The Cactus Eaters (34 page)

I
decided to head back down to California for a while, just to clear the mental fog. It didn’t seem right to jump on a plane after walking the trail, so I got on Green Tortoise, the counterculture’s bus line. These buses have mattresses, so you can watch the woods and cities slip past while you’re on your back with your feet in some ponytailed Earth Firster’s face. The bus line’s motto: “Arrive inspired, not dog-tired.”

We made our way down south, stopping for a naked sweat-lodge ceremony and a vegetable barbecue, then on through the violet dark beneath the streetlights of nameless towns, and finally to the Safeway supermarket in Santa Cruz, California. A teenage girl in a rainbow batik dress peered into the bus. “Love the bus, killer scene,” she said. “Anyone have a pipe?” The driver scolded her. “Believe it or not,” he said, “we’re substance-free.” As the girl wiggled back toward the grocery store, the driver turned to us, smiled, and said, “A lot of heads live in Santa Cruz. If you’re confused, move there. I guarantee it’ll fuck you up even worse.”

I moved to Santa Cruz shortly thereafter.

I immediately got my job back as a substitute teacher. “We’re desperate,” the human resources woman at the school said.

I missed Allison in Santa Cruz. I didn’t miss Allison in Santa Cruz. I wanted Allison in my life, and yet I wanted freedom. Santa Cruz is the kind of place where you can have it both ways, or at least think that you can. It all seemed so easy there. They’ve got banjo pluckers and skateboarders sitting around on city benches in the middle of a Monday afternoon. They’ve got a farmers market every Wednesday, with people selling nectarines and fennel and doling out free copies of the
Socialist Worker.
I would miss Allison every few days, check in with her, and she was cordial, even flirty, on the phone, and then I’d hang up and dream up strategies to entice the ladies of Santa Cruz onto my jet-black futon, where they would recline against my natural-fiber pillow covers. I could not commit to flying out and moving in with Allison, nor could I abide the thought of our breaking up, and so I kept her in an in-between state, tied to the hemp lanyard of uncertainty, never knowing where she stood.

About a month had passed since I finished the trail and hung out with Allison in Canada. I thought nothing was amiss, that we were in a pleasant state of stasis, when I called her up on her twenty-seventh birthday.

“I’ve been sleeping all day,” she said when she answered the phone. The abrupt tone surprised me, and so did the way she bit off the ends off of every word she spoke.

“But that’s silly, sweetie. You should be out enjoying your big day.”

Silence followed.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“I don’t think we should be together anymore.”

“What? It’s not…I mean, it hasn’t come to that yet. I don’t see why you’d jump to something so extreme without…”

“I’m not going through this again. If you want to talk about this later on, we can, I guess, but I really don’t think there’s anything to talk about.”

The conversation limped along for a while, and then we hung up. This talk did not bother me because I sensed, even then, that it wasn’t real. She was merely confused. No problem. I was confused, too. I’d already decided that the only way to gain some clarity was to play the field for a while, weigh the situation and see if we could work our shit out. Allison
had
to understand that the trail had made me cool. How could I sort out what I needed out of life when there were so many beautiful women waiting for me? How could I act like nothing had changed when the trail had turned me into a viable person for the first time in my life? In a word, I was lost. On the trail, I’d convinced myself that The Goal was all that stood between me and the rest of life. But the trail was over, and the rest of life was more nebulous than ever. I missed Allison, always, yet the thought of flying out there and being with her paralyzed me.

I couldn’t figure out what I wanted, and so I got into yoga for a while, ostensibly to center myself, but really just to meet hot hippie women. There was a swishy-rumped girl in my class, in her early twenties. Her Danskins could hardly contain her vegan, carb-enforced curves. “Okay,” the yoga instructor said. “Time to pair up with someone else. Don’t be a stranger! We’re all friends here. What I want you to do is pick a partner, and help them with the first stretch. Grab your partner’s thigh, and we’ll see just how far they can bend.” Score, I thought. I loved yoga classes. The women in yoga classes will assume poses you really couldn’t pay them to do in any other context. So I took a couple of giant steps toward the holistic nubile, perched like an egret on her cerulean yoga mat. But when she saw me, she froze. If you’ve watched the Discovery Channel’s footage about wildebeest mothers protecting their young, you have a
good idea of this girl’s facial expression. She saw me coming, and she retreated, straight through the wall of vertical beads marking the entrance to the women’s changing room. I was waiting her out, waiting, waiting, when it became clear that she was just not coming back. And then, at that moment, I heard a male voice, a plummy German accent, and turned to see a thin man with mousy hair and huge glasses standing behind me. “I’ll be your partner, if you like,” he said. “In fact, you can stretch first. It’s no problem at all.” Before I could say one word, he’d already grabbed my thigh and lifted up the end of my right leg and started to grind my bare and horrified foot straight into the bulge in the groin of his leotard. For three minutes I stood there on one foot, flash-frozen in repulsion, my toes being dragged repeatedly against my yoga partner’s seemingly stiffening knob. “You’re all doing great,” the yoga teacher said in a chirpy voice, as my partner softly moaned.

I tried not to let this minor act of yogic molestation get me down. I persevered. I even got set up on a hot blind date with an attractive young Bay Area journalista. We flirted like mad on the phone. “You’re funny,” she told me. She came to my house; we’d plotted out a day on the beach. When I answered the door, she was even more gorgeous and perky than I expected, and when she saw me, and after she’d looked me up and down, she said, “Is Dan White here?”

Allison had been out there waiting for me, so I assumed that all these other women were waiting for me, too. Now it occurred to me: perhaps I was wrong. Maybe all these women were just signposts directing me back toward the only woman in the world who had ever put up with me for more than seven months running. Maybe “Dirty Dan” was never real, except in my mind. Perhaps I wanted my old identity back, my old shape, my being, my erstwhile purpose. And maybe Allison was the only woman in the world who could give me back my shape. Allison and I did quite a lot of baking together—brownies,
turnovers, pies, you name it—so you will forgive me if I indulge in an extended baking metaphor. Perhaps Allison was the ramekin, while I was the pudding. I occupied her center, and weighed her down in a way that gave her comfort and happiness, at least for a while. You might even say I
filled
her ramekin, while she shaped me and baked me as best she could. But when we broke up, perhaps I was not fully baked. The oven setting was too low, and the timing was wrong. When the ramekin dumped me out, I splattered out like a blob of cheesy, eggy custard goo.

After the Pacific Crest Trail, I settled into the sort of ego-flattening funk you can only have in Santa Cruz, that funky little beach town, that gentrified catch basin of the unhinged. It’s not that people were mean to me for acting crazy. Quite the contrary. In Santa Cruz, people are serious when it comes to letting you follow your bliss, even if your bliss is really a form of depression. I began to walk aimlessly around the town, wearing hemp vests with purple paramecium, vests with puffy elephants, vests with dreadful spangles on the shoulders, reversible vests that were black on one side, red on the other, so people could dig my mood. I became a lounge lizard with no lounge, and it was becoming clear that I must have Allison back, that without her there would be no girl, no adventure, no purpose, no mojo, just existential horniness and confusion. We still talked on the phone, as friends. It seems to me that we were close. She confessed she was still “fond” of me, that she liked the sound of my voice. I held out hope. I would look through our boxes of shared things and take comfort in the fact that I still had so much of her Pacific Crest Trail gear, and all those lovers’ coupons she’d given me for Valentine’s Day long ago, good for a free yoghurt, good for a dozen doughnuts. I had tangible things, in boxes under my bed, and these things meant I still had a connection to her. But the link was still tenuous, so I had to make a plan. I began to write an irresistible letter to get her
back. I was in the later, revision, stage, contemplating when I might actually finish the thing and put it in the mail. There was no hurry. Drafting takes time. But one day, about four months after I last saw her, I opened up the mailbox just after New Year’s Day and found a letter from her. I tore it open.

The intention of the letter was clear.

She wanted all her gear back.

It was over then. Undeniably over.

A year passed, and in that time I gained and lost a job, gained and did not lose thirty pounds, went on unemployment, and moved into an attic in downtown Santa Cruz. When the checks ran out, I entered my third tour of duty as a substitute teacher.

In every relationship, attraction is the lure, but maybe it’s only the entry point to an intimacy that counteracts silliness, superstition, awkwardness, and loony behavior. Allison and the trail were no longer there to hold these things back like a dam, and soon they ruled over me. My long walk provided me with the time and the space to develop strange thinking patterns.
The forest had given rise to a dog’s breakfast of superstitions, animism, and pantheistic piffle that dominated me now. In Santa Cruz, a year and a half after returning home from the trail, I still hadn’t adjusted. In fact, I had become irrational, or at least more irrational than usual. Santa Cruz’s cultist and New Age emporiums were the ready recipients of the dollar bills I doled out in exchange for the restorative voodoo candles, amulets, plastic knockoffs of Zuni bear fetishes, poorly carved Ganesh figurines, herbal snake-oil ointments, and fakir-blessed trinkets that crowded my apartment and turned my bedroom into a stinking, incense-choked ashram. But none of these elephant brooches or herbal rescue remedies could fill me up like Allison and the trail had. No amount of sorcerer-blessed gewgaws could put my noggin to rights or make me sleep at night. And so I spouted inanities and wore hideous pants made of sustainable materials. I wrote zany affirmations on bits of paper that I rolled into scrolls and stuffed in my pockets to carry around all day when I was subbing for some kindergarten class, in the vain hope that the the affirmations’ enthusiasms would leach into me. “Free the body!” they said. “Cave in to pleasure! Inner space, flow, one, one, one! There is peace in every day, perfect moments, the cool of morning, and moments of stillness. Man, in his natural state, is calm and centered.” These affirmations were desperate and untrue. After walking the trail, I knew full well that calm centeredness was
not
mankind’s natural state. Mankind had evolved over millions of years on the African plains. They had hyenas out there the size of school buses. “Peace out,” and you will be ripped in half.

I began to suffer nervous attacks that went on for days at a time. After a while, I started showing up late to my teaching assignments. Then I stopped showing up altogether. The phone would ring and I’d let it go. Friends became alarmed.

One day, when things were feeling especially chaotic, and I hadn’t held a job for months, I tried to do a self-intervention.
On that day I paused and declared that this was the absolute bottom, and that there was no lower level of muck in which to mire myself. In Santa Cruz, it’s never a good idea to make such a proclamation. In this town, where marginalia can become more marginal, you should never tell yourself you’ve hit bottom, because the bottom will move to a lower elevation. There is always some other substrata of bottomness you have not considered. In Santa Cruz, you can wind up in a tape loop of backsliding and recovery that folds back on itself like an Escher staircase. Your life can turn into a bottomless Stouffer’s lasagna; no matter how far down you reach with your plastic fork, there’s another layer of nasty noodles and cheese before you hit Pyrex.

I became an insomniac, thoughts circling my head until they screwed me right into the ground. Thoughts twisted so fast I could not control them, slow them, or even separate them after a while. I was up for eight days straight, rarely nodding off for five to ten minutes at a time, even when I gulped a bottle of melatonin or took an herbal sleep aid or, on one memorable occasion, whole bottles of sleep aids. My eyes bugged out as I hid from friends and daylight, peering Boo Radley fashion from the blinds of my attic hideaway. And then, on the eighth day, I tore my room apart, in between guzzling organic Chenin Blanc and an unholy mixture of other substances, bouncing all about that place, ripping posters off the walls.

I suppose I would have gone on spiraling forever, if not for the fact that I ran out of energy, and spirals, and places to spiral to. And when there was no more spiral, I collapsed. Perhaps it would be overstating matters to call this a Pacific Crest breakdown. All I know is that my rational mind went on an extended backpacking trip somewhere in the North Cascades while my body remained in Santa Cruz. I did not realize this at the time, but my little spinout was, quite possibly, an example of post-trail withdrawal. I have heard about other hikers who
returned too abruptly from the wilderness and experienced the psychic equivalent of the bends, the condition deep-sea divers face when yanked too abruptly out of the ocean. I have heard about fresh-off-the-trail hikers breaking down and sobbing on city streets.