How to Piss in Public (8 page)

John was a very tall, bearded scientist with curly hair and clothes from the garbage. Technically he was a professor on sabbatical enjoying the great outdoors, but he was really a mentally ill genius on his way out of society. When we started this particular season he was someone the university faculty was losing and someone who was losing his faculties. He was ten times smarter than any of us but was still kind of the village idiot due to his nonsensical rants. Oh yeah, he had multiple personality disorder.

Where John was on the decline, I seemed to be moving up in the world. It was only my third season of tree planting, but I was already a foreman. I think the quick promotion happened because I was like Roberto Benigni convincing his son they weren’t at a Nazi death camp. Morale is king in this evergreen prison and I was happy to come up with stupid games for everyone. The previous year I started the Buddy Lemieux Hate Club. He was a fucking dick who owned the only store within a hundred miles and lorded it over our desperate heads like he
was Gargamel and we were Smurfs. At the club we would all gather ’round and discuss what a shithead he was. Some locals from the village even ended up joining. I also hosted a talent night every day off (which was every ten days) and began Expert Night, where, every night after dinner, a different person would lecture everyone else on his or her area of expertise. Wrangling troops this disparate and getting them to move in unison was difficult. If being the clown at the death camp wasn’t working, I was also happy to become a Nazi. I knew my boss put down $100K as a bid for the contract, and if we didn’t plant the trees right, it was all over. A former rival called Paper Tree once had a motto: “Do your best—fuck the rest.” They went bankrupt, nobody got paid, and the owner lost his house. As De La Soul once said, “Stakes is high.”

Everything about this job is telling you to go home. Waking up for your first day is like waking up in a coffin. It’s four
A.M.
, snow is all over the tent, and leaving the womb of your sleeping bag feels like being born a trimester early. The silver lining is that you sleep fully dressed, including jacket and ski mask, so all you have to do is throw on your freezing-cold boots and head to the mess hall for coffee and eggs. Few people speak at breakfast. Babies born prematurely are like that. They just sit in their Plexiglas boxes waiting for the nurse to make more coffee.

“Good morning, everybody,” I said as I walked into the tent. “I’ve got some great news. The first site is only an hour away and from what the assessors [the government workers who come by to inspect job quality] tell me, it’s the most peanut-buttery land of the whole contract. Nice easy start. So let’s plant some trees and make some money!” Peanut butter meant you didn’t have to kick and scrape (“screef”) to get to dirt. When you’ve been tree-planting for a long time you’ll have dreams about planting a whole football field of peanut butter, which is kind of like dreaming the bats you’re beaten with don’t have nails in them. Everyone harrumphed a curt “yay” and slowly made their way to the bus.

I grabbed my walkie-talkie and joined them. When I got on the bus, I saw Dr. John had boarded early and was using his socks as puppets to play out a conversation with his other personalities. He was folded over in the seat with his face down on his lap and his hands way over his head and they were moving around like black eels doing a Punch & Judy show.

“Hey, you’re John, right?” I asked as the bus started up. He looked up and smiled. He had on a dirty ski jacket, even dirtier pants, a wool hat with holes in it, broken glasses, and bare feet with toenails made of old wood. “Are you all right?” I asked. John sheepishly put his puppets back on his feet and explained it was nothing. As I sat in the seat across from him and offered up some coffee, the bus steered out of camp and along the logging roads to our site.

After a bit of small talk and a lot of green scenery, I gently guided the conversation back to his socks. “So what was going on with the puppets?” I asked.

“It’s for a thing I’m working on,” he replied stoically, “a classical guitar opera.” I asked who it was about, and he said Snuggles the Dog and the Super Man. Everyone knew he had other guests living in his mind, but I was now getting to meet them personally. Apparently, Snuggles is an adorable little guy with a heart of gold who looks like Rowlf the dog from
The Muppet Show.
“He’d never hurt a flea,” John told me. He also told me Snuggles has a large poster of Moses in his doghouse.

I asked John why he called Superman “the” Superman, and he corrected me: “Oh, no, no, not the superhero—the Nietzschean ‘Übermensch.’ The über male. The Super Man wants Snuggles to die but Snuggles doesn’t want to die … It sounds weird out of context.” For the rest of the drive, I tried to conceive of a context wherein that wouldn’t be weird. I thought about German fascism and Hebrew Bible scholars, but settled on “possibly a cartoon used to educate psychiatrists about mental disorders.”

The first day went surprisingly smoothly. Tree planting is about working as a private contractor for the government, and like all things government, the people you answer to are not honest. For example, your first assessment is always two out of ten no matter what. “You had a lateral branch under the dirt,” they’ll comment, like trees were made of moth wings and couldn’t survive in the wild. I didn’t pay attention to most of what they said. All I knew is if we did our best and were nice, they’d give us enough perfects at the end to counteract all these early twos and we’d have a passing quality grade that allowed everyone to get paid.

My day consisted of walking and ATVing over several miles of scarified land and making sure everyone was alive and working. I’d also riff a little bit and occasionally scare the bejesus out of someone by jumping out from behind a bush. They were all an amicable, hardworking bunch. The Africans were always friendly and planted like cyborgs created to plant perfect trees. Jocks were similar. You had to watch the Indians and the hosers because they tended to stash trees and claim them as planted. And I’m sorry, but the girls were hopeless. It’s man’s—or maybe bulldyke’s—work. Sometimes I thought the only reason women were there was to take advantage of the incredibly tilted female-to-male ratio. It wasn’t unusual to see a girl with the head of a crow and the body of a tuna-filled garbage bag being followed around by a guy who was so handsome,
I’d
fuck him.

That night, we had spaghetti for dinner and the chef even put bread sticks on the table. Fancy. We consumed the meal like death-row inmates inhaling their last wish and I sauntered happily over to John, who was sitting by himself. “Hey, John, lemme ask you something,” I said. “How would you feel about playing some music to the other inmates?” He told me he couldn’t because the opera wasn’t even close to done. “Fuck the opera,” I said before adding, “No offense.” I meant to say, “We’d like to hear whatever you got.”

Without saying a word, John got up and left the tent. Soon after, his crazy face popped back into the tent holding a beautiful guitar in mint condition. Everyone clapped and slid down the bench to see the show.

After some brief tuning, John gently broke into Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” His fingers were filthy and covered with stray pieces of duct tape, but he played the song like it was his debut at Carnegie Hall. It was the most heart-wrenchingly sincere and perfectly in-key folk guitar I’d ever heard. He was a tramp who sounded like an angel and when we heard him say, “I’ve been in my mind / It’s such a fine line … And I’m getting old,” there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. One of the girls, Jill McAlpine, was full-on bawling her eyes out. The song ends with the chorus, but instead of giving us that final strum, John kept the tempo and pulled us into some of the most evocative Spanish guitar this side of the Atlantic. His fingers were wandering all over the frets and it
sounded like someone who had been playing guitar for so long, it was a part of his body.

I started to think about other mad genii: The guy who developed Morse code thought immigrants were out to kill him. Nikola Tesla, the true inventor of electricity, only stayed in a hotel room if its number was divisible by three. Einstein believed in Martians, Pythagoras had a cult, and Andrew Jackson regularly beat the shit out of people with his walking stick. “Wow,” I thought, “Dr. John is so good at playing guitar he’s making me philosophical about the entire world’s sanity. Now, that’s some sweet licks.”

When he was finally done, he looked up and said, “That’s it,” with the most sane smile I’d ever seen him give. Everyone stood up, overalls at their sides, rubber boots covered in mud, and clapped their chafed hands like Oprah’s studio audience.

John went to bed early that night. Maybe he tasted what it was like to be sane and it made him homesick for his old life. I left the mess hall soon after him and saw his boots sticking out the bottom of his tent. He’d bought a kid’s tent to save money, so his enormous frame couldn’t hope to fit in it and his two feet stuck out a good foot from the bottom like he was in a
Peanuts
cartoon. “Good night, John,” I whispered as I walked by. He said nothing. He was already out.

The next day I got to John’s land at around noon. We were spread out over a small city’s worth of terrain, so even with an ATV to get me through the easy parts, I’d be lucky to check on a planter more than once a day. When I got to John, he smiled and said, “Hello,” like he had never seen me before. He had on a wool hat and a sweater despite the fact that the temperature had risen to molten-lava levels. That’s not good. I remembered that one of schizophrenia’s primary characteristics is an inability to gauge temperature. “Who are you?” he asked like Data from
Star Trek.

“I’m Gavin, remember?” I said like a cop trying to talk someone down off the edge. “I work here.”

John found all this very intriguing and tilted his head to the side like a curious bird. “Oh, that’s great,” he said with a huge, dirty smile. “I had been hoping to meet someone soon and try to figure out what’s
going on here. What do you do?” he asked, now sounding more like C-3PO. I told him I manage tree planters and he asked one of the most disturbing questions I’ve ever heard: “Is everybody on this planet a tree planter?”

Holy shit. John was so far gone he had rebooted his hard drive and not only did he have no idea who he was, he had no idea what fucking
planet
he was on. Is there a farther gone than that?

I explained to John that an infinitesimally small percentage of the six billion people on our planet were tree planters and left him to his work. His trees were not looking great. Very few of them were the requisite six feet apart and about half the ones I tugged on came out of the ground like they had simply fallen out of his bag. This could be bad for all of us because it would hurt the average. I called the boss on the walkie-talkie and arranged to meet him nearby.

His red GMC truck pulled up a few minutes later and I got in. He was eating insects. The strange thing about blackflies (not really flies but small “buffalo gnats”) is they bite the shit out of you in the field, but they won’t bite you if they’re somewhere they can’t get out, like a truck. Though mosquitoes will devour a full-grown man in his tent, blackflies will spend the whole evening bouncing against the ceiling trying to figure out an escape route. This first led to our killing them in droves on tent ceilings for revenge, but then one guy ate one. Delicious. For some reason unbeknownst to science, one out of three blackflies tastes like raspberry bubble gum. The other two taste like potato. (Mosquitoes don’t taste like anything.) As I stepped into the truck I began snacking too. The boss’s name was Markus Saunders and he was of Nordic descent with a huge blond beard and long blond hair. He was tall with gorilla hands but he also had high cheekbones and that Northern European nose that looks like a chickadee.

“Something’s up with John. I think he has to go,” I said as I dabbed my forefinger on the windshield and procured two gnats to eat. “He’s acting weird.”

Markus stopped eating. “I’ve had too many of those,” he said, undoing his top button. “I know John is incredibly weird, but firing people out here is all but impossible,” he explained. “I need to make a
long list of all their offenses or they drag my ass through worker’s comp bullshit and all kinds of other bureaucratic nightmares. But I will have a talk with him and kind of feel him out.” I was happy with that and walked off feeling satisfied. I had only eaten a few bugs, but I wasn’t that hungry to begin with.

Markus spoke to John and said he seemed perfectly fine. A few days went by and John kept sailing along, so Markus asked him if he’d host that evening’s Expert Night. “No problem,” John said. After dinner, I went up to John and asked him if he was ready to start because, well, it’s after dinner now. He had no idea what I was talking about. I explained. He looked puzzled but stood up.

“Hey, guys,” he said.

“Hello, John,” everyone said like we were in AA.

John looked around the tent and I could tell he was not prepared and had put zero thought into what his subject was going to be. Then he looked at the table below him and noticed some tiny white dots that were the result of the sun shining through minuscule holes in the top of the tent. “You see that?” he said, pointing to one of the bright dots. “That’s the sun.” He then looked up and calmly described the fundamentals of what we were seeing. “The holes act as lenses and actually project a full image of the entire flaming star—it’s not a planet—onto the table,” he said. “What a gift.” Then he got closer to the one in front of him and started to describe the sun to us. “Look at it. That’s a perfectly complete representation of a ball of fire a hundred times the size of our planet.” We were spellbound. “Oh!” he added enthusiastically. “You see those dark dots just off the center? Those are sunspots. They’re sort of cold patches caused by really strong magnetic activity. I mean, they’re still hot enough to evaporate metal, but because they’re so much cooler than the rest of the planet, they appear as dull, dark holes.” Then he stood back up and addressed the crowd. “You know, studies have shown people are much happier when they surround themselves with people who are less successful. Those poor sunspots are in hell.” Everyone laughed. The reclusive Dr. John had killed again.