight days, to my Mom on Mother’s Day. But that was five months ago from the Post Office across campus. Otherwise I’ve had no contact of any kind with anyone. Hell, until a day or two before, I didn’t even know there was a phone booth out here. But that’s not even the strangest part to me. Of the two hundred thirteen thousand one hundred twenty some odd minutes I’ve been here in the park, Sean calls during the only single minute when I’m within earshot of that phone, when I’m the only person around who could possibly even get it. And he lets it ring and ring and ring, never hanging up, until I answer at the single lowest, most abyssal moment of my entire life.

Some days, timing is all the miracle you need.

I have little memory of what we talked about, only that his voice on the other end of the phone may as well have been God’s. He doesn’t even know today is D-Day, he’s calling just to say “What’s up?” I don’t relate the tale of the last few harrowing hours or my apoplectic descent into madness. I just give the cliff’s notes on what a shitty day it’s has been, and he commiserates with me like I have with him a hundred other times. I don’t need answers, or my problems solved. Just a voice on the other end of a lifeline at the only moment that matters: right when I need it. Freefall arrested, millimeters from impact. Not early, not late.

Nothing else that happens after that really matters much. I leave the third week in October, pretty much the last guy out. They turn off the lights and lock the doors behind me, and the snow chases me all the way home. I rescued Sluggo from a police raid, an hour before they lowered the boom on his small-time meth operation down in Gardiner. For lack of a better idea, I took him back to Oregon with me, but charged him five hundred bucks and his pair of rollerblades for the ride. Because fuck him, that's why. Lawrence and Doug Oregon make quite the pair. Strange bedfellows indeed. But I know I would never have made it here without him, and I see now that’s a debt I can never repay. Balance that against the Meth-dealing, Lothario-videographer he wound up, and at the end of Act Three he might not be the worst guy I know anymore.

I never figured out where it was I was supposed to go after my grand epiphany, so I just headed back where I came from. It’s a mathematical fact that if you go far enough away from somewhere, you’re headed back again. I guess I finally made it far enough from myself to come back again. Anyway, you can’t stay in hiding forever. I wish I could tell you that I saw the light and everything was OK after that. I guess it was, and it wasn’t.

Shannon didn’t marry that Steve, who turned out to be a child molester. See what I mean about those Steves? She and I have another go at it, which lasts a year-and-a-half but with the same outcome. This time I have the sense to end it myself, which is a first. And a last, since I never looked back again. I like clean breaks, not loose ends. But there’s a price to be paid for that, like everything else, because it’s followed by three very lonely years when I can’t scare up even a single date to save my life. But then I do, and it’s the last first date I ever go on.

There’s been tragedy and triumph, good days and bad. This wasn’t the last time I had my life gutted to the studs, pruned back to nothing. But it’s always come back, minus some shit I didn’t need and having made room for the things I did. I’m left with an enormous sense of gratitude for the embarrassment of riches in which I live and breathe every minute. Because no matter how far down the well I ever went, or how dark it ever got, or how lost I’ve been since, I never forget that at the worst moment of my life, when I was the most desolate and forsaken, a phone rang in the dark of night, in a deserted parking lot in the rarified air at 6,239 feet above sea level. And it was for me.

It’s funny how life turns out

The odds of faith in the face of doubt.

Camera One closes in, the soundtrack starts, the scene begins.

You’re playing you now. Take a bow.