Already Dead: A California Gothic (4 page)

Two visitors in one day, each of them arguably more batshit than himself. The German, or whatever she was, was goofy. But he liked her, and maybe he’d see her again if he didn’t perish first of cocaine or Yvonne. As for Van Ness: just another ghost in another dream. And uglier than ever with his magnified eyes and that Kung Fu mustache like jungle vines. Frank felt sure that Van Ness had materialized here in the role of a demon—but not, thank goodness, one of mine, he thought. This time it’s somebody else who’s conjured him. I was fed up years ago, weary and sick of the power the world gives us to create entities like Van Ness.

His own demons whispered from behind the walls and underneath the floorboards. They had a special slyness, and their cowardice was devastating. Van Ness bore quite other markings. He might have been bodied forth out of some Eastern parable or Buddhist fairy tale, in particular one that Frank now recalled concerning a pilgrim and seeker in the North Country. Tired of his travels, this man sat one day in the shade of a tree in the heat of the afternoon to meditate on the changing emptiness of life. The air tasted good in his throat, but after a while he was thirsty, and he couldn’t drink the air. He wished he had a cool drink. Immediately a big urn full of fruit nectar appeared on the ground in front of him—because this tree he’d stopped to rest beneath happened to be the legendary Wishing Tree. He took a long, delicious drink, and then he felt his hunger and thought how good some food would taste.

Instantly, he had a plate of wheat cakes in his lap. He ate and drank his fill. What a great spot I’ve come to! he thought. It occurred to him this would be exactly the right place for a little home. And there it was, sunlight pouring

20 / Denis Johnson

down around it, a cottage made of white stones. Now, he thought, if only I had a wife…A completely beautiful woman strolled up, sat down beside him, and took his hands in both of hers. They made love and then nestled in the grass together, he with his head in her lap. As the man started to drift off to sleep he suddenly wondered with alarm if these wishes weren’t being granted, perhaps, by some sort of devil.

Sure enough, a terrifying devil, red as anger, huge and stinking of rot, appeared before him. And right in front of his wife and his gorgeous home, the monster tore him to pieces and ate him.

Already Dead / 21

August 8–10, 1990

M
y wife is a lovely woman, and we’ve built one of this area’s most beautiful homes.

It’s a new house, of true adobe brick, with redwood interiors, solar heating, a fireplace, two bedrooms, all on forty acres. Certainly no mansion but perfect for a childless couple providing they love each other. But we don’t.

Winona loves California. Winona loves her westward, golden dream.

And I love Melissa.

Melissa: your eyes: the gravities and winds across those skies…

I saw Melissa drifting up the rutted drive. Her music was sad. But as I saw her walking in her alien softness, squinting under the indelible blue sky, I vowed again as I had at my first glimpse of her that for this woman I would throw everything away. All of you: if you make it necessary, I will.

“How’d you get up from town?”

“By begging rides.”

22

“No. Melissa—you can’t
do
that. Someday somebody’s going to kidnap you.”

“And what will they do to me?”

“Things,” I said.

“The things you like to do.”

She was a nature’s child of the drug-demented sort, always living without power or running water and dressing from the rummage sales, but just for me she sometimes wore dark eye shadow and painted her lips a pale disheveled pink. Just for me she’d put on long blazing rags and fake jewels and high-heeled sandals and no panties and we’d whiz in my convertible to someplace up the coast where you could get a freezing margarita by the sea. We’d get smashed and kiss on the open wooden decks of these restaurants while the sun went down and the whole world blushed and trembled. Do you get it? Do you think I could do that with Winona? Thoughtful, muscular, artistic Winona? No—with her I stayed up through the first nights of our romance talking about Europe, and we said everything there was to say about Europe, where I’d never been. Later I did visit there, and it was a fantastic, an inspiring region. But I like Melissa even better than Europe.

Let me tell you about this girl. Her eyes are brown and wet. Her mouth twists from the effort of hiding her bad teeth when she smiles.

But when she’s drunk she laughs widely and her gold bridgework flashes. Bartenders like to lean forward to light her cigarettes and in the match-glow examine her as closely as a lover would. It’s all exactly there. The punished child in the stolen makeup. Eyes that are never going to look at anyone again. And then she leans back, receding into that wonderful posture, her left hand in her lap. Sometimes she wilts, and sits hunched over a drink drumming her fingers on the bar, and then she looks like a whore. She’s capable of sneering. A woman this vulnerable and perverse is usually taking time out from being tortured to death slowly by a man who looks exactly like her father. Things come to me in images. I see the image of a man strangling an orchid. Oh, flowers!

Up and down the Coast Highway you drift, orchids and azaleas, your petals smeared underfoot.

She was looking too hard at the busboy—blue-eyed, ponytailed, shirt open wide under his strong Adam’s apple. His music was Asian flute and hollow sticks knocked together. Ah, she probably knew Already Dead / 23

him. He’d had her, probably, on the wood table of his shack with orange crates full of garbage stinking by the windows, had her on the sand at Schooner Gulch in a chilly wind, he’d torn at her gooseflesh with his beautiful teeth.

“What’s the matter?” she asked me.

“Did you screw that guy? No”—I ran over her sudden, fearful laughter—“but you’re going to. Before your life is over you’ll have every last one.” The tequila was mixing badly, my brain glinted like a knife, I wanted to make a famous speech now, to tell her how much I hated her for being a woman, for being able to open up and
receive
, but all that came out was, “The whole
world
will be inside you, you’re like the
ocean—
”

And then I’m driving fast in the open, yellow Porsche, head clearing in the blasting atmosphere, searching my heart for apologetic words while beside me Melissa cries, “Burst apart, explode, fly, galactic, starburst, asunder!…”

For three generations my family has belonged to Northern California, living in the shadow of its ways—nature’s big moves, the colossal, twisted gestures of cypresses along the bluffs—bluffs, there’s something about that word that rings right, you can hear the grunts of God shoving these massive cliffs into place.

And to this natural grandness the best, the finest people are drawn, people just trying to touch life with awareness and kindness.

But it’s also a land of interminable rains, baffling droughts, and, in July and August, the thick, cloying fog banks. For twenty-one successive days they clung to the North Coast this summer, like…like the American Dream plowed up against the freezing sea. Now we mean to set up oil rigs out there and dig our dreams from under the ocean’s bed, our black, dripping dreams, so that we’ll remain at liberty to drive our dream-deals faster and faster along these tight roads. I myself drive not only the secondhand Porsche but also an open jeep with a high-speed rear end, both very fast. Or I did. Winona’s got the jeep now.

We do what we have to do in order to make it all come true. A few years back a man in our area paid a seedy character to kill his wife so that he could collect her insurance and live with his mistress. The supposed assassin, it turned out, was an undercover agent. The husband was charged with conspiracy and spent three years in prison.

24 / Denis Johnson

After a few months his mistress forgot him. During the third year his wife paid him several visits. They’re back together now.

Melissa’s been my mistress since October. She’s Austrian, this beautiful hippie. I believe she’s anorexic; she’s like a bird; when we make love I try to break her bones. I met her at the high school play last year.

It was a piece of shit, and I was embarrassed to see my wife, Winona, involved in it. Winona worked backstage. Melissa sat right under the lip of the stage, on the floor, with the smallest children. I watched her all night.

I want to lock eyes with Melissa, my passion, while casually destroying Winona—I want to drop Winona crumpled beside the plates of our feasting.

Winona’s music is the big, symphonic kind—maybe Vivaldi,
The Four
Seasons
. Any one of them, or all four. She’s small, somewhat chunky, but on her it’s becoming. Her face we call cute, darling. She’s snuggly.

In the middle of a pasture on our property, Winona keeps a ramshackle studio where she makes her sculptures. Her works stand in the sunny pasture, in that coastal clarity made stunning by the ocean’s nearness, big wooden totems of a modernesque unintelligibility, also unpleasing iron shapes—crescents stuck to parallelograms, et cetera—eight, ten, a dozen feet tall. Winona’s strong. She cuts the wood with a big chainsaw and hefts the iron into position for the welding all by herself. Welding’s dangerous. High voltage. Even a simple mistake can fry you. I imagine coming home to find Winona standing there with her clothes burned off, a crisp black self-portrait among her other statues. I like to think about it. I imagine ways of making it happen.

And she views me the same way. She loves our forty acres. She’d do anything to keep it—increase it—divorce me? Without a blink. I think she’d shoot me. She’d trade her talent, what little there is of it, anyway, and probably her immortal soul.

Our land overlooks the distant Pacific, and below us, all the way to the ocean, stretches fifteen square miles of timber, mostly redwood.

That forest belongs to my father.

If you ask anybody in these parts, I’m sure they’ll tell you without hesitation that my father is an awful man, a terrible person, and they’re right, he’s done harm to anyone who ever befriended, needed, or trusted him, and if there’s anything wrong with me, then I serve as an example of the warpage worked, a map of the fissures Already Dead / 25

cracked open and shaped uncloseable, by a childhood spent loving such a person. Right—I know—the world has its horrors, mine among the privileged, American kind. But let my statement stand: I blame my father for myself.

Father, for his part, was messed up by Grandmother, an Italian woman of mountainous and steadily mounting stature, well over three hundred pounds by the time she died, with the resulting embarrassment of extra pallbearers at her funeral, a banshee from Palermo. She couldn’t stand being married off to a Welshman, the only British rancher around, one of the area’s first sheepers. Couldn’t stand being removed from the Sonoma wine country out here to the coast. She died when I was four and my brother Bill was seven; we share vivid memories of her, in our little eyes she was a nightmare of alpine blubberiness, and vaguely I recall our grandfather, her poor husband, an immigrant from Cardiff, who was dead at fifty-five—a bit earlier than she, but ten years her junior—his British steel battered down by her angers, griefs, and nights of wild religion. My father was the son of that tremendous coupling, and he served to convey its stresses perfectly—the Italian passions choked off in that stiff British neck. It made him mean. His eyes twinkled when he caused disappointment, when he sowed doubt, when he reaped scorn. Uneducated in the ways of domestic life himself, marooned on the shores of parenthood without any equipment, his manner of teaching us, my brother Bill and me, was to ask mysterious questions as a way of indicating we’d made some mistake or other: “Would you like to see that horse bloat up? and lie down? and turn over and die by morning?” Then we knew we’d erred in the feeding or some such, but he’d never tell us exactly how, not until we begged. “How far you think your brains would splash under a tree like that?”—would indicate un-safe behavior in felling timber; “Do you have an idea you’d like your leg broke?”—maybe we were waiting in the wrong spot while a load of logs went on the truck. But in that case where on this earth
should
I be, Father? Where do you want me, what should I do? Anything, but only tell me. I don’t know what you want! Speak! A child, I’m miserable admitting it, a child stands like a priest under his father’s sky. Why do you fate me to fail you?

“Burst apart, explode, fly, galactic, starburst, asunder!” Melissa liked to shout American words while we drove too fast in the 26 / Denis Johnson

Porsche, a creamy yellow 356 roadster, a third of a century old. But on the rare Coast straightaway it easily broke a hundred. I could get a word in only on the tightest curves, when the engine quieted.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. Then a brief straightaway. A Porsche is not a cream puff car. It’s angry, full of wrenching torque. A curve: “I know you wouldn’t screw that guy.” I meant the busboy I’d accused her of.

“Okay, you would, we both know it. But my job is to love you anyway.

That’s my task.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me. I’m going to show you how much it matters. Show you something I’ve never shown anyone.”

“I’m getting carsick again.” We’d entered a series of zigzag hairpins taking us down toward a creek that passed under the highway and out to sea.

I didn’t keep to the road, but turned off abruptly just before the culvert.

“Why are we turning here? It says no trespassing.”

“I’m checking things out.”

“Checking for trespassers? Is this your land?”

“Shut up, please. Watch for the plates.”

A pickup with a camper shell lowered itself down around the hairpin switchbacks, passed our position, and started climbing up the other side of the gulch. It kept to the highway. They hadn’t seen us turn.

Melissa said, “Plates?”

“The plates! The plates! The license plates! Were they Oregon? They were blue. Could have been California. How many in the car? I saw two. Did you see two?”