Planet Fever (9 page)

Prior to having been knocked into a life of perpetual confusion, I had been a mediocre writer who had spent his time scrounging for money and drinking booze. After the blow in the bar, I had become (according to the recorded writings) some sort of covert operative working to subvert a world-domineering entity that controlled the entire human race via subliminal, economical, political, philosophical, educational, sociological, psychological, spiritual, mathematical, irrational, unnatural and vital means.

My façade was as a drunken bum.

“No one would ever think twice about a bum!” my journal read. “When flooded with alcohol, all neural roads and byways become inaccessible or downright treacherous. Their brain-scans are almost impossible to conduct—like going to a mountain pass during a blizzard to do a sobriety test on vagrant….”

Oh, how clever I supposed myself to be.

But the truth was, during these stints I’d disappear for a period of time, prompting Mona to call the police and file a missing persons report on me. Eventually I’d be picked up in a random ally, sidewalk, freeway underpass, or park bench, stinking drunk and muttering incoherent gibberish while clutching one of my notebooks.

“You arrre leeving een a dreeeam und vaaking state hybreed.”

That’s what the Doc had told me.

SPEAKING OF
Dr. Sydney Götzefalsch: he was a world-renowned psychiatrist. The reason I had originally landed in his office was because the Blonde—I mean Mona Malena—had heard about him in an ad on the radio for his clinic in the Redondo Beach area. His specialty was working with and curing cases such as mine. He deemed these cases the suffering of “temporal neurological displacement disorder,” the symptoms being “figments of reality intermeshing with fragments of imagination for a synthesis of strange perception.”

Yeah, I thought it sounded like a bunch of
quackery,
but Mona seemed to think it would help get me realigned with reality.

And she had pretty much come to her wit’s end at that point.

Götzefalsch had invented a revolutionary drug called “Fractalyn,” which he decided to test on me. When absorbed into the system, Fractalyn sends micro-robots deep into the brain so the patient becomes a living movie studio in which every tangent of thought is perceived and downloaded into a visual file and stored.

The patient becomes both
spectator to
and
part of
the entire mind production. These neural director-robots label all mental perceptual procedures as “fragments of reality” or “figments of imagination.”

The director-bots then organize the two components into their respective camps and send them to the “thought editor/producer bots”—who decipher which thoughts would be profitable to the organism’s sanity. The chosen ones are then released into consciousness or as dreams.

The drug acts as a type of “psychological Roto-Rooter” which cleans out the pipes in the brain from all the hallucinatory and irrational clogs. Booze, of course imperils the effects of the treatment.

Whenever I relapsed into drink, the progress I had made would regress back to the starting point and then some. Hiking is a good analogy: if I had hiked one mile, then had a slip with the booze, I’d find myself
two
miles back in the opposite direction of my starting point. When that did occur—which was not irregular—Dr. Götzefalsch would intensively sober me up and put me under heavy hypnotic sedation, and sometimes house me at his clinical facility.

“This veel cause great deeskomnfort und deesoreentation”—and the shock sober treatment was very uncomfortable and disorienting.

“Ze kraveeng for ze booze vill steadily deemineesh”—eventually it seemed to do so, but my brain-patterns still went to the drink out of habit.

I had to become “de-habitualized.”

And that’s where the journals came into the picture. They served as a method to keep track of my fragmented ongoing drunken stupor, as well the pill’s effects.

Though I never told her, Mona was a Godsend and the fact she had cared for and put up with my B.S. during the aftermath of self-induced blackouts spurned me on to try and be a “better man,” whatever that was.

My troubles tested and anguished her; the only conclusion to be drawn for the reason behind her patience and help could be boiled down to two words: true love.

LATELY I
had been waking up earlier and earlier in the morning, so began a ritual of driving to a breakfast joint out in the inland desert of L.A, one I had frequented as a kid and teenager growing up in the suburbs called Chino Hills.

I had begun to look forward to that predawn drive. It seemed to help clear my head.

I climbed into the pickup and drove off. The clutch was beginning to show signs of slippage, and I reckoned I’d have to get it fixed in the near future.

Through the winding roads and intermittent neo-suburban desert sprawl, the truck rolled into the small, old-school breakfast joint called the “Freeborn Diner.” Their policy: feed the customer behemoth portions at an absurdly low cost.

How had it remained in business for over quarter a century? The place was always jam-packed, that’s how. The guy who owned it was a part Czechoslovakian part Cherokee chef who came across as cynical and cranky, but was in fact as gentle as a doe to those allowed into his tribe.

Aside from being a gourmet hash slinger, he had a gift of astute societal observation and was well versed in history, psychology, etiquette and cussing. The man’s humble, yet profound intellect resonated in ways beyond the operations of academia and media.

He was what they once referred to as a
wise man
.

And, as I said before:
the man could cook
—especially eggs Benedict.

“Chief, your stuff is gourmet cuisine. Still cheap as dirt,” I said the first time I had returned to his place in years, shoveling the ’68 Omelet into my mouth.

“Well thanks—thank you much. But you’re wrong. My stuff is not cheap like dirt. Look around, these days dirt ain’t cheap!”

His place, a service station, and a bar had once been the sole inhabitants for a mile either way off the once two-lane, half-paved road. Back then, people wouldn’t have taken money to own the deed of the shoddy land his little diner rested upon. I used to ride my BMX bike up and down that road to his diner without having to worry about traffic.

Today, his little restaurant resembled an archeological relic from a bygone era wedged within a mosaic of strip-malls, mega-shopping-complexes, gas station/junk food Meccas, cappuccino/latte/whatever-other-exotic-called-caffeine-fix joints, health spas, banks, movie complexes, sports bar-and-grills, theme-oriented restaurants, repetitive townhouse condos, and cheaply built houses, all adorning a six-lane road that had traffic aplenty.

“American Dreams: how can they all be the alike?” Those were the sort of pontifical questions the Chief posed to his clientele.

As an aside: Chief had acquired his English via a couple of foul-mouthed Italian immigrant mechanics, his own mother and father (both spoke very little English), and a George Carlin LP entitled
Occupation Foole
.

His mother was born a Lakota. She married a Czechoslovakian beer-brewer named Vaclav and the couple had baby Chief. In 1920, because of the asinine 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol in the United States, Vaclav moved his young family back to Europe. And that is where Chief grew up. His parents believed in keeping ancestral traditions intact, so Chief had been passed Eastern European habits, as well as some Indian customs (he liked the term
Indian
because rather than feeling demeaned by it, he laughed at how it reflected the absurdity and stupidity of the people who assumed that nomenclature upon them).

In 1968, when the Soviet Union rolled tanks into his beloved city of Prague, Chief decided to flee Europe and return to the U.S. (which had long since ditched the 18th Amendment via the 21st Amendment). He was 50 years old at that time, and one of the first things he did when he got to California was to purchase (with all his savings) this diner and the land underneath it from a very old friend of his dad.

He had learned the craft of brewing beer from his father, who had learned from his father, and so on. Chief’s masterpiece brew was a golden bodied pilsner he called “Shiky Na Nový Světový Rád” which translates (from Czech) into “Piss on the New World Order.” The label had a tactful illustration of a farmer and Comanche chieftain urinating onto the back of an enlarged one dollar bill—both their streams targeting the eye atop the pyramid.

The beer was the best I had ever had.

I PARKED
in the lot and breathed a sigh of relief; I had beaten the morning surge of people, who tended to be loud and boisterous.

An overwhelming aroma of bacon & eggs, hash browns, along with an underlying scent of pipe tobacco and brewery wafted through my nostrils.

“Morning, Chief.” I took my usual stool at the counter and grabbed the piping-hot coffee that had been promptly set before me.

“Eddie, how the fuck are you, eh?” Chief gulped down a glass of milk, set it down and donned his “Old Glory” cooking apron.

“Best as I can be. What’s new?”

“Same shit. Those bastards won’t leave me alone with their fuckin’ money offers. Now they got fuckin’ lawyers who want to find a way to get place with bullshit laws. They probably pay fuckin’ politician to make bullshit law to steal place from me. Son-of-the-bitches politician lawyers … always stirring up the shit and figuring out ways to rob us.” He cracked a couple of eggs and tossed them on the burner. “Fuckin’ money, money, money. I pay tax to some fuckin’ politician I don’t know or care for so I can give good food and good beer to good people so he can make me pay for license and license and license and tax and tax and tax so I can be legitimate and legal so I can pay more so the son-of-the-bitch can stuff my money into his obese pants pockets and go and gamble in the stock market and have good time with his fat pig son-of-the-bitch banker buddies while I barely keep my head above water. Fuck him—he and his obscene pig friends will cook in hell. Shit—they probably own hell and charge devil rent. Maybe they need more room for hell so they try to buy land from me to put on extension. Hell is too overcrowded already!” He bellowed a laugh and tossed the bacon on the burner.

The little bell above the door jingled as some guy walked in. He sported a ponytail under a faded ball cap and wore dark sunglasses, work-ridden overalls, a grubby heavy-duty flannel jacket, and duct-taped work boots.

His vestment said “trucker” but his gait and demeanor lacked what most other truckers’ expressed: cumbersome fatigue. His movements were controlled, fluid and stealthy, and he floated from the door in through the diner with an effortless cloud-like advancement.

Though the place was pretty much empty, the guy opted to take the stool right next to me.

“I be right with you!” Chief yelled from the kitchen.

The trucker grabbed the newspaper that was on the counter and opened it to the movie listings. He brandished a green Hi-Liter pen from his flannel pocket and began examining the films. He’d peruse, take pause then highlight a film, or—after taking pause—decide not to and continue his examination.