No Monument To Justice

There’s this traffic light in town that I swear is against me, personally. I never, ever make this light. I live in kind of a crappy town that is comprised largely of bars, mills, and strip joints. In fact, at different points in the last fifteen years it’s held the dubious distinction of being the per-capita capital of strip clubs and methamphetamine in America and the world, respectively. I believe those titles are presently held by other fine towns, but we had our glory days. It’s the kind of blue collar burg that I can afford to own in, as opposed to renting in the nicer neighboring town. This has virtues of its own, of course, but the light at 28th and Main is not one of them.

Yeah, it’s the kind of burgh that has a Main Street. The junction of 28th and Main is kind of a linchpin in the town. It’s where the zip code changes, where the railroad spur connects the Union Pacific and Burlington Northern lines together, and the biggest Mill in town finds its home there. Between the railroad crossing, the logging trucks for the mill, the gas trucks for the Amerigas plant, and all the buses, the area gets choked out pretty quickly at certain times of day. Which are the only times of day that I ever pass that way, of course.

But I digress.

28th and Main, where I spend an inordinate amount of my adult life, has a trailer hitch shop, a battery shop and a really loathsome little cinderblock tavern on its various corners. The bar is called The OK Tavern, which is a generous assessment. I spent about ten minutes of a bad New Year’s Eve there once, where we actually got “bounced” by the Bouncer because my buddy Doug—who was already drunk when we picked him up at 9:30—chose that charming little bistro as the place to void the contents of his stomach. People like Doug and his vomitus are the reason bars have dim lighting. The night would have been a bust no matter where we spent it, because of the company, but I still hold it against The OK, and have never darkened the door of their establishment since. And it’s been eighteen years, so I guess I showed them. It could just as easily have happened at any of the other wretched hives of scum and villainy that pass as watering holes around here; The Pour House, The Alibi, The White Horse. But it happened at The OK, so fuck ‘em. I ain’t no monument to justice.

But I digress.

I have a love-hate relationship with traffic lights. And vehicles. And cell phones. And computers. And kitchen appliances. Pretty much all inanimate objects. By love-hate, I mean that I hate to love them, and they love to hate me. If there is a field of intelligence that surrounds us, and penetrates us and binds the galaxy together, it might just hate me. All inanimate objects are inherently possessed of a malevolence that is directed at me personally. I always pick the broken one off the shelf at the store, or the one without the price tag which also happens to be the last in the inventory. It requires a large portion of my emotional and intellectual resources to wage my daily war against malfunctions and sabotage, outwitting and outflanking these enemies who deceptively just sit there doing nothing, as though they were not little assassins plotting my demise.

The only inanimate object that is actually on my side is my iPod. My iPod loves me. It understands my moods, and tells little jokes by its song selections. You could argue that I’m crazy, and that none of these objects has any capacity for good or evil outside of our use of them, but you would be wrong about my iPod. It’s the only thing I’ve ever asked for as a present that has actually made my life better. Everything else is just stuff taking up space. It always plays the right song at the right time. Like when I’m sitting at the Nemesis Light at 28th and Main.

I’m most likely to get stuck here on my way home from work. As a carpenter specializing in insurance restoration, my days have a huge amount of variety in them. I go from one construction discipline to another from day to day, so it never gets boring. Framing to drywall to roofing to concrete to finish carpentry to paint. If I can indulge my ego for a moment, it’s like having a brown belt in ten martial arts, as opposed to a black belt in one specific form. If you went to work every day and were expected to be an accountant, a chiropractor, a mechanic and a photographer at any given time, then you would know exactly what my career is like. Keeps it interesting, but some days are brutally exhausting, others are messy, and some are truly disgusting. There are dead things under houses.

So the end of any given day can entail a nice sense of satisfaction at an honest job well done, or it can be a gauntlet that tests my will to live before I can get home, strip in the garage, and take a boiling hot Silkwood Shower while my clothes burn in a pyre out on the lawn. On those days, when I’m covered in paint, caulking, drywall dust, or fiberglass insulation, sitting at the Nemesis Light waiting to get clean is particularly galling. It is then that my iPod is a balm that soothes the savage beast.

Most of insurance restoration work is trying to prevent or eliminate mold. Whether from fire suppression, holes in the roof, or burst pipes, mold is the new asbestos. It has the power to induce spontaneous decapitation, and is believed to be the leading cause of dog hickeys and uncle abuse. Or so the lawyers would have us believe. The point being, mold scares the shit out of everybody in a superstitious way that you used to need a witch-doctor to induce. You’d swear it was plutonium, just radiating cancer everywhere. Over the years we’ve learned a lot about how to prevent mold. It amounts to “Keep Things Dry.”

There are specific protocols involved in preventing mold, and even more involved in eliminating it once you’ve got it. Insurance companies send us across the country to attend Mold School. We take continuing education classes every year. The thing you find out at Mold School is that there is no such thing as killing mold. No. Such. Thing. Mold can survive in the vacuum of space at nearly Absolute Zero. Their spores are almost everywhere, indoors and out, and only the environmental conditions prevent it from growing all over. It needs moisture, food, darkness and relatively still airflow to thrive. Failing these conditions, it remains in a dormant state. 

In that state, spores are effectively immortal. Radiation, heat, cold, caustic chemicals? No effect. That bleach water you’ve been using just puts it to sleep. That’s all. Then it naps until favorable conditions exist again, and it’s back to business as usual. And while fire can technically kill a mold colony, it instantly begins to eject its seed in a panicked plume of spores that almost always find a way out of the given environment. So even if we burned the world down, mold would almost certainly outlive us. The best we can hope for is containment. Really, that’s it. I had to go all the way to Vancouver, WA to learn that you need to keep stuff dry, or else bleach and paint it. Seems like they could have put that in an email.

But I digress.

So some days when I’m sitting at the Nemesis Light, bottlenecked because of a little yellow schoolbus and a choo-choo train, my iPod will throw on a song that just makes everything alright. It has a library of choices that’s about ninety-five hundred songs, organized into eighty-one playlists; one for every possible mood or occasion. It never fails to amaze me how much better music makes everything. Doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, or crawling through the boneyard under somebody’s house looking for dry rot, doesn’t matter. The right song can make it ok. Music is a panacea for what ails us, and a perfect reliquary for memories. Most days, that's a great thing. But sometimes the things it brings up out of that repository of memory can hit you like a ton of bricks. The other day when I was sitting there at the Nemesis Light—righteously ignoring The OK—one of those songs came on. And even though I’ve heard it a thousand times, it still blindsided me in that moment. The song is “Yellow” by Coldplay. It’s arguably the best song in the canon of a great band, the music and the lyrics matching each other in simple beauty and depth. I have live versions, acoustic versions, live acoustic versions and even a cover or two; it’s just exquisite.

I was pretty surprised to discover that it’s my niece Kailee’s favorite song. It’s fairly mature for a five, almost six, year old. To be accurate, Kailee is actually my cousin, once removed. Her Mom is my first cousin, the daughter of my Dad’s sister. Most people call my relationship to Kailee second cousin, but a genealogist would tell you we are first cousins, once removed. I let all my cousins’ kids call me uncle, or cousin, or just Lawrence. I’m not much for standing on ceremony. Neither are kids her age, which is something else we have in common. I didn’t find out “Yellow” was Kailee’s favorite song until we were planning her memorial service. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always wished I knew that sooner.

Kailee was killed by a drunk driver the evening of June 17, 2009. She and her parents were headed home from Church one Wednesday night, southbound on I-5, and a forty-one year old man named Stephen Whitaker was headed north on I-5, in his 1972 Winnebago. He had a blood alcohol content of .24, three times the legal limit. There was a lot of speculation about a fire that may have occurred in his RV. Whatever the reason, he lost control and crossed a sizeable median doing in excess of seventy MPH and, entering oncoming traffic, intersected with my cousin’s Oldsmobile Alero. He took the lives of Kailee, my cousin once removed, and the other passenger in his RV, a homeless friend named John Ratcliff. 

Stephen had three previous DUI’s, and was driving on a suspended license. He spent four days in the hospital and emerged with a broken leg, only to be taken into custody and held for manslaughter against $890,000 bail. I think $890 would have sufficed to preclude his release, given his homeless stature, but it was time for Statements to be made about how Seriously the System was taking this. You’d think that Statement might have been made between DUI’s two and three, but you’d be wrong about that.

The following morning, June 18, 2009 at 6:22 AM I was up for work, engaging in the ritual of making coffee and stretching out for the day of mold containment ahead of me. The rolling narrative of the previous day’s disasters was being recited by the talking heads on the morning news show. The background noise of life, all the things that were happening to Other People while I was busy making my plans. I had no sense of premonition that while Kelli Warner was talking about a little girl, name withheld, being killed by a drunk driver—to me, just another addition to the endless litany of tragedies that had happened to Someone Else—that this tragedy wasn’t passing me by. This one was for me.

The words were no sooner out of her mouth when the phone rang. I was at first surprised and then annoyed to hear it going off so early. My boss usually had the good sense to wait until the 7:00 hour to start regulating on me. It’s funny how a call from someone you love and ordinarily look forward to hearing from, can suddenly turn into a foreboding toll of the bell if it comes outside the windows of normal, civilized communication. When I saw my Aunt Kathy’s name show up on the caller ID at 6:22 AM, I knew something was terribly wrong. Without preamble, she told me that Kailee had been killed, and that Brian and Cathleen were in the hospital for minor injuries. As I tend to do in times of shock, I made some irrational objection to the idea. This time I based my rebuttal on the non sequitur that I’d just heard about an accident matching those details on the news, and the news is what happens to Other People. So clearly, what she was saying was patently ridiculous.

There is no way Kelli Warner knew that my first cousin, once removed, was gone before I knew, and was presently telling fifty thousand other people about it, name withheld. That Kailee had been absent from the world for almost nine hours of my life, unbeknownst to me. But of course Kelli knew. And so did her co-anchor, Mark. And the producer, and the camera man, and the sound guy. And for all I know, the intern that brings them coffee, too. To them, it was another in a series of ongoing tragedies that they report on each day before they get to the puff piece at the end about the Panda born at the zoo. Which seems unforgiveable, until I consider that it otherwise would have been another in the series of Other People’s tragedies that wash right over me until they get to the puff piece about the Panda, at which point I know it’s time to put the coffee on.

Without exploiting the grief of those that I love and who shared in the surreal apocalypse of this staggering loss, I can say that the ever-expanding shockwave of bereavement is somehow compounded and magnified by the logistics of death. Caskets and plots of ground to be chosen, flowers to be arranged, stationary to be selected for the order of service, pictures to be sifted through. To say nothing of Police Reports and sworn affidavits, all the professional concern of the DA and reporters. While we were circling the wagons and looking for the ripcord on the parachute to save us from this freefall of unimaginable shock, anger, and loss, Stephen Whitaker was denying and obfuscating for his life. Pleading with his doctors and priest to advocate for his innocence. It wasn’t alcohol, it was a seizure. There was a fire in the RV. The Devil made me do it. Whatever. 

It was during this process of selecting which wavelength of grief we were going to tune in to that I found out something about Kailee that I hadn’t known. I was in the back bedroom, combing through grandma’s photo albums for pictures of Kailee to scan into digital images for the memorial service. The rotating staff of the Picture Selection Committee was hard at work printing off pictures and mounting them to posterboard, or scanning images to create the computer slide show for the projector at the Church. No one could take the duty for too long without meltdown, so we rotated fresh souls into those trenches hourly. As hard it was to go through the mountain of pictures of Kailee as a baby, a toddler, learning to swim, riding their dog—a Chocolate Lab named Knuckle—we all knew that eventually we’d come to the end of them. And when we did, we’d permanently run out of pictures of Kailee, and never be able to add another. The silence beyond that was like a tsunami that could not be denied or kept at bay.  

Apple makes it super easy to come up with a photo montage set to music, and the Selection Committee was running through the demo version for the service when the unmistakable opening chords of Coldplay’s “Yellow” came on. My Aunt’s house is the last place in the world I’d expect to hear any music composed after 1965, so my curiosity was piqued immediately. I came out to the living room, to see the slideshow in progress with its musical montage. It was at one of those strange moments of grace and peace that arrive as unexpected interludes during the grieving process. A lull between tears when fond recollections and stories bring laughter and sighs of contentment, before you return to the reality where the stories are all that remain, and the wailing on the inside of you resumes.

I was sorting through these emotions and realizing that Brian and Cathleen wanted you to talk about Kailee; not avoid the mention of her name, not talk about her in hushed tones, or in the past tense. So when I came out and said how much I loved the music they were playing, they told me it was Kailee’s favorite song, which came as a delightful surprise to me. Coldplay is an acquired taste that doesn’t really fit in with the Top 40 sensibilities of most people, let alone the Church crowd. How fascinating that this little soul had resonated with something so mature and sublime in its beauty. I felt like I understood her just a little better. Like another piece in the beautiful mosaic of her had dropped into place for me, even as Yellow played over pictures of her life floating by on a computer screen, only to fade and dissolve into the next in an endless loop that could have no more added to it.

Over the coming days and weeks I was granted an opportunity to speak about Kailee at various venues. At her memorial I remarked how her eyes had the kind of shape that always looked like she was laughing. Like she already knew the punchline to the great cosmic joke God was telling. She was in on it. I told one of my favorite stories about her. How once, when she was four, she had gotten into an argument with her Mom, Cathleen, and as Mom’s sometimes do, Cathleen ended it with “Because I said so.” To which Kailee responded, “Mommy, sometimes I want to make the rules.” That was the kind of mind that she had. Even at four years old, she understood the logical structures at work in the world, the idea of Authority and where it flows from. She could game the system with the best of us; a force to be reckoned with. All of these stories I told about her, whenever I could. But never about “Yellow.” That one I’ve kept to myself until now.

During this swirl of days and months, Whitaker found it in himself to come to terms with the truth and plead guilty to the charges leveled against him. We were spared the agony of a trial, and were able to move directly to the Penalty Phase of the court proceedings. It was a small mercy that I’ve always been grateful for. The Sentencing Hearing was brutal enough; I can’t imagine having to go through the gauntlet of a whole trial to get there. At that hearing, the Prosecutor read letters from our extended family across the country who could not be there. Via his attorney, Clara Rigmaiden, Stephen Whitaker had a letter read aloud by way of apology. He said in part that he was "sorry to have been the instrument of such sorrow and tragedy," and that he would "gladly trade his life for Kailee's." The DA and the Defense made statements to the Judge. As a family, we were allowed to address the Court as to sentencing recommendations, and even speak to Whitaker directly. He never once picked his head up off the defense table, as though laying prostrate before the court and Kailee’s family.

It was a remarkable testament to us as a family that every single word that came out of our mouths was in absolution and forgiveness toward the man who had taken everything from us. Not one harsh word or epithet was hurled at him, not one voice was ever raised, only pity for his lost state as a human being. When I got up to speak I had all kinds of thoughts in my head. I’m an articulate guy; I’ve spoken to hundreds of people, even in paying gigs, and never felt a moment of stage fright. With three whiskeys in me, I ad-libbed my Best Man’s toast at my best friend’s wedding to hundreds of people and brought down the house with laughter and tears. That said, you’d have thought I’d suffered a stroke by the way I yammered when I got up to that lectern to address the Court.

I went on and on about the bizarre confluence of events that had to mesh together with clockwork precision for this man to have ended the life of my flesh and blood, instead of Somebody Else’s. Because it’s always supposed to be Somebody Else’s! I talked about how nothing could be done to reverse this and how only preventing Whitaker from doing this again could be accomplished at this late date. I was like some drunk that wants to get all deep and talk about God. May He forgive me for all the “For Whom the Bell Tolls” horseshit I blathered on about. I went on and on until I was embarrassed with myself and hated the sound of my stupid voice; until the gracious words of my family highlighted to me how much better they all are than me. Until I realized that when someone steals a car or a TV set, they can give one of those back or exchange it for equal cash value. But when something like this happens… There literally is no such thing as Justice.

The scales cannot be balanced, no matter what we do to men like Whitaker. So we build statues and monuments to Justice, and rightly name the Justice System as what it is. A System. It stands in for Justice, in the same representative way that the monument of the blind woman with the scales stands in. As my stupid voice echoed plaintive in my ears, I saw that it’s not Justice that is blind, but us. Lest we look on the world, and ourselves, and understand that Justice cannot exist in our midst. Merely representations of it. In that moment, I just trailed off. It was then that Stephen Whitaker became an object to me, and I went and sat down.

If a tree had fallen and ended Kailee's life instead, I would feel the same animus toward it that I do toward Whitaker. None at all. I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup today, any more than I would be able to pick out the particular branch of a tree if that had been her fate instead. I have no memory of him at all. I wouldn’t be more satisfied if they’d elected to feed him feet first into a wood-chipper like a tree limb, instead of giving him sixteen years in prison like they did. Stephen Whitaker’s punishment, even unto death, means nothing to me. The absence of his punishment would indeed be an injustice, one I could not tolerate. But the presence of his punishment is not Justice; it’s no balancing of the scales. His punishment, no matter the severity, restores nothing; therefore he is irrelevant to me. With men like Whitaker, the best we can hope for is containment.

Only the absence of Kailee, and the presence of memory remains for me now.

There’s this constellation of awful impressions and memories that orbit around me now, even a dozen years later. Ones no one should ever have to experience. The words of Whitaker’s attorney as she argued that he should receive a lighter sentence for the death of his passenger, John Ratcliff, because Ratcliff was also a drunken, homeless drug addict who’d knowingly elected to get in the RV with Whitaker. She said, "I don't want to sound calloused, but he was there by his own choice, drinking with Mr. Whitaker and getting into the car with him that day. He had some culpability in that situation." I guess that's lawyer-speak for "He kind of got what he deserved." It worked, too. Whitaker got four fewer years in prison for that. He’ll be out in 2025 instead of 2029 because Ms. Rigmaiden convinced the judge that Ratcliff mattered less than Kailee. I don’t envy her for having to have those words come out of her mouth in defense of her client. At first I was disgusted, but eventually I came to see that she was just doing her job, and then I pitied her. Because unlike my days down in the boneyard, there’s no Silkwood Shower that’ll ever wash that off of her.

But by far the worst of it all is the memory of the graveside canopy that we all stood under, the mass of us huddled in its shade on that blazing hot day. When the pallbearers came into view from around the bend in the path through the copse of trees, they were carrying the smallest casket you can imagine toward us. When we laid eyes on it, together and at once, the collection of mourners began to sob with a fervency beyond language. It began with a single, otherworldly cry from her mother as she collapsed into our arms, and then it was as if a match had been lit in a gas-filled room. Our collective wail went up to the Heavens, raw and inchoate, with a grief and anger deeper than any language or tongue. The casket was just so fucking small. No one should even know those exist, let alone ever see one. Because you can never unsee that. It's just a part of you for the rest of your days.

Most days when “Yellow” comes on, which is pretty often on my iPod, I simply enjoy the beauty of it and how wonderful life can be. Given its fragile, clockwork delicacy, and all the things that can go wrong, life is actually pretty great most of the time. Sometimes when “Yellow” comes on I really remember that moment of revelatory connection with Kailee, that affinity of our souls, and I smile and just soar on the memory of her. I sing at the top of my stupid voice, “Look at the stars, see how they shine for you. And all the things you do. Yeah, they were all Yellow.” And it’ll be the best thing that happens all day. Because around here, we don’t talk about Kailee in hushed tones or the past tense.

But sometimes I’ll be sitting at the light at 28th and Main, and “Yellow” will come on and it lights a match in a gas-filled room and I dissolve into uncontrollable sobs, even all these years later. I guess that’s the thing about loss and grief, there’s no such thing as killing it. No such thing as getting over it. It lies dormant and awaits the proper conditions, and then it’s alive and well, as fresh today as it was at that June morning at 6:22 AM. On days like that I repeat to the Almighty what I said to Him from the dais at Kailee’s Memorial: “Lord, if you’ll forgive me a moment of impertinence, I’d like to say...Sometimes I want to make the rules.”

But I don’t get to. The best I can hope for is containment.

“Your skin, yeah, your skin and bones

Turn into something beautiful

Do you know? You know I love you so

You know I love you so”

And Grace Will Lead Me Home

It was a surprisingly temperate Saturday evening for a February, and I was sitting out on my front porch at 2276 N. 8th St, having just finished the tail end of my stash. I was enjoying the last of the daylight on a bench that my roommate Michael had built so I could smoke my cigars outside, as opposed to in my room where he and his girl Monica would have to smell them all the time. It wasn’t unusual for me to smoke a joint right out on the front porch as well, in the shade and cover of the Japanese Maple. Of course, it wasn’t unusual for me to smoke a joint almost anywhere. Seriously, I once got high in the parking lot of a clinic on the way in to take a drug test. I failed that one, although I had successfully passed three others while I was high as a kite, so I felt I had reason to be confident. That’s how a lot of mishaps and calamities in my life begin, with a feeling of perfect confidence. That time it cost me a temp job as a forklift driver. Oh, the humanity.

That February 7th evening, 1998, I was suffering a kind of travel hangover from having just completed a nonstop sixteen hour drive from Los Angeles by myself. The 90’s included a lot of epic trips to and from LA for me. Sometimes on planes, most often in cars, but and few times on the train, and once on a Greyhound bus. On the whole, I prefer the train. The company is better and, for all its failings, Amtrak has sublime coffee service. I do believe I’d prefer to drop a bowling ball on my tongue than to spend another minute on a southbound Greyhound. The Sacramento Greyhound station is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and they are exporting felons and drug dealers just as fast as the correctional system can spit them out. I guess I should have felt right at home. I didn’t, though.

Most recently, I'd driven, spending a week visiting my two best friends from High School. While I was there I saw “Scream 2,” “Titanic,” and “Fallen.” I rode my bike along the shore. I smoked a ton of pot. My buddies and I tripped our faces off on some magic mushrooms for a whole day down in Trabuco Canyon, just outside of San Juan Capistrano. But the thing that really sticks out about that trip was that all of my friends expressed concern about the epic quantities pot I smoked. One of them was a drug dealer. How bad do you have to be to be singled out of a group of musicians and dealers as the guy with the drug problem? I assured them it was just because I was on vacation, kickin’ up my heels. It wasn’t, though.

I smoked my first joint on October 31, 1991. 

Messenger House Care Center, Bainbridge Island, WA

My friend Wanda Rose Tingelstad had died in a car accident on her way to Moses Lake, Washington, where she had enrolled at Big Bend Community College in their pre-med program. Wanda Rose, as we called her, was just beginning as a Freshman there, and had been my very first friend, of the two that I had, in Washington. She and I met in September at Messenger House, a care center for those with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. I’d moved to Washington that July, on the day of my twentieth birthday, and had to beg, borrow, steal, and kill to get a job mopping up urine in the locked dementia wards, thanks to my credentials as a Certified Californian looking for work at the height of anti-California hysteria.

Downtown Long Beach, CA

I’d previously held down a nice office job as Division Secretary for the Southern California Rent-A-Center franchise chain. Not a milestone career, but pretty nice gig for a guy in Community College, and a damn sight better than dealing in adult incontinence for a living. But there I was, having spent three months of impenetrable solitude looking for a job in a town that literally had fewer people in it than my graduating class at Long Beach Polytechnic High School. Not just fewer than the High School itself, mind you. Fewer than the group of seniors I matriculated with. I’d been job hunting four hours a day, five days a week for three solid months before I got that shit detail, and had not made even one single friend while stranded in the lush no-man’s land of Kingston, Washington. Not until Wanda Rose.

Downtown Kingston, WA. Jewell of the Middle of Nowhere.

If you think Alzheimer’s is bad from the outside, you should try watching the gears turn on the inside of the locked wards. Tragedies churned out daily. It’s demoralizing even at the best of times, but somehow Wanda Rose took it all in stride. She had her plans, her exit strategy. She was the first person that didn’t look down and spit on the ground every time my name got mentioned, and the only friend I had for a thousand miles in any direction. Day one, she'd been assigned to train me on how to properly mop up lakes of diarrhea. Turns out it’s all in the wrist.

Wanda Rose

Wanda Rose and I didn’t hang out much, outside of work. The odd cup of coffee here and there, the occasional smoke out on the jetty. She took me to the DMV once, after I got a ticket for expired out of state plates. Mostly it was just shift work and an hour a day between breaks and lunches. But after the months of seclusion, even that was like an oasis in the desert; a balm for loneliness, if ever there was one. Though Wanda was a bit of a wallflower, kind of mousy and unassuming, she had a sweet, easy laugh, and an uncommon grace about her. She welcomed me when literally no one else would, and she was just a good egg, through and through. The kind we really could’ve used more of in this world. 

She introduced me to her crazy boyfriend, Chalon, who came to work at Messenger House several weeks later. He was an affable hippie type; a bit of a douche, but harmless enough and generally well-intentioned. After Wanda headed to Moses Lake to secure a job and an apartment in advance of school starting, Chalon and I kind of fell in together, both just waiting for her return. I never had a lot in common with him, but three months of solitude in the wilds of rural Washington make for strange bedfellows, believe me. I was into the Smiths, the Cure, and Depeche Mode. He liked Steve Miller Band and the Doors. He had brown hair almost to his shoulders and seemed like the living embodiment of Shaggy from Scooby Doo. One citified kid, a stranger in a strange land, thrown in with a hippie stoner behind the locked doors of a tragedy factory. What could possibly go wrong?

Chalon got the news of Wanda’s death at work. It’s funny how seeing someone you love somewhere they don’t belong can immediately fill you with dread. His mom showed up while we were sitting at the ersatz break table on the loading dock. It was really just a discarded wooden spool from a high-voltage line roll, but with a couple of crates to sit on, it made for an OK place to catch a smoke out of the view of the powers that be. Plus we could keep an eye on all the cute CNA’s that came by. I happened to be looking at Chalon as he caught sight of his mom approaching from the parking lot, and saw the change that came over him. He knew something was wrong before she even spoke. When she said, “It’s Wanda,” he disintegrated instantly, his whole world over. I’d known him for four days.

Circumstances kind of dictated the strange sequence of events that put me in Chalon’s house listening to “Riders on the Storm” in the gloaming of October 31, 1991. There’s a set protocol of events that kicks into gear when someone dies in a single car accident. Questions to be asked and answered, tests to be run. It’s not like a heart attack or falling off the roof. It might be drunk driving, it might be suicide, who knows? And you can’t bury the body until there are some reasonable answers. Turns out her friend, the driver, had simply fallen asleep and driven them into a tree. Which constitutes a reasonable answer, I guess, and so it came to be that by the conclusion of these inquiries Wanda Rose was buried on Halloween Day. There are no good days to bury your child, your sweetheart, or your only friend. But there are worse days. 

Halloween has got to take the cake. Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. All of his friends and hers came to the funeral, and then every single one of them had somewhere else to be. Life goes on. After all, it wasn’t just any Thursday. It's Dia de los Muertos, man. Got my best suit and my tie, a shiny silver dollar on either eye. So off they went, and there I stayed, having inherited Chalon and his grief, bequeathed to me by Wanda Rose as the vig on the loan of her friendship for the six weeks I’d been sustained by it. I try to be a stand-up guy, but even when I’m not, I never forget the debts I owe. So I drove Chalon home to his parent’s house on the edge of the Suquamish Reservation.

It overlooked Puget Sound and took advantage of the view with floor-to-ceiling windows on one full wall of the house. I remember thinking that the water was the exact same gray as the clouds that day, and then grasping for the first time that the color of the sea is a reflection of the sky. It had never occurred to me until the moment I saw them meet at the iron gray horizon-line out those windows. So I sat there as an ambassador from the faraway Land of Decency where one's friends—not virtual strangers—bore burdens like this, prepared to console a dude I'd known for forty cumulative working hours, total. How, I knew not. Chalon cued up a CD from the stack Wanda Rose had left behind.

Puget Sound, as seen from the Suquamish Reservation

“Into this house we're born

Into this world we're thrown

Like a dog without a bone

An actor out on loan

Riders on the storm”

Then Chalon offered me a hit off his joint.

I’d seen him roll a joint before, but never smoke one. I’d grown up in LA and been offered it tons of times, but had never touched the stuff. I politely demurred, assuring him that I understood and didn’t care if he smoked. Who could blame the poor bastard? But he was plaintive in his desire to not be alone. Not in anything. So I did it. Out of pity, or empathy, or some shit like that. Hell, maybe it was just curiosity. Either way, who could blame me? Having come unmoored from every touchstone of my life, I was through the looking-glass and adrift in a world I hadn’t dreamed existed. One where I was a hated minority, a pariah mopping up sewage in a filing cabinet where people stored their loved ones while they waited for them to die in slow motion. So hell yeah, I hit that thing.

Nothing happened. 

We toked it all the way down together. It was small and twisted up pretty tight. I had no idea at the time, but it was a pretty pathetic joint. Tiny, desiccated, and full of seeds. It tasted like a mixture of coffee grounds, skunky German beer, and ashes. My throat felt like I’d gargled with a mouthful of burning gravel. I wouldn’t have thought my lungs could tell the difference between pot smoke and LA smog. They could, though. I knew I’d stepped off the straight and narrow, and had the vague sense that I should feel bad about it. I didn’t, though. I wasn’t really sure what to feel, but I definitely did not feel high. If I’d stopped there, I might be a psychologist today. I’m not, though. Because it worked the next time I tried it, which was fifty-seven days later when I had exactly one more friend.

2,171 days after that, I was sitting on a bench in a marginal part of a crappy town, contemplating what it meant that a drug dealer thought I had a substance-abuse problem. Could it be that no one thinks it’s normal to be high literally twenty-four hours a day for years on end? Maybe not everyone who smokes pot has a bong hit before their feet hit the floor in the morning? Or for that matter, when they wake up to take a piss in the middle of the night, lest they be conscious for even one second of the day in an accidentally sober state. 

Looking back over the previous seven years, there was virtually no sobriety in there. I mean sure, sometimes I ran out. Once or twice I went for a week, just to prove I could. Though it’s way easier to do that when you’ve got a finish line in sight; I always went right up to the minute I had set for myself, and not a second longer. Not. One. Second. I would smoke out at 12:01 AM, having fulfilled my contract to the letter. By and large it was pretty much one long, uninterrupted bender. One that had begun when I was twenty and was still in wall-to-wall effect at twenty-seven.

Assuming you’ve passed that window of years, think of the changes that occurred in that time. Finished school, got your first serious job? Got engaged, got married? Maybe you even had kids. Now imagine it passing as a slow-motion hallucination where none of those things happened. They say pot is a gateway drug, and sometimes it is. I think it most often leads to a life of sweatpants, Cheeto-dust on everything you own, and a perennially lost TV remote. But for me, it lead to Mushrooms, Acid, Benzos and other miscellaneous pharmacological cocktails of opportunity, Coke, and Crank. Not that much of the last two, as I’m not fond of post nasal drip, but plenty of the rest.

There was a lot of water under the bridge in that seven years. And by “water under the bridge," I mean felonies. It’s probably foolish to enumerate them here, especially since I don’t want to burden my attorney and law enforcement friends with some kind of responsibility to drop dime on me. I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has passed on most of them, but who knows? Suffice it to say, I’ve spent at least ten fewer years under correctional supervision than I deserve, and probably more. A couple of times owing to a police officer with a sinus infection, or one that didn’t crane his neck three degrees further to his right, and so missed the incriminating evidence by inches.

It’s preposterous how many raindrops I tiptoed between without getting wet. I’d lied, stolen, cheated and engaged in questionable accounting practices. And I wasn’t even running for office. Eventually I even found myself on the business end of some nut-job's shotgun. And while that did prompt some serious thought as to my career choices, it never even touched my habit.

A college education up in flames. Literally.

Some people wake up in a gutter, a jail cell, or a hospital and have their moment. Some people come home to a semicircle of their friends, family, and coworkers and find themselves ambushed by love. My moment came on a home-made bench at 2276 N. 8th St, in Springfield, Oregon. Minding my own business, watching the sunset on a surprisingly temperate evening on Saturday, February 7, 1998, at 5:22 PM. Feeling a nice lassitude brought on by the end of a long trip, and thinking to myself that I should arrange for the procurement of my next ounce. Not thinking at all about the reality of chucking another $100 onto the pyre of $38,400 that I’d already burned through in the previous seven years. The facts never even entered into my thought process. But as I was considering whom I would call and when, I had a moment of interior voice-over like the kind Morgan Freeman would read in the movies. 

It simply said, “No. You’re done.” 

In response, I said aloud, “You know? I think I am.”

That was fifteen twenty-two years ago today. The end of a long trip, indeed.

Two months later I was living on my own, clean and sober. I didn’t make a deal out of it. Most of my friends were recreational users, and I only mentioned the change if they asked about it, which wasn’t until they noticed, weeks later. We still hung out; I still passed the bong to next guy when it came my way. This isn’t a sermon; I’m not even morally qualified to deliver one. It’s just my story. To this day, I’d estimate that half of my friends use recreationally, including the two guys who got me to consider that I might have a problem. I did, but they don’t. I can tell the difference between an actual problem and something that is simply a problem for me. 

I’ve thought many times over the last fifteen years about why I reached out and took the hand that Grace offered me. I think in the end, I decided that I wasn’t lazy enough to continue on like I was going. Because the reason I gravitated toward the kind of drugs that I did—the ones that impose meaning and create connections between all things, whether real or imagined—is that I’ve always wanted the world to feel a certain way. For there to be a thread of logic, order, and maybe even redemption running through the sea of chaos we’re adrift in. Not to make sense of it all, per se. Simplistic dogma and bumper sticker philosophies are of no use to me. I just wanted to believe that the vast machine that turns the quantum clockworks, whose intricacies and mechanisms I could never hope to grasp, might occasionally tell me the time of day. Pot especially made me feel that it would, and that it did. But there on Michael’s bench, I started to think that it might actually be that way already, all on its own, and I didn’t need to help it out anymore. Maybe I could look at the world and find my way without the assistance of those kinds of shortcuts. So I decided to try. More to the point, I took up the dare that was put in front of me. 

In that fifteen years, there have been three occasions when opportunity, conditions, and temptation all came a callin’ together; when there would be no one to see or care, and no consequences. And for several very long moments I actually forgot what it took to get me here. The last one was in August of 2009, when I’d already been sober for more than eleven years. Like Carlin said, “Just ‘cause the monkey’s off your back, don’t mean the circus has left town.” 

That’s the thing. The Circus never leaves town. 

I didn’t twelve-step it, though I have a lot of empathy and respect for those that work the program. As with so many cycles of the blunder-to-consequence-to-rescue scenario that have run through my life, I took the hand that was held out to me and was pulled through by something that has treated me with ridiculous care and protection all of my days. From car accidents, to drunken walks through Crip territory in LA, to riding 2nd story ladders all the way to the ground, all with nary a scratch. I’m embarrassed sometimes when I consider how many people have not been so fortunate. Better people than me. They do get arrested, or disabled, or shot. They struggle every day of their lives to stay sober. 

I have no lamentations of which to speak. I may not be a psychologist like Mom wanted, and I’m nowhere near as good at math as I used to be. Brain cells do not breed in captivity. When they’re gone, they’re gone. But I’ve been happily married nineteen years to the best person I’ve ever known, and I love my life. All because I followed the voice that said, “Come with me if you want to live.” Gratitude is all I have to offer.

“Grace has brought me safe thus far, and Grace will lead me home.”

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.