The Nameless Dark: A Collection, page 26
I downed my glass and walked over to Doyle, drying my hands on my pants like a school kid called to the front of the class to receive a ribbon. I always hoped that Doyle liked me because I was interesting or special in some way, but deep down I knew it was most likely because I slept in my ’48 Buick Roadmaster, which was the last working ride on the block. Never mind that it was the only home I had on earth. I probably could have crashed at Doyle’s pad, but I didn’t want to intrude. Anyway, I had wheels, which meant Doyle did too.
He gestured to the sky. I looked up, and couldn’t see anything through the incoming fog that reflected the light from the city back down upon itself like a golden canopy. “You see what I see?” Doyle asked, more to himself.
“Yeah... Yeah, I think I do.” I saw nothing, but it was very important for Doyle to think I was on his level at all times, even though I couldn’t find his floor if you built me a golden elevator.
Doyle exhaled a perfectly shaped nimbus cloud of spicy smoke that he was holding in the entire time. It didn’t smell like grass. It didn’t smell like anything I’d ever come across. His voice dropped an octave. “Nelson, we need to find the hydrogen jukebox.” He turned his electric blue eyes on me. “We need a cleansing.”
I paused, then nodded. “We sure do.”
He stubbed out the narrow joint on his tongue and swallowed the roach. “Fire up the sled and let’s burn.”
I waited, expecting him to continue, but Doyle just stared at me, looking stone-cold sober, like a professor waiting for an answer. “N-now?”
“If not now, then when?”
I thought for a minute, climbing through the gauze that spread from my stomach until I discovered that his question was rhetorical.
Doyle waited for me to say what I was supposed to say, what anyone would say, but I didn’t, so he smiled and hopped down off the ledge, landing lightly on his bare feet. “Meet me out front in thirty,” he said as he disappeared, taking the light with him.
I stood in the dark for several seconds. “Where’re you going?”
“Provisions!”
Thirty-two minutes later, we were rumbling down the Hill like a dull spear thrust into the slow rising sun, just as the city was shaking off the regret of the night before.
Sugarboy rode shotgun, rolling an Atomic Fireball across his stunted teeth and awkwardly jerking his head to the Kay Starr song on the radio, a gut full of bennies beating a hole in his heart. Doyle was in back, sitting between Cincinnati and some cat I’d never seen before. He called himself Escofet, which could have been a first or last name. Didn’t matter, really. Just another punter riding the carousel. I took him for a queer, with his sweat-stained silk shirt open to the waist and long lashes that fluttered over black eyes that looked perpetually on the verge of tears, and presently seemed to be locked into watching me in the rearview mirror. A lurid tattoo of something ripe and naked peeked out from behind the row of pearl buttons. Doyle brought new faces and names in and out of the group almost daily, and it never mattered the color or persuasion. He had an interest in all of it, and tried every inch of it on for size.
In between sips of Old Fitzgerald and necking pretty heavy with Cincinnati, Doyle called out directions just as each turn was almost behind us. I yanked and careened, lurching the Buick through three lanes of traffic and a hailstorm of curses, catching the I-80 out of the city. My dad would have had a heart attack with the way I was beating this car. Doyle howled above each tire squeal, instructing every disgruntled commuter in turn to sodomize various family members in a variety of creative ways. Cincinnati giggled like she was seven instead of twenty-four and nowhere and drunk, while Escofet kept watching me in the mirror. Sugarboy popped another handful and lit up a joint, lost in the world just outside his window as he ground his nubs further into his gums.
We crossed the Red Bridge and invaded darktown Oakland like roaring barbarians, waving to the mothers heading to the salon and nodding to the hard-eyed neighborhood toughs manning their posts under the eaves of shadowed stoops. By this time, I was dipping into the road whiskey, and after a few slugs stopped wondering where we were going and focused on how capital it was that we were getting there. “Tapping in and letting go,” as Doyle so often called it. Tapping into the lizard brain to learn the secrets of the reptiles, and letting go of the ego of the sapien. It wasn’t easy for a boy raised between hay bails.
The row houses ceded ground to rugged hill and Spanish fir, and we soon made our way onto the 24, passing Emeryville and Upper Rockridge as time seemed to speed up while the fish cans around us slowed like unwound toys.
The highway thinned out, the energy in the car plateaued, and an unspoken silence crouched just below the radio backbeat and the roar of the pavement. I watched the painted signs pass above us, looking for clues. No one said a word for a long time, going through what they were going through. Escofet’s eyes made the minutes into hours.
“Where’re we headed, anyway?” Sugarboy asked as he turned to the back seat, his bloodshot pinpoints darting from Escofet to the creep of Cincinnati’s dirndl skirt that showed just a hint of rounded cotton. He had pulled himself back together long enough to ask the question I had been meaning to bring up back on the Hill, but didn’t have the guts. I wanted to seem the bold adventurer, tearing off in the pre-dawn slate without a destination in mind or a care in my soul. I wanted to be Dean Moriarty. But I was just Nelson Barnes, all smooth hull without texture, and what I was most concerned about was the five-body wear on my wheezing shocks.
Doyle took another belt from the bottle and grinned, squirting a rivulet of warm liquid between his teeth onto the back of my neck like a spitting cobra.
“Up into the rim. Forehead of the Western world. We gotta get a better view of things, you know?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, and neither did Sugarboy. The back seat, on the other hand, seemed drenched in understanding. The unifying power of liquor and forgotten modesty. I tried to join in with a chuckle. “We going mountain climbing? I didn’t bring my boots.”
Doyle started humming, or gurgling, deep in his throat. It was a terrible sound. “The songbiiiird waits, at’er top o’ Deeeevil’s Moun-tain, openin’ them brown arms wiiide,” he sang in an off-kilter voice, then hit the bottle again.
Sugarboy knitted his brow and cut his eyes to me. I just shrugged. We didn’t know each other well, as he ran with the Night to Day crew in the house while my hours were more in line with a college professor. But on this trip, it seemed like the dividing line between camps was separated by pale blue vinyl seats. Escofet and Cincinnati just grinned knowingly. “We are about to be enlightened,” Doyle pronounced before throwing on some grandma shades and leaning back in his seat.
My copilot twitched a few times, casting lassos through his orbiting brain, then turned back around and popped a Tootsie Roll into his mouth.
I swallowed a few times. The whiskey was wearing off and left something hungry and hollow in its place. “But what does that mean?”
There were a few moments of silence. I couldn’t see Doyle’s eyes behind his dark lenses, but I could feel Escofet’s latching onto mine, as if he was watching for the man next to him. “How’s that, Barnacles?”
I cleared my throat, wishing the bottle would make its way back up front, but Escofet was holding it with two hands, blowing into it like a jug player. Licking the opening. “Enlightenment, I mean. What are you getting at?”
Doyle lowered his sunglasses and looked at me with an expression I’d never seen before. Finally, he broke into a smile, then a laugh. His backseat chorus joined in, cackling like they were watching Jack Benny.
“Do I need to break it down for you? Our brothers are dying in the streets, bodies chewed raw from the filth of Korean rice paddies. Our sisters are locked in cages by husbands turned bosses… slavers, while the rest of us stare at our glowing squares, worshipping Cronkite and Lucy. Laughing inside the flames.” Doyle grabbed the back of my seat, wrenching it back toward him, his eyes flaring. He was strong. “What we think we know is bullshit, and what we don’t know is our salvation. The West ain’t the best. The West is a gerbil wheel. Knowledge from the older places is what we need right now. I’ll be good goddamned if we scorch ourselves off this marble and leave only a black smudge with nothing underneath. I want to go deeper, find out how to rise above.”
“Right on, big daddy!” Cincinnati hooted and lit up a cigarette, pushing her limp blonde hair behind her ears. She was such a brown noser, made worse when her underwear was warm.
“We’re going to see the man with the plan.” Before I could ask, Doyle sat back in his seat, as if exhausted. “Take the first exit.”
I drove for five more miles, and was about to turn around, when I saw the small green sign on the side of the highway. Mount Diablo State Park.
The Buick veered onto the 680 South. That was the path to Devil’s Mountain, where an angel awaited.
After sliding through the foothills, we began to carve up the mountain on a fib of a road that degenerated into the truth of a barely paved switchback. I had to sit up straight and man the wheel like a Clipper captain amid a furious gale, lest we split open on the rocks below that waited at the bottom of a thousand-foot gorge, grasping at the tires just inches from the edge of the spotty asphalt marking the trail like flattened, black popcorn balls.
Within minutes, we were totally disconnected from civilization, as the sequoias closed in like colossal spires around us, eating the sun with arms a thousand feet high. The radio had faded to static, and Doyle started to hum again. That hideous, tuneless sound, as if intentionally missing notes. I wondered if we’d ever be able to turn around and head back down. Forward or die.
The road straightened and leveled off, ruts smoothed by wear and some level of primitive upkeep. I rolled down the window, and in between gusts of Cincinnati’s cigarettes, I could smell a dedicated wall of pine and ancient soil, worn down from the mountains to birth a million wooden titans. This was a different sort of smell than Nebraska loam, which had a damp odor of retreated ice, shallow streams, and clumsy agriculture. Up here lay the bite of primal dust, clinging to the backs of slumbering giants, full of wisdom born way down deep.
I looked into the rearview, hoping to catch Doyle’s gaze but expecting to find another’s, but I saw nothing. I pivoted in my seat, and found Doyle whispering into Escofet’s ear. He was leaning into the side of the car, eyes closed. Cincinnati pouted and picked at her nails, flushed ears poking through straw.
“Watch the road, man!” Sugarboy screamed, grabbing the wheel and wrenched it to the left as the right tire nearly slipped off the edge of the trail. The car found the road again. “You almost killed us!”
My face drained and my ears pounded. I was terrified of heights, and here I was, piloting a crew of hopped-up ragtags to the rim of the world on a broken spider web. Doyle just laughed behind me.
Further up the mountain, the asphalt degenerated to a dirt path. A pair of figures stood on the edge of the tree line, holding hands. It would have been hard to tell if they were male or female, as they wore matching plastic Wanda the Witch masks. But they were both naked, both male, and totally erect. Their heads turned as we passed, hollowed out eyeholes pouring darkness into the car.
Sugarboy jammed his hands to the side of his head, wagged his fingers and made a face at them through the window. They slowly imitated his hand movements in unison.
I looked at Doyle, who frowned at the naked pair like a disapproving parent. I had never taken him for a prude. Maybe he objected to their cheap costuming. “Is this some sort of orgy?” I asked, hiding my discomfort with a lame attempt at humor.
Doyle shrugged. “It’ll be what you want it to be. But it’ll be something, that’s for sure.”
“I’m ready for anything!” Cincinnati squealed, hugging Doyle, who had craned his neck to watch the two men run back into the forest as if being chased.
Mismatched automobiles and campers were parked on either side of the road, stretching as far as the eye could see into the shadowed depths of the forest ahead of us.
“Pull in behind the last car,” Doyle said.
“So many people,” Sugarboy muttered through clenched teeth, scratching his neck raw as the car squeaked to a halt.
“Grab the tent,” Doyle said to Sugarboy, who was about to protest when Doyle tossed him a baggie full of pills. His mouth cracked into a jack-o’-lantern grin, and he threw open the door and hustled to the back of the car.
The rest of us piled out into the unnatural dusk, accept for Escofet, who was sleeping in the back seat. “What about him?” I asked, half hoping he had overdosed on a noxious stowaway Doyle secreted back from the jungle.
“Leave him. He’ll catch up later.”
“What’s he on?”
“I don’t know, but I wish I had some.” Doyle put his ropey arm around my neck and grinned, projecting that glow out of his mouth and eyes like a blanket. “We’ll have to ask him later.”
We walked nearly a mile on a gentle upward incline, joining a procession of travelers from all stations of life and what looked like a hundred countries across the globe. Many of them spotted Doyle and offered greetings of various sorts. He responded in turn, like some sort of pilgrimage ambassador. This was Doyle’s Christmas card list come to life and congregating on one California mountain. An advert for international brotherhood right out of central casting. His mystery deepened, if that was possible. Between multilingual salutations, we all trudged toward the locus of light dead ahead that would lead us out of the forest and back into the sun.
We breached the womb of trees and emerged into a vast clearing, and I could have sworn we stepped into a medieval carnival. Thousands of people clad in outlandish garb or some far-flung native dress danced, spun, and congregated in tight groups on the tamped-down grass. A tent city was set up at the far end of the glade, while gaily festooned vendor booths fronted the trees to the right. Lording over it all was a massive central structure built out of a mountain cliff that rose up into the clouds. It was a hundred feet high and a football field wide, erected from mortared stone and thick wooden planks, topped with an onion dome that could have been ripped from eldest Siam or reddest Moscow. Narrow windows dotted the sides, giving the impression of a church, or perhaps a fort. By the weathering and veins of creepers crawling up the sides, whatever this place was, it must have been here for a while.
“Crazy, man…” I breathed, soon realizing that Doyle was waiting for my reaction. “What is this place?”
“This is the Listening Place,” Doyle said, taking all of it in with the appraising eye of a construction foreman. He glanced at me and winked. “One of them, anyway.”
A smiling woman with striking yellow eyes and skin tanned from a faraway sun skipped over and hugged Doyle before handing Cincinnati a flower. It looked lush and tropical, shining as if made of wax. Just like the woman who gave it. “Power to the children,” she said in a dreamy voice.
Cincinnati brought the flower to her nose and gasped. “Wow, it smells like… like… my grandmother’s farm.” She giggled and cooed, and I saw a glimpse of the little freckle-faced girl from Ohio, before she traded everything certain and safe for a chance to chase kicks and wild boys in the weird hothouse of San Francisco.
Sugarboy was eying vendors’ row, which was insulated by a coterie of patiently waiting customers. “Y’all sell candy around here?” he asked the woman without facing her. She handed him an identical flower before padding away, liming the magic hour sky with the serpentine curls of her black hair. Sugarboy glanced around sheepishly, then inhaled the glistening petals. A wince escaped his lips and he staggered. Swallowing a wave of emotion, he threw the flower to the ground and stomped it flat, before skulking away with that hitched, agitated gate of his.
“What did it smell like?” Cincinnati called after him.
“Aftershave,” Sugarboy murmured, as his mind tumbled backwards to those places he had tried to leave buried in the west Texas sand of east Lubbock. My stepfather’s aftershave, he thought, hoping his mouth didn’t move as he worked the words across his swollen tongue.
I watched Sugarboy melt into the crowd. “We’re gonna lose him.”
“Probably,” Doyle said. “He’ll get what he needs here, or he’ll go home.”
I stood back and marveled at the scene, again noting the smiles and bows shot Doyle’s way. This wasn’t like Telegraph Hill. This was an international procession of young and old. Mostly old. Yet all of them respectful, and often near reverent. “Why does it seem like everyone knows you up here?”
“Not everyone,” Doyle replied cagily, eying a pretty girl with red hair twirling like a Dervish on an open patch of ground nearby, her bare feet tamping down a perfect circle in the grass and her beatific face aimed up at the sky.
“How’d you find this place? It doesn’t seem real. It’s like… like a play, or something.”
Doyle took me by the arm and we walked like country gentlemen, Cincinnati falling in behind us, still holding the flower to her nose, grazing her thin lips as she inhaled deeply, eyes lidded heavy. A little girl again, almost beautiful. Almost.
“Have you ever traveled, Barnacles?”
“Me? Yeah, of course. I ended up out here, didn’t I? I mean, in the city.”
