Zombie Spaceship Wasteland Page 6

  Well, no . . . not my grandfather and grandmother. They didn’t grow up in that house—or anywhere, really. My grandfather and grandmother grew up, separately, elsewhere. They collided in their youth, sent four kids flying into the world, and then continued on without each other. Except for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which were unspoken rally points in their solitary lives, when they’d get together with their four kids at either our house, one of the uncles’, or—best of all, in my opinion— at Grandpa Runfola’s. Other than that, it was a condo in Chevy Chase for Grandma and the little house in College Park for Grandpa and Uncle Pete.

  Grandpa’s house in College Park was my favorite. So much better than Grandma’s sterile Chevy Chase condo. At the condo, after dinner had been consumed, the adults were drawn in two directions. The men coalesced around sports on a television and short, bumblebee bursts of travel to the wet bar. The women sat with them and gossiped about work, kids, and celebrities. It was the first musical mash-up I can remember hearing—the headlong pulse of a football game, with the driving drone of the announcer’s voice and the occasional whoop and bark of adults praising or condemning this or that godDAMN that or yyyyEEEEESSSS or AWWWWwwww (shit). And then, laid over this, like gulls over a noisy summer beach of dropped hot dog bits and popcorn kernels, the women, who can’t beLIEVE how STUpid this one at work is or HORRible this one kid on the block is or HOW she can stand to be photographed when she’s so FAAAAAAT? A high treble of lip-smacking snark over the drum and bass of sports.

  My brother loved sports. I couldn’t believe anyone could follow any conflict that didn’t involve lasers, robots, or magic rings.

  I’d go out on the balcony and swoop up the crusty snow on the railings and drop it far far far into the empty courtyard.

  Uncle Pete would join me out there on the icy balcony. Not that he hated sports or even company. I assumed, at the time, he was the only other person who understood the inherent awesomeness of shattering ice sheets and plaaaaping balls of soft snow on concrete, which looked, from that perspective, like spells or evil presences smashing against the gray wall of reality, not getting through.

  What I didn’t know was that Pete already had a hundred songs and voices and movies and gods in his head, chattering and flirting and arguing in an eternal overlit salon. It probably seemed rude, to him, to subject a group of job-holding, tax-paying, child-raising adults to such a cosmic and otherworldly standard. You wouldn’t let Barney Fife go up against the Man with No Name or the Magnificent Seven, would you?

  We stood on the balcony, Uncle Pete and I. My breath came out in a clean fog in the winter air and he exhaled an empty gray exhaust from the cigarettes he chain-smoked. Pete hadn’t started growing his mad-Russian-priest beard. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses. He had a square, clean-shaven face that looked like any number of people you’d see in the background of an early-fifties group photo of a searching party.

  “Think you could hit those ravens with your snow bombs?” he asked, pointing down to a huddle of black birds on a branch two stories beneath us.

  “I could, but it’d be mean.”

  “They’d bomb you if they could. That’s what they’re talking about now,” he said, going back inside for another handful of the endless peanuts he used to wash down his cigarettes. I looked back down at the ravens, and as if they felt my gaze, they huddled together closer.

  I thought Pete was the coolest person in the world.

  And he lived in the coolest house ever. A little suburban bungalow, perched on a corner off the highway, with this weird backyard that swooped and rose, abutting other backyards that swooped and rose. Standing on the back porch, you looked out onto a stormy ocean of grass, flash-frozen at its angriest moment. Whoever designed College Park, Maryland, must have been quietly terrified of the landscape and left it untouched, as if the confused, dark, and ancient forces that carved the surface had signed it with an exclamation point.*

  * * *

  “Nevermore,” said Pete, slamming himself down in the chair next to mine at the little kitchen table.

  I was laughing. He said “nevermore” in this weird, TV-horror-movie-host voice, and he bugged his eyes out.

  He had a thick book in front of him, and one of his thumbs was marking a page.

  “Quoth the Raven . . . ,” said Pete. And then, fumbling the book open, he started from the beginning of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”

  That was my first encounter with Poe—being read “The Raven,” without preamble, introduction, or context, by my insane uncle in a tiny kitchen in College Park. And he read it like a little kid discovering it—making a poem about adult regret and loneliness seem like the greatest thing to a kid who thought coolness acted like the Fonz, sounded like Kiss, and rode a motorcycle like Evel Knievel.

  My world was fun, but I always suspected there was more. Vampires in a room shuttered against California sunshine. A snow fort melted into the water that we swam in at the community pool in summer. Heroes and villains created at the flick of a pencil tip or in the tumblings of a handful of dice. My parents could drive us to Washington, DC, to get freeze-dried ice cream at the Air and Space Museum or ride the rides at Kings Dominion, or take us to movies. They could drop me off at an airport to take a plane to visit my other grandparents, out in the Arizona desert. Still, the world felt bounded. Uncle Pete was the first one ever to heave open the gates that sealed ancient pages and make me suspect there were worlds within and without the world I was in. That there were worlds outside of the time I was living in. All of this he carried against his will, in his head. But unlike the other adults, with their resentments and their anxiousness or anger, he seemed eternally, uncontrollably entertained. I really envied him.

  And then, before I knew it was happening, Pete became a living totem for everything I wanted to avoid in my life.

  I’m sitting here writing this and I can’t track the exact change. But it happened. I grew into my teens and I grew afraid of awkwardness. Pete grew out his beard like he was God’s cartoon and retreated farther and farther back into the thicket. And, more than anyone in my family and way more than anyone I’ve ever met or would become myself, he was comfortable and happy being quietly, antisocially batshit crazy.

  Occasionally visiting Pete and Grandpa in my teen years forever soured me on the “holy fool” portrayals of the insane and eccentric in films. You know the ones I’m talking about—pale and unshaven, but always rakishly so, with a clowny glint of kooky wisdom in their eyes and an elliptical way of muttering hip-shot revelations the rest of us are ignoring, unaware of, or dancing around like some monstrous flame. Who can brave the shaman heat of the truth? Why, kooky Aunt Lottie, who wears earrings she made from toothbrushes and names all the squirrels!

  I’d be brooding about some teenage slight I’d conflated in my teenage mind, and Pete’d come into the kitchen.

  “You all right?”

  I’d say, “Sort of.”

  Here’s Pete’s chance to Sort It All Out: “That old lady in the commercial for the Clapper? Someone should clap her in her face.”

  No help.

  I began thinking of life—a real life—being about movement and travel and awareness. Or, at least, I thought awareness came from seeing the world, experiencing it. I still think that.

  And that’s where Pete and I parted ways, slowly and then all of a sudden.

  As the thicket closed its final branches around Pete’s mind, he built a soundproof chamber in broad daylight. Out on the front porch of the little College Park house, he’d sit in his chair, sunup to sundown (and, truth be told, far beyond the darkness), and listen to the Washington, DC, oldies station. They’d still take requests and, over the years, Pete became a minor celebrity, at least among the six-strong crew of deejays who regularly took his calls for requests—the Elegants’ “Little Star” was an abiding favorite. When winter came he ran an extension cord from inside the house to a heating pad he’d sit on, baking his body like a mound of dough inside the
clay oven of his winter parka.

  And coffee. Endless cups of coffee. From the same chewed and bruised Styrofoam cup from the 7-Eleven down the street. He’d bring it back, use it until the edges of the bottom literally dissolved. Only then would he deign to grab a new one from next to the coffeepot. He would use a cup until it no longer existed as a cup.

  And there he’d sit. He was still lucid, and relatively young, but I could imagine his features blurring and sliding beneath the beard. I could imagine his body sagging and spreading and creaking under the parka in winter and under his sail-like, oversized cotton shirts in the summer. Who knows what his mind was doing, raging and humming and slowing to a white crawl and then lurching forward in blue-hot bursts of mixed sound, memory, and random images. There was nothing in the eyes to tell you. When he spoke it still related, pretty lucidly, to whatever or whomever was in front of him. If there were poison, dragons, or ghosts behind his greetings or good-byes, I never saw it. I just saw my uncle Pete, sitting in place, and knew that wasn’t how I wanted to live my life. I suspected, around the time I graduated college, that we’re all versions of targets, fired at by indifferent events. If that was the case, then I wanted to be a moving target.

  What sealed my final, silent drifting away from Uncle Pete was a Christmas when we visited the College Park house. I was in the early stages of realizing I wanted to move to San Francisco, to get serious about being a comedian. When you’re beginning to suspect you might be leaving a place, you become hypersensitive to it, as if your mind is subconsciously stocking itself with smells, sounds, sights, and tactile sensations of a place you’ll no longer see every day.

  So that Christmas, the one before I headed west, was a feast even before I sat down at the table. I can vividly remember the smell of the fireplace in my grandfather’s basement, the feel of the fabric on his couch. Snow was visible, falling, through the big glass doors in the back of the living room. And I remember how it made the white winter light ripple like seawater. I couldn’t summon the illusion of the house rising through the air, but I tried. And I can taste every bit of that Thanksgiving-by-way-of-working-class-Italian-cuisine dinner. The turkey, with a side of macaroni and peas. The rolls and roasted peppers. And the cheap jug wine, so sweet against the green-bean-and-onion casserole.

  And I couldn’t take my eyes off Pete. He ate dinner like he always did, in three or four huge, whoofing bites, before heading back out front to his cone of warmth, his coffee, his cigarettes, and ghostly tunes piping from his little transistor radio. And, most important, to whatever thoughts drowned out the voices of his own family saying “hello” and “happy holidays.”

  I watched him because I couldn’t believe that could be anyone’s comfortable horizon. A tiny porch on a dark corner near a highway. We lucked out living on a planet made thrilling by billions of years of chance, catastrophe, miracles, and disaster, and he’d rejected it. You’re offered the world every morning when you open your eyes. I was beginning to see Pete as a representative of all the people who shut that out, through cynicism, religion, fear, greed, or ritual.

  We were on our way home. My dad realized he needed to stop in the 7-Eleven for something. I went in with him.

  Another man was asking the clerk for directions, farther up the road from where we’d come.

  The clerk said, “Well, you keep heading back the way you were, right?”

  “Okay,” said the man.

  “And you’ll get to a corner. ’Bout a mile up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And there’s this house, and there’s going to be a fat guy with a huge beard sitting out front listening to the radio. That’s where you take your right.”

  Pete had become a landmark.

  Pete died a few years after I’d moved to LA. The chain-smoking, junk food, and immobility had finally gotten their message through to the rest of his body, and it quietly shut down.

  “Pete had his own little world there, you know?” said my mom over the phone.

  At this point in my life, I’d traveled over a fourth of the planet. I’d been to little towns and marveled at some random person—maybe a cineaste who visited the same little movie theater in Prague every night, or a craggy bar denizen in Dublin who inhabited the same stool, or even the crazies in Los Angeles, dancing shirtless on the same stretch of sidewalk, holding up signs for the disinterested commuters to honk at.

  I was still hungry to travel and move and create and connect—and I always will be—but I’ve got to admit something.

  There’s a little bit of Pete in me. There always was, and there always will be. Maybe it’ll grow stronger as I grow older, maybe not. But it’s there. I still don’t agree with spending a life the way Pete did, but I understand it and respect it. Who knows how many lives have been saved and villains vanquished by those who sat still?

  Will anything we do last? No. I just read a quote by Sir David Rees: “Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoeba.”

  On the day Pete died, someone left a fresh cup of coffee on his empty seat in front of the house in College Park. A nod from a fellow human who, like Pete, had started out as cosmic matter, shared with the stars above him, in an explosion eons ago.

  And, long before Pete disintegrated out of this world, he’d become a happy ghost in his own heat-pad heaven— a paradise of tobacco, caffeine, and “Little Star.”

  FULL DISCLOSURE

  Stuff I did on the Internet while writing this chapter:

  Played a game called Treasure Seas, Inc., while listening

  to the In Our Time podcast

  Deleted my Myspace inbox and then deleted my MySpace trash

  Looked at photos of search parties from the fifties

  * Didn’t even cross my mind to write “sixty-odd.”

  * The house that Pete and my mother and their siblings grew up in— their original house, a few blocks over, and not the one Pete and Grandpa moved to—was down the street from where the kid who inspired The Exorcist lived. Pete and my mother would talk about it obliquely, and they’d never go into detail. But Pete’s details, scant as my mother’s, were vivid. “You’d walk by the place and you could kind of hear that someone was screaming in the upstairs bedroom, but there’d also be traffic and noises and they kept the window shut, so you’d also think maybe you were hearing things,” said Pete. I’d wonder—how young was he when his schizophrenia began to blossom and the volume knob began to crank toward the red? Was this kid’s demonic yowling somehow mixed with whatever unreliable memories Pete viewed through the thicket of his madness?

  And then, in the next sentence, Pete would lay in a more prosaic—and, by virtue of its blandness, more valuable—detail: “Father Bowdern went away for a few months with this kid, somewhere in the Midwest, and they say they cured him.” And then the thicket would close in again: “But when Father Bowdern came back, me and the other altar boys could tell he wasn’t Father Bowdern anymore.” And then one final, comforting frosting flower of reality: “Anyway, the house is gone now. They put a gazebo up in its place. You and your brother used to walk down there all the time when you were little.”

  Wines by the Glass

  WHITES BY THE GlASS

  MUSTARD TIPTOE VINEYARDS FRESNO

  “THE SENSITIVE TEEN” CHARDONNAY $8

  Overprotected, easily frightened white first-growth grapes with hints of butterflies, honeysuckle, and tears. A dramatic first palate with a fey, whiney finish. Great with fish, steamed veggies, or Livingston Taylor music.

  TAMBY WILLAMETTE VALLEY

  “HEATHAZE” PINOT GRIGIO $10

  Asphalt, licorice, and tobacco over a confused bed of summer squash. A mouse died in one of the ba
rrels. Is that where your glass came from?

  THREE DOTS FADING SOMEWHERE IN AMIDNIGHT DESERT

  “OBSCURA” CHENIN BLANC $14

  A finger tracing a friend’s demise in a pile of spilled sugar on a mahogany table. Cherries. Black pepper winking at a werewolf who just took the wrong contract. An idea hiding in a shoe. The swordsman! A winter morning! No percentage in kittens.

  PRECIOUS OBJECT VILLA

  “UNATTAINABLE” RIESLING VARIABLE

  Angel sweat strained through diamond mesh into a platinum tureen hammered smooth by three former presidents and the current pope. Stored in an oak barrel made from the Tree of Life, bottled by billionaires, and poured into your glass by a scientist or poet. And Bob Dylan will personally watch you drink it. Although, now that we think of it, we’d rather you weren’t seen imbibing this wine. No, choose Something else. No. something else. Are you still talking?

  REDS BY THE GLASS

  FRED LUDD GARY,INDIANA

  “DRINKABKE” MERLOT $2

  A bunch of grapes, and they’re smooshed, and then they get kind of rotten, and we drain off the alcohol part and that’s the part you drink and then you’re drunk. Are you going to finish that burger?

  ZOMBIE SPACESHIP WASTELAND

  COLLEGE TOWN VINEYARDS

  “FRESHMAN AT THANKSGIVING” PINOT NOIR $11

  A Nietzschean blend of arrogant pinot grapes, half-informed with an amusing smugness. Fermented in stainless steel vats, formed from iron ore mined by exploited workers in Guatemala, whom our government uses as drug mules to fund a shadow war that’s gone unreported for more than fifty years. Great when paired with Gang of Four or Fugazi CDs, southern Hunan cuisine (not the northern provinces, which are so fucking mainstream I want to puke), and ironic T-shirts.