Invisible Monsters Remix

Chapter 13

already wish I hadn’t written this. Let’s take that as a good sign because most truth is like that.

The part of this book that takes place in Canada is based on a road trip I took with two college friends, driving from Eugene, Oregon, to Vancouver, British Columbia. Their names were Robin and Franz. You already know my name. We were all undergraduate students at the University of Oregon. Robin bought tabs of Ecstasy for us to enjoy and to sell at nightclubs and—he hoped—pay some tuition. We drove Franz’s car and hid the tabs in his ashtray, buried under some ash, never imagining that border agents might check there. We were all liberal arts majors, plodding along with crushing student loan balances, registered for the draft, that’s how dumb we were. Franz didn’t even know we were carrying drugs.

Not a radio song after we’d cleared the Canadian border, Robin dug the Ecstasy out of the ash. Franz was furious, yelling, “Please tell me you did not just use my car to smuggle drugs!” The rush we felt from not being arrested was better than any bought chemicals. Instead of packing suitcases, we went every day to the big department store on Granville Street, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and bought new clothes. Each subsequent day we exchanged those clothes for even newer clothes, using that huge store as our “Canadian Closet.” This being 1985, you can only imagine the billowing Hammer pants and Flashdance ripped tops. For daytime, preppy knit polo shirts embroidered with alligators. The Bay took back everything, though it was reeking of disco sweat and clove cigarettes. Honestly, my biggest problem was what to do with my hands while I danced.

We stayed in the Nelson Place Hotel, but we never slept. Ecstasy will do that. After the bars closed, we’d sit in our dark hotel room and tell about the strangest parts of our lives so far. When it came Franz’s turn, he told about the summer his family had sent him hundreds of miles away to work for some people who ran a florist shop. That August, the florists loaded their vans before dawn and drove for hours across a desert to a desolate railroad siding in the middle of nowhere. As the sun rose, an Amtrak train called the Empire Builder arrived over the horizon and rumbled to a stop. With the sleepy passengers watching from their windows, Franz and his employers hung flowers and bunting down the length of the train. They hung a banner that read “Wedding Bells Express.” At the time, Franz was only eleven or twelve years old. Even that young, he was appalled as wedding guests approached on dirt roads and began to park their pickup trucks trainside. A bride and groom climbed atop the locomotive with a wedding party of two bridesmaids and two groomsmen. Someone played bagpipes, and a minister conducted the ceremony while the delayed passengers groused. Within an hour, the train was on its way to Spokane and St. Louis. The event had happened so quickly, at such an early hour, and Franz had been so young, that by 1985 it seemed like a bad dream.

In our room of the Nelson Place Hotel, I hoped this story was only the Ecstasy happening. Franz and I didn’t officially meet until college. In 1983? Was it 1984? His bad dream wasn’t a dream, because a decade before we first met …we’d already met. The man getting married on top of that train had been my father, and my brother and I had been the two groomsmen. That had been the beginning of my father’s second marriage, after divorcing my mother, and he’d wanted to put on a good show. Over a decade later, Franz and I would realize that our childhoods had had that uncomfortable hour in common. Even the bagpipe? Everything.

That’s the worst aspect of being a writer: managing plausibility. Everything else about that road trip, I could use in Invisible Monsters. But that’s the kind of actual miracle that, if I wrote it into a novel, you’d instantly cry, “Bullshit!”