Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (9 page)

And then, before I knew it was happening, Pete became a living totem for everything I wanted to avoid in my life.

I’m sitting here writing this and I can’t track the exact change. But it happened. I grew into my teens and I grew afraid of awkwardness. Pete grew out his beard like he was God’s cartoon and retreated farther and farther back into the thicket. And, more than anyone in my family and
way
more than anyone I’ve ever met or would become myself, he was comfortable and happy being quietly, antisocially batshit crazy.

Occasionally visiting Pete and Grandpa in my teen years forever soured me on the “holy fool” portrayals of the insane and eccentric in films. You know the ones I’m talking about—pale and unshaven, but always rakishly so, with a clowny glint of kooky wisdom in their eyes and an elliptical way of muttering hip-shot revelations the rest of us are ignoring, unaware of, or dancing around like some monstrous flame. Who can brave the shaman heat of the truth? Why, kooky Aunt Lottie, who wears earrings she made from toothbrushes and names all the squirrels!

I’d be brooding about some teenage slight I’d conflated in my teenage mind, and Pete’d come into the kitchen.

“You all right?”

I’d say, “Sort of.”

Here’s Pete’s chance to Sort It All Out: “That old lady in the commercial for the Clapper? Someone should clap her in her face.”

No help.

I began thinking of life—a
real
life—being about movement and travel and awareness. Or, at least, I thought awareness came from seeing the world, experiencing it. I still think that.

And that’s where Pete and I parted ways, slowly and then all of a sudden.

As the thicket closed its final branches around Pete’s mind, he built a soundproof chamber in broad daylight. Out on the front porch of the little College Park house, he’d sit in his chair, sunup to sundown (and, truth be told, far beyond the darkness), and listen to the Washington, DC, oldies station. They’d still take requests and, over the years, Pete became a minor celebrity, at least among the six-strong crew of deejays who regularly took his calls for requests—the Elegants’ “Little Star” was an abiding favorite. When winter came he ran an extension cord from inside the house to a heating pad he’d sit on, baking his body like a mound of dough inside the clay oven of his winter parka.

And coffee. Endless cups of coffee. From the same chewed and bruised Styrofoam cup from the 7-Eleven down the street. He’d bring it back, use it until the edges of the bottom literally dissolved. Only then would he deign to grab a new one from next to the coffeepot. He would use a cup until it no longer existed as a cup.

And there he’d sit. He was still lucid, and relatively young, but I could imagine his features blurring and sliding beneath the beard. I could imagine his body sagging and spreading and creaking under the parka in winter and under his sail-like, oversized cotton shirts in the summer. Who knows what his mind was doing, raging and humming and slowing to a white crawl and then lurching forward in blue-hot bursts of mixed sound, memory, and random images. There was nothing in the eyes to tell you. When he spoke it still related, pretty lucidly, to whatever or whomever was in front of him. If there were poison, dragons, or ghosts behind his greetings or good-byes, I never saw it. I just saw my uncle Pete, sitting in place, and knew that wasn’t how I wanted to live my life. I suspected, around the time I graduated college, that we’re all versions of targets, fired at by indifferent events. If that was the case, then I wanted to be a moving target.

What sealed my final, silent drifting away from Uncle Pete was a Christmas when we visited the College Park house. I was in the early stages of realizing I wanted to move to San Francisco, to get serious about being a comedian. When you’re beginning to suspect you might be leaving a place, you become hypersensitive to it, as if your mind is subconsciously stocking itself with smells, sounds, sights, and tactile sensations of a place you’ll no longer see every day.

So that Christmas, the one before I headed west, was a feast even before I sat down at the table. I can vividly remember the smell of the fireplace in my grandfather’s basement, the feel of the fabric on his couch. Snow was visible, falling, through the big glass doors in the back of the living room. And I remember how it made the white winter light ripple like seawater. I couldn’t summon the illusion of the house rising through the air, but I tried. And I can taste every bit of that Thanksgiving-by-way-of-working-class-Italian-cuisine dinner. The turkey, with a side of macaroni and peas. The rolls and roasted peppers. And the cheap jug wine, so sweet against the green-bean-and-onion casserole.

And I couldn’t take my eyes off Pete. He ate dinner like he always did, in three or four huge, whoofing bites, before heading back out front to his cone of warmth, his coffee, his cigarettes, and ghostly tunes piping from his little transistor radio. And, most important, to whatever thoughts drowned out the voices of his own family saying “hello” and “happy holidays.”

I watched him because I couldn’t believe that could be anyone’s comfortable horizon. A tiny porch on a dark corner near a highway. We lucked out living on a planet made thrilling by billions of years of chance, catastrophe, miracles, and disaster, and he’d rejected it. You’re offered the world every morning when you open your eyes. I was beginning to see Pete as a representative of all the people who shut that out, through cynicism, religion, fear, greed, or ritual.

We were on our way home. My dad realized he needed to stop in the 7-Eleven for something. I went in with him.

Another man was asking the clerk for directions, farther up the road from where we’d come.

The clerk said, “Well, you keep heading back the way you were, right?”

“Okay,” said the man.

“And you’ll get to a corner. ’Bout a mile up?”

“Yeah.”

“And there’s this house, and there’s going to be a fat guy with a huge beard sitting out front listening to the radio. That’s where you take your right.”

Pete had become a landmark.

Pete died a few years after I’d moved to LA. The chain-smoking, junk food, and immobility had finally gotten their message through to the rest of his body, and it quietly shut down.

“Pete had his own little world there, you know?” said my mom over the phone.

At this point in my life, I’d traveled over a fourth of the planet. I’d been to little towns and marveled at some random person—maybe a cineaste who visited the same little movie theater in Prague every night, or a craggy bar denizen in Dublin who inhabited the same stool, or even the crazies in Los Angeles, dancing shirtless on the same stretch of sidewalk, holding up signs for the disinterested commuters to honk at.

I was still hungry to travel and move and create and connect—and I always will be—but I’ve got to admit something.

There’s a little bit of Pete in me. There always was, and there always will be. Maybe it’ll grow stronger as I grow older, maybe not. But it’s there. I still don’t agree with spending a life the way Pete did, but I understand it and respect it. Who knows how many lives have been saved and villains vanquished by those who sat still?

Will anything we do last? No. I just read a quote by Sir David Rees: “Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoeba.”

On the day Pete died, someone left a fresh cup of coffee on his empty seat in front of the house in College Park. A nod from a fellow human who, like Pete, had started out as cosmic matter, shared with the stars above him, in an explosion eons ago.

And, long before Pete disintegrated out of this world, he’d become a happy ghost in his own heat-pad heaven— a paradise of tobacco, caffeine, and “Little Star.”

^*
Didn’t even cross my mind to write “sixty-odd.”

^*
The house that Pete and my mother and their siblings grew up in— their
original
house, a few blocks over, and not the one Pete and Grandpa moved to—was down the street from where the kid who inspired
The Exorcist
lived. Pete and my mother would talk about it obliquely, and they’d never go into detail. But Pete’s details, scant as my mother’s, were vivid. “You’d walk by the place and you could kind of hear that someone was screaming in the upstairs bedroom, but there’d also be traffic and noises and they kept the window shut, so you’d also think maybe you were hearing things,” said Pete. I’d wonder—how young was he when his schizophrenia began to blossom and the volume knob began to crank toward the red? Was this kid’s demonic yowling somehow mixed with whatever unreliable memories Pete viewed through the thicket of his madness?

And then, in the next sentence, Pete would lay in a more prosaic—and, by virtue of its blandness, more valuable—detail: “Father Bowdern went away for a few months with this kid, somewhere in the Midwest, and they say they cured him.” And then the thicket would close in again: “But when Father Bowdern came back, me and the other altar boys could tell he wasn’t Father Bowdern anymore.” And then one final, comforting frosting flower of reality: “Anyway, the house is gone now. They put a gazebo up in its place. You and your brother used to walk down there all the time when you were little.”