The Nirvana Blues (15 page)

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“Suit yourself. It's your funeral.”

One deep breath later, Joe twisted the key. He elicited a glare from the dashboard's red and green lights, but only a
click!
from the starter. Cursing softly, he climbed into the back seat for his tools, then crawled underneath the bus and touched pliers handles to wire-connection points on the solenoid attached to the starter. Something gave a fluttering
clack!
in there, and dirt fell in his eye. He snarled and spent five minutes trying to knuckle away the pain.

Ralph's feet and Rimpoche's paws appeared at the edge of his car: “Everything all right under there?” Ralph queried imperiously.

“No thanks to you.”

“Well, I'm going home. I need a float. You got me all tense in there.”

“Bon voyage, bunghole.”

But he had forgotten his change. Making a Dracula face as he cackled “the Master of the False Exit strikes again!,” Joe slumped ashamedly back into the Prince of Whales and took—without a word—the seven dollars Darlene offered.

“What happened to your eye, Joe—you got punched?”

Ignoring her, he headed for the door.

“One other thing,” she called after him.

Joe stopped in his tracks, but didn't turn around. Instead, he hunched up his shoulders and grimaced, like a man expecting an arrow to tunk between his shoulder blades.

“Tribby Gordon just called, looking for you. He says it's urgent you get back right away.”

“Did he say what about?”

“He said he heard that your friend was on the Trailways bus last night when it was hijacked and dumped into the Rio Grande with all passengers aboard. He wanted to know if your friend was really in the intensive-care ward at the Our Lady of the Sorrows Hospital undergoing surgery to replace a severed hand.”

“Ha ha, Darlene. You're a million laughs.”

“He was
serious!
”

The door banged behind him. For some strange reason—his psychic powers were functioning—Joe thought to check under the vehicle's right rear wheel, and sure enough, his abandoned pliers lay there. With a stifled growl, he snatched them up.

Shifting gingerly, depressing and releasing the clutch with delicate finesse (his throw-out bearing was almost gone), Joe muttered, “The light forces of Innocence and Righteousness triumph over the dark forces of Devious Technology yet once again,” and steered his car out of the plaza, heading west.

“Oh damn!”

He had left his papers in the café. But on second thought, the oversight was probably a blessing in disguise. For no doubt the headlines he'd been too preoccupied to check out declared:

CHAMISAVILLE DRUG FIEND RAPES HANUMAN GROUPIE
!
STATEWIDE MANHUNT PROCLAIMED
!

*   *   *

T
HOUGH A
Chamisaville resident for only three years, the changes Joe had observed along Route 240 during his brief sojourn were stunning. A new house went up every day. Back when electricity entered the Pueblo and construction began on Joseph Bonatelli's dog-racing track and Ya-Ta-Hey Hotel complex, land in Chamisaville had been going for two thousand an acre. Now it had skyrocketed to nine, ten, sometimes fifteen grand an acre, with no end in sight. New houses, built exclusively by valley newcomers, inevitably combined the ridiculous and the sublime.

Old-style adobes, favored by Spanish-speaking valley denizens, had been solid, flat-roofed, one-story dwellings, so simple they seemed logical extensions of the earth. Unobtrusive, beautiful, and architecturally similar, for centuries their unpretentious sameness had added to the valley's feeling of community. In contrast, the new houses were explosions of individual expression gone awry. Every house was unique, an extension (call it a flaunting) of its owner's implacable ego. The design idiosyncrasies of each dwelling slobbered all over themselves. If fabricated of adobe, that mud was sculpted in Gaudiesque driblets. Ramparts, scaffolds, and turrets abounded. At every turn were corbels and arches and cantilevered patios, pyramids and towers ad infinitum. Enormous picture windows framed cinemascopic and panavistic views of Hija Negrita, the sacred mountain. Greenhouses proliferated like rabbits fed a diet of oysters and ginseng; banks of solar collectors reached toward the blistering sky. Bubble skylights let light stream into bathrooms where tubs were sunk into terrariums of banana trees, goo-goo vines, and pot plants. Two- and three-story frame houses shot toward the heavens like skyscraperitos, their flanks paneled with redwood, their roofs sheathed in Mediterranean-orange terra-cotta. Sky-lit and glass-sided studios seemed to stand on stems no sturdier than those supporting crystal champagne glasses. Behind beautiful stained-glass windows, you could see endless arrays of gourd-shaped flowerpots clutched in the folds of elaborate macrame Oriole nests. No staircase ever proceeded from point A to point B in a straight line: each one spiraled upward from the living room to the sleeping loft, or zigzagged from behind the organic banco in the sunken kitchen up to the second floor, from which a ladder rose to the staggered third floor, all the rooms modularly disposed to create separate but attached living quarters (guard that privacy, folks!), much like the nesting habits of paraplegic baboons.

In some of the old valley houses, residents had decorated their ceilings with splintered cedar or aspen branches, known as latias, lodged in a herringbone pattern. More often they had simply laid boards across their viga rafters and heaped on the dirt and tar paper. But in the new houses, craftspeople went berserk with latias, graduating from herringbone patterns to complex hexoglyphic designs of positively gaga spiritual significance. The old houses had been heated by wood, or by cheap butane heaters. In the new houses, solar technology ran rampant. Fireplaces were sculpted with Daliesque wit and intricacy, so crammed with nichos, and so inlaid with colorful stones and tiles (and hung with corn or chile ristras), that they resembled space-capsule cones in which mere burning logs would have seemed trite, if not downright nonsensical. Others installed superexpensive electric heating to go with their 26-inch color-perfect cableized TV consoles. A few people bought up old radiators in Colorado resort-hotel auctions, installing them in their modern houses. Daily, trucks, piloted by enterprising ex-advertising consultants, left Chamisaville to scour the Southwest, buying up collapsing old barns for a song, tearing them apart, and trucking them back home, where, as highly prized paneling—oh, that weathered look!—they could bring as much as sixty cents a board-foot, nearly three times the going price of finished lumber.

Steam rising from countless hot tubs seemed like emissions from myriad chubby little factories. There were swimming pools, too, and saunas, and Jacuzzis. And several dozen private tennis and paddle-ball courts.

Joe himself had dreams of doing his own house in some elaborate, farfetched style that was a “uniquely viable habitat” to go with the “aesthetic living” demands of himself, Heidi, Michael, and Heather. Yet occasionally, right in the middle of a reverie about pyramids, hexagons, A-frames, domettes, U-curves, rounded or mansard windows, sunken tubs and saunas, his balloon would suddenly pop, making him feel like a fool. Then he'd sit down and draw a one-story L-shaped house, such as they had been building for centuries in the valley before the newcomers arrived and instituted their architectural carnival.

Of course, wherever no elaborate dwelling punctuated the drawn-and-quartered fields on the way home, a simple white tipi extended its lovely inverted cone of slender aspen pole-tips toward the smiling bourgeois sky. It had been hundreds of years since local Native Americans had last bedded down in these smoky domiciles. Hence, the kooks inhabiting the dozens of tipis along 240 between the plaza and Joe's current lodgings were: a onetime Oklahoma DA turned jewelry czar, a potter with an NYU master's in child psychology, a former stock analyst with Bache and Company, a reflexologist who used to be a teller in the San Diego branch of the Bank of America, an ex-presidential financial adviser (under Gerald Ford), a onetime speech writer for Billy Graham, two ex-Moonies, and a female industrial nutritionist turned born-again plumber, who also did sexual massages for a privileged few (and much hard cash).

Squat beehive-shaped adobe sweat lodges next to the tipis were kept going day and night.

Occasionally, Joe felt bewildered and disheartened by the relentless development. Pizzafication, urbanization,
cutification!
What was the point to domes made of bottles or beer cans, or to family rooms fabricated from five hundred old tires? It was all too pat, too self-indulgent. Everybody was fleeing urban jungles and mind-fucking occupations to create a new life and a simpler life. Instead, they were trampling down the vineyards where the grapes of tranquillity had been stored, boldly and idiotically polluting the landscape with aesthetically relevant bullshit, and in the process re-creating only a semicamouflaged image of the pernicious complexity they had hoped to escape.

Then again, Joe saw Chamisaville as his first real chance in life to create around himself and his little family a humane and compassionate ambience, something low-key, unexploitive, articulate, and (coincidentally) comfortable. A life with access to reason. Then Chamisaville could be a rainbow, a magic valley.

Joe beeped at Dr. Phil Horney and his wife, Gretchen, the head of Sköl Realty: she had arranged the deal with Eloy Irribarren. Phil had recently taken Joe off Tedral and put him on Aminodur; the Tedral had given him hot flashes, cold sweats, and fainting spots before his eyes. They (the Horneys) wore matching forest-green headbands, sunflower-yellow jogging suits, and white Adidas with slanted maroon stripes. Joe waved, they returned the salutation. Aloud, though not so they could have heard him, Joe said, “Someday, you turkeys, I'll swerve and flatten an unsuspecting jogger, and I'm gonna run back and forth over the carcass until it's just a mangled splash of plum purple or cobalt blue against the asphalt of this bumpy road.”

He was exhausted, and frightened. What had happened to Peter? How should he act with Heidi, what could he say? Confronted by this dilemma, did a man lie his head off, or tell the truth, hoping for mercy? Already, the whole town knew of his infidelity—how could he keep it from Heidi? And what about Nancy Ryan? Would she leave him alone? Perhaps all she had wanted was a one-night stand. Did he dare hope? Joe hated her, he hoped never to see her again. She had lured him into it against his will. Christ, such diabolically clever creatures! He was terrified of them all. Was Nancy capable of blackmail? Joe wished he were back in the bar last night with a chance to play it differently. Why hadn't Peter gotten off that goddam bus? It was all
his
fault.

Out of nowhere a thing swelled up under his diaphragm, making him almost dizzy—a wave of pure, unadulterated lust for Nancy Ryan.

“Oh shit,” he moaned. “I'm just another cock, now, that went after just another cunt, now, in the screwing pool.”

Shame! Remorse! How come his sexual moves could be just as banal as everybody else's erotic gropings? He was an insult to his own intelligence and sensibility. One greedy misstep, and he'd brought himself down to the level of a
True Romance
magazine, or, to coat it in a bit of intellectual sugar, a John Updike novel.

Yet suppose this Nancy Ryan affair opened the floodgates, releasing him from his puritanical hang-ups? Off he'd gallop through the valley's Ready, Willing, and Able—forget the cynicism involved—pulchritude. Joe Miniver, Traveling Stud. “Yes ma'am, I certainly
do
make house calls.” He would cart his prick around in a fancy, velveteen-lined, fiber-glass carrying case, as if it were a pearl-inlaid custom-made, two-piece pool cue. Why not? His truck, like a plumber's jalopy, would be full of his sexual accoutrements. Whips, chains, dildos, leather outfits, rubber scuba suits, tubs of Vaseline, sacks of scented condoms, jars of aphrodisiacs. A mini-fridge would keep the fresh seafood from spoiling: “Eat Oysters, Love Longer.” Every evening around five thirty he would open his eyes and spend twenty minutes stretching, yawning, and slithering erotically around on his satin sheets, waking up slooooowwwwwly, sensuuuuuoussssssly. Then he'd check in with his answering service to see who was lined up for that night. “Hello, Joe—this is Diana Clayman. Would you be free around two
A.M.
? I got a feeling I'm gonna need that great big motor-driven Roto-Rooter of yours.…”

Joe started writing another in a long line of farewell letters to Heidi. He was always in the car alone when the urge hit to speak them out loud. Eyes glazed, barely paying attention to the road, his heart aching—how come he so often felt crippled with emotion? Why did his assessment of his needs, ambitions, and goals in life change so often? One minute he was truly in love, in control, happy, on top of the situation. But sure as hell the moment he settled into a smug frame of mind, whoever minded such things yanked the rug out from under, and he got hit by a nearly suicidal rush of despair.

“Dear Heidi, I love you, you know that. You will always be the most special person in my life. After all you're the mother of my children—” Uh, can that, Miss Pierson, she'd clobber me. It has a male chauvinist ring. Okay, from the top again—you ready? “Dear Heidi”—take two. “Fuck you, fuck women's lib, fuck being a house-husband, fuck the whole goddam shmeer—I want to be a male chauvinist pig! I
am
a male chauvinist pig, in case you hadn't noticed. I'm tired of the clothes you wear. When we first met you wore lipstick and mascara, miniskirts, garter belts and stockings and high-heeled slingbacks and transparent panties. Now all you ever wear are dungarees and sneakers and sloppy sweatshirts and you never wear rouge, you never wear perfume, you never wear lipstick. I'd give a million dollars, sometimes, just to hang out with a miniskirted, butt-wiggling little Kewpie doll again!”