Naked (23 page)

“It’s jade!” The man’s eyes sparkled. “And I’ve got plenty more where this came from. It may not be the highest quality, but
still, it’s enough to make me a rich man ten times over if I don’t mess up and start drinking again, knock on wood.” He sat
down and rapped his knuckles against his knees, producing a hollow sound.

I was dumbstruck.

“You want to knock wood? Go ahead, take your pick. One leg’s just as good as the other. He hitched up his trousers, revealing
sleek, putty-colored calves. “They’re not real wood, I was just pulling your leg. Ha! How do you like that one! No, they’re
plastic and they’re all mine and you can’t have ’em.” He grabbed his knees in a mock gesture of defensiveness.

The man was clearly some sort of a lunatic, not unlike many of the other people who had picked me up hitchhiking, but I knew
for a fact that if it came down to it, I’d be able to outrun him. Perhaps that’s why I stayed and listened as he spoke about
the many years he’d spent in Alaska. It was one of those places I wouldn’t dream of going. My childhood fantasies of polar
bears and smiling Eskimos chasing one another across the frozen tundra had been shattered by magazine articles picturing hardscrabble
towns where bearded men arm-wrestled over mail-order brides beneath the harsh midnight sun. If that was the last frontier,
they were more than welcome to it.

After his first marriage broke up, Jon traveled to Fairbanks in search of fortune. “But the only gold I found was swirling
around the bottom of a bottle.” He lost his left leg when his car overturned, pinning him against a tree. Its partner had
been amputated some months later because of gangrene. It was the pockets of air caught between the prostheses and the stumps
that created the farting noises whenever he walked.

“So there I was. My legs were yesterday’s news but I still had my hands, and that’s all it took to reach for that bottle.
Yes, indeed, the best medicine in the world is made by a fellow who goes by the name of Jim Beam. I was just a dried-up pill,
nothing to do but get drunk and feel sorry for myself. And that’s what I did until I met a man who told me I could walk tall
even without a pair of stinking feet. A man I happened to meet by accident in the crowded hallway of a VA hospital. A man
named Jesus Christ. He happened to be a close personal friend of my wife’s and thought the two of us should meet. Oh, she
wasn’t my wife at the time, just another cute nurse with a great set of tits and an ass a man could get lost in. Jesus brought
us together. Then he told us to get married and hightail it the fuck out of Alaska, and that’s just what we did.”

The jade was picked up later, somewhere in Washington State, where he also learned to cut and polish. “That’s where the skill
comes in,” he said. “Take a look at this rock, it’s nothing, right? Just a dusty hunk of nothing.” Jon stood on his artificial
feet. “Now, take a look at this!” He lifted a sheet off a nearby table, revealing a half dozen brightly polished slabs of
jade fashioned into timepieces, the battery-powered minute hands jerking past blobs of gold paint used to represent numbers.

“What is it?” he asked, holding up one of the larger models.

“A clock?”

“Well of course it’s a clock, but what else? What’s it shaped like?”

I tried to make sense of it but the best I came up with was a slice of bread, its corners chewed away by ants or mice.

“It’s
Oregon,
dummy. Everyone knows the shape of Oregon. Maybe you haven’t spent much time here, but that’s still no excuse. The yokels
in this town are going to snatch these babies up like you’ve never seen! I’m charging a hundred bucks a pop, which is nothing
compared to what some of these jokers are getting for their wildlife paintings. What with Christmas right around the corner,
I’ve got to get cracking and start churning these suckers out, and you know something?
You’re
going to help me!”

The moment he said it, I knew he was right. Opportunity had presented itself, and I saw no reason not to run with it.

It was Jon’s habit to begin each workday with a prayer. “Am I the only person in this room?” he’d ask. “My pal Jesus is looking
down here saying, ‘I know that’s Jon, but who’s that puddin’head with the stupid smirk on his face?’ Hurry up now, get down
on that floor and act grateful you’ve got the knees to bend on.”

After I had assumed the position, he could commence. “Hi there, Lord. It’s me again, your old buddy Jon. If it’s not too much
to ask, I’d like you to keep an eye on this disrespectful mutt I’ve got working for me. Let me be patient and try my best
to teach him about you and this precious jade you’ve given me. And hey, thanks for the coffee, but do you have any sugar?
HA!”

“You can joke with the Lord,” he said one morning, removing his right leg to apply ointment to the bandaged stump. “Hey, up
there. I sure hope nobody takes me to court. I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. HA!”

The religious instruction was delivered with a charm that quickly faded once it was time to begin work. The jade was sliced
upon a pressurized saw equipped with a hose that prevented the blade from overheating. Jon cut the rock into slices, and it
was my job to sand them, using a variety of graded discs that fit upon a rapidly spinning wheel. Once they were smooth, I
would polish the quarter-inch-thick slices against a rotating leather belt. The friction generated a fair amount of heat,
and despite the gloves, I would occasionally let go of an advanced piece, sending it shattering onto the floor.

“You stupid, clumsy jackass,” Jon would shout, pounding his canes against the table. “Do you know how much work went into
that piece? You goddamned silly mutt!” Having exhausted me, he would take his case to the heavens. “Hey, Lord, why are you
treating me this way? Is this some kind of a test? Did you send me this butterfingered fuckup in order to teach me a lesson?
What did I do to deserve this stinking shit?”

The door leading from the basement to the first floor would open and a woman would poke her head over the banister. “Brother
Jon, is there a problem?”

“Oh, I’ve got a problem all right. This son of a bitch just dropped four hours’ worth of backbreaking work on the fucking
floor.
That’s
my goddamned problem.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” the woman would say, covering the ears of her five-year-old daughter.

This scenario repeated itself until the day the child addressed her mother as “shithead,” and it was suggested that Jon might
want to find himself a more secluded workshop.

“Get the equipment into the car,” he said. “We’re clearing out of this rat’s nest.”

He found another studio, a former beauty salon located on the outskirts of town. We moved the machinery in the morning, and
by afternoon he was back to tracing the shape of Oregon onto the slabs of polished jade and cutting them on his jigsaw. Quite
often during the course of our workday, we were interrupted by members of Jon’s church who popped in to see how we were getting
along.

“Pete, Kimberly, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll let you have one of these clocks for seventy-five dollars. Don’t
try to talk me out of it, this is the Lord’s discount, not mine. I… what was that?” He’d look toward the ceiling, cupping
his hands to his ears as if trying to decipher information from a distant, crackling speaker. “What? OK, if you say so.” Turning
back to his company, he’d shrug his shoulders. “The Lord told me to throw in the batteries while I’m at it. What do you say?
Seventy-five dollars.”

Whether he was speaking to Phil and Dotty Frost, Walter and Linda Tuffy, Hank and June Staples, the Mangums, the Stenzels,
or the Clearwaters, the response was always the same. “We appreciate the offer, Brother Jon, but I’m afraid that’s a bit out
of our price range.”

“I’ll let you have it on a payment plan, how’s that?”

His fellow parishioners would chuckle, trying not to meet his eyes. “We’d love to take you up on that, we really would, but
the bank’s already got us on more payment plans than we can handle.”

“Fucking cheapskates.” Jon would stand at the window, waving as the visitors pulled out of the driveway. “Hey, Lord, why’d
you send me these cheap, good-for-nothing friends?”

Until the age of seventeen I had been forced to attend the Holy Trinity Orthodox Church. The service was delivered in Greek
by a robed priest and involved endless rounds of standing, sitting, and kneeling. Every few hours the altar boys would roam
the aisles with smoldering tankards of incense, and one by one the congregation, woozy from fasting, would drop like flies.
Because I could never understand what was being said, I formed an idea of a God who wasn’t judgmental, just painfully boring.
Christ was a mystery to me, and Jon and his friends were eager to fill in the blanks. There were days when I would leave work
convinced that there was a five-hundred-dollar reward for the first person who could dunk my head into the nearest river or
plastic baptismal pool. I was a lump of unformed clay surrounded by a guild of willing sculptors. These people were the only
contact I had outside of the men and women who picked me up hitchhiking back and forth to work every day. I’d arrive at the
shop, listen to Christian radio, get blessed out by Jon and blessed back in by his visiting friends and neighbors. It was
like being sent to a foreign country to be immersed in a language that somehow, over time, became your own.

“Peace be with you, brethren,” “You know what they say in John thirteen,” “The King is coming!” I fought it like crazy, but
my only alternative was talking to nobody. I’d tried that already and had wound up lecturing to cows until the farmer told
me I was ruining their digestion. This God was someone I wound up turning over and over in my mind each night as I returned
to my increasingly cold trailer. Was He punishing me with this meal or was He rewarding me? Did He actively watch me or take
me for granted like a fish you don’t notice until it’s floating on the surface of the tank?

With a newfound spirit of forgiveness I wrote my friends ten- and fifteen-page letters, and again, they never responded. They
couldn’t manage to send a postcard while here all these people — the Halbergs, the Cobblestones, Sam and Charlotte Shelton
— had mailed invitations asking me to join them for Thanksgiving dinner. When I declined, some people had taken it upon themselves
to deliver a turkey to my trailer door. Unfortunately, the offering was decorated with slices of canned pineapple, but still,
they’d made an effort. The gift embarrassed me, and so did the others. I found myself ducking into the bedroom several times
that day. A car would pull up and I’d run into the other room, pretending I wasn’t home. I was shamed by their goodwill and
mortified by their cooking. There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marsh-mallows.

“What did I tell you,” Jon said. “The best people in the world, and you’ve got them right in your own backyard. Did your friends
back home give you a basket of homemade stuffing? Did your folks bake you a marshmallow pie or a tray of crescent rolls? Of
course not! They could have, but they didn’t.” He walked to the window and shouted up at the sky, “Hey, Lord, in case this
numbskull hasn’t said it, thanks for the stuffing.”

From time to time during the course of the day, Jon would shut down his saw and turn to me saying, “I’ve got a friend who
wants to have a word with you. He says he’s been trying to reach you but you won’t take his calls.”

“Well, it’s hard, seeing as I don’t have a phone.”

“Don’t need one. This guy speaks straight to the heart. Why don’t you talk to him? What have you got to lose, happiness? You’re
not happy now, I can tell you that much. You’re searching in the weeds for something you’ve got right under your snotty little
nose. You’ve got to
reach
for the joy! It’s not going to drop into your lap, ya stupid nitwit, you have to
ask
for it. That’s all you have to do, is ask.”

My trailer had water but it wasn’t hot. Since arriving, I had always boiled my bathwater, but by the last week in November
it had gotten so cold that the water assumed room temperature upon impact with the tub. My heating system consisted of a space
heater, the oven, and a toaster, none of which did any good unless I hovered directly over it. The warmest spot in the house
seemed to be the refrigerator. I went to bed fully dressed and removed my gloves only when bathing and scooping the change
from my pockets. Because the studio was heated, I took to spending more and more time there. Jon would leave at five, and
I would remain to sweep up and work on my own projects. The clocks did nothing for me, but the jade itself could be pretty
if it wasn’t polished to death. Jewelry was too fussy, and bookends seemed a waste of time. The thing to make, I decided,
was a stash box. Jon promoted his clocks as being both a needed object
and
a conversation piece. The problem was that you needed to be stoned in order to really talk about them. No one else was going
to sit around and appreciate the fact that at three o’clock the hands fell on the cities of Eugene and Arlington. Stash boxes
were the supplement that would make these clocks bearable. They needed to be simple yet charming. Not so elegant that guests
would reach for them and not so luxurious that the owners would be reminded of all the other nice things they might own if
only they didn’t spend all their money on drugs.

There were nights when I’d work until midnight and sleep on the cot Jon kept folded in the back of the studio. Just before
dawn I would wake, muddled and wondering where I was. “Go back to sleep,” a voice would say. “You’re in a former beauty salon
surrounded by battery-operated clocks. It’s nothing to worry about.” Was it God talking?

I’d always thought of my life in terms of luck, but what if there was someone actually in charge of our destiny? What if all
our plans amounted to nothing? Think of the guy who trains all his life for the Olympics and steps on a nail the day before
the competition. What about all those perfectly nice, hardworking people who lose their homes to floods and fire? I listened
to a woman on the radio. Burns covered eighty percent of her body. “The Lord doesn’t send us any more than we can bear,” she
said. Like Jon, she didn’t seem bitter about her situation, far from it. She sounded practically ecstatic, her voice so high
and melodic that I thought she might burst into song. “God doesn’t close one door without opening another.” Was this peace,
this total trust and surrender? Because I was lazy, I’d adopted the philosophy that things just happen. It was much easier
to blame others than it was to take initiative. Was it accidental that Jon had picked me up hitch-hiking just when I’d thought
of returning home? Could I have been sent by a higher power to this small town? Had the Lord arranged for me to make stash
boxes?