American Spirit: A Novel (12 page)

So for now, the satellite radio pulls down whatever steely sentiment is playing up in outer space, and Matthew drinks the tea he bought at the gas station minimarket this morning in lieu of the usual coffee. But for some reason the tea isn’t doing it like Tatiana’s tea did it. The minimarket tea refuses to happen. There was even a side trip made to Stan Leland’s to enter the massive land of mechanical Negro dancing milk, if that’s the acceptable way to say it, to purchase a single lemon. This drew a few looks from the woman at the cash register, and then a few more when Matthew asked her for some sort of complimentary plastic knife; maybe from the deli section of prepared meals, certainly something like this existed. Anyway, now with the tea not happening, Matthew is trying to cut slices of the lemon with the individually wrapped plastic spoon he was given by the disdainful checkout woman. A hole has been crudely gouged into the spot he was able to peel and now pulp bleeds out of it and all over and even into the tea a little bit. But nothing is changing with the tea’s act, so the brain reasons that either a: Tatiana actually does live in a loft made of beams that are alive and it is furnished with lamps that breathe and have feelings and that the tea had nothing to do with it, or b: Perhaps she added something more than simple lemon to the tea.

There are a couple of beers still rolling around on the back floorboards after their migrating south when the car accelerated to the park-and-ride lot yesterday. So Matthew opens one and adds some to his tea. The taste is terrible and the effect is nothing. So he crushes up an old Vicodin
and stirs that in. Somewhere in a sock or in his bed or in the Bavarian Motor Works here, or almost anywhere, are the blue and yellow parting gifts purchased by Tatiana, and the head deduces that these would be the active ingredients that made Tatiana’s apartment into essentially a large land mammal. The heart is not pleased with all of this figuring and begs the head to leave last night filed away in the gray as a much-needed mysterious and magical respite that doesn’t need to be explained and duplicated; and the heart wins in this. Mr. Fagen’s Steely lyrics beam in from light-years above the parked black beast and seem newly relevant and much less cautionary. Lines that stroll along with an arguable optimism, talking about drugs that are kitchen clean instead of laced and junked up with stuff like kerosene. And A-frames! And lines about going to L.A. alone on a dare! It’s as if this guy could see everything last night from way up there on the radio satellite.

These words are certainly about her and last night, the heart posits. The head argues that almost any aged pop lyric seems highly relevant when one is sitting in a car wrestling the cruel and delusional haze that comes the morning after an inexplicably lucky bout of sex and psychotropic leisure time spent with a beautiful woman, and without a job, and with a handgun under the front seat. The hands lift the non-happening tea to the lips and the mouth is left wondering why it was awakened to drink hot beer with bitter pills mashed into it. The ears have no sympathy for either lips or mouth, as they and the brain are once again left to listen to,
scour, and file lyrics and try to assemble them as maps, legends, and topography of a downward spiral. But none of this legendary topogammawhatever downer shit matters much, to be blunt, because a real buzz is coming on fast, and it is courtesy of a stiff little substance called Craft Class.

Someone has already shown up to unlock the place and prepare for it. The whole lot was empty except for Matthew’s car, and now this person has parked one space away. She’s aiming her eyes right for the Bavarian land yacht, looking on and peering in past what she doesn’t know is dried spit from fits ago, apparently possibly mistaking Matthew for someone else. Jumped up on the junky tea, a freshly lit cigarette, and the optimism still left in him from last night, the brain sends word down the left arm to depress the button that will roll down the window so that the mouth can smile and roll into some small talk and convince the craft woman that Matthew is normal. Signal goes down the arm and into hand then down through the button, the car’s electronic brain just some manifest of the synapses and cells and switches inside us. The window hums and glides down into the door panel and Steely Dan floats out into the morning air in loud, fair warning to the craft woman. Upon the spat-up window’s reveal of Matthew, he raises up a little toast gesture with his plain white paper cup, smoke from a Native American cigarette swirls out the window to complete the portrait, he exhales the initial drag, and the mouth screws into a weird, soft, suburban nice-guy grin that stands in stark contrast to the glassy eyes above it.

“Good morning.” And the simple gesture of declaring this makes Matthew start coughing in a fit, and he raises his eyebrows in bashful acknowledgment of this.

“Oh, I thought you were someone else.”

“Someone else, yep, I know, it’s like I’m someone else. Like we’re not… like everyone thinks they’re the person they thought was… oh, what am I saying anyway, right? Okaaay.” Fucking Christ on a stolen bike, the worst part about drugs—even the relatively harmless ones that come in tea and brownies—is the way they leave one in a state like this; a piece of biological litter along a shortcut road that is supposed to parallel the highway to awareness or spirituality; bloodshot and babbling for days afterward, with no clue if it will go away or keep you locked like this, like a happy San Francisco hobo acid casualty. It is not a small price paid.

“I mean, you know, I just mean that I thought you had, yeah, obviously maybe mistaken me for someone you knew.”

A rare moment of lucidity—thanks to the junked tea—seems to have put both Matthew and the craft teacher at ease.

“Well, anyway, I’ve got a class to run, so I should…”

“Right, well, see you in there.”

“No, it’s…”

“Basic Creative Crafting.”

“Right.”

“Yeah, I’m taking that.” This while holding another drag of the spirited cigarette a little too long; like it’s pot or something.

This seems to elicit nothing but expressionless silence. What the hell is it lately with people not being able to figure out the most basic shit in conversation? Matthew presses on, takes the last hit of his cigarette, and pours some of the pilled-up tea on it to make sure it’s extinguished before tossing the butt over his shoulder and onto the floorboard behind him. The tea, while not happening, is certainly working at the edge of everything.

“And on Fridays, I’m doing back-to-back Meditation and Crafts.”

“Okay, well,” she says, and just pauses trying to figure a way out of this conversation she only accidentally started.

“That’s cool, I wouldn’t know what to say either. Shit’s weird with me right now, I get it.”

Oh, good, a smile. Matthew presses on a bit, the blood semi-fortified and jacked up with this half-assed tea that jigs and jags him.

“I am going to craft so hard it blows your fucking mind,” but the mouth says this only quietly as the woman is already walking away.

Matthew lights another smoke, slams the tea circumstance and squints, tries to kill the taste with a drag, and drums on the steering wheel to the pout and grind coming from the speakers, as he stares out the windshield up toward the community center. Pre-crafting has officially commenced. Once in the zone, Matthew leaves the car the same way a snake leaves a den in chilled suspended animation upon realizing that spring is here to warm its skin; slowly at first, a little bit
sleepy and stiff, and then with gradual fluid movement at a decent pace.

Inside, one finds a completely different set of people than the type taking meditation class. Here are maybe eight or ten women, twenty and thirty years older than Matthew, and they all seem to know one another. These women have had kids; not had kids; outlived kids; had husbands come back from war; had husbands not come back from war; watched what was left of Kennedy, a hole in his head, laying it one last peaceful time on Jackie’s lap while getting whisked away in that motorcade in Texas then back to the place we must’ve all come from; they’ve envied Diana’s wedding, pitied her funeral; had hysterectomies, mastectomies; survived economies; had jobs; had careers, you name it. These women have kicked ass and they’ve done it without Cadillac SUVs and collagen. They’re kind to Matthew and perfectly pleasant, crafting people are decent people, turns out. The meditation snobs were small clusters of impenetrable cliques containing three to five insufferable narcissists each. And meditation brought in the worst kind of narcissists; the kind who were convinced they were enlightened or on the verge of it. But crafters are a sturdy, good-natured bunch. Walk in as an unfamiliar face and within a few minutes of milling around getting a Styrofoam cup of coffee one gets three “Hi, hons,” and a “It’s nice to see a man who appreciates this type of art,” as well as one “You’re gonna love this group. We’re not a bunch of old duffs sitting around pissing and moaning. We keep it pretty funky in here. It’s a neat bunch in here.” There
is a whirlwind of hellos and welcomes. A cloud of names drift by fast with the introductions that have been extended: Ruthie, Jan, Suzanne, Lori, Lynn, and two more of them that disappear from the brain almost the instant they hit.

“Okay, so are you married or gay? What’s the catch?” This comes from one of the sort of saltier members of the group; Jan, maybe.

“Oh, stop, listen to you! You’re terrible! Don’t listen to her, Matthew. She’s a sad state of affairs; you’re looking at the effects of paint thinner in a non-ventilated workspace,” says a Bonnie or Lori as the laughs rise again.

“Hey, if you had my last twenty years, you’d work with thinner and enamels in a non-ventilated space, too.” And they’re off to laughing again.

And now Matthew is, too, even speaking up to answer what was probably a rhetorical question. “The answer is that I’m not gay, I’m basically not married, and I don’t have kids. The catch is that I’ve become highly unemployable recently and I don’t seem to care, and cocktail hour starts at noon, in my car, alone. Also, I am not licensed to carry my secondhand firearm.”

This gets a gigantic swell of laughter from the group and a Bonnie or Anne chimes in, “Wait a minute: Was I married to you briefly in 1967?” With this, the group is in
whoop
s and titters again.

Jesus, Basic Crafting is awesome. The heart scolds the blood for spending pre-crafting time in such isolation; should’ve brought the smokes and junk tea in here to get
things rolling in the system. The instructor—the younger woman that Matthew met briefly out in the parking lot—is numb to this bunch and busy putting boxes of supplies on two eight-foot folding tables that are in the middle of the room. She must be getting something out of this, but it’s not really clear what it is. Matthew surmises that she must own a small ceramics shop in town or something and she’s running the class as a way of gathering up some cheap advertising and grabbing a few craft fiends who will need to come in for supplies or something. She issues the score about how things are rolling in class today; that if one has a project in progress from the last class, one is free to work on it, or to prep anything they want from the boxes on the second table apart from a lesson or instruction. Which is all basically a way of saying, take some of the ceramic shit out of one of these boxes, do something to it with paint, leave it here in class, then pick it up after the instructor has fired it at night or over the weekend or whenever the semi-polite, distant woman from the parking lot has time to cook shit in the kiln for you.

So Matthew takes a step up to the second table, takes a look in these boxes the way men his age approach tables of appetizers at dinner parties, looking in like,
Oh, hey, hmm, what’s this stuff here? Okay, well, maybe I’ll try one,
when really you know they can’t wait to dig in. It’s all rather random plaster stuff. A couple of coffee mugs, a small deer and bear, a log cabin, a seascape with a pelican on a pier, all white, chalky, unfinished. Matthew grabs one of the coffee mugs
and investigates the paints and charcoal pencils in the other boxes. All the ladies have projects already going from prior classes; real pros, but Matthew is finally someplace on the planet where he is undaunted.

He finds a place at one of the desks and starts to work. There is some attempt at making a little something appear on the mug; an illustration of some kind that is so far looking like a defeated stick figure, and the brain panics for a second that crafting may be too revealing; like doing group therapy or something. So far, within minutes, a bowed, broken, and disheveled stick figure, clearly male, is starting to manifest on the chalky white mug in black painted lines. What else is going to pop up on the dumb thing, a woman with a man in a bed laughing at the hunched little stick man? A boss pointing at the stick man while it urinates in an office? But therapy has been on hold for a bit now, the same way the trip to Alpha Imaging has been on hold, the same way everything has been on hold in this time of financial uncertainty, so maybe pay-what-you-wish crafting is a way to work a few things out on the cheap. So in hopes of holding his cards a bit closer to the chest, he starts making the man possibly a woman; the stick figure starts becoming more non-gender specific.

In trying to paint some color onto the little human, a crude blotch of blue is laid on at the middle of the abdomen, which is maybe a shirt or possibly a hiked-up skirt the way it’s fallen on in a triangular splat. A weird little red triangle is added in midway on the face, which is looking like a lipstick mouth if indeed the figure is a woman, or easily a bloody
nose if the figure is a long- and narrow-faced man. The hour passes in the kind of calm that students were promised in the meditation class but didn’t find until physically confronting the instructor; Basic Crafting is obviously delivering on its promise right from the get-go. As the hour winds up, Matthew realizes that the little square-inch stick figure’s crudely rendered little left claw looks like it could be a gun. And so with the smallest, thinnest brush of black, Matthew paints on one of his maxims that has been typed into his emailing phone thing, and under the little asexual, cross-gender stick person, he starts to letter the realization that came to him at the park-and-ride lot yesterday,
God will help you find a secondhand gun, but not until you’re grateful and reaching out to friends.
But there’s the small problem of fitting the entire phrase, and he ends up with
GOD WILL HELP YOU FIND A GUN IF YOU’RE GRATEFUL,
which still has a nice ring to it, for a mug.