American Purgatorio (18 page)

A woman was doing something at a stove and an older woman was sitting on a rocking chair. The older one was wearing a deep green shirt and a long full ruffled skirt. No one said anything to anyone as far as I could tell. Gilbert sat at a square table and I also sat and still no one spoke.

Gilbert nodded when I thanked him for the ride. I asked some question about sheep and whether he had any sheep and he pointed in a general direction with his hand. I nodded. I had so much to tell them, to share with them in words, but I could see that words were not the medium here, and in living without the gluttony of words, they were taking the burden off the descriptions of things and letting the things themselves be what they were. Although these people weren't speaking, I imagined that when they did, their words would be a little purer and a little more meaningful.

I assumed that not speaking was a normal mode of relating and so I stopped trying to speak, stopped trying to think of something to say, and instead just sat. The fact that everyone else was doing the same thing made it easier. We all sat for quite a while and it didn't take too long before it felt normal, and even comfortable.

The woman was making food, and food, I thought—that would be a good way to bond with this family. I was starting to feel at home in this strange abode. And happy. And because I wanted that feeling to last (into the future), I began wondering where I was going to sleep, thinking I should have brought my sleeping bag because I didn't see any extra beds, and as my mind raced ahead, I was looking forward to sleeping in the traditional Navajo dwelling. Or Hopi dwelling, I didn't know.

Either way, it was a memorable experience, one I would savor and cherish, and as I was thinking about what a fine experience it was and how happy the experience was making me, a car drove up outside. Gilbert went to the door and there, standing at the door, was a white man, a ranger. He'd seen the Pulsar, he said, and now he was here to take me back—something about the native domiciles being off-limits, or private property, or National Park regulations. My car, however, was a unique situation, and so he'd make an exception and let me spend the night in my car. I nodded at Gilbert, who nodded back, and I got in the truck with the ranger. He dropped me off, took down my information, said he'd check back in the morning and that I could make the necessary arrangements then to have my car towed out of the park.

The stars were out and then the clouds came in and I stood outside, leaning against the car. I drank from a bottle of water, ate cashews, unrolled my sleeping bag in the back seat, and although I tried to sleep, I was awake the whole night. My mind was filled with thought after thought, starting with the car. Why hadn't I fixed the car before it was ruined? Why had I been such a cheapskate? And it wasn't the car; it was my life. The dream I'd had for my life was getting smaller and smaller, shrinking and cracking, and at a certain point tears actually came to my eyes. I was crying for that dream, or the loss of that dream. I felt an actual physical pain, a heaviness in my body. And once I felt it, once the reality of the deadness of my dream started festering in me, sleep was impossible.

5.

I mentioned that I was an editor in New York, at a baby magazine. But I wasn't always an editor. Growing up in Chicago I had, I don't know what to call it, a dream, I guess. I wanted to be a playwright. I felt I needed an identity, as a person. I needed something I could be, some thing, and I thought a playwright, that was something I could be, I could live with that. If I was a playwright I could be happy, I thought, so I got together with some people and started a theater company. I did all the things I thought a playwright would do. I got an odd job. I wrote a play. I wrote this play and the play got a production and I thought, Okay, this is it, I will be the thing I want to be. This will make me what I want to be, I thought, and the theater mounted the play and the play was a failure, critically and artistically. I could see that. But I thought, No, you learn from your mistakes. Yes, you do, you learn, and I did, I learned from my mistakes and I knew, I knew what to do the next time. I wrote another play, and this play was much more original. It was something no one had ever seen before, and it was going to blow the walls away. I directed it, with a pornographic movie projected on a screen behind the actors, and I thought it would be good, really good, and I was excited about it. But the play was a failure. A different kind of failure, but a failure nonetheless. But no, I thought, you learn from your mistakes, yes, yes you do, and not only that but those obstacles make you stronger. A great playwright isn't just born, you have to struggle and overcome the obstacles and be stronger, and I was, I was getting better. I knew what I'd been doing wrong. So I wrote another play, and I thought this play would be good, and it was, it was really good, it was from a true-life experience and it really was good and this play won a prize. So the confidence I had in myself was confirmed, by an outside source, and yes, I thought, I'm on my way to being the thing I want to be. I'll be happy now. And that's great, and the play won another prize. I was flown to New York and I thought, Okay, here we go, and I felt as if the world … here it is, and I went to New York and the New York producers looked at it and it wasn't quite right for them, they said. But that was okay because a theater was planning a Chicago production, and I thought, That's good, that's better, start small, start small and then just go forward, conquer the world, and the theater put on the show and no one came and the show lost a lot of money. The theater company went bankrupt, and I didn't know what to do. I began to think, Something is not right here, obviously, and I took some time off and I discovered what it was, what it was I wasn't doing. I wasn't being myself. I was trying to do something else, and that's it, I thought, I will write a play that is who I am, about people and the things between people, and the society, and the structure of that society. And I wrote this play that I thought was good, brilliant even, and it had a reading and it was terrible. It was. I was cringing at my own words. And so I didn't know. I just didn't know. And I began to think that maybe the dream was not the right dream. Maybe I had the wrong dream. But I didn't want to say that, I didn't want to admit defeat. I was strong. I could persevere. And I was walking along, in New York, on Wooster Street, it was Wooster Street because the sidewalk was bumpy and I had to keep my eyes down so as not to trip, and I was walking along, and all of a sudden I felt it snap. It snapped. The dream. The dream died. And I let it die. It didn't feel that bad. In fact it felt good. It felt like what it must feel like, or what I imagined it must feel like, when a dream comes true.

6.

In the morning the ranger knocked on my window. He gave me a ride to the ranger station where I called the towing service. As I waited for the tow truck, I wandered around the exhibits and dioramas, reading about desert plants. As I sat on the toilet in the Park Service headquarters I realized I hadn't thought about Anne for almost a day, and thinking that, I remembered how she used to arch her feet when she sat on the toilet.

When the tow truck came I watched the man hook the Pulsar to a chain and winch it onto the truckbed. I got in the cab and we drove off across the undulating flatness of the desert, punctuated here and there by masses of less eroded sandstone in the otherwise eroded expanse. There were ruins along the road but I wasn't paying all that much attention. I was worried about the bill. The driver, the son of the tow truck owner, talked about timing belts and said there was a fifty-fifty chance of piston damage.

We pulled into the Sinagua Trading Post, a curio shop and towing service with a junkyard in the back. It was run by a man named Cecil, an old Arizona leatherneck—literally a man with a leatherlike neck—who told me my car was junk. He said he'd fix it if I wanted him to, but there was a fifty-fifty chance of valve damage. He said he'd buy the car and offered me fifty dollars, which just about covered the tow.

I wanted more than that. This was my life and I didn't want to
give
it away, which is what the man, essentially, was asking. I was not in a good negotiating position, leverage-wise, but I didn't want to let go. I'd bought the car and had invested the car with my dreams. Money too, but mainly dreams. I'd invested that small, powerless, uncomfortable car with my life, so it wasn't that easy to just let go, to just say
take it,
to just walk away from what had been my self.

When we dream of cars and driving in cars, they say we're dreaming, partly, about our selves, the things that move us through the world. And at first Cecil seemed to recognize this; he was polite and even compassionate, but he was also businesslike. He added up the hours replacing a timing belt, and parts. Plus the tow. Plus the fact that the car wasn't worth that much from the get-go. And then he gave me time to think. Which I did, outside the store, on a bench in the shade, looking at the hills, watching cars pass on the road. Slowly I came to a realization that the era of the car—and me in the car—was over. My car was gone, and being gone it was one less thing to stuff my life with.

So I sold the car. In the process of selling it, what with papers of transfer and registration fees, I ended up having to pay Cecil (with my credit card) about fifty dollars, but it was worth it. I felt a lightness. I'd lost this thing which had meant so much to me and now, without it, I felt a weight had been lifted. Instead of feeling the loss I thought I would feel, I felt renewed.

I took the cactus out of the car, carried it to a suitable location in the desert sand, dug a shallow hole with my fingers, and planted it. I left the antique binoculars in the glove compartment, and I took out of the car my box of books and the envelope of photographs, including the one which had fallen off the dashboard. I took my laptop computer, the plastic sack of cassette tapes, the mandolin, a backpack filled with my clothes and sleeping bag, and a small red shoulder bag. I stood in the sun, in front of the building's Fort Apache architectural façade, and once again I was waiting. This time for a ride into town where I would catch a bus, somewhere.

After a while of waiting, a man in a large mobile home who'd stopped at the trading post gave me a ride. He was a retiree who told me that “Anasazi” was no longer a correct term for the ancient people who lived there. He said that “Anasazi” meant “enemy” in Navajo, and that the Hopi, who also lived in the area, naturally thought the word was an incorrect description. People had lived with the word for a long time, but now, according to the man, quoting a Visitor Center brochure, they were changing it.

The man let me off at a main intersection in the northern part of Flagstaff, near the railroad depot. I was going to do what people do in the movies, take the first train out of town, but a railroad employee behind a booth told me no train was leaving anywhere until the next day, and since it was already getting into the afternoon, I started walking to one of the bars the man recommended, walking with my box of books in my arms, the backpack and haversack and mandolin on my shoulders, and the bag of cassettes in my fingers, until my fingers gave out, then stopping, setting down the load, resting, then walking some and then resting, then walking and resting, and I carried my possessions into an older, seedier quarter where I happened to see the El Rancho Grande, a bar I'd noticed the day before. It was an old bar, an old-style bar, almost empty, and I went to the bar and took the money I had left and had a beer. I was leaning against the bar in a typical way when an older woman who looked a little ragged took the stool next to me, said “Hi,” and then asked me to buy her a drink. Which I did. She introduced herself as Conchita, which was fine, but then from somewhere in the shadows of the bar another woman, a younger woman, joined me on the other side. This was Conchita's niece, named Cheyenne, and she also wanted a drink.

I said I really didn't have enough money, which was mostly true, but I also wanted to start on my new life and I wasn't sure this was it. I wanted to be rid of unnecessary appurtenances, but money was not, at this point, unnecessary. I said I couldn't buy them a drink but I offered to go in on a pitcher of beer, but by then they were already kneeling on the floor, examining the plastic bag filled with cassette tapes.

I offered them my books. I said, “Check out some of these,” but they were too busy checking out the tapes. I'd spent years recording the songs on those tapes but I was ready to let them go. My new friends weren't impressed with my taste in music but they wanted the tapes, and were reaching into the plastic sack, indiscriminately taking every tape that touched their hands, not that they intended to listen to them, but because these things existed. I told them to take the whole bag, which they did, too far gone, or too lost in their own wanting, to notice when I left.

Although my load was somewhat lighter, I still had the other articles of my life, and I carried these up the street to a coffee shop. The train depot worker had mentioned a “hangout” place, and this was it. An imitation New York beatnik coffeehouse. I noted the college students sitting at various secondhand tables, and I was going to order something warm and comforting, but realized that I was extremely low on money. So I just sat at the wooden bar. Someone sat down next to me, a student probably, and this person started talking to me. She looked like a student and I talked to her, and oddly, I didn't want to sleep with her, which would have also meant a place to stay. Instead, I asked her if she liked to read books.

She said she did and I showed her the ones in my box and she picked out a couple that interested her. I pointed out the mandolin case and she opened it, took out the instrument, and although she said she couldn't play, she held it as if she was about to play. I told her it was my father's mandolin and that I couldn't play it.