path: root/tomorrow/ch6/ch6.txt

This is the room --  these days run away like -- treasure chests of pomegranates -- nightfall on the savannah -- we had no idea --  be more like the ocean -- visualize action -- all that is waiting -- the problem -- understanding at the expense of ambiguity -- pulling in the shells -- red plumes of blue -- something to move -- turbulent somnobulist in the air -- this is the room -- 

Something strange is amiss, hitting its pointed beak on the roof in time to the squirrels scampering feet, up there with the fallen limbs of pecans and maples and the disgorging of wings, cardinals and warblers and wrens and somewhere way up there, really up, straight fucking up, canadian geese in the marshmellow tuffs and syrupy blue ether -- feathers raining through the pecans and maples and little Leda, wiping an impish grin on the back of her hand,  tosses the club amidst a great splash of feathers that billow around her, listing slowly to the ground like gentle warm snow, -- this is the room where we are waiting.  

Perhaps Jimmy is not waiting.

Perhaps I am the only one waiting. Watching the scenery out the window of a train car still sitting in an empty railyard. Everyday the same scene, but hoping for motion.

Jimmy and I are just making some headway on a bottle of Scratch's and there it is -- another train car pulling along side ours -- the innocuous blue -- green tint of Dean's soda -- can sedan pulling to a rickety halt on the rutted driveway. I go the window and watch as he gets out and sets down his battered suitcase. Dean has wings, but they're black and someone has swallowed all his halos as if to say there is only pleasure with pain, only balance in contradiction. I've seen him dine on buddhists, put bullets through honeydew and mix gin with the Khan's famous after dinner treats. Dean was miscast. Given the wrong physical build, some paper work mix -- up on the way down, departmental records secretary spills the coffee, papers snowing off the edge of desk some requisition order slides under the filing cabinet where it's still gathering dust and Dean gets here looking like an underweight Dempsey. He's done well with it though, he's grown into into it in spite of himself.

This morning he's wearing his trademark pin -- striped suit and fedora with his hair greased back like it's 1957 and he's slightly ahead of his time. He scratches his head and surveys his surroundings, craning to inspect the treetops and sapphire twinkles of sky poking between leaves. Then he puts his hat back on and marches down the driveway. He looks like an enemy of the people, but only as a tag, a tag they would give to Dillinger or Mitnik, a tag that belies the warmth of men who know the odds and aren't putting any money on the table. They look best as a smiling Xerox on the post office bulletin board, never a sketch, never a half remembered glimpse, no Dean would do it all in broad daylight, the sort of criminal that is no longer permitted. There's a glamour to that sort of crime, crime which may steal, or destroy, but never does any real harm. An innocent criminality that got lost somewhere along the way, a formal criminality, an innocence that makes you believe that crime is as noble an art as any.

He looks like something from a tall tale told by a drunken leprechaun tugging at your coattails in a Dublin alley. But Dean is a darker sound than most, one with a heavy backbeat, something bass driven, with accordian melodies. The innocent criminal and lighthearted formality can collapse like bellows and exhale a different man, a heartbreaking melody then, dark and heavy -- a gypsy song or a curse -- half -- muttered words. One day in New York City.... But even in the watery darkness of Dean's quiet moments the formalitity and innocence remain in little things, like words, always aeroplane, juncture, sonombulist,  never airplane, time or zombie,  or his clothing, always suits, antiquated, out of style, yet fitting on his wiry frame, always a zippo, never a bic,  or his near reverant love of silence and thought. You can see thoughts folding in on themselves behind his eyes, train wrecks he will never describe for you, locked forever in a half curl of lips or rise of an eyebrow, entire railyards with meticulously inlaid switching systems with cars to carry you as far as Bangledesh or as near as the very stop your own train is pulling into just now, and yet he remains gulping in the silence, the beauty of saying nothing. I have seen Dean vanish, become so silent, so still that he disappeared right in front of me. 

Everything is always on or off, there is no mediocrity or in between state --  everything or nothing at all. When he drinks, and Dean often does, his eyelids droop slightly and his head teeters about on the end of his neck, but just when you think he's skunked, he'll snap to and ask you about something you casually mentioned two weeks ago, wanting to know the finer details of your off hand remark -- razor sharp. 

He doesn't knock, artificial formality is not his style. He moves through the door with more grace and sense of comfort in his surroundings than I can manage after four years. Jimmy and I sit silently waiting while Dean carefully lays the battered suitcase on the dining table and fishes out and lights a cigarette in one long fluid motion. He exhales and breaks into a broad smile.

"Sil my old friend," he walks around the divan and clasps his arms around me,  "you ought to unpack... it will be good for you."

"I will my friend. I will." 

We do not pat each other on the back. Eventually he pulls back, and, still grasping my shoulders, says, "You look well. You look marvelous actually." His attention shifts to Jimmy who, realizing he's next, has risen off the couch, glass of mead still in hand, "James... Good to see you."

While they embrace and clap each other on the back, I walk into the kitchen and grab Dean a glass and pour him some mead. 

"Mead huh? Never had it."

"A Scratch specialty. It's not bad actually." Jimmy takes another sip as if to encourage Dean along.

"Scratch? Is that a person?" Dean flops down on the couch with his glass carefully raised and counterbalanced to avoid spilling.

"Scratch was discovered shortly after you left. You'll love him."

"Not bad. A little sweet for my taste but not bad." He sets the glass on the table and smacks his lips. "And where is Little Miss?" 

"Sil pissed her off last night... Maybe you can retrieve her and assuage the feminine irk"

Dean's smile droops to a frown and he cocks an eyebrow at me. 

I shrug. "Long story. Married people were in the house."

He winces. "Things are falling apart in my absence.... Fear not my friend. I'm back to save the universe." The smile returns, and he reaches again for the glass. "Get's better the more you drink..." He raises his glass and Jimmy and I follow, clinking our glasses against his "to a new dawn in the dark night of the soul..."

His toasts are always twinged with a melodramatic glamour that makes sense only after you have raised the twelfth one and come to see that, far from artifice, melodrama is the last glimmering of false hope, the desert hallucination of shimmering water that turns out indeed to be the water, shimmering and half -- eclipsed by date palms. 

"Okay man... hey let me get one of those..." Dean hands him a cigarette, and Jimmy lights up and exhales with his non -- smoker aggressiveness. "So lay it on me... What have you been up to?"

Dean signs and lights another cigarette off the cherry of the former. He looks over at me with a twinkle on the corner of his lips. "When was my last email...? Oh yes. Okay that was a few days ago." He rubs his goatee ruminating on the elapse of time. "It's pretty vague... wait, hold on now, a couple of snapshots are developing. I remember looking up from a formica bar at thousands of blinking lights, like getting off a Ferris wheel and realizing that it was still and the rest of world is what's spinning." He nods to himself as if pleased with the recollection. "I have an image of an alley, two dumpsters labeled United and a cocktail waitress with extracurricular monetary schemes. I remember trying to buy cigarettes from this old man with a tray around his neck and I had no money, so he gave me a pack provided I left the building. I'm just not sure where the building was... Virginia maybe...?

"Yes. Yes it was somewhere by a river, I remember the smell and empty bottles floating in the water. Yes. I put them there. I drank them and then I lobbed them into the river and watched them bob around and list over on their sides and then they would slowly fill up with water and sink. But a couple of them righted themselves before they reached that critical mass, or equilibrium, or whatever, and they just floated off with the current..."

"Right," Jimmy interrupts impatiently, "but I meant up in Brooklyn... How did the city treat you?"

"Oh that part. Well let's see. I never really got a job. I mostly sat around the house smoking... let myself be a fucktoy for Melissa... naturally that wore thin after a while... I worked for two weeks tending bar at one of those Williamsburg joints that doesn't close... Working class place, where the night shift comes in around eight AM and wants to get ripped after work... So I did pay rent for a couple of months off that, but then I got fired for tapping the till... So I went back to being a fucktoy... I had a fish, but he died...

He pauses and stares intently at me. He starts to sit back and cross his legs, but then changes his mind and jerks to his feet. He paces a circle around the coffee table and then goes into one of his abstract -- theoretical rants. He stops pacing to light a cigarette, the smoke maces him and he squints for a minute, rubs his eyes and lurches off again.

"Do you remember, when we were living out in LA, how it seemed like everything was so important and everyone had something they were working toward, but we always knew there was nothing and never would be? Well it's the same thing... same types of people, same types of jobs, ... everything exactly the same... except for the houses... I love the brownstones, take that over stucco any day, but it's pretty much the same sorts of people, the same caricatures that they present... real people mind you and plenty of interesting ones, though too many jogging and pushing baby strollers and that sort of nonsense... on the whole sharper than most in OC or LA, but not really all that different when it comes down to fundamental things like outlook on life, or maybe what I mean is lack thereof... plenty of shock at the notion that I don't want to work. I remember at this one party, one of Melissa's more yuppyish friends cornered me and started grilling me about what I did and all this stuff and I kept hemming and hawing and whatnot... finally she says, 'well what do you really love?' 'Everything,' I said. Absolutely everything. Except for onions and insects... and work. I hate work. I don't want to work. I want to absorb. I want to breathe in and out and understand. You know... run of the mill stuff. Anyway so Brooklyn was a lot like going back to LA, but with better restaurants. Not that I had expected it to be different, but the thing is, I've changed so much that I couldn't relate to it anymore. Couldn't even get that old superior amusement out of it.... I kept losing track of time... time is very important in that city. Never seems to be enough of it or something, everyone's trying to find it, the only place you can forget about time is in the parks. I would take wonderful naps in Prospect Park every afternoon. I got into letter writing. I spent most of my days writing letters to Sil and some folks on the west coast... I would find myself moving my fingers over the keyboard... I realized that I was playing it like an instrument, that the keys were what I was paying attention to, not the words or even the screen but the rhythm of the keys as my fingers danced over the..." He sighs wearily and crushes out his cigarette. "Who's the gimp?"

Out the front window we can see Scratch hobbling along with a pack on his back and what looks like ten or fifteen plastic shopping bags clutched in each hand. Jimmy bounds outside to help him. 

"That, is Scratch." I smile at Dean. "I sort of thought that perhaps you wouldn't want me to share those emails with anyone..."

"Yeah maybe so." He sits down on the throne chair. "I've been feeling much better by the way..." His voice is swallowed by a bellowing laughter and Scratch limping through the doorway with Jimmy just behind him holding the screen open.

"Sil," he barks my name like a director unsure of his actors, "you're having a party. We forgot to have a summer solstice party, so, damnit, were having one now."

"Okay. Should we wait for the autumn equinox?"

"We haven't got that kind of time." He heaves the bags up onto the dining table. "Beside who knows when that is... just doesn't have the ring of summer solstice. Autumn Equinox is very awkward to even say, let alone have a party for. This is going to be an Indian Summer party if it really must have a name. But damn it, you better get on the horn and call yer friends cause old Scratch is putting on the chef coat and it's feeling like grilling season..." He then reaches into one of the bags and extracts from it a starched white, double breasted chef coat and begins to theatrically pull his arms through the sleeves. That accomplished, he snaps the collar smartly to his neck and shrugs several times as if adjusting his body to the coat rather than the other way around. He drops the theatre display when he notices Dean. "Hey...You must be Dean... how ya doing? I'm Scratch."

They shake and Scratch mumbles something about not really being this weird most of the time, which Jimmy vehemently denies, assuring Dean that Scratch is indeed always this weird. "He hit his head you know..."

"James," Scratch is back to barking, "thanks so much for organizing these fine young lads to retrieve the double wide grill which you will find right beside the tire swing in my back yard."He dangles the keys to his truck on his outstretched finger. I leap up and grab them grab. We set off  with Dean through the forest along the river trail. 

"Little different than Brooklyn eh?" Jimmy is still smoking the same cigarette and keeps stopping to inhale.

"Hmm... Yeah... So what did you mean when you said he hit his head?"

Jimmy laughs and then stops. "I guess it really isn't funny. He had a rather severe accident. We should probably let him tell you the story..."

Almost and hour has passed before we get back with what turns out to be the largest barbeque known to man and takes all three of us gasping and struggling to get it in and then out of Scratch's truck. In the mean time Scratch has converted my kitchen into something resembling a Cossack encampment shortly before crossing the river to descend upon the Turks. Plastic bags are hanging in a curtain -- like semi -- circle around the sink, suspended by hooks I didn't know I had. The tiny four -- burner stove has disappeared beneath a barracks tent worth of pots and skillets, which on closer examination reveal several bubbling brown liquids with various herb clumps protruding from them. The oven door is propped slightly open and its insides are laden with skillets full of sautéed vegetables richly coated in butter or oil or some mysterious glaze made from butter and oil.

Scratch is bent over the sink sharpening his knives. The sink has been buried beneath an enormous, two -- inch -- thick cutting board that must weight thirty pounds and came from god knows where. It certainly wasn't carried in a plastic bag. He straightens up and turns around when he senses me inspecting the stove. "Keep back." He growls. "No sampling. This is a professional operation you are witnessing here." Then he relaxes for a moment. "I think perhaps you should go up and talk to Chloe and make sure that she and The Professor feel welcome this afternoon..."

"I sent Dean and Jimmy on that mission. If she's really mad at me then maybe I will talk to her, but I was kinda hoping it would just blow over."

Scratch snorts and goes back to sharpening, the deft scraping of steel and stone echoing dully off the stainless steel sink below it. I pour myself a glass of mead and retreat to the couch. I flip on the stereo and put on some music. Scratch requests a deeper backbeat. "Some fucking hip hop I said... I can't cook to this morose crap... it's the middle of the day fer godsakes Sil."

I give up and put on the radio. 







Mystical is bumping his way over those strange haunting Spanish guitar licks of his when I spot the entourage heading down the walkway. I can make out Jimmy and Dean in front and what looks like The Professor behind them. But there are far too many girls behind that to be Chloe. Unless she has divided into different bodies. They come through the door like a carnival troupe laughing and Jimmy starts singing the end of the song the minute he hears it. Dean breaks into an entirely inappropriate Irish jig sort of routine dragging one of the Chloes, who it's now clear is in fact an entirely separate entity named Nancy, at least according to Jimmy, who is attempting introductions over the sound of laughter and music. Nancy immediately wins my admiration by branching off from Dean's ridiculous dance into an even more spastic and disorienting careening series of movements, managing to draw a reluctant Professor into the routine. She stops abruptly, laughing as the professor continues with an awkwardness that, unlike Nancy's, is not faked. "There you go Professor." She claps and scrunches up her face and unleashes a voice that is one -- part British nanny and one -- part Shirley Temple "Oh you're sooo fabulous Professor. Run with it baby."

Scratch is momentarily spellbound and ceases his ceaseless movement as if stuck on pause by the touch of an unseen remote. Suddenly the ground gives way beneath him, and he hobbles forward to hug everyone and then gently shoo them outside. I climb up from the couch and move the speakers around to that they face outside.

Jimmy has already lit the grill, and everyone is gathering chairs around the fire pit. 

"Let's burn something Sil... this is so great... You have a fire pit in your front yard... We have to have a fire." Nancy's enthusiasm is contagious, and before I can protest, she and Jimmy have disappeared on a wood gathering expedition. 

Dean takes off to get beer. The mead is not to his liking he says. By the time he returns there is an alarmingly large pile of wood next to the pit, and Jimmy seems to have every intention of setting it on fire. Chloe is generally ignoring my presence, though The Professor has been making small talk and seems to want me to understand that he is not holding against me whatever it is that Chloe might be.

Conversations swirl in little whirlpools, like dust devils circling the yard, joining together in tornado, and then breaking off again. Though Jimmy and Nancy distinguish themselves with voices that rise in volume and enthusiasm like long rolling tidal waves finally making the beach, crosshatching and threatening to drown us all.

Chloe retreats and is standing by the doorway wearing a blue spaghetti strap dress, shaking her head slowly as she eats carrots and listens to Jimmy ranting. "Oh come on," I can hear him saying though I am trying to catch her eye at the same time, "there is no conspiracy..." his voice momentarily is swallowed by thumping bass and then returns,  "...enlightened, wealthy,  uber -- powerful people living lives of extraordinary decadence at the expense of shmucks like you and I...." 

The radio sings "hell was a place I knew long ago/is where I am/ is where I was/ is where I don't want to be/hell was a place I found by mistake..."

"There was a rainbow and we drove right under it and looked up at it... I swear we were right in the middle of it." Nancy's eyes get wider as if to emphasize the truthfulness of her story.

"I don't think you can be in a rainbow...."

"No one cares what you think Dean." She exaggerates, rolling her eyes and turns her around toward Chloe and the other girl. "We were in a rainbow weren't we?" They both nod.

"Fair enough."

 "You wouldn't have been able to see it unless you were at a right angle to it," Jimmy breaks off from whatever he was ranting about and dives into the perilous waters next to Nancy. 

"Ugh Jimmy. Didn't you hear what I said to Dean here? No one cares what you think... we were there. I think then that really, the authorities in this situation, would be, um, us." Her lips plaster on a sickly sarcastic smile. "Ohoh how you like that boy?" She weaves side -- to -- side imitating her dance from earlier, and Jimmy gives in laughing.

"Scratch kicks the screen open with a thunderous crash. Every one stops talking and turns toward him. He sniffs the air for moment and disappears back inside and returns carrying an enormous tray of meat. "It's grilling season," he bellows. "Let the grilling begin." He enlists my help in carrying the tray over to the frill and the rest return to what they are doing. I follow Scratch back inside and he sits down for a moment. 

"Can I bum a smoke from you Sil?"

"You serious?"

"The only time I smoke is when I cook. When I was actually running the restaurant I was a two pack a day guy and for some reason every time I actually cook, I mean cook for a half dozen or so, I have to smoke." He accepts the cigarette and inhales deeply. "Been almost a year since the last one."

He smokes about half and puts it out and returns to cooking. I sit on the couch watching the rest of them talking and goofing around with Annie in the yard. Jimmy and Chloe break off together and head toward the house. She goes straight into the kitchen to investigate Scratch's cooking. I can hear ingredients being listed over the thump of the bass. Jimmy is making gestures and such that seem to indicate he wants me to talk to Chloe, but actually I have lost all urge. He sits down beside me on the couch.

"If she wants to be mad, who am I to deprive her of the satisfaction?"

He shrugs and nods.

She steps back from the kitchen chewing a haricot vert and smirking at Scratch's scrambling figure darting back and forth, stirring pots, now tossing a pan of braised beans, now whisking an emulsion..."You know Scratch in your life you've spent more time in the kitchen than most women. You might as well be pregnant by now..."

"Yeah," Jimmy stands up to pour more mead, "and those clogs you chefs wear mean you're basically barefoot." He laughs.

"Your point being..." Scratch's head pokes around the corner and glares at him.

Jimmy shrugs, "You'd make a good wife...?" 

"What I am doing here James is art. You build things out of wood and call it art. Well, I build things out of food and call it art."

"Hey take it easy Scratch." Jimmy is a little taken aback "I was just trying to make a joke. Everyone knows there are lots of great male chefs."

Chloe groans. "Does it have to be like that?"

"What? Almost all the great chefs are men." Jimmy stares at her blankly. 

"Oh god."

"What? They are. I mean almost all the ones I see on the Food Network are. Don't get all feminist on me Chloe."

"Oh this isn't feminism James, this is just pathos. You're pathetic. You force women to be these domestic servants for god knows how long, then just to prove you could do it better, you create this elitist snobbery around the very same thing when you do it."

"Hey I didn't do any of that. And I'm not gonna feel guilty for it. History is a rubbish heap of wrongs Chloe... we've all heard this one before...."

"Have we?" I try to warn Jimmy off with eyebrows, but he ignores me and soldiers on.

"In essence, yes. Very familiar pattern here... the dominator culture... the repressed... the horror. The horror."

"I don't know man, patterns are in the eye of the beholder. Patterns are misleading. Lots of times we think they indicate order, but they don't necessarily. They only indicate patterns."

"Yeah, but patterns within disorder implies a kind of order, wouldn't you agree?"

"No. It depends on what you mean when you say order. Order as an inherent discoverable phenomenon is fiction..." Chloe storms outside and Jimmy and I watch as she sits down next to The Professor, her back toward the house. I continue watching her as Jimmy and I carry through our conversation, which by now, neither of us cares about. 

"Imposing order seems to work for certain reducible things... But I think patterns simply imply something outside the disorder is trying to make sense of it.... It doesn't have anything to do with the order or meaning of real nebulus thing. It has to do with us. Not the other... Where one person can find the pattern 'Jesus is the reason for the season' another person finds 'season the reason. Bake for twenty minutes'

Jimmy's voice is flat and distracted "You know as well as I do that those are not anagrams drawn from the same set of letters..."

"Okay sure we keep spare letters around for times when we want them, but isn't that just a further example of that fact that the order isn't there... we invent it?"

"Touché. OUCH!" 

"FUCK!" 

Scratch slaps us both in the side of the head with metal turners.

"I understand that all that was some misguided attempt to make Sil look good there, James. But I thought maybe a good crack on the head would remind you morons that Chloe isn't as stupid as you two can be." Scratch looks as close to mad as I have ever seen him. He thrusts a pitcher of sauce into Jimmy's hand and a brush into mine.  "Now go outside and baste the chicken... And for the love of god keep the sauce off the pork. I didn't soak it in brine for twenty four hours to have goop all over it."

Outside the Professor is trying to coax Dean into some philosophical debate. "So what are you saying? That we can make a difference or that we can't?"

"Neither." Dean lights a smoke. "I have nothing to say on that one because once you start debating that you have already digressed out of life and into the realm of ideas. Ideas are just words, words are just abstractions all you, no offense, do -- good intellectuals are missing the point. Yes, life could use some tinkering, it certainly isn't fair, but the problem isn't recycling, it isn't pollution, the problem is you and I and the solution is individual and has to be dealt with on that level. As long as you ignore the individual and focus on the abstract you not only miss the problem, but you delude yourself into thinking that you can find solutions for everyone."

"Oh God," Chloe cuts in with an exasperated voice, "you would think by now with the number of times we have failed to change things that we would be able to look ahead, put two and two together, and stop even talking about this crap." She shakes her head.

"Well yes, that's what I'm saying," Dean points to her with his cigarette. "Everyone has to face up to himself or herself first. And don't pull any psychological mumbo jumbo on me either because there will never be enough therapists to go around until we realize that we are our own therapists, and our own patients and that all the solutions we will ever need are already there in our own brains." He stabs his index finger into his forehead. "And as long as you are going to approach the world as, on one hand, a concrete thing in front of you, and on the other, some fanciful, abstract set of possible solutions, you are never going to realize that the power of words is not in the words themselves, but in what they can create. I mean, come on Professor, you know your surrealists I'm sure, what do think they were saying...? That the world is fanciful? Well sure, but lets scratch the surface a little shall we? Want it to be a better place? Try being a better person. Try thinking with your heart instead of your head. Your imagination can do things we haven't even dreamed of yet. And that's where all our ideas and solutions and future problems will come from. And I don't mean just the dreams you have when you're sleeping. I mean dreams... love, hope, the true work, all these are products of the imagination, all of this, everything around us, even each other, all springs from the interplay of our imaginations...."

"Yeah but Dean, most people just want to be happy..." Jimmy is yelling in my ear as he swabs chicken breasts with barbeque sauce. "People don't have the time or energy in their lives to think or talk about the kind of complexities you're talking about."

"Sure they do. We do. What makes us different than anyone else?"

Scratch swings the door open again with the same silence -- inspiring crash. "What makes us different is that we know how to have a summer solstice party long after summer solstice is past."







There are whirls of color balanced on theories dreamed from the Fibonacci sequence, balanced on the harmonics of a root two rectangle... a salad like a dancing lady from a Toulouse -- Lautrec poster advertising the greatest carnival of all in some Parisian back alley, the girl's skirts all atwirl and sucking on a bottle of sodium pentothal... eyes circle the table in blurs of mead settling on the green of the haricot verts in just about the place that fanciful Italian would have placed them, and yet Scratch probably doesn't know Fibonacci's name or even if he does the coincidence is a dance of intuition and formal logic hand in hand, skirts atwirling, painted faces glowing, the mirrored windows and the laughter three stories above where the madam is stringing her stockings across the open sliver of sky that you can see when your head flies back, heavy with absinthe and the dizziness of the endless spiral... and if we hesitate it is only of a desire not to disrupt, to preserve the golden garden, but damn if that isn't one fine looking apple over there by the pork and its honey gastrite accompaniment, and now the gold rush is on, down the alleyway come the miners and it's all the dancing girls can do to get up on the steps of the doorways before the stampede of miners comes clamoring down the cobblestone, greedy hunger in their eyes... dividing amongst them the finest of both homely honesty and Parisian fantasy... met here on a table of modest proportions... giggling girls in petticoats pretending modesty and impropriety while gold -- rush ruffians wreck havoc on what was once a peaceful alley.

Outside. Dirt and folding chairs. Chairs open. Chairs close. Mandibles move up and down. It's inescapable. And it tastes so good when it waltzes between the lips, the way the honey sweetens the front taste buds, and the camisole meat dances backward as the slight bite of mustard hits the sides of the tongue and a street band strikes up something in the key of G, something anyone can move to, a hypnotic dance that even cartoon animations moving frame by meticulous frame, can replicate and your eyes roll slightly back as you swallow, crescendo and then here comes the augment...

Mead. Or in Dean's case beer. Sweetness piled on thick with no shame. Gluttony. Fucking in the streets. On the roads. In the middle of the interstates. Everything drawn out of the alley into the open night air, and by the time most of us have finished eating, the sun is gone and night fast approaching. Nancy is petitioning for the fire, which Jimmy obliges and they embark on a ritual of twig snapping and branch breaking. Dean and I attempt to put my kitchen back in some semblance of order. He carefully wraps all the leftovers, intuitively realizing that this is all the food we have in the house and we had better make it last no matter if the camisole turns to chamois. By the time we finish and look outside a volcano has erupted in the front yard.

While some people might throw a few sticks on the ground, strike a match and call it a fire, Jimmy has other ideas. Jimmy has approached the thing more from an architectural angle. He is back with that famous Italian and his wonderful spirals. This is no fire, it's more of a pyre. It's the kind of thing pagans used to dance around in the woods. It's the kind of thing the Romans used to heat the great palaces with, back in the days when fire meant life. It's the hissing, raging swirl of motion that makes you want to understand it, to be able to recreate it at any moment. It's alive, that much is obvious, but more importantly, Jimmy has given it life, he has set it in motion down that spiral path ever -- increasing. He appears to have started with the remnants of the bamboo fence that I noticed earlier in the pile. Bamboo burns hot and fast and explodes as it does. He has combined it with fallen limbs of oaks and pecans and then reassembled the elements in a drip sandcastle formation that is flooded inside and out by a ferocious roaring sound that twists itself up, turns blue, then red, then yellow and disappears into the lower branches of the pecan tree, singeing the leaves and causing them to fall. It's fantastically loud, and it's sending flames over eight feet into the air. 

He and Nancy are the only ones even close to it. They are both still feeding yet more wood into the already excessive heights of flame. The Professor looks downright terrified by this spectacle and is clearly re -- evaluating what sort of madmen he has fallen in among. Even Scratch looks mildly alarmed, but he isn't saying anything. Dean heads straight for the woodpile and begins to throw more logs up on the top. Jimmy and Nancy have moved back from the heat, but Dean seems unfazed. He keeps at it until the entire woodpile has been fed to the flames. Even at ten or twenty feet, the heat is nearly intolerable and clearly no one is in control of the fire. Nancy runs inside and turns down the stereo and emerges from the house with two fresh bottles of mead. Jimmy retrieves the remaining chairs and he and Dean even carry the couch outside offering it to Chloe and her friends. We sit around listening to the roar, in awe of Jimmy's creation. Every so often, as the wood burns down, we draw our chairs closer.

"We used to have fires like this out in Humboldt..." Scratch rubs his head, and Dean perks up, glances over at me and nods. 

"You lived in Humboldt?"

"Yeah back in the late seventies I used to go out there in the spring... some friends of mine had a regular crop... then in the fall I'd pack it into a VW bug and haul it back here to sell to the college kids... ya'll are lucky... man, back then, there was nothing to do in this town..." He drifts off into some private world for moment. "Yeah Humboldt was something back then, maybe it still is, I dunno, but back then growing was part of the economy, nobody messed with you. The car dealerships would put up billboards advertising 'harvest specials' on trucks and 4X4's. It was hilarious. But why was I telling you this? Oh yeah, the fire, man out the middle of the redwood forests we used have huge bonfires and big parties... all the growers would get together after harvest..."

A silence momentarily settles over us, but Jimmy interrupts it, asking Scratch to tell the thump story. "You don't want these people to leave tonight think you just limp for no good reason do you?"

Scratch snorts. "Like I was handicapped by some fate of nature rather than my own stupidity?" He sits up and straightens his pants. "No I guess we wouldn't want that."

"I didn't notice you limped." Nancy leans forward in her chair and inspects Scratch's leg.

"That's sweet of you to say my dear, but it doesn't put your powers of observation in a good light. So yes, I do limp. And I limp because I'm missing about an inch and a half of bone in my left leg." He lights up a joint and passes it to his right. 

"Okay so as you might have guessed I used to cook for a living. I started doing that in LA back when I was your age probably, maybe a little younger, but anyway, I worked in some nice places and developed a bit of a reputation... I got to the point where some friends and I were able to put together a catering company, and we worked movie sets because that was where the good money was at."

"What movies did you do?"

"Oh shit, lots of stuff that never saw the light of day, but we eventually did get some big ones, Reality Bites was probably the biggest and definitely one of the worst, I should have given them more protein on that set. But the thing in Hollywood is that the money isn't necessarily in the big productions, those things have tight fixed budgets, and if they run over their budgets they cut things like catering so we actually tried to avoid them except when we thought it would be a good resume builder.

"Anyway in the course of a few years I became friends with Debra Winger, who honestly is one of the nicest, sweetest women I've ever met. So as time goes on I get tired of the business end of things and I was bitching to her about it one night and she offered me a job making good money just cooking for her. A personal chef basically. So I sold out of the catering company and was going to work for her...

"Now the other thing you need to know is that I was an avid sky diver. We used to go all the time. Pretty much whenever we weren't working we were jumping out of airplanes. So when I sold the company my friends decided to have this big party for me out in the Inland Empire... Dean and Sil know where that is, but the rest of you just have to imagine a big, dry, grassy area where LA stores its smog during the day... So there was this community house out there that we sort of crashed at when we weren't on location or whatever... the key point being that it was in the middle of nowhere and it had a barn with a corrugated metal roof. So we decided that about half of us would jump and try to land at the house and the other half would stay behind and cook."

At this point Scratch stands up and hobbles toward the fire and turns around facing us. "So I was the last jumper. It was a perfect afternoon. Nice and warm even at fourteen thousand feet. Everything about the day was just lovely... and I know what you're thinking and no the 'chute opened fine, just like it was supposed to, everything was great the whole way down..." 

Scratch looks around to make sure everyone is edged up on their seats. He stalls everything from this point on to build it up because we can see from his obviously twisted, scarred kneecap that something goes horribly wrong at some point, but Scratch likes to amplify the suspense. 

"Well, about a hundred feet off the landing, everyone else is already down. Most of them in the yard though a couple are down the street, but they're all down and I'm kind of half steering half watching them pack up their chutes and half thinking, in the very back part of my brain, at some level I don't normally pay attention to, that something is not right. The first few guys are in the yard and the last three are spread out down the street." 

He pauses to take a long drag.

"What this tells me is that there is a nasty gust somewhere between me and the ground. And that is the last thought I remember half -- forming. Three months later I woke up in a hospital."

He passes the joint on.

"What happened is that I started to drift and I tried to correct, but something in the way I moved and the way the wind was blowing... one in a million kind of thing... one of those variables that you don't get to control." Dean is wincing and Chloe puts her hand over her face. Jimmy gives a little ironic laugh. "Anyway," Scratch continues, having built it up enough, "basically the 'chute twisted and the gust caught me about twenty feet above the ground and threw me into the extended edge of the barn's corrugated metal roof. The tops of my ankles hit the edge of it square on at about forty miles an hour." 

He looks down at his legs. 

"It cut almost all the way through to my Achilles tendon, smashed my ankle joint to smithereens; understand of course, I don't actually have any memory of this.... It's just what people have told me, people who were there.... They're not sure if that's what did the knee too or if the knee was from the truck I landed on," Scratch chuckles. "Lucky for me, after I got dragged free of the roof with my feet flopping behind me, the 'chute caught another gust and blew over the house. I fell two stories and went right through the front windshield of a pickup truck." He laughs heartily.

"And that," Scratch looks over at me with a green jello twinkle in his eye, "is why I don't walk quite right."

"Jesus Christ," Dean exclaims, "I can't believe you lived through that." 

"Well that makes two of us... and I'll tell you, I don't remember it happening, but to hear my friend Dave tell it, it sends chills down my spine. He saw the whole thing, he was the one that drove me to the hospital... they were afraid to move me so I was half hanging out the windshield of the truck all the way to the hospital." 

Scratch leans back, wipes his hands over his face and sighs deeply. "It just sounds so funny to me you know? There's times when I think I might have made the whole thing up... like I never did cater films, never lived in Hollywood, never went sky diving, never knew Debra Winger, never did any of it... I've been lying the whole time and I just made this stuff up to impress you guys." He trails off. But his story is true. He showed Chloe and I pictures of his ankles. The reconstructive surgery and use of sheep tendons was very experimental at the time, and Scratch is actually in the medical books as a case -- study complete with horrifying photographs. 

The fire has subsided to levels that might be considered normal. After a while The Professor announces he is leaving. Chloe gets up to walk him out, and Nancy and the other girl take the opportunity to walk back to Chloe's house where they are staying. Scratch mumbles something about age and he enlists Jimmy to help him carry things back to his house. When everyone else is gone. Dean stands up and announces he is going for a walk.

I just keep staring at the coals, imagining they are little cities seen from a great height. I get lost in architecture. The fire. The road. The echo of words settling at the departure of their speakers, slowly winding down in familiar spirals. The architecture of language paints these pictures and somehow, despite the fact that they exist only as vibrating air, they still exert influence over everything in reality. Dean, for instance, is going for a walk down the road. Road is very specific, it is not a street, it's a road. The word road has specific connotations. The Empire State building is not on a road, the mansion on the hill is not on a street, and Rue Montapassat is not Montpassat drive. Street is a clean simple word, inspiring clean simple lines, right angles, mirrored super -- smooth surfaces, liquid sand... Drive is more suspicious, stucco and suburbs, but neglected suburbs, remodelled track homes straying from their architect's intentions. Lane's are ambiguous, they can go either way. But the word road winds, switches and curves around in your mouth. Its jaw -- stretching vowels inspiring things like graded dirt, bumpy potholes, fallen -- down mailboxes, sagging porches and bullet -- riddled stop signs. Streets always have people walking down them, roads do not. But tonight they do. Tonight Dean is walking down a road. Tonight he is walking and listening to trees, perhaps even talking to them. 

The fire is only glowing embers, echoes of its once towering self, fallen silent and the sound of the crickets roars in over my thoughts. Neanderthals. A glowing fire in a cave, wrapped in the warmth of bearskin, wondering what it would have been like, to have been there -- have I been there? Have we all been there and just don't remember it? Is it the very fire that kindles the imagination? The fire crackles, and an opposable thumb grasping for more fuel, a twig, a branch. An idea is born, the night sings. The same crickets, cicadas, and hooting night owls fill the air -- the distant sound of dawn. Was there music? Drumming? Chanting and singing filling the night air for miles? 

"Everybody gone?" the voice startles me and I have to turn around before I realize that it's Chloe. 

"Yeah. I think those girls are at your house or something..."

"Yeah. They're old friends from Atlanta."

"Oh." 

She is standing beside my chair arms crossed, looking down at her foot, which she drags back in forth making an arc in the dirt and leaves. "Where'd Dean go?"

"Uh. He said he was going for a walk..."

"Lets go find him." She tugs on my sleeve until I stand up.

We walk out and down the dirt driveway trading kicks on pecans and pinecone sized rocks.

Finally I decide to deal with it. "Chloe, look I'm sorry if I pissed you off, but damn I was just asking him a question."

She doesn't respond at first. "That's the worst apology I've ever heard." And then she giggles, "but since I was never mad at you, it's okay."

"I got the impression that you were."

"What from Scratch and Jimmy?"

"Partly. But also because you seemed to be avoiding me."

She laughs. "I wasn't avoiding you..."

"Seemed like it to me..."

"I wanted you to rise above it." She stops and rolls the rock under her shoe.

"Above what?"

"Above the fact that Jimmy and Scratch were telling you that I was mad at you. And it did actually piss me off for a minute that you let Jimmy try and dupe me into some sympathy thing." Her leg rises up behind her poised to send the rock scattering into the tree. "Jimmy is a sweetheart and I wasn't mad at him for trying I was mad at you for thinking I would buy that shit."

"Yeah," my head droops involuntarily, "sorry." 

"That appology I like. I forgive you." She begins to giggle again. "You guys thought you were so clever... I couldn't let you get away with that." She turns slightly, and kicks the rock about twenty yards straight down the road, and we both instinctively take off after it. 

We come up over the rise in the driveway, and there is Dean, head thrust back, neck craned, inspecting the uppermost limbs of a pecan tree or perhaps the sky.

"Hey kids." Dean's voice is near a whisper.

Chloe's instinctively drops her own voice as she walks up beside him and tilts her head back to stare upward with him. "Why are we whispering Dean?"

"I don't know, but it seems like the right thing to do."

"It does, doesn't it?"

I hang back a bit and watch them staring upward trying to resist the temptation to do likewise. It's very hard to watch someone watching something without instinctively bypassing them to see what it is they are watching. 

"You know you want to Sil..." Chloe's head never turns.

I give up and stare upward at a sliver of moon. The soft white glow reveals phantasmal basket spider webs poised in the upper branches of the trees. The baskets baskets are errie and enormous, silohetted against the star -- specked sky, they are beautiful, almost alive, waiting to crawl across the trees, dodging glitters of moonlight and disappearing into the purple blackness of shadows.

"Okay my neck hurts." Dean turns and reaches in his pocket for a cigarette. I gesture and he hands me one as well. The dancing flame of the lighter momentarily blinds me.

"How long have you been doing that?"

"Dunno." He takes a long drag. "So um, can I ask you guys a question? Well, I was asking around about jobs, you know, kinda hoping Jimmy had some work..."

"Did the cowboys ever get off the roof?" Chloe asks.

I shrug.

"Cowboys? I didn't hear anything about cowboys..." We start walking back toward my house. "But he did mention something about pills...?"

"He can get more? That greasy little weasel said he couldn't get any more." 

"Calm down Chloe. That's what I want to know. He wants me to go get them because he found out the feds or somebody are watching the guy's house and they already have his license plate and whatever... So I'd be willing to do it for a fee of course, but is he putting me on? What's the deal?"

"Yeah he told me about the cops." Chloe nods her head. "Basically this guy he was getting them from was a pharmacist or assistant or something... anyway he got a ton of pills somehow or other and he got caught, but for some reason they can't do anything to him, I don't know this all down in a little town south of here, and it's a very small town so it's hard to really know why, but the story is that the town couldn't do anything, to him, but for some reason the feds got involved... the rest of the details are hazy but I don't think he's putting you on Dean." She jumps on his back and throws her arms around him. "Please please Dean, go get them... you get some money we get the extra pills, Jimmy makes his money, it's a win win win situation...please..." She slides off and puts her arm around his shoulder. They embrace,  and then she says goodnight to me and disappears into the incandescence of her doorway.

Back beside the fire, Dean and I sit in silence on opposite sides of the shimmering coals. I shift in my seat and lean forward, arching my back to stretch it out. Dean and I are from a different universe than the rest of them, that is, we have our own universe, one that we share with no one else in Georgia. A universe born out of many years spent sitting silent together, each respectful of the other's contemplation. It is rare to be able to sit around with someone and not have a conversation. That is the true measure of friendship, the silence in between words, the boredom between the adventures, with Dean and I it is always a light carefree silence, no matter how heavy our thoughts might become. A silence where even the cricket hesitate. An underwater silence where thoughts are mute but travel forever in ripples, expanding slowly and lapping at distant shores. I can hear Dean's thoughts like the surface of a pond roils and surges just before some enourmous creature climbs up out of it. But before it can climb up out on to the land, Chloe shuffles up in her pajamas holding a spiral bound notebook. 

Her face is shy in the glimmering, irregular dance of light that surrounds us. She says nothing, but her mission obvious and determined. One more to be consumed. Dean looks up and smiles. There is a muted atmosphere which cannot be disturbed. I nod, and she carefully spreads the notebook open atop the pyramid formed by the last two semi -- intact logs. At the weight of the pages, they finally give in and lay themselves flat. Slowly new and hungry flames curl up, reach out from beneath the glowing logs to accept this new gift, this ever so susceptible nourishment of paper.

First a hesitant lick, but soon a more daring dance, a courting of the soon to be consumed, a slow waltz of charred hardwood floors, the ruins of some mid century dance hall... The sucking out of air, the consumption of oxygen flutters and ruffles the pages, Chloe's handwritten scrawl is visible for fleeting seconds, words leaping out of the fire, the silent tongues of Shatterack, Meshack and Abendago. There is no comprehension, only the sense that here is the truth, slowly licked up and down in long caresses of tonguing flame, turning amber and smoking with desire.

Chloe waves and shuffles off into the darkness. In the distance there is the sound of a starting motorcycle, faintly in the background, the river -- like sound of cars on the highway. The stereo inside has long since fallen silent. Dean shifts and leans forward to stir the fire with a branch that was spared. He throws it on top. After a while orange flames are again kissing the darkness and sending up embers, messengers off into the night, fading into the blackness and disappearing, and I'm never sure if they continuing upward or turn to ash and disolve into the air. Here and there a particularly courageous or lucky one can be seen carried off into the depth of the forest by a fortunate breeze.

Dean goes to bed leaving me alone beside the fire. A few minutes later I head inside as well. I lie down in my bedroom and stare up at the moon, trying to bath in its light, but the angle is wrong. It hits the edge of the window and refuses to come into my room. I get up to use the bathroom, but the bathroom is in shambles. Clothes, towels, magazines, books, scraps of paper and other trash litter the floor. Outside seems easier, so I return to the chill of the night. I am more than a little drunk. I sigh inwardly and pee on the nearest tree.