Ablutions (11 page)

Discuss the renting of a vehicle and your conversation with the pockmarked counter man about the cars he has to offer you and then about the cars he does not have to offer but that he wants to speak of anyway, foreign and luxury automobiles he hopes to someday sit in and drive around in and whose horns he would like to honk and whose powerful stereo systems would push air through his hair. Discuss his lewd innuendoes when you say you do not care for the color or make of the rental but only the size, as you plan to lie prone inside its walls. You make no visible response to the intimations, being medicated on fat white pills, with many more in an aspirin bottle stashed in your suitcase (you scattered a dozen aspirins atop the white pills as a diversionary tactic), and the counter man, understanding there will be no mannish banter, drops his head to tap chicken-like on his computer.

You select a truck with a shell or camper top and when the man asks for your destination you tell him you are driving to the Grand Canyon and he makes one last pass at friendship, asking for the purpose of your trip (he is typing and speaking at the same time, which impresses you), and as you have no real reason but only an elusive, mesmeric feeling for going,
you tell him a lie, which is this: When you were twelve years old you visited the Grand Canyon with your mother and father and spent three happy days and nights in the area, camping out under the stars, burning hot dogs over a barbecue pit and watching them fall from the sticks into the fire, cursing, catching and killing lizards and snakes—all the wiles and whims of any fast-paced boyhood. Or this at least is what you have been told took place those years past because you cannot, inexplicably, remember a single thing about the vacation, not the canyon's alleged breathtaking scale or the mules that are said to carry camera-laden passengers the eight miles down a treacherous trail to the canyon's shaded floor, and you share your frustrations with the counter man, telling him how bothered you are that one of the world's wonders has been shuffled from your mind, and you tell him that at the end of the day you simply believe the Grand Canyon deserves another chance to make a proper, durable impression.

The counter man has ceased working and is looking into your eyes for signs of psychosis. He asks that you have a seat while his people bring the truck around and you do not sit but stand at a nearby brochure display to listen in as he speaks on the telephone with his regional manager and you hear him retelling your story of the Grand Canyon Forgotten with emphasis on the mutilation of blameless reptiles and he describes your crooked glasses and underarm sweat stains and you hear him call you a weirdo and then a real weirdo and he requests the authority to deny renting to you on the grounds of suspicious vehicular intent but the manager, either a sentimentalist or else a hater of snakes himself, is unconcerned by the story and the truck is brought around forthwith and the counter man is frustrated at his unsuccessful attempt to ruin your plans and does not wish you
bon voyage
but turns his dented head away to hate at the walls.

Your next stop after the rental office is the health food store, where you will stock up on supplies for the long desert journey. You have never been to a health food store before and are looking forward to the experience, this due more to narcotic euphoria than an interest in herbs or roots or any other healing elements. The rental truck is brand new and you fiddle with each knob and button and your feet feel as though they are bound in sable pelts, making for inelegant driving, but the sensation of movement is as pleasant as the quilted dreams of deepest sleep and you are not worried for your safety or the safety of your adopted vehicle, which you recall is insured from grille to tow knob, and you watch your feet rise and fall on the clean rubber pedals and experience a profound satisfaction at their activity.

Your trips to the health food store and the Grand Canyon were motivated by a visit with a liver specialist called Eloise, working from a strip-mall office in the dead-hilled community of Agoura, deep in the San Fernando Valley. She came recommended by the child actor, who called her Magic Fingers and said she could repair the bloodied organs of decrepit winos, but you were nervous about the visit because people often died around doctors and you had not seen one in years and the pain in your side had increased so that you sometimes doubled over in hissing pain.

Eloise was forty-five years old, with ornately decorated chopsticks crisscrossed through a bun of black and gray hair. She led you to the examination room and asked that you take off your clothes for your colonic and you froze and said, but I'm not having a colonic, and she slowly turned and her expression was severe and she said that just by looking at your eye coloring she could tell you were poisoned with alcohol and hepatitis and that there had to be a prompt and total change in your
life or your liver would turn to charcoal and you would die, and that you had to begin treatment right away even though she did not have time for the procedure, and she made a stab at bedside humor, saying she would make time by eating her lunch throughout.

Her lecture frightened you—it was what you had been dreading, to the word—so much so that you surprised yourself by agreeing to the colonic, which was as you suspected it would be, humiliating and disgusting, and when she said you would have to go through this many times before your body was completely cleansed you wondered if death was not the more dignified route to take. Also you were shocked when you learned she had not been joking about her lunch: She put away a large bowl of rice with steamed eggplant and zucchini, all the while gesturing with her plastic fork at the running tube, alive with bouncing excrement.

You are thinking of all this as you walk from your truck to the health food store entrance. Eloise was unhappy when you canceled today's appointment (you called on a pay phone from the car rental agency) but when you told a lie about a family emergency she said she understood and that you were a good boy when you promised you would not think of drinking alcohol or taking drugs or aspirin during your absence. Wrenching a shopping cart free from the corral you decide you will not see her again and will try not to think of the colonic again and you will not tell anyone about the colonic and are glad to have ventured all the way to Agoura, where you will never in your life return and so never by chance bump into anyone who had seen you in the office, and you think of the stories you have heard of those who die only after they stop drinking and of the doctors who raise their hands up and say, "What a shame the man didn't come to me sooner." You decide Eloise
is one of these, and feel a heavy burden lifted the moment you divorce yourself from her.

That you have wasted a portion of your pill-high thinking of such things as doctors and corkscrewed tubing is madness, and you strike them from your mind and relax your hands on the grip of the cart and stretch your neck to test your high and you feel that it is still with you and you enter the health food store and are contented to find it smells just as you hoped it would, like a giant, wheat-filled pill. There is soft music piped in from the ceiling and you browse the aisles for forty-five minutes, putting things in and taking them out of your cart and speaking with the store employees, telling them you contracted hepatitis C through a blood transfusion (lie) and are now in need of advice, and in their scrambling sympathy they refer to magazine articles and websites and they give you bottles of every sort, pills and muddy-looking juices, and also a pound of trail mix and a large container of blueberries, evidently a strong antioxidant. The manager offers to loan you a few books and she pulls these inspirational texts from a tasseled suede bag and fans them out on the counter for you to look over but you graciously decline and wish her a good morning and she responds in kind as do her coworkers, pimply, pretend hippies, tugging on their smocks and waving.

Sitting in your truck you open the bottles and take some of the good-for-you pills and then some more of your special white pills and you open a can of beer—you had stopped at a gas station and bought a single can of Budweiser—and stick this between your legs before setting out on your trip in earnest. There is traffic heading into but not away from the city and you stare at the disappointed faces stuck in their cars and lives and you feel the next wave of pills coming on and are certain you have made the prudent choice in planning this
vacation and you drink your beer in one long gulp, breathing with your nostrils as you had been taught as a boy, with your eyes watching the road at a painful downward angle that makes you laugh (at the thought of the cricket-legged muscles on the backs of your eyeballs), and you toss the empty beer can out the window, or rather let go of it and it is sucked out the window (also funny), and you pull off the freeway to stop at a gas station for another can of beer and a phone card.

The truth is that you had not planned to drink on this trip and in fact this was its grand if overly dramatic purpose: To travel and see the world without any alcohol and to think of what was broken in your life and wonder clearheaded about the mending of these broken things. This was the plan and it was a fine plan, only midway through your previous night of work you were offered the bottle of white pills at a price so low you were morally unable to turn it down. You took these pills home and thought to leave them untouched in the cupboard as a present for your homecoming when it occurred to you to bring a few along in case of any emergencies—certainly they would offset your desire for whiskey—and you were happy with your realistic point of view and you took four pills to celebrate this and also to test their strength and you were happy again to find the pills were stronger than you had hoped and when you entered gas station number one your only idea was to purchase a phone card but your high made you dull-minded and there you were in the aisles, looking and pretending not to look at the coolers and at last giving in and purchasing the one can of beer, and later when you realized you forgot to buy a phone card you stopped at another gas station and again you forgot the phone card (you remembered
the beer) but took comfort in the thought of the next gas station, and you wondered where it would be, and would the cashier be friendly or unfriendly, and you felt an uncommon patriotic shiver as you considered the country's innumerable gas stations and markets and rest stops, small businesses thriving or going under, the owners gambling their very lives on customers like yourself, travelers in need of single cans of beer and forgettable phone cards, and you looked forward to the next gas station, gas station number three, and you drank your beer down so that you might meet up with it sooner.

Traffic thickens in Covina and you exit the freeway looking around for gas station number seven. You drive past an old bowling alley and decide to wait out rush hour at the bar, swearing to yourself you will not drink a drop of whiskey, and you say it aloud: "I will not drink a drop of whiskey at the bar in the old bowling alley in Covina." You do not drink any whiskey but you want to terribly and you pour out two more white pills and lay these on your curling tongue (you shudder at their taste and fill your cheeks with beer). Time passes, an hour, and when you do not feel the pills coming on you know there are too many blocking up your bloodstream and that by taking any more you are wasting them, and so for the time being you cancel them from your mind and focus instead on your surroundings.

You do not bowl and do not want to bowl but find the sound of bowling therapeutic and also the sound of the baseball game on the television, which you do not watch. You noticed seven or eight classic cars in the parking lot and it is easy enough to pick out their owners: Men and women in their sixties, bowling and drinking and talking; the men wear
matching shirts and are members of some type of car or social club. A few of the women, old enough to be grandparents, are made up like bobbysoxers, with poodle skirts and pony-tails. One is jumping and clapping at her husband's bowling ability, acting the part of the spry teenager. She is drunk, and follows her husband to the bar and asks in baby talk for a Long Island iced tea; when he refuses, she complains and you hear him say to her, "Goddamn it, Betty, if you don't settle down and shut your mouth up you'll be home with the cats next time we ride." The bartender winks at you and you look away, laughing into the flat of your palm.

Your right pants pocket is filled with blueberries that you eat with each sip of beer and a drunken woman at the bar is making fun of you, asking if you are eating grubs and potato bugs. "'M talking to
you,
Tarzan." She turns to the bartender. "The King of the Wild Bowlers," she says. You ignore her and she settles her tab and drifts away to the lunch counter and the bartender apologizes, saying in the woman's defense that her husband has recently died of "balls cancer" and that she is roughing it out these last few weeks. He brings you a beer on the house, and then another and another—he is drinking tequila shots but hides this fact from you don't know who; he initiates this apparent rule-breaking as a bonding point. Other than the occasional walk-up you are his only customer and he asks you friendly bartender things about your life and then he speaks about his and you tell a bad joke and he laughs too hard and lays a hand on yours as if for support and then strokes the top of your hand and winks again, and this wink is the wrong sort of wink and it makes you uncomfortable and you tell him to watch your drink while you step out for a cigarette and he balances a napkin on the beer can and you leave the bowling alley just as the social club erupts over some crucial bowling error. (Betty is sitting a lane away from her
friends, arms crossed in frustration at a life passed too soon, and with too little excitement.) You try to sleep in your truck but owing to the heat and discomfort of the cab you cannot and so after stopping at a gas station for a beer, and again forgetting the phone card, you are shortly back on the 10 freeway, heading east toward the desert.

Discuss Las Vegas. It is eleven o'clock at night when you arrive. That you are here at all demonstrates ill will toward your goodwill trip intentions and eleven is a particularly dangerous time for someone struggling with whiskey jitters but as before you promise not to touch a drop and swear you will drink only beer and that you are stopping by only to wonder at the lights and also to duck into the piano bar at the Bellagio for their blue-cheese-stuffed olives, a personal favorite and rare treat.