purge the mind?
At Mellow Grounds that evening, I tried to use sheer will power to avoid an explosion of temper after the Lilly debacle, but the barista had sided with the gremlins. He was talking both to me and to someone outside at the drive-thru window with one of those boom microphones growing out of his ear. He looked like he’d feel at home in any air traffic control tower in the country. After the usual confusion as to whom he was addressing—the irritated driver at the drive-thru or the heebie-jeebie-suffering patron standing right in front of his face—I received my coffee and sat at the nearest dissection table. The barista looked relieved.
As usual, I was pitifully lonely, and had a vague, unrealistic idea of interacting with someone that evening. But, of the 20 or so people in the coffee shop, it seemed that all were texting, talking on their cell phones, listening to their iPods, working on their laptops, or reading their eBooks. Everyone was connected, except for me.
I chugged my Grosse Sud Amerikaner Kaffee, which, translated into 20th century English, was “a large cup of coffee.” Perhaps it was too large, because as I stood up, I felt as if the back of my head had blown outward and the stuff inside was jetting me toward the door at a terrific speed. Yet my thinking had slowed down so that I could see every pseudo-crack in the plaster wall in fantastic detail. My mind started fragmenting like that plaster, only in my case there was nothing pseudo about it.
The drive home, through film noir-harsh street lights and darting black shadows, took ten minutes. As I pulled into the entrance of my trailer park, the one working headlight on my car lit up my miniature front yard with a preternatural glare, changing the faded green of my trailer to a chalky white. The TV antennae on the roof looked like a deranged pretzel thanks to a storm ten years before, and a jagged shadow fell away from the mailbox pole that I had hit with my car last year. The headlight revealed a discoloration across the entire front of the trailer that I hadn’t noticed before. I jumped out of the car, pressed my glasses to my nose to sharpen my vision, and saw that the entire side wall of the unit was delaminating from its frame. I needed to do something about that fast, because my trailer was coming apart, and squinting up at it, I thought, And so am I.
Chapter 2
The next day I woke up at noon with a coffee-induced hangover, and for a few seconds, I thought that was the worst of my problems. But as I rubbed my eyes, the mild anxiety that ran through me as a chronic undercurrent quickly expanded into a full-blown heebie-jeebie attack. I had lost my job. The gremlins plucked a cluster of nerves encircling my heart and jolted me to my feet. I ran into the kitchen to the only drawer in the trailer that was organized and grabbed a pen, a piece of paper, and an avocado that had disappeared that summer. I threw the avocado into the overflowing garbage can near the sink and cleared debris off the kitchen table with a swipe of my arm.
In a masterful letter to Testing Unlimited, I questioned the wisdom of state governments mandating standardized tests for first graders to show how smart their kids are, so that the state receives more federal money…for more testing. I also felt it was a waste of money to pay college-educated people $10 an hour to analyze the spelling of “cat.” At the nearly-illegible end, I wrote a filthy word and suggested that one of their $13-hour PhD test scoring supervisors read the word to the Board of Directors to see if they could spell it. I signed the letter with a scrawl, stuffed it into an envelope, addressed it, stuck three or four stamps on it, and went outside to the mailbox.
The trailer park had looked good when I moved there in 1989, but now the grass was sporadically mowed, the rocks along the drive were displaced, the dumpster was overflowing with garbage, and many of the residents had the haggard look of people who worked underpaid full-time jobs, then went directly to their underpaid part-time jobs so they could afford their $600-a-month lot rents and gas for their 15-year-old cars.
The mailbox was stuffed mostly with junk mail, on top of which was a letter from my folks. I pulled the glasses to the bottom of my nose to read the letter. It seemed that it cost Mom and Dad a few thousand dollars to convert the front yard from grass to gravel. But, it would save the cost in water many times over. It seemed that Los Angeles was in the midst of yet another drought.
Under my folks’ letter was a bill from Harry Morton, M.D. Usually, I would not even have opened the bill, but a perverse desire for undesirable stimulation—the gremlins hate boredom—prompted me to tear open the envelope. The first thing I saw was the figure $4,579.92, the cost of a CAT scan I had undergone six months before. My general practitioner had thought I needed a chest X-ray because of a chronic cough and had sent me to a cardiac specialist, who in turn remanded me to the CAT scanner because I had moderately high blood pressure, that was treated with an ACE inhibitor.
I tried to tell everyone that the cough was caused by the ace inhibitor, which I had stopped using. The cough had stopped, too. But my GP insisted that I needed the chest X-ray, and the cardiologist insisted that I also needed a CAT scan, even though the stress test electrocardiogram and the other tests all came out normal.
“You can’t put a price tag on your health,” the cardiologist admonished with a used car salesman’s smile.
“Relax, I just called your insurance company. They’re covering it!” the medical assistant chimed in.
My insurance paid $77.64.
The results? High blood pressure controlled by medication, which caused a $4,502.28 cough.
Clutching the mail to my chest, I walked up the jagged path to my front door and tossed everything on the floor with the rest of the debris. Craving the hair of the dog that bit me, I opened the pantry, shooed away the cockroaches, opened a fresh can of chicory-laced coffee, and made a pot, black as coal, just the way I liked it. Stay at home, hunker down, drink coffee, and avoid all nerve-provoking stimulation. That was the ticket.
But I kept looking through the mail anyway. Next in the pile was another unwelcome letter from Marta, a hippie I’d met years ago while at SIU. Out of the blue, after almost 40 years, a series of letters from Marta had started arriving that summer. I’d never replied to any of them. The letters absolutely baffled me, but I read them anyway because they were so…interesting. This one was absolutely fascinating:
Dear Peter,
I trust everything is cool with you. Hopefully you and the instrument have reached an epiphany, and your life is in the groove by now.
Do you remember what we talked about while at SIU; that science will solve your problems? Well, if not science, maybe magic!
Hah, Hah.
If life has changed for you, you’ll know what I mean. But if it hasn’t, then you won’t know what the f--- I’m talking about. In any event, write me. I’d love to hear from the sanest guy I‘ve ever met.
Your friend,
Marta
I didn’t remember talking with Marta for more than two seconds, only to say “Hi” and “Bye” in the cafeteria at college, forty years ago. For the first time, I looked at her return address, which was illegible except for “Carbondale” and the first letter of her last name, which was an M. I took her cryptic letter and threw it at my new mail drop: the floor. By then, I had lost patience with tearing open envelopes, and threw the rest of the unopened mail on the floor as well.
I checked the front door to make sure it was locked. Although I had little tolerance for routine, I had even less tolerance for surprises. I didn’t answer the door unless I was expecting someone, and made sure I was expecting no one. Ditto for answering the phone and returning emails. I figured that if I didn’t read, see, or hear bad news,
