Authors: Arty Nelson
I cry. It begins as an exercise and ends as a twisted ballet. Writhing on the floor, bleeding a sad clown face. I can’t remember
how long it’s been since I cried. I cry for Ray… I cry for Lindsey… I cry for my mom… I cry for the old man… For Diane… For
Doobe… For London… I cry for rain… I cry for summers that I had when I was little… I cry for memories… For the world… For
MY world… I cry and I cry and I bury my face in my hands… Grinding my fists into my
eyes… I’m ashamed… Ashamed because I cry like a baby… Because I don’t know… Because I don’t have any answers… Because I don’t
have any money… Because I’m afraid… I cry for me… Most of all… I CRY FOR ME….
For two days, I sit around the house and drink whatever I can find short of Sterno. Start off the day with a double NyQuil
on the rocks. The pattern is set. Wake up, smoke hashish with the girls, they leave and I get on the booze-full train of sorrow
and hiding. By noon every day, I get the pen out and I’m trying to write letters to Lindsey. It’s either that or call Diane,
and I don’t particularly want to hear what anyone else has to say. I start out every time with lots of poetic bullshit, all
passionate and violiny and by the second paragraph, my hand’s making lines across the page—shut down. Nothing to do but drink
more and pray for 80-proof rain. Finally, the booze runs out and I decide to take a walk.
The sun’s gone down and I can see the air in front of me. I walk for an hour before I even realize that I’m walking. I walk
and I walk. I start to wake up early in the morning and I take walks through all the neighborhoods. I take the tube across
town and I
walk. Get up, fry potatoes, drink a pot of tea and walk. Looking, smelling, thinking, and dreaming. I walk until it gets dark,
and then I catch a train and go home and eat a few more potatoes. The potatoes fill me up but I’m still always hungry. I watch
the traffic, and the lights, and the people, and the trees, until I’m so hungry that everything begins to vibrate. At that
point, I’m just coasting through a Cézanne painting, everything jagged and vibrating, jumping into my fourth dimension. I
begin to lose weight and all the boys start taking notice. Jeans hanging off my hips and all those fickle boys loving me.
I’m bony. I got cheekbones! No longer the suave stepson of the Elephant Man.
I hit a piazza one day in the middle of town and I get a load of this statue. The usual—tall, stoic, uniform, big chin, the
works… When a slight detail catches my eye… ONE ARM. The motherfucker’s got one arm! Turns out, as I skim the plaque at his
boot, that it’s Admiral Nelson. Apparently this guy beat the whole Spanish Armada with not only one arm… BUT ONE EYE! Talk
about making me feel like a weasel! I got the herpes and my buddy offed himself and I’m broke… This guy, Nelson, beat a whole
fleet of the world’s baddest ships with like rowboats and cap guns. It’s all I can do not to skip home followed by a band
of admiring Liberace look-alikes. I’m happy this motherfucker beat the odds. It gives me hope. Hope and an idea—A DIME STORE
KIND OF BRAINSTORM.
JIMI IS CALLING FROM LONDON… WILL YOU ACCEPT THE CHARGES?
“Yes… I’ll accept the charges.”
“Unc?”
“Jimi?”
“Hey… How ya doin’?”
“Good, Jimi… I think the question is… How are you doin’?”
“Actually… Somethin’ went down.”
“What a surprise.”
“I lost my wallet with all my money.”
“And your passport?”
“No, I didn’t have my passport with me.”
“Where’d you lose it?”
“You know?… I’m not quite sure. It’s all a little hazy that night.”
“So now you need money?”
“I do, Unc.”
“You know you coulda come up with a better one if you were going to call me collect from London and ask me for dough.”
“The weirdest thing is that it’s actually true… I swear, Unc.”
“Yeah, well… I’ll drop you some cash at Western Union… It oughta be there by tomorrow since it’s already so late in London.”
“Unc… I owe you one.”
“No… If you owed me ONE… Then you’d owe me A COUPLE… But you don’t owe me anything… I gotta go to work… I’ll see you later.”
I’ve never been a big fan of holidays with the family or even THE FAMILY PERIOD… But times like this make it GOOD to have
a group of people who feel at least MILDLY obligated to give a fuck! It’s the little victories, the small triumphs that keep
the Kool-Aid Smile on my face.
Memories are a big hassle. They weigh more than any pile of gravel I ever shoveled. I’m a slave to my past… I’m a slave to
the pussy… I’m a slave to the car… The land… The desire to be something I’m not… I’m a slave to everything that weighs.
Lying in bed with a pocket full of someone else’s money, desperately needing a new pair of socks. PARIS. What two-bit dreamer
didn’t go there and talk about how rude the waiters were? A song sung a million times by ten million different mooks like
me.
It all started with a phone call from Jane, Ray’s last girlfriend, to Doobe, asking us to come see her. It’s a long way from
the vacation hot spot of my youth—WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY. Personally, I’m not all that keen on seeing the chick, but Doobe thinks
it’ll be nice, so we’re doing it. I got a friend of a friend over there by the name of Harry Clements, who I figure I’ll look
up when I get there.
I’ll go. I’m tired of London and I’m starting to catch up with myself here. Time for a new town. It’s always better when I’m
coming or going, just watching it all pass by through the window.
Jackson Pollock coulda painted the sky, I think, as I turn over and look for another pillow. I’m not really one to go on about
nature and its power, but I gotta cop to the fact that there are moments when I am all but brought to my knees by Big Mamma.
Something about leaving makes me feel relaxed. I watch the sky, all the shades of blue and black splattered and I think about
Paris and I fade….
I wake up and do the chores that Doobe needs done while he works. Then I meet him down at
Leicester Square. We have a short one at the pub and then we jump on the train to Heathrow.
“I hope you didn’t bring the hashish, Jimi.”
“Of course I brought it… I thought we’d need it.”
“What we DON’T need is a few years in a french prison because of a little miscommunication… Gimme it.”
Doobe breaks the chunk in half and throws a half back at me.
“Cheers,” he says and we toss the chunks in our mouths.
“Anything else I should know about?”
“Well… Yeah… I got the pipe.”
“Gimme it.”
I hand it to him, he breaks it up and throws it under the seat of the train.
The train lets us out right at Heathrow. We jump on to the plane and grab a glass of red wine, which is nice, because my throat
is coated with hashish crumbs and I’m having trouble properly enunciating my vowels.
A trip to Paris—definitely some kind of justice I could have only earned in another lifetime.
“Doobe, this trip is fate… Man.”
“No… It’s about an hour and fifteen minutes,” he says and turns out his overhead light.
I look out the window… Thinking… I got no right to even think about this life anymore… I don’t know what the fuck is gonna
happen… Nothing ever goes the way I THINK it’ll go… Why do I even bother… The English Channel below me… Lined
with lights… France on the other side… FUCK IT… FUCK GUILT… I’m gonna let it be whatever… NO MORE GUILT… NO MORE BULLSHIT…
I’M GONNA DO WHAT I CAN DO WITH WHATEVER I GOT… OR WHATEVER I CAN GET… MY SLICE OF THE PIE… THE CITY OF MOTHERFUCKIN’ LIGHTS
AND LOVE… PARIS!
We land.
“Doobe, are you feeling that hashish?”
“Yahuh.”
We hurry through the airport and find our way lost outside. WAY LOST! Neither of us speaks a word of french. I mean I studied
it for years, but I don’t even let Doobe in on that little piece of information, because between the hashish and my study
habits in school, I’m useless. Doobe moves fast, being a New York boy, even though he’s lost. I follow with my head on a swivel,
lookin’ like one of those big spring-head dolls that sits on top of a dashboard. London’s Jersey City compared to PARIS! Sculpture…
The whole fuckin’ town. I think they commission artists to do the goddamn drinking fountains! Doobe hasn’t said anything yet,
but from what I can tell, we’re walking in some kind of a tweaked circle. Finally, he turns.
“I don’t know where we are.”
“Did you just realize that?… We’ve passed this same fruit stand three times.”
“Why didn’t you fuckin’ say something?!”
“Doobe, I have NO idea where we are. I don’t even know where we SHOULD be going.”
“Jimi… I’m really spun from that hashish. I didn’t realize it until now.”
We walk a while, until we hear a few words of english, and ask directions. Lucky for us, all the circling we did kept us close
to where we needed to be. We’re back on track. I begin to hear all the foreign tongues more as music than as a wall. It’s
actually better to not know what people are saying. I like it. London is one thing but Paris… Forget about it… The trip just
started. London was a warm-up. I wanna go to Africa and India, that’s the shit right there. Different clothes, and smells,
and faces and teeth. It’s all just started. It makes me think that maybe there are a few things worth living for! Maybe there
IS something left after your first legal drink.
“We musta walked outta the wrong side of the airport.”
“I’m glad you figured it out… I wouldn’ta even been able to dial a phone to call Jane.”
“You woulda figured it out if you had to.”
“Doobe… You’re better at this stuff, trust me.”
A little compliment and your average slob will bend over backwards for you. Just let Doobe believe that he IS the trailblazer
and I’ll never even have to open a map.
Ten minutes and one train later, we’re in front of Jane’s apartment. From what Doobe tells me, her dad is like some CEO-type
who got hit by the mid-life crisis
and decided it was time to spend some of his money on something other than Saabs for his five daughters, so he and the old
lady packed up and moved to Paree. Jane, being the middle child and naturally, the most clueless, came over to “get her shit
together.” Yikes… To even put that cliché in quotes makes my herpes itch.
I met Jane for the first time at Ray’s funeral, and I gotta come clean on this one… It was bad spooky voodoo vibes right from
the get-go. The chick bummed me out hard. I mean I know that it wasn’t her fault that slick-boy strung himself up in the old
oak, but it being the only time I’d met her, it was hard not to associate Ray’s death with meeting Jane. Something in my gut,
knotted lie detector that it is, gave me a jolt when I touched her. I never believe what my gut tells me at first but that’s
probably a lot of the reason why I find myself SO WRONG all the time. As fucked up a human as I am, the animal part of me
does OK.
Jane was all over the place at the funeral, blabbering and moaning and yelling, “Please don’t take him! Don’t close the door!
Don’t take him away,” when they were shutting the casket, and that voice in my head was saying, “Shut the fuck up and have
a yogurt or something, Jane!” I just don’t know what it was. But you know Doobe thinks she’s great, of course, like I said
before, and that’s why we’re here. And forget about the rumors that Jane and Doobe have a thing going… Just forget about them.
We ring the bell. Mom answers and buzzes us in
and now here we are, all gook-eyed, meeting the family.
“Doobe! Oh my God! You made it!” she says, as if it’s a miracle. “And Jimi! Oh my God! It’s so good to see you again,” as
if we go way back. It’s begun already.
Mom and Dad are alright. Dad’s one of those banker guys who’s decided it’s time to get into the Arts, so he’s moved to Paris,
and Mom is definitely that faded Jane Fonda-esque debutante from like Long Island or maybe, the Oranges in New Jersey. A 1980s
health spa version of Holly Golightly—the pearls, the hairdo, all slipped into a yummy-mummy motif. Nice enough people, and
more importantly, they’ve cooked up a beautiful spread for us. Chicken, roasted with asparagus and potatoes and greens. Out
of the corner of my roving eye, I see strawberries and cream waiting on deck in the kitchen.
Doobe’s in rare form, the hashish that made me a zombie made him Jerry Lewis, so he carries the conversational ball, and tells
of all our WACKY mishaps on the way to Paris. The parents love it, like they always do. I guess after a couple of decades
on the couch ANYTHING can be pretty zany. I’m useless. I just have seconds and thirds, occasionally grunting or nodding my
head to validate one of Doobe’s twists. He lies a little, but the story moves better that way.
Jane, of course, is all but totally enthralled by every peep Helms makes.
“Did you really?… Oh my God!… And you weren’t scared?!” The thing that bothers me the most about Jane is that it’s obvious
she WAS perfect for Ray,
and I can’t bear to see that simple truth bouncing around in front of me. Even with my iron curtain of humor, it’s painful
to watch her bounce around in front of me, thinking of old purple Ray. Ray’d found the perfect playmate. All the right stuff,
that earthy rich girl from the east hanging out in Aspen, hiking and skiing, waiting tables, going to Dead shows and doing
bucketsful of coke—just perfect for him.
Mom and Jane finally clear the table and I watch with a broken heart as the last few potatoes escape my jaw-full death.
“You two boys shower, and then we’re going out.” I wanna tell them to go on without me so I can stay home, eat the leftovers,
and make passes at Mom, but something tells me to hold back.
We walk through the city, Doobe and Jane laughing while I swing in and out of insecurity. It’s either, “what a coupla assholes,”
or “oh jeez, I wish they’d talk to me” the whole way.
“We’ll go to Harry’s. You guys’ll love it. They serve whiskey there and the walls are filled with pennants from american colleges.”
“That sounds cool,” Doobe says.