Nine Kinds of Naked (16 page)

“I just don't understand what's wrong with being happy.” Doreen paused, then offered, “We don't have to watch them both.”

Diablo fell silent, and later, they watched both movies.

 

46
T
HE
W
ASHINGTON
M
ETROPOLITAN
Area Transit Authority manages the second largest rail system in the United States. It is efficient, well-maintained, architecturally impressive, and nearly 50 percent of its rush hour riders are employees of the federal government. Despite this peer pressure, Diablo avoided riding it, even when it was free on pollution days, even when his commute exceeded the half-hour mark, and even when people bragged of the superlatives in its construction. That the subway runs as deep as 200 feet underground and that one of its entrances boasts a 230-foot escalator—the longest in the Western Hemisphere—only confirmed the distance he had chosen to place between himself and what seemed to him to be a literal hellhole.

One Sunday afternoon, however, while shopping with Doreen, Diablo happened to overhear some college kids discussing the immense tunnel that accessed the underground Wheaton Metro Station. The usual superlatives, of course, did not impress him, but when he heard them refer to the tunnel as the “Martha Washington Monument,” well, that suddenly gave him a different way of looking at things. Perhaps the WMATA rail wasn't only a smoke screen to camouflage the
Cold War construction of a gigantic government bomb shelter capable of withstanding a nuclear attack. Perhaps it could also be a hidden portal to the feminine in a capital dominated by the masonry phallus of the Washington Monument. It certainly warranted an investigation.

And so, after arranging to rendezvous with Doreen in a half hour, Diablo ventured onto the bottomless escalator. As he glided down, the white walls did little to convince him that the grimy air was suitable for breathing, and he could soon feel the boogers gathering crust in his nose, accreting debris like asteroids with meteoric aspirations. And the people were just as he'd feared: blasé and spiritless, their faces filled with antifascination, stupefied by consumerism, a herd of hellhound workers trudging after a plasticized carrot hanging perpetually out of their reach. When, despite his best efforts, his eyes glanced off those of various passersby, nothing but mutual mortification passed between them, as if they had just crashed each other's funeral. Diablo would have liked to feel compassion, but he could barely keep himself from recoiling in disgust. He winced as an exhausted woman riding the opposite escalator took a bite out of a chunky chocolate bar. Yes, delicious, Diablo thought derisively. Who would have guessed that three rodent hairs and ninety insect fragments could taste so good?

This was exactly why he avoided mass transit. It lent credibility to the idea that some Gnostic demiurge had cloaked the immanent numinosity of life and replaced it with a demoniacal delusion so dull that it cannot fail to find its own sallow reflection in every strung-out, drawn-down, frowning fool who
surrendered their free will to the dictations of the fearful. And the fact was, Diablo was scarcely different from any of the lost souls crowded all around, and deep down he knew it. His life had become as hopeless as a pair of sneakers dangling from a telephone wire, and furtherworse, it was a wire that only connected telemarketers, most of whom were imprisoned. Here, he was just another person lost in a world of people, one more ho-hum human, another cheerless chump bummed out by the blah, sullen and sluggish, ravaged and unamazed, and shallow. Like everyone, the once-sparkling soul of his youth had long ago evaporated into the desert of the real, the crystal pool of his childhood now nothing more than a polluted puddle, a parched personality left to thrash like a shark out of water. At least in a traffic jam he couldn't see himself reflected so immediately in the faces of others. Here, the truth was inescapable.

No, this was no hidden portal to the feminine divine, at least insofar as the feminine represents all that is gentle and nurturing. To her credit, however, the Martha Washington Monument
is
a suitable companion to the marble and granite boner of the (George) Washington Monument, though even Martha would be unable to engulf all 555 feet of that capitol manhood. And while it's easy to think of the male sex organ as rock hard, it's more than a little jarring to think of a steel, concrete, and tile vagina. No, in Diablo's mind, the hidden portal to the feminine divine would be moist and warm, a subterranean grotto surging with water and teaming with moss, and all who entered would exit flushed and smileful. Diablo exited nauseated and depressed, and when he found Doreen he was a cantankerous companion for the remainder of the day.

 

47
D
IABLO'S LIFE WAS
a driveway buried in three feet of wet snow, and he had been shoveling it with a dented spatula. One is left to wonder, then, what sudden spring thaw led him to abandon his incessant weeping and hand-wringing and get on with the happy business of participating in evolution. As it turned out, it was the Monday immediately following his visit to the Martha Washington Monument, and he simply . . . ran away—first from work, then from home. As he peeled Billy Pronto's truck out of the parking lot of his condominium complex that Monday afternoon, it occurred to him that he was running not from his condo, which could hardly be considered something so affectionate as a home anyway, but rather from security in general. High adventure is unsustainable in the midst of stagnant security, and reveries of running away promise a freedom transcendent in its totality, a flee from security and into serendipity.

Of course, there's more to Diablo's runaway story than this, but we'll catch up with the details later. For now, it is enough to note that, more than anything, he was running from
the drab.
And adulthood, as far as he could see, was drab, a faux-gold-leaf invitation to quiet desperation. The enthusiasm so vital to life seemed to have abandoned everyone past a certain age, and he didn't think it had anything to do with how many winters they'd seen. No, it had more to do with the consequences of a hidebound culture that guarantees nothing to its members as they age. Adulthood, as it turns out, is an enforced role. The mind becomes overwhelmed with responsibility, financial planning, time management, highly effective habits, and the soul gradually grows rotten with frustration. And this
is no neutral fact, Diablo determined as he drove. Frustration is the opposite of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm derives from the Greek
éntheos
, meaning “having the god within.” Frustration, then, is a spirit gasping in the absence of the divine, and the natural consequence of burying the impulses of the spirit beneath the requirements of personal finance.

Bouncing along in Billy Pronto's rattletrap, Diablo felt exhilarated,
enthused
, and as he wiggled the middle stump on his left hand gripping the steering wheel, he was reminded of that fateful day five years ago when he'd last felt this way: uncolonized and free, scot-free, like a shoplifter passing through an automatic door, as if his booty were not a meaningless piece of shrink-wrapped plastic junk, but a key, a sacred key, and the door led not to the asphalt expanse of the parking lot, but to the limitless horizons of freedom.

Diablo pulled onto the limitless horizons of the interstate, wondering how he'd let five years whiz by as if it were all just billboards and ugly scenery on the road to nowhere-in-particular. He dug into his back pocket and pulled out the Joker, now crumpled and faded, and placed it on the dashboard so that it faced him. Thus distracted from the obligations of driving, he studied the design on the card, a cherubic jester dancing on the back of a bee. He had never understood what the bee had to do with anything, but nevertheless vowed the same simple vow he'd made five years prior: to participate in evolution and to do so by surrendering into the whimwinds of synchronicity.

It was no small coincidence, then, that upon glancing back at the berm onto which he'd drifted, he instantly had to swerve
to avoid striking a pedestrian. Tires screaking like a demon trying to yodel, Diablo's world flew at him like a deck of tarot cards sprayed in his face. Helter-skelter he hurled through each stampeding moment, as present as present gets, present enough to notice that the pedestrian failed to flinch, even as the passenger-side mirror sideswiped a plastic gas can clean out of his left hand. Diablo had time to bring the car to a screeching jolting stop, release his seat belt, and get out of the car before the plastic gas can bounced off his roof, spilling its contents everywhere.

Curiously, however, these contents did not include gasoline. This was some kind of a modified gas can, a five-gallon capacity, with a door rigged into one side, containing some basic clothing, some fruit, a couple of sandwiches, and money—lots of money, now fluttering everywhere like the embers of a fallen civilization.

Diablo looked to the owner of this peculiar gas can and saw a young man ambling along, his gait never having faltered. “Synchronicity on the sultry soothe of your day!” the stranger called out in cheerful salutation. Diablo returned a tentative wave. Upon arriving at the car, the stranger set about gathering and repacking his effects, taking no great care to reclaim every banknote, and prattling on about clouds and how if you just open your mind it's really entirely predictable how they shift their shape and even when, don't you think?

Diablo glanced at the sky, but his recent adrenal surge permitted little patience for cloud gazing. When he looked back at the stranger, the stranger was studying the surface of an orange as if it were a crystal ball. “Are you okay there?” Diablo asked.

The stranger looked at him, thought for a moment, then replied, very carefully, “I am okay here,” before bursting into an enormous and vigorously nodding smile. “Yes,” he reaffirmed. “I am okay here. Are you okay here?”

“I mean, that was pretty close,” Diablo tried to clarify. “You're lucky to be alive.”

“Everyone is lucky to be alive,” the stranger responded.

Diablo paused, considering. “Can I give you a ride?”

“Can you give me a ride?” the stranger repeated, incredulity stretching his voice. “I cannot tell you that. I speak only for myself. Your capacities are beyond my comprehension. Whether or not you give me a ride is for you to know and for me to discover. I,” he gestured to himself and shook his head emphatically, “I can tell you nothing in that regard.”

“All right.” Diablo smirked, finding the stranger's bizarre verbiage engaging. “Do you
want
a ride?”

“I want for nothing,” the stranger immediately answered. “Desire is the root of all unhappiness.”

Diablo thought for a moment. “Then permit me to give you a ride,” he said. There, he thought. That should defeat the incessant decontextualization.

The stranger nodded. “I am honored. What can I call you?”

“You can call me Diablo. What's your name?”

Grinning like a skinny-dipper, the stranger answered, unmistakably, “Billy Pronto.”

 

48
A
N INCIDENT IS
an occurrence.
A
coincidence is a simultaneous occurrence. Hence, everything that is simultaneously occurring
right now
is a co-incidence. So, a few words
ago when it was right now, it was coincidental that meaningful symbols happened to exist on this page just as you happened to be looking at the page, and that doesn't begin to capture every other cosmic co-incidence that emerged in that universal moment. However, we will not here develop an index of every happenchance that occurred in the universe back then when it was right now. It is enough to point out that it was—as it always is—quite a coincidence.

Of course, we only glimpse the coincidence when we spot the connection between two simultaneous occurrences. That's what makes it meaningful, synchronistic. But that does not imply that the coincidence is absent simply because we fail to pay attention. We demonstrate remarkable absentmindedness when we forget that everything else is also always happening at the same time. As it turns out,
everything
is a coincidence.

Still, Diablo was understandably staggered by this turn of events. “Billy Pronto,” he said after a few whooshes of traffic. “Christ, from the goddamn tornado. Do you recognize me?”

“Of course,” replied Billy Pronto, latching the side door on his gas can. “You're the guy with the car.” At that, he crawled into the passenger seat, leaving several hundred dollars in twenties still littered about.

Diablo joined him in the car, and started down the road. “You missed some of your money, you know.”

Billy shook his head. “I miss nothing.” He drummed the side of the gas can. “Which goddamn tornado?”

Diablo proceeded to relay the story of how this very truck was Billy's, how Billy had given him a ride just outside the jail, how the tornado had whapped the truck off the road, and how
Billy had disappeared. He showed Billy his severed middle finger, as if that would suffice as evidence. Billy listened politely, and said he was sorry to hear about the lost finger, but insisted that he didn't know what Diablo was talking about. Fascinated, Diablo decided to let the matter rest for now. There were other curiosities at hand.

“What's the story with your gas can, anyway?” Diablo asked.

“It's a suitcase, actually.”

“It's a gas can with a door cut into the side of it. Why don't you get a regular suitcase, or even better, a backpack?”

“No one picks you up if you have a pack on your back nowadays, or a suitcase,” Billy explained. “This gas can is my thumb. With a gas can in my hand, people assume I'm a driver in distress, not a hitchhiker. I can hardly walk five minutes with this in my hand. When I explain that I'm not really out of gas, they usually still give me a lift. It's much too uncivil for most people to beg off at that point.”