The Nirvana Blues (16 page)

Brilliant! Senility already at thirty-eight? “Erase all that, Miss Pierson, let's start from scratch.”

Who exactly was Miss Pierson? And that really was Miss, not Ms., all you libbers out there, all you members of the Crypto-Lesbo-Commie-Whore-Fascist-Retaliation Society! Joe had never pictured her too closely. Call her just another mythical secretary who, coincidentally, wore tight fire-engine-red sweaters and had enormous jugs à la June “The Bosom” Wilkenson.

“Dear Heidi. I don't know how to tell you this, but I did something awful. Actually, I don't even know if it was awful or not. Probably it isn't, in fact. Probably it's just a routine thing that shouldn't even raise a half of anybody's hackles, except we are all caught up in a totally confusing system which doesn't know its moral ass from an ethical hole in the ground.”

Too cute. Let's try it again, Miss Pierson.

“Dear Heidi. I don't know about you, but I know for a fact that I'm tired, I really am. I'm tired of all the chaos. I wonder where we are going together, and I can't come up with any answers. We seem to have lost the thread. I'm so sick of raging kids, of a house that always looks like the atomic bomb hit it, of shot nerves and sleepless nights, of tension, silent hostility, moodiness, anger, bitching—”

Joe paused, thinking it over, wondering if he ought to dictate in a few tears on the face of this self-pitying cliché clown.

One more time, Miss Pierson: from the top.

“Dear Heidi. Actually, if you must know, I just drilled this cunt on the other side of town. And if you give me even one iota of lip about it, I'm gonna emigrate to Alaska, become a powderman on the pipeline, marry an Eskimo, move to one of those desolate little islands up there crawling with foxes, and just hang out until I get my Berings Strait. Ha ha.”

Ha ha indeed.

Veering too speedily around a corner at the deserted and crumbling Ranchitos Cantina, Joe swerved to avoid striking two nasty little black-and-white dogs—Mimsy and Tuckums—that charged his bus as if they meant to dismember it piranha-fashion. A right turn at this juncture would have taken Joe to Eloy's land; it lay three hundred yards along the hideously potholed road. Instead, he bore left, heading for his current digs (two miles farther south), trailing yaps, snarls, and growls like a string of wedding-day tin cans.

“Where will I live?” he wondered aloud, “if she throws me out?”

Even more gloomy to contemplate: Given a divorce, if the dope deal went down successfully, who would get the land, already retained in both their names? Would they draw straws? Would he have to sell it a week after risking his life to buy it in order to pay her off?

Enough! A hex on such vicissitudes! A simple human being (male) pokes the business end of his thing into another simple human being not his wife (but female), and the stock market shudders, thousands of dollars change hands, marriage counselors trade in their old automobiles for this year's models, real-estate agents add another wing to their houses, group therapists nail their shutters closed and fly to Saint Croix, divorce lawyers plan Hawaiian vacations as soon as the lucrative proceedings are over, and the thousands of greenbacks to be earned by two upper-crust sophisticated honkies disappear in a puff of emotional and legal hysteria. And what about the future lives of two adorable, normal, middle-class brats originally destined for fame, fortune, and security? Suddenly, Michael's cards are holding reform school, alcoholism, perhaps patricide with an ax, eleven years on death row, and finally—despite a last-minute conversion to born-again Christianity—the electric chair. Heather, lacking a father figure (or a mother figure, depending on who won in the divorce proceedings), is a pill popper and promiscuous by the age of eighteen, drops out of Sarah Lawrence, marries a Mafia bagman, loses him and becomes a high-priced call girl until her looks nose-dive, and eventually winds up as a lady bum wearing a grease-stained trenchcoat and stockings rolled down around her ankles, rifling trash baskets on Third Avenue, New York City, for other people's rejected goodies, which she stores in plastic-coated Macy's shopping bags.

Or maybe she would get off easy, at age seventeen, with a case of anorexia nervosa that would reduce her from 130 pounds to 63 pounds in six weeks.

“Help, help—
sharks
!”

*   *   *

J
OE'S HOUSE
—not his, actually, but rather Tribby Gordon's Castle of Golden Fools—loomed on the horizon. In return for room and board, Joe and Heidi had, over the last two years, helped with various aspects of construction. The house itself defied coherence: it was a ponderous figment of Tribby's whimsy, incorporating a dozen major materials, architectural styles, and protuberances that struck the eye, at first, as sheer anarchy. Tribby had designed and built the house largely by “playing it by ear.” Constructed a room at a time with whatever materials happened to be on hand, the house was like a three-dimensional crazy quilt. It seemed part Bavarian castle, part sharecropper shack, part Navajo hogan, part solar dome, part log cabin, and part frontier fort. It had started as a one-room barn. Now it had eighteen rooms, six chimneys, two greenhouses, one trombe wall, and a large green pyramid housing the master bedroom.

Everything, of course, was in a disarrayed state of “almost completion.” Windows had been studded into frames, but never puttied. Flaps of ninety-pound granular paper dangled over roof edges like the feathers of a queer molting bird, waiting to be trimmed. Walls made of adobe, and hung with chicken wire attached to nails, had waited two years so far for plaster. The forms had yet to be removed from one poured-mud flying buttress. Uneven viga butt-ends poking out from mud walls waited in vain to be trimmed to uniform and eye-pleasing extensions. Discarded lumber, wire, and rebar lay scattered among the weeds, rusty wheelbarrows, and inoperative cement mixers. A vast array of useless green hosing was frozen in silent writhes across the yard. Piles of beer cans, collected by Shanti Institute students, glittered destitutely, waiting to be bound into the six-pack blocks Tribby had used to construct several wings of his monstrosity. Dozens of birds nested under the overhangs, in little niches created by the turrets, gables, cupolas, eaves, and shoddy workmanship.

The Minivers occupied a second-story apartment consisting of a large living room, two bedrooms, and a kitchenette. Leading to their front door was an outdoor ladder which could, of course, be drawn up in case of attack. Atop their roof, underneath a green plastic corrugated awning Joe had erected, sat Michael's drum set, (hopefully) rotting due to exposure.

Heather, at least, had shown interest in the guitar.

When neighbors accused Tribby of creating a monstrous eyesore, he explained that the house was “creative,” “functional,” “a work of art,” “a white elephant with sentimental value,” “the best he could do under the circumstances,” or “Chamisaville's own San Simeon.” Ralph Kapansky, residing in a tipi upon the grounds, had a flair for pegging the monstrosity more accurately. He once described it as “an intergalactic shitheap.” Another time he called it “a masterpiece by Frank Lloyd Wrong.” In his lighter moments he suggested it was what happened when “California architecture fucked Victorian sensibility in disco heaven.”

Once, when Joe asked Tribby why he had built the enormous, garish thing in the first place, Tribby replied, “Because it wasn't there.”

Fearful and trembling, Joe entered the driveway, coasting to a halt among a passel of vehicles that resembled the stage setting for a play about Hiroshima. Rimpoche danced around the truck, barking his hydrocephalic head off. Well, this is it, Joe thought: the jig is up. Inside that convoluted excuse for a dwelling, Heidi awaited him with a rolling pin and a thicket of divorce papers. Beside her, FBI agents, Treasury, Firearm, and Tobacco flunkies, state narcotics bruisers, and local law-enforcement personnel eagerly tuned up their lie detectors, subpoenas, and rubber truncheons. In their midst stood Peter Roth, manacled and in leg-irons, his eyes puffed shut, most of his teeth missing, blood crusted at his nostrils. “Who's this bum?” Joe would growl. “Get him out of here. I never saw him before in my life.”

Despite his bluff, the FBI's chief torturer grabbed him: another man clipped electrodes onto his testicles. “Heidi,
do
something!” Joe screamed. “
Die,
you male chauvinist swine!” she replied.

Unable to move, Joe sat tight. Everything he had worked for all his life was about to unravel; he couldn't understand why he had allowed it to happen. What insane alter ego had goaded him into risking his personal existence as well as a life term in jail for selling dope? Even if, somehow, miracle of all hallowed miracles, they stumbled to a successful conclusion on the cocaine front, what good would the money do him? For two hours in the arms of another woman he had thrown away his children, his unbuilt house, his wife, his promising future.

Opening the door, he got out. Joe ignored Rimpoche: the dog barked, growled, groveled, whimpered, and bared his teeth, not knowing whether to kill Joe or slobber fawningly over his feet. Standing beside the bus for a moment, Joe thought he could hear the planet draw in a slow sad breath and hold it. The script called for a last look around before the warden yanked that lever.

Sunday morning, Lower Ranchitos, Chamisaville, USA. Oh, Dem Golden Rockies!

Cool spring sunshine glittered in cottonwood trees whose leaves were young, more silvery than green. Early butterflies puttered above young alfalfa plants and budding timothy. Faintly, in the distance, sounded church-bells. Far to the left, across dozens of small pastures, every one of which harbored a new house abuilding, the Midnight Mountains presided over the valley like a melancholy judge frowning upon the frenetic (and criminal) development below.

Slim little airplanes dotted the sky. Some were gliders, circling thoughtfully, plying the thermals. On Sundays, the Coyote Glider Club did their thing. Heidi took lessons from Gil Forrester, dreaming of the moment when she could drift between sentinels of unruffled cumulus froth all alone. Though an acrophobe himself, for three years Joe had wished to go aloft for an hour, just to have that macroscopic perspective, not to mention a permanent memory of silken buoyancy. But he hadn't yet summoned enough nerve to risk everything on such an infantile whim.

Joe's 1947 Chevy pickup, known as the Green Gorilla, caught his eye. He scuffled over and leaned contemplatively against the hood. Rimpoche gave up and crawled into shadows beneath Ralph's 1953 Chevy two-door sedan. The warm metal of the Green Gorilla gave Joe succor. Every week, for the past two years, in the
Chamisaville News
classifieds, Joe's ad—featuring that hideously decrepit (but heartwarming) vehicle—had appeared:

Need trash carted away, furniture moved, goodies transferred? Call for Joe Miniver and his Green Gorilla. We haul everything from soup to hay. 758-3989.

Joe loved that truck, and would miss it when he was just another number on the state's dole, manufacturing license plates fourteen hours a day. It was no great shakes physically, but Joe had kept it running. He constantly stuffed oatmeal into the transmission, plugging up holes; he broke eggs into the radiator, stopping leaks; and he went through a bar of Ivory soap every week, sealing the flak wounds in his gas tank. The truck had a quart-of-oil-every-twenty-miles habit: when Joe accelerated on the highway, it laid down an impenetrable smoke screen. Other marvelous details included: a reverse-gear trigger on the stick shift that constantly malfunctioned, vacuum-operated windshield wipers run off the manifold which stopped dead whenever he accelerated or climbed a hill; five-dollar voltage regulators that self-destructed so often Joe kept a box of a half-dozen in reserve under the front seat; a gas gauge, oil-pressure gauge, battery-charge meter, odometer, and speedometer that didn't work; a driverside window rusted open; and other byzantine quirks too numerous to mention.

Still, the Green Gorilla had conveyed him relentlessly from here to there. It had successfully hauled everything from dead cattle to granite boulders to the weighty loads of green piñon Joe cut every autumn with his two-hundred pound solid-steel 1927 Pioneer chain saw (which dislocated his shoulders every time he used it). Loaded well above its stock railings, the truck had never failed to reach Chamisaville, where Joe sectioned the wood using a hydraulic splitter of his own fabrication. Then he retailed the logs for seventy dollars a cord. Good Lord, he mused, how many times had he rattled along dirt roads toting a full load of piñon during late October storms, his shoulders aching, his hands cramped (and frozen), snowflakes that fluttered through the open window plastering his chest and his crotch white, while he sobbed and croaked out rock-and-roll songs to keep his blood flowing on the interminable way home?

Heather's self-righteous little voice cut through his reveries.

“Boy, Daddy, are you ever gonna get it. Mommy's having a real conniption. Why didn't you come home last night? Your name is shit on a platter.”

“Go wash your mouth out with soap,” Joe said dispiritedly. “You got a filthy gab, Heather.”

“I'm rubber and you're glue. Everything you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.”

Glumly, Joe asked, “Why is she so pissed? What did I do that's so wrong?”

“You didn't come home last night. What were you up to, out messing around with all the chickie-poos?”

Joe stared at her, his face all squinched up in a puzzled, disapproving expression. Heather wore her pink, Easter-rabbit pajamas; they had feet and a ball of white cotton for a tail on her butt. Her perky blond hair was in double ponytails attached with rubber bands. A pair of Heidi's solid-gold hoop earrings dangled from the earlobes Heather had made her mother pierce nearly three years ago. And lipstick, of course. Sunday mornings being when she was allowed into Heidi's makeup paraphernalia (which Heidi never used anymore), she usually painted herself up like a Pigalle streetwalker. A fresh plum-purple maquillage on her fingernails completed the garish damage.