The Road Narrows As You Go (22 page)

She doesn't owe you money, so …, Jonjay said. He looked out the side window as he drove, left arm dangling out in the wind while the right hand steered her Gremlin through the usual insane traffic. No, my dealings with Justine are like a cautionary tale. See, if I was a kid living in San Francisco who made a lot of abstract paintbrush squiggles on small sheets of paper, the first thing I'd do is print a comic book. Small run. Drop it in the right shops. Get the heads talking. Send some copies to the Guggenheim so you can say you're in their permanent collection. Then show some pictures with Justine Witlaw.

Wendy wasn't sure if Mark heard, his eyes were closed but maybe his mind was open. The Gremlin carried us up the steep hill of Stoneman Street to the dead end where the white van was still parked. We drove over the extension cord.

Does she have a TV in there or something? Wendy asked.

Yeah, said Jonjay.

What does she watch?

Soaps.
Solid Gold
.

Wendy scowled. She got out and opened the garage door, and Jonjay parked inside the carport.

He got out of the car and, leaving Mark passed out in the backseat, closed the door of the garage. He said he thought the door needed something to spruce it up. It was corrugated aluminum that lifted up and slid into a shelf near the ceiling, and it was painted black. What else did he want?

Wendy said she couldn't handle it, she had to know if Jonjay was going out with that damned surf pixie, she obviously wasn't just some new friend from the desert highway, was she? Was he sleeping
in
her van with her or was he sleeping
with
her in the van? Because it seemed to Wendy like the
latter
.

He didn't make eye contact with her as he said, Sort of but not really. Manila is serious about
me
, and she saved my life, so. But I'm not with her. I'm with
nobody
, he told her. I don't
date
, Wendy. That's not me. My lifestyle is unpredictable. Plus she's just a girl.

Oh, yes, you're much too old for her. Wendy combed her fingers through his hair. You're ancient, aren't you? Like a mountain.

Eternity is a tough gig, baby. And sexual solitude is essential to my meditation regimen, he said in all earnestness.

Fine then, fine, have it your way. Wendy walked away into the manor ahead of him. I'm determined to live life to the fullest, she said, even if all you want to do is sneak sex with a kewpie doll and stare vacantly at a wall. Some men find me very attractive. She winced. Then she turned around and came back and asked him for help with rent. At least you can do
that
.

I'll come up with some dough, don't worry.

Whatever. Just go to your secret bank account.

He looked around. No one else within earshot. (We would not learn until much later about the secret bank account with supposedly over a million dollars in it.) You and your misnomers, he said. Hey, you want this? He pulled the fifty from his pocket and snapped it open so
Ulysses S. Grant's portrait faced her. That's the only tune I can play and that's no lie.

Wendy struck on an idea. Let me kiss you once or twice and I'll let you keep the fifty.

16

Who were we supposed to believe, Jonjay or Wendy, or our own skin? Twyla Noon tried to woo him, too. Little did she know about the kooloomooloomavlock.

Put some time between her moves and Wendy's attempts at rekindling whatever it was happened between them up in Canada—so at the tail end of the summer of eighty-one, when Manila Convençion was back on the road and the leaves on the trees turned yellow and red, and hormones, instinct, and brute physical attraction take over like a suicide mission, Twyla caught Jonjay in the living room smoking through a bag of weed and watching reruns of
Twilight Zone
on late-night TV while Mark, in the fetal, snored on the chesterfield surrounded by empty cans of Old Milwaukee. Kittenish, quietly on her hands and knees, she pawed her way up to where Jonjay was lying on the other sofa, meowed, and threw her hair back.

He startled. Didn't see you there. What are you doing, Twyla?

She tiptoed her fingers up his chest and whispered in his ear,
Lord, I think I want you
.

Say what?

Without meaning to she called him lord. She meant it as an exclamation but it came out sounding more like how she really felt at the moment, like a servant crawling at the feet of her desire, a vassal at his beck and call. Behind his back, we competed to describe Jonjay. Viking. Druid. Centurion. Prince. Olympian. Mephistopheles. Bacchus with biceps. Romanesque. Hypnotizer. Pulchritudinist. He didn't just pay attention; we felt his eyes locked so hard it felt as though while you spoke he was listening not to your words but to your soul. Most of all he was a heartbreaker.

That boy's on a higher plane of existence, Biz would say. You're all just fuckin' floccinaucinihilipilification (and in a word dismiss our dreams). This was the night Twyla found out the literal truth of Biz's comment.

Lord, I think I want you.
Already unbuttoning the fly of his Levi's. Come on, I brought a condom. Now's the time, she whispered. Let's do it. Right here.

Dang, timeout, Twyla. Wow, hey, this is cool but what about Mark?

Twyla was sleeping with Mark at this time. She looked at her on-again-off-again and said, He's dead to the world.

Look, wow, I'm sure we'd be a phenomenon in the sack and all, but I'm on the natch. No more fucking until I capture the kooloomooloomavlock.

You can't be serious, said Twyla. It's been months.

This was the name for a mental animal more desirable than the elusive simultaneous orgasm. Instead of sex, Jonjay would sit lotus on Hick's exercise mat, balance lit candles in the palms of his hands, and go into an hour-long hypnogogic trance he called
Hunting the kooloomooloomavlock
. He'd sit there in his crawlspace or in Hick's old bedroom go into a deep state of being. Staring into space, flying through the blue skies of pure thought into the smog of opinion over the valley of ignorance, and through the caves of suspicion. Glasseyed in the manner of a vampire in the dormancy of his daily coffin. His meditation was catatonic, his eyes stopped blinking
and white droolcicles hung from his chin. The Kooloomooloomavlock was a precosmic wraith who stole from mankind the key that unlocks the gates of all-knowing. To hunt the Kooloomooloomavlock was as close as a mortal could get to the gardens of enlightenment. It was how Jonjay said he spent all his pineal energy.

He was a trained climber in a trance and on foot, and was the leader of two ascents on the Paro Chu, plus the solo he did the year Hick died of the Osorezan, the Kanchenjunga a decade before, and he was a teammate on many other expeditions, some of which he alone survived. As for astral projections, his experiences were more vast. He knew many of the world's mountains through deep meditation. The deeper he went into himself, the higher he could climb in astral projection. One day he turned the insides of No Manors into a practice mountain, to keep his skills fresh, and attempted an ascent from the basement to the attic without touching floors
or furniture
. Only the walls and ceiling. He carried chalk powder on him, to dust his hands with periodically, and a few bagels in case he got hungry as he crimped the edges of Victorian finishings, underclinging from Edwardian doors. He rested in the pockets of high art deco cartouches, and pinched, palmed, and pulled himself steadily up the maze of five storeys, not just the main floor, to the flat-top peak. The tendons in his forearms and neck stretched at the skin as he frogged from high corner to baseboard and back up, making good time. He ate the bagels in a cubbyhole on the third floor's front hallway and arrived at the attic's summit by dark. No one took pictures, so he repeated the climb a week later for the sake of documentation.

In the attic at the top of No Manors there's a little window that opens onto the tiny flat roof, it's about the size of a tabletop. There you can see an almost three-sixty view of the Bay, Jonjay said of his view at the peak. All the traffic. Gosh. All the freeways. Lanes and lanes of cars speeding back and forth, in and out of the city, hundreds every minute. Exits. On ramps. And you should see how houses blanket the hills, houses and apartments
and buildings seriously cover everything. From up there, Golden Gate looks like a park with a swing set. All these cars. It's a beautiful view, it helps you remember that it doesn't matter what direction you go, someone is always going the other way.

Jonjay was slightly dangerous, in that he had no impulse control when it came to acting on an idea, no matter what whim. He woke us up this one time, it was three in the morning, the middle of summer and a Thursday, probably this was in eighty-two or eighty-three. He still hadn't had a show at Justine Witlaw's and at this point she had only paid him back half what she owed him (cash he had to remove himself from her purse while she drank sangria). C'mon, Jonjay said, help me set this up.

Set this up. We didn't know what
this
was when we hopped in Wendy's lime-green Gremlin—she was fast asleep for this one. Jonjay had the trunk weighed down with at least a dozen eighty-pound sacks of Checkers icing sugar and he wouldn't tell us what for. He took us through town to the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge was amazing to see at that hour, when the sun was moments away from the horizon and the bridge's long red body was totally silent like a sleeping dragon stretched out on a bed of lowlying fog, a fog full of glittering multicoloured metallic particles, and not a single car before or after us rode its great outstretched back. It was just us and the road eventually joining the horizon.

Jonjay stopped the Gremlin—
skrrch!
—in the middle of the bridge. Good, perfect, we're alone. Okay, someone stay behind the wheel and leave the car idling, watch for traffic, especially the fuckin' cops. He popped the trunk and got out.

What are you doing? Patrick said. Oh hell no, he's not going to jump, is he?

He'd live anyway, said Rachael. She scooted from shotgun to the driver's seat and eyed Jonjay through the rearview as he took a sack of Checkers from the trunk and used a knife to rip the sack open and dumped the white powder on the bridge. We watched in silence as he tore open all the sacks
and caked both lanes with a pile of icing sugar. Then as soon as
that
was done he jumped back in the Gremlin with the empty bags, squealing,
Go, go, go!
and so Rachael pumped the gas and away we went. Twyla slapped his shoulder and said, What the fuck was that about? You're out of your gourd.

Sugar dump, Mark Bread repeated in an escalating falsetto. Sugar dump, sugar dump
sugar dump
.

Did you forget to take a picture of this
again
? For your documentation? Patrick asked in a contemptuous tone, rubbing the bags under his eyes. He said, I can't tell what's art for you and what's a joke. Is how tired I am a part of your art?

Relax your false tribulations, Jonjay said. He giggled. He stuck his arm out the window to feel the breeze as Rachael got us off the bridge, the Pacific Ocean rippling under us, the dark skies above sparkling, and maybe the icing sugar was like a clod of moon dust fallen to Earth. A dream that we didn't wake up from. As soon as we got home Jonjay turned on the local morning news and there was a helicopter hovering over the sugar on the bridge.

Multiple VCRs got set to record. We tuned in to different stations on different TVs as news coverage of the icing sugar expanded to other networks and Jonjay wanted to capture it all on tape. Soon every station in America was broadcasting footage of the icing sugar. It was on one channel or another all day long. CNN did a segment. But nobody knew what the sugar was, it was this
mystery white powder on the Golden Gate Bridge backing up traffic for miles in both directions
. By noon the bridge was on complete military lockdown. Nobody was allowed on or off without clearance. The ocean was being patrolled by the navy in black Zodiacs and wearing frog suits. And the whole nation's attention was turned to the bridge as the situation made us a nervous wreck. The Pentagon's scientists—the
Pentagon
, Jonjay—microsampled the powder, they tested it for everything from anthrax to bananadine. Jonjay laughed for hours watching anchormen and anchorwomen make paranoid
assumptions about the mystery powder
thought to be the work of Russian agents
, sweating over the mysterious white powder
being analyzed as we speak … this act of terrorism
had the Golden Gate out of commission for
eight hours
while hazardous-materials specialists ran parallel rounds of tests in CIA labs—
CIA
labs, Jonjay!—to identify anything that might lead to a culprit.
Culprit
, Jonjay! We watched as the story made headlines all over the world when the labs came back with Checkers brand icing sugar. The news repeated the confirmation that evening, Checkers brand icing sugar, the bridge was once again open, and it was on to current events without a punchline. Jonjay considered the piece a success—he had seven VHS cassettes loaded with six hours of footage each, including hours' worth of the aerial shots of the icing sugar pile from a helicopter and an hour-long panel discussion with SFPD toxicologists who labelled this
a level one
, and a perceptive criminal psychologist who guessed either a shipping truck mishap or an adolescent prank.

I'm glad you didn't bring me along on this little excursion, said Wendy as she watched the story unravel. But thanks for stealing my car, you jerk. You owe me a back massage for that, at least.

Jonjay kept this documentation in a box labelled
A Game of Checkers
that he was going to use in his solo show at Justine Witlaw's. There was no reason for us to be afraid that someday this prank might become evidence in our trial,
as if
the CIA and the Pentagon are going to investigate a pile of icing sugar. He was never going to cop to the prank, just to recording a news cycle that fascinated him, as an artist—the documentation
was
his art. Never breathe a word of it to anybody, he told us and sliced a finger across his neck, or we'll all go to prison.