Eyeheart Everything (4 page)

Emma, Mark’s kid, was kind of pissed off because we had to steal the extension cord that runs from the garage out into the back yard and up into the tree where she has her totally killer tree house (which Mark and I built), and up there she has an old TV of her own (which Mark and I almost killed ourselves hauling up there) that she had been watching some bullshit program about horses on, but once she saw that we were out on an expedition she wanted to come along, even though it was getting late. But it seemed like a good idea to me because God knows it’s hard getting kids interested in anything adults like to do. And also I figured that if Mark had any unstable or (ick) violent plans in mind — which I doubt because he’s usually a sweetheart — that he wouldn’t try any of it in front of his 8-year-old daughter who he’s normally kind of self-conscious around. And I wasn’t sure if we would be able to use the volume of the signal received to triangulate the source like we planned, because TVs have auto-gain-controls in them, and even if it did work I figured it would just lead us towards the First Chinese Mennonite and what would that tell us? But you know, when you’re stoned you do dumb things. So we hooked everything up, and wound the extension cords around and around Emma and showed her how to twirl around clockwise to take the line in and counterclockwise to let it out. Then we powered up the set, and it was a bit awkward because it seemed, from that position and collection of hard-to-isolate reception variables, the porno channel came through louder and clearer than ever, while The Simpsons were plowed under the snow, and Joe wasn’t on the phone at that moment.

It was sort of a sketchy situation at that point. We’re all sitting on the front porch, and we’re watching these two women on the TV sort of taking each other’s clothes off, the volume is turned up, little Lisa Simpson is unwittingly entangled in an adult consensual lesbian sex event, and there’s Mark’s daughter standing next to us by the TV, tied up in orange and yellow extension cords. I mean people don’t really bug or interlope upon their neighbors much in the neighborhood where we live, we all respect each other’s privacy most of the time, but Mark & I became kind of intensely paranoid that someone might see us on the porch and get a wrong idea. Emma, for her part, appeared to find the porno kind of boring, and I gather from what Mark tells me that she knows all about sex already and thinks it’s incredibly, incredibly gross. But still ... we were about to chicken out and move everything back inside when suddenly we heard the string of little beeps that meant that Joe was placing a call.

So we were off. Joe began talking now to Barb, and he was really laying on the sugar, perhaps because in our last episode we learned that Barb’s lawyer (Laura) had sent some communique to Joe’s lawyer (Mel) that had him and Joe a little bit concerned, and I guess Joe was supposed to sweet-talk her into just not doing anything, in a legal sort of way, while the two of them (Joe and Mel) got some sort of litigation ready that was supposed to, in Joe’s terms, “Staple her to the Seeling,” financially speaking. So there was Joe, showing his vulnerable side on the phone with Barb ... meanwhile there were Mark & I, standing out in the middle of the cul-de-sac with Emma giggling and spinning around in circles on the porch, letting out more of this long ratty string of tied-together extension cords. We walked twenty paces in the direction of the church, and the signal started to break up more. “Colder,” Mark said, which surprised me and contradicted my original theory about where the signal was originating from. And we walked twenty paces in another direction, off 90 degrees from our first path, Mark holding the TV against his chest with both hands (“portable” TVs from that era weigh about 40 pounds) and me watching it, walking backwards facing him, outside in the dark, with the volume turned all the way up and these occasional moans and swells of porn-soundtrack interspersed with Joe, The Simpsons, and blurry fuzz. Colder. We moved out into the intersection, Emma still twirling around, and Mark says “Shit! Colder!” Then we head back towards the house in frustration, but then the signal gets warmer, definitely. Joe meanwhile is doing a real number on Barb, I can’t believe she’s falling for this but I guess she went as far as to marry the guy at some point so she must be a sucker. His big soliloquy goes “SweetcheekS, all I’m Saying iS we Shouldn’t Say no, never, nothing. We Should Say, you know ... Something! Someday, poSSibly ... I miSS you Sugar ...” et cetera.

We strung all of the wire back through the living room, through the kitchen, and out the back patio into Mark’s yard, which is pretty large and which isn’t separated from the other yards by fences, yet, although there is one guy down the block who’s installing fence posts and the whole neighborhood is up in arms about it because: this guy is some rich yuppie who bought the house a year ago and still never talks to his neighbors except to ask tactless questions about their property and their equity in it, like he’s waiting for all of the rest of us to move away so he can own the whole block, and apparently also he doesn’t recycle. But anyway, we start walking out across the lawn and the signal is getting warmer, warmer still. Emma at this point has given up trying to keep the cord wound and is just playing with it, whipping it up and down, sending waves along its length. Mark follows the signal across his yard, across his next-door neighbor’s yard, and runs out of extension cord halfway through the yard after that, which is the yard of the Bad Taste People who have covered their back yard with tiny ugly green concrete frogs from Fred Meyer, and flimsy plastic-resin injection molded lawn furniture, also from Fred Meyer, which is all fallen over because it won’t stand up on anything but concrete, and which is laced with glistening slug trails. Also they have a dwarf picnic bench, also pre-fab also from Fred Meyer, and also they have a 50-foot extension cord hanging on a little hanger under their back porch next to their lawn mower, which cord Mark immediately grabs and splices into the power line. He doesn’t even stop to consider not doing it or asking first. When he gets done and turns the TV back on, the signal is so hot that every sibilant S is like pressurized air escaping from a car lift, and Mark at this point is laughing and shouting “We’re reading you Joe! We’re picking you up loud and clear!” The extra extension cord takes us out of the Bad Taste Zone and across another yard and into the yard where the aforementioned fence is being dug. There’s lots of other high-end landscaping stuff beginning to happen there. Bags of high-grade horseshit are stacked in a pile along with sacks of cedar chips, there’s a couple cords of cedar deck lumber fresh from the mill, and behind it all there’s a pit dug where I guess they’re going to put in a hot-tub or a pond or something. So we’re standing there, we’ve run our of extension cord, Mark is peering around in the dark, pointing the blue-blinky TV light around and looking for the free extension cord that he’s expecting to find in every neighbor’s yard apparently. Emma is just looking up at the house. I follow her gaze to see that there’s one light on in an upstairs window and one silhouette is talking on the phone, and it penetrates my stoned brain that yeah, this is probably Joe’s yard, that’s probably Joe up there talking! This looks like his kind of yard. Mark’s obviously had the same thought, because he’s looking up there too, and now he’s silent, and we’re all standing in the yard, looking up at the window, listening to Barb’s voice as she’s sort of letting her emotional guard down and confessing embarrassing things, it’s become black outside, the snow from the TV is casting this light that’s now blue, now pink, and then I hear this weird sound, a buzzing, clicking sound, and I smell sparks .. and I look at Mark and see that he’s sort of shaking ... he’s being electrocuted! I grab a sack of cedar chips ... he’s standing in the mud and he’s got no shoes on ... I swing the plastic sack of cedar chips at the TV he’s holding, to knock it out of his arms, and the sack breaks open when it hits and the chips fly all over him, he topples backwards slowly like a bookshelf, still clutching the TV, but when he hits the ground the TV falls out of his grasp and into the pit. Mark is lying on the ground, panting, he’s saying “aaaaaaaaa” but he’s also kind of laughing ... Emma doesn’t seem to understand what’s just happened ... but you can’t hear anything very well because the TV is still on in the bottom of the pit, and somehow either because reception is better down there or because the volume knob got bumped or because of the acoustics of the hole itself, the volume is really immensely loud, public-address level it seems, it echoes, and apparently while all this drama was happening, Joe said something wrong and Barb is now calling him on his bullshit, and now they’re having a full-fledged vicious argument, and Joe is calling Barb a Sneak and a Slut and a Sybil and saying he’s going to cruSh her aSS into the Sidewalk! And a floodlight goes on over the back yard of the Bad Taste people two doors down.

Mark gets up onto his knees, he’s panting and feeling himself all over but, amazingly, he seems to be conscious and perhaps not badly hurt, but his mood has totally changed. “Definitely time to bail,” he says, and just then we see Joe’s silhouette slide open the upstairs window and peer out at us, and we just start hauling ass as fast as we can, Mark grabbing Emma’s arm and half-lifting her off the ground. Halfway back to the house Mark stops to try and undo the last link of the extension cord, and it takes him a little while because he also knotted it, and only then I notice: at the Bad Taste House some figure is standing on the back porch, holding I think a bottle of something in one hand, just quietly watching and listening.

We can all hear Joe hanging up on Barb, dialing 911 and talking to some operator there. All he can say is “There’S treSpaSSerS on my premiSeS!” and she keeps asking him if he needs an ambulance, or is there a crime in progress, or is his life in danger, and he says “EaveSdropperS in my yard! They’re liStening on my Sellphone!” and she’s asking him over and over, Are you injured? Have you been shot? I swear I can hear whoever it is up on the Bad Taste Porch laughing. Then it goes instantly dark and quiet, and Mark grabs the free end of the cord and we all make a quick fucking getaway.

Some people are like cliffs that you can jump off of and fall to your death on the dry jagged rocks below. Some people are like long hallways you can shout down and hear the distant echo of your own voice coming back at you, but no other signs of life. Some people are like albino ferrets that hop up and down when they’re excited and that are cute but kind of bad-smelling. Some people are like dwarves, in fact they actually are dwarves. Some people are unable to cope in normal society and yet rise to the occasion in conditions of pure survival. Some people have extra nipples. Some people owe me money. Jack was all of these things, and more.

He lived in a hole in a shoe in a forest in a can, in France, in the summer, in June in debt in a constant state of doubt, on some land near a continent with oceans next to it somewhere north of Antarctica. He had a certain indescribable something. He kept it on a string looped around his waist. He liked cats, falafel, long walks on the beach, honesty, Grand Marinier, his mom, films, breathing, himself, food that didn’t have giant quivering gobs of pus and fungus with tiny eyeballs and tentacles and raspy teeth crawling all over it, large unexpected government benefit checks, cheese, and people with names beginning with vowels. His turn-offs included: nuclear winter, human feces, being beaten about the face and neck with the barrel of a large automatic pistol, rape, chewing on tin foil, food that did have giant quivering gobs of pus and fungus with tiny eyeballs and tentacles and raspy teeth crawling all over it, court appearances, drowning, cancer, canned vegetables, snowboarding, moments of sudden, unshakable and complete comprehension of one’s own mortality, artificial breasts, lard in Mexican cooking, man’s inhumanity to man and beets. He had at various times in his life been a lifeguard, a mailman, a boxer, a telephone sanitizer, a build-maintenance engineer, a dental hygienist, a sucker, a straight-man, a second-story man, a minor functionary, a middle manager, a bum, a dwarf, a dwarf-bum, a dental-dwarf-hygienist-middle-bum-manager-engineer, a contractor, a consultant, an activist, an anarchist, an anaesthesiologist, a picador, a conquistador, a barrista, an underclass, a phalanx, a junta, a soccer team, the upper twenty floors of both towers of the World Trade Center in New York, an ant, a microbe, a giant quivering gob of pus and fungus with tiny eyeballs and tentacles and raspy teeth that crawled along the ocean floor in search of food, or companionship, or stimulating entertainment, or heroism, or just to end it all and see what happens next, and he had also been the driver of a school bus full of blind orphan quadriplegics on the way to a lacrosse match against a school of deaf test-tube amnesiacs, as part of an intramural handicapped lacrosse program funded in part by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, when a sudden mechanical failure in the transaxle caused everybody’s heads to detach from their necks and fall off onto the floor and roll up and down the center aisle bumping against one another like bowling balls do in the bowling ball return mechanism exit chute storage groove thing that they have at bowling alleys, and understandably he had been scarred by this experience so he didn’t do that any more. When I met him, he was dead. I haven’t seen him recently. I often wonder where he is, what’s he’s doing, whether he’s finally gotten over the trauma of that horrible day, or that other trauma of that other horrible day when he woke up on the ocean floor to find giant quivering gobs of pus and fungus with tiny eyeballs and tentacles and raspy teeth chewing on him, and he said: “Hey, stop that, cut that out!” and they looked at him with their tiny eyeballs assuming an expression that said: like, who’s this guy? Like as if he was the one who was interloping and being rude, and presumptuous, and not these horrible unreal parasitic pus-fungus creatures that were touching him with their hideous clammy tentacles and digesting his flesh, and it was all very awkward. I wonder if he ever found love. I wonder if he’s still a dwarf. Maybe someday he’ll call me.