Clearly Now, the Rain (10 page)

Twelve

While I spent a nervous New Year's Eve with a gaggle of friends in the mountains, snowball battling around a massive bonfire, wondering if the specter of Y
2
K was ripping anarchic holes in the world, Serala sat in the psychiatric ward of a Connecticut hospital. I got her on the pay phone they provided once an hour.

You think you can do it?
I ask her, inanely, incapable of the toss-off humor I know she probably needs. Serala sighs or exhales smoke—sounds the same.

I couldn't, Eli, that's why I'm here
.
Do you think I'd have done this to my momma if I could have helped it? Do you think I'm that awful?
Her tone is edgy and she's treating me like I'm stupid. Although it was a stupid question, I don't appreciate it—I haven't thrown any guilt at her. She seems to realize this.
I can do it.
Okay? Now I have to. There's no choice—I'm living like a fugitive now, I know. Gotta be good. Get off early with good behavior.

Yeah
, I say.
Good luck being good.
And I earn a small laugh, which relieves me. A schizophrenic, going berserk, hurls a chair across the room, apparently not missing her by much, but her tone doesn't reflect this as she reports it. Then there's silence, except for the general lunacy of the ward at war behind her.

Eli
,
how do you unchoose to die?

Before I have to answer, she is called to take her medication.

In the first days of the millennium, finding the world disappointingly unscathed, I had to assume that the Department of Corrections' computer systems were up and humming. My small-town lawyer had been telling me for months:
Best case scenario, Eli, you plead to the marijuana and don't even have to show up here. Worst case, you gotta come out here and they'll hit you with a fine, time served, and lax probation
. But when I called him the afternoon of January 2, he didn't know what to say, because
it seems like they're gonna push the felony
and I had better head over in the morning. I was caught up in state politics: the residents of Grant County—which hosts the Gorge Amphitheatre—were fed up with city kids traipsing through for shows. They put pressure on the sheriff and prosecutor, both of whom happened to be running for reelection, to be hard. Hence the unheard of: pinning a felony on a kid for a half-dose of fungus.

The night before trial, I stood on the frozen porch of my mother's mountain house and looked out at the wide meadow multiplying and spreading the moon glow, as light as early dusk. I put on the Eagles'
Hotel California
, because it was the only cassette I could find in the dusty, disordered old house. I shivered, smoked, and drank two beers, telling myself I could handle whatever was coming if Serala could handle the return to her life. I thought about how, in a matter of twelve hours, we might both be locked up, fiercely lonesome in that way that only crowded jails and hospitals can make you.

The lazy lawyer tells me that if I fight the felony and lose, I'm looking at two or three months, plus serious probation, fines, and service when I get out. If I plead, I might get time served plus the same trimmings. When I ask the fat man through my clenched teeth what my chances are, he says

Oh, 'bout fifty-fifty.

I cop to the railroading job, and walk out of that courthouse a felon. It is the same day that Serala gets transferred home, back to the scene of her crime.

I see her standing gaunt and quiet in the doorway to her bedroom, the plastic hospital bracelet still looped on her tiny wrist, her skin dry and ashy, and hair heavy with grease. The linoleum of the floor is so clean it shines, nothing to suggest a warm corpse staring up at the doorway as hers would have at her mother. Maybe she catches sight of her reflection in the window over her bed and sees that her mother is behind her, in the kitchen, watching. Maybe Serala imagines the cold metal in her mother's guts, the panic she has put there. Maybe she turns, catches her mother's eyes looking. Maybe Serala smiles as wide as she can before she turns away, to cheer her mom a little, to suggest the course that she knows she has to be on now: the up-and-up. Or maybe not. Maybe she just staggers to her bed and lies stiffly, like a corpse.

The next day, i ease my way down Stevens Pass through a wicked blizzard. I'm bound for the hospital where my father lies recuperating after his final major spinal surgery—to remove hardware screwed into his partially severed backbone. When I arrive he's already arguing painkillers with the doctor. The harried physician puts the prescription in my hands and tells me
not to respond to pressure from my dad.

I hold that position for less than a day. My father is in a fit about how few OxyContins he's been given. He spends a long afternoon haggling with his primary doctor over the phone. He has enough to zipper his agony—not to mention his mind—for weeks, but that's not enough security for him. I acquiesce, but not without some resentment.

When I throw out a snide remark concerning a mishap with his über-complex entertainment system, he snaps. We have it out like never before, even in the most dire of times: when he caught me lying and drug dealing at fifteen; when he married a horrible woman and let her run roughshod over his relationship with me and Luke. I'm pouring out all the nasty alterations in his personality, how “
everyone
is alarmed,” he's fighting back with all the defensiveness and denial he's not yet had reason to use against me. I unload the details of his addiction: the nodding off in restaurants, the slips in and out of reality, the weaving into the opposite lane driving, the stack of books that he's “reading” but truly hasn't yet started. He perches on the edge of the sofa, fitfully rearranging his agonized body, firing back with everything he has: that I don't understand a goddamn thing about it, that I'm selfish, that I'm trying to love him conditionally just like everyone else, that I don't respect him, that if I really knew how hard it was I'd be impressed that there was still a full clip in Grandpa's service revolver. And it's in that dark living room, beneath the wall of DVDs and vinyl, where Serala and he and I had felt easy with each other, working our way through old movies, that it hits me:
I have to love him precisely like I love her
. He's telling me that I should be proud that he hasn't ended his life; he's hinting that he might soon. He's telling me that I love him conditionally, like everyone else, that I judge him for the taking the only solution to his suffering.

It doesn't end in a long, firm, father/son embrace, sobbing, and pledging to fight through to some solution. He doesn't promise to quit and I don't promise to stand by his side. It doesn't end that way at all. I leave him there, curled on his bed, the pills and pistol in reach, an impossible distance in his eyes. I leave him there alone and partially helpless, in pain, depressed, and crippled, and addicted. I leave him there in unspeakable shame. I leave him there to go get drunk, carrying the same in me.

Serala is home and her family has no intention of letting her go far, not only out of fear but also because she is needed. In a compromise, she moves to Brooklyn and in no time at all, she is toiling hard at her father's advertising agency, leapfrogging by nepotism to near the top of the pyramid. Instantly capable, she earns the respect—and, in some cases, the fear—of everyone she deals with, from the office workers to big-shot clients. I imagine her swinging into this world with a yawn, writing computer programs and negotiating contracts like she's been doing it for years—instead of writing poems and making films.

It is already deep into March when she tells me she's coming out to Riverside for a weekend. Both of us are hoping we can turn the clock back, trick ourselves back to the better times in the Batcave, to the shiny promise of the American road ahead. But it's not that simple, of course, and there is a weariness to her visit, a slightly frayed quality, like our idea of how it should be has cycled too many times in our heads.

I think I tried to be the same. But when we returned to the Five Star, that formerly glorious dive, it felt dirtier, sicker—the reality dwarfing the charm. As the boozehounds and desperately drunk college kids swelled, we leaned into one another at the sticky counter.

Fuckin' place is ruined,
Serala says, and drops her Pall Mall to the floor when an ashtray doesn't present itself immediately. She lights another and catches my sideways look and forces a smile. Nothing has changed about the Five Star and she knows that.

I bet you're glad as hell to be through with this place, huh?
I ask, nodding out the windows to the smoggy sprawl and dying palms. But she just shrugs and points at her tumbler for another shot.

Only if by “this place” you mean the world, love.

And back goes the shot with a chaser of melodrama.

When we got in bed hours later and she moved close to me, the nausea I felt was not at her. It was at the image of waking up with her corpse. When I vomited it was not so much the booze and not at all her: it was her death come early to my chest in a half-dream born of whisky and dread.

She left early, as put off by me as by this whole world she had left behind. I watched her walk to a cab, only flipping a casual wave in farewell. Right there beside my ache at watching her vanish was a feather of relief, brushing it over.

I didn't speak to my brother Luke but once between September 1999 and May 2000. The exception was when I heard through our mother that one of his friends had died in the street, veins blown out by heroin. I'd gotten this news before Luke. But not much—he heard a rumor of it and called me from some point south and I told him it was true. He wept and I said nothing, because I can't go from angry words to words that have to be gentle enough for that. Instead, I told him I loved him and went and wrote a poem for that young, dead kid, who I'd spent some days with—a kid who had a bit of the same fetish for darkness as Serala.

When Luke appears on my front porch one night in early May and Kaya catches his scent and does one of her wild, charming freak-outs, we laugh. The freeway sings with Friday night in the distance and a Santa Ana gust shivers my brother's long, unkempt hair. The months of travel through Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and then Europe show not only in the wind and the sun treatment on his high cheekbones, but also in his eyes. In the way he looks at me is his alteration, and simultaneously the way I look back at him is changed. There's an open kindness I've never seen him aim at me. His presence says more than his words could: let's leave the trouble behind and know each other new.

You are shitty at keeping in touch and a mean big brother,
he says.

You are a spoiled, self-righteous little druggie,
I reply.

And he hugs me hard, like a man and not the kid I'd feared was in over his head, and I know that all of the conflict has indeed been squashed. Serala had counseled me once that sometimes you have to just
let shit drop
. At the time I'd said something about not sweeping things under the rug. She'd just shook her head, done explaining. That was the point: no explaining.

A wild and happy week of graduation hysteria followed, concluding with a nostalgia-driven affair between Mona and I, just in time for me to drive the golden coast north, home, away from her. I wound my truck through the spaghetti curves on the cliffs above the crashing California shore and sang along with Serala's mix tapes, belting lyrics out the window until Kaya, sitting shotgun, barked along with me. I stopped on deserted beaches and helped Kaya chase great, whirling clouds of seagulls up, against the sun, as if we were the wind.

Thirteen

In June, Serala finds a lull in her hectic corporate schedule and catches a flight out. I was mired in the numerous projects of my mom's mountain home. It was she, Hugh, and me, and we were all glad of that.

The sum total of their previous time together was probably less than a month, comprised entirely by Hugh's rambles through Riverside in his fire-red Ford Rocket. They shared a wordless peace and comfort, and asked hungrily after one another when I was the intermediary. It was Hugh's brother's suicide that had brought Serala close to me the first day I met her, so it certainly pulled the two of them together.

We spent a lot of time kicked back in the fetid cabin, which was just down the road from the proper mountain “house.” Hugh and I had turned it into a comfortable place: hand-carved easy chairs, ratty, soft old sofas, kerosene lamps, candles, and a hammock.

My father had given me Bob Dylan tickets for my birthday, so we headed off on a Saturday evening, back to the Gorge, despite my probation order to stay out of Grant County.

Dylan is opening for the leftover Grateful Dead. He plays some of my slow favorites—“Visions of Johanna,” “Girl From the North Country,” “Forever Young”—and we sit on the hill above the still-sparse crowd. He makes his rocking powerful; he is almost a young man, there, silhouetted against the bleeding sky on the lip of that canyon. When he strums and moves and bends double to blow through the harmonica, he commands healthy shadows, which slice across the dancing crowd.

When Dylan speeds it up and starts an energetic version of “House of the Rising Sun,” Hugh and I run and tumble down the hill to dance barefoot, like the hippies around us. And when he rocks his way into “Tangled Up in Blue,” I find there are tears leaking from my eyes and I feel better, higher than I have in as long as I can remember. I feel a part of Hugh and even a part of the dirty kids twirling around me, and a part of Dylan hunching over his guitar, jumping and strumming. When I look up at Serala, watching us from the hillside, above, I know she is with me—I know that the residual numb that has pried us apart since the winter and her “accident,” is done. And I know she is fighting a smile, disguising it with cigarettes. It's fair to say that during Dylan's set of my favorite songs, I permit myself the vice of hope for her once again, I let the ragged thing back into my heart because I have to, because I can't be so free in the embrace of that music if I don't.

When Dylan is done and the legions of Phish/Dead Heads rush forward like refugees on a relief convoy, we split. The cabin is waiting with wine in its lap.

I glance at a trio of sheriffs standing around their cars as we roll past, not recognizing any, luckily. When a black cat darts across the county road a few yards ahead, Hugh curses and skids to a halt next to an alfalfa field.

Fuck.
He puts his hand through his hair once. His fleshy, stubbled face sags a little and there is fatigue in his light eyes.
Oh well.

He starts to crank the wheel to U-turn. I grab his arm.

No, Hugh, it's okay, it's okay.

Hugh shakes me off. He knows my story of a crazy late night traffic stop that went badly just seconds after a black cat darted across the road. Between that and my current probation Hugh has apparently been converted to paranoia greater than my own. I argue with him anyway, not wanting to burn our time on the big detour loop to other highways. But Serala ends my protest.

Don't be stupid—no, no, shut up. What do you think? This is not a discussion.

As we turn back south, I realize that she doesn't even know the event that turned me—and Hugh—superstitious. But she doesn't need to. As we take the longer but more majestic ride back, driving directly into the finale of the high plain's sunset, the dregs of rose light fall through the glass. In the backseat, she hums with Tom Waits's melancholy. I think about what good friends both of them are to not even permit a discussion. And I think about how I sort of hope we might all end up in bed together tonight.

I find myself writing and slugging wine in the cabin the next afternoon. Serala's leaned against my shoulder, busy with her cigarettes and biting off the split ends off her hair. Hugh's outside banging his drum, I can see him through the dusty pane: muscled forearms blazing, a cigarette dangling from his lip, an angry, tight rhythm shivering the air. As her weight leans into me more and more by the moment, I'm dreaming that I feel contentment rising in her. She has, for the first time in a while, brought me peace with this visit. My
tough as nails
best friend seems to be standing tall again, as if there had never been any faltering or earnest attempt to ditch life. It feels so good.

So Serala flew back to her corporate life and I was still bumping along with my summer of manual labor and bad writing.

When she described more ECT and psychotropic drugs I responded with rants against the medical establishment, asinine lobbying about how she should refuse it. When she needed my stable presence at her back, I was a chattering dasher along the sidelines, sending her Albert Camus quotes and manifestos on how Nader was going to make the world better (
so, hey, if you can manage, don't die
).

Meanwhile, in an inverse world, she was doing what she could, and she was clear about it: sleeping with strangers, shooting and snorting (
like a horse and a cowgirl
), drinking a ton, hanging out late nights with a big-shot rapper and one of his trumpet players. She was living, she said quite clearly, out of spite. Humoring teams of doctors and running a business by day, living hard by night. I had the audacity to ask her in one of my diatribes to live
despite
instead of
in spite,
okay?

Come October, I moved into the basement of a friend's house in the city, got a construction gig, and began assembling portfolios of seriously flawed writing for grad school applications. I got myself dismissed early from probation, which immediately caused me to plan to leave America in January with an old friend for a few months of adventure. Serala took in my bastard poems and was severe but kind; I have no doubt that the one poetry program that accepted me was because of her pen.

I lobbed emails to Serala from the haunted streets of Nicaragua; the grimy heart of San Jose, Costa Rica; from the postcard calypso beaches of Panamanian islands; once again from the Old World heights of Mérida, Venezuela; from the overwhelming magic of Cuba; from the freezing, culture-shocked carnival streets of Amsterdam. I wrote from Paris, where I slept too much on the couch of an old friend, and thought of Serala's restlessness, and walked the drizzly streets feeling strange; from Spain where I spent only one night with a wickedly attractive Spanish friend of my brother's who damn near stole my heart (and now she has, but that's a story for another time); from drab, unremarkable days of London where Luke was living his raucous college life.

In the U.K., two plans were born that secured my passage back to real life.

One: got word that I'd been accepted to the MFA program at University of North Carolina Wilmington and that I'd been given a position as a graduate teaching assistant. Given that I had nothing resembling teaching experience, understood few conventions of grammar, and my BA was in International Relations, I was pleasantly shocked by this.

Two: Serala told me that she would give me a ride—a ride from JFK International Airport to Mona's house in Los Angeles. Mona's house: where I would finally “give it a try” with her, a proposition unduly sweetened by the exotic distances between us and the inevitable homesickness I suffer. If Serala had any misgivings about driving me three thousand miles to Mona's clutches, she didn't give any indication of it at the time.

I clear customs in New York. They wave me through without so much as a glance at my passport, which is disappointing as I have so many stamps to show off. When I get to baggage claim, the May light slamming the white-tiled room, I wince into the glare and see Serala—and none other than Monty at her side. It was, of course, not dramatic; I knew that they were in the midst of a streaky affair. I think that he even hugged me, but I was relieved when we dropped him at the next terminal for an outbound flight. This time across the country was for us.

That afternoon we rode through Midtown, managing to get lost on the way to Brooklyn. We played our way through the music we'd both accumulated over the months. The virile sun dropped in a square through the sunroof and she didn't shut it as she usually would have. She even reached up and opened it wider, and I touched her cheek lightly for a moment. She leaned into my hand and looked up at me, then got nervous and screeched out of the terminal. We smoked and smiled, held hands, and did not talk much. There was so little that needed to be said. We both knew that my rambling across a third of the world and what I'd witnessed in the course of it made us closer. I felt the pleasant soaring that I'd felt the first time she touched me in a drab dorm five years before.

There were still three weeks to come until I closed the most massive loop of my life and returned to Seattle, but that afternoon my feeling was one of coming home, distinctly.