The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

THE LAST TIME I'D SEEN HER

Chevs mom and dad are dead.

Which is why I cant make jokes about fucking his mom when he starts making jokes about fucking mine. Its also why hes constantly in my ass about calling my mom and being nicer to her and being more responsible so she doesnt have to worry about me. Like my mom worries. Like she can retain a single coherent thought long enough to work up a good worry. Not that I want to rag on her or anything, I mean, shes my mom. But life hasnt disrupted her mellow since, like, 1968. How is anything I do or say gonna break that trend?

Chev doesnt see it that way. Which makes sense. You take someone who doesnt have something themselves, theyre always gonna put more value on it than the person who does have it. So, sure, I love my mom. But Chev may love her a little more than me. Which is maybe not as fucked up as it sounds like at first.

– Hey Mom.

– Who is it?

– Its me, Mom.

– Web? Is that you?

– Its me, Mom.

– Cool. Thats cool.

There was a pause. A long one. This might mean she was:

A) Waiting for me to tell her why I was calling,

or

B) So stoned she had forgotten I was on the line.

– So, Mom.

– Who is this?

Which was pretty much a dead giveaway that the answer was B.

– Its Web, Mom.

– Heeey Web. How you doing, baby?

– Im cool, Mom, how about you?

– Alright, alright. The blackberries are ripening nicely.

– Thats cool.

– Yeah. I could send you a couple quarts. Or some pies. Should I send you some pies?

Every time I talk to Theodora Goodhue of Wild Blackberry Pie Farms, she offers to send me some of her world-famous, all organic, bush-ripened blackberries. Or some of her equally famous pies. Then she hangs up the phone and, her short-term memory impeded as it is by the intake of her far more famous Wild Blackberry Cannabis Sativa, she promptly forgets.

– No, thats cool. I still have some of the last batch you sent.

– The crops gonna be something special this year.

I never have any illusions about which crop shes talking about. Mom may have dropped out and headed to Oregon to pursue her dream, one in a long line of dreams, to start an organic berry farm, but it was only when she started cultivating some of her land with seedlings supplied by a friend from upper Humboldt County that her operation showed a profit and became self-sufficient. Not that she cares about the profit part of the equation.

– Im sure it is. Hey you know, I got to roll here soon, but I wanted to ask you something.

– You go on. We can talk later.

– Sure, but I wanted to ask something first.

– Sure, baby sure.

– Chev got in a little fender bender and hes, you know, embarrassed to ask, but I knew youd want to help if you could, so I wanted to ask if you could help him out with the repairs. And stuff.

I sat at the kitchen table, playing with the phone cord, looking at the bills stuck to the fridge with magnets, my share of each bill circled heavily in red. A thick sheaf of IOUs clipped to a magnet all their own. My signature at the bottom of each.

Mom inhaled deeply, exhaled long and slow. A cloud of smoke no doubt drifting to the ceiling.

– What about Chev, baby is he OK?

– Yeah, hes fine. But his truck, you know.

– Yes. I know. I know, Webster.

Webster. The name my dad picked. As opposed to the name she wanted. Fillmore. Not for the president, mind you, for the rock venue where they met. Webster, the name she hates to use now. Because its a reminder that they ever met anyplace at all.

Crap.

– If you could help it would really… help.

– Webster.

– Yeah, Mom.

– Do you need money?

– Well, yeah, I can always use. But thats not why, I mean, Chev is the one. I mean.

– Webster Fillmore Goodhue.

Oh, double crap.

– Yes?

– Do you need money?

Stoned as a sixty-year-old Deadhead, berry growing, commune founding, transcendentalist yogi pot cultivator can get, Mom still sees right through me. Part of the science of being a mom.

Again, crap.

– Yeah. I do.

– Well. I wish you would just ask.

– Yeah.

– Well?

More crap.

– Mom. Can you send me some money?

– Of course I can.

– Thanks, Mom.

– Web, Web, I wish youd call me Thea.

– Its weird. I dont like it.

– Chev does.

– Chevs not your son.

– Not biologically.

I looked at the photographs stuck on the fridge next to the bills. Looked at the one of me and Chev up in Oregon with Mom three years ago. Me on one side, Chev on the other, Mom, almost as big as Po Sin, between us. A joint between her lips. Three years ago. The last time Id seen her.

– I just dont like calling you Thea, Mom. Thats not gonna change. Im almost thirty and its not gonna change. OK?

– Of course its OK. I just wish you would.

– I know. So. OK. Im gonna go. I gotta go… do something.

– Web.

My turn to pause.

– Yeah.

– I could send you a ticket. A plane ticket, I mean. You could come up. For the harvest. Spend some time. Get a break from that place. Breathe some different air. Be away from all the unbalanced energy still floating around you.

– I dont need a break.

– But if youre not working anyway, you should think about shifting your position over the center point. You know, the earth, she knows where you are, and you can change her attitude toward you just by changing your physical location on her skin.

– Yeah. Sure, Mom, I know that, but the thing is, I am working. Im working for a guy me and Chev know. Just that the jobs just starting so I need some extra cash.

– You can have whatever you want, baby. You know that.

Sometimes its hard to know if she means that literally. Like as a philosophy or something. The kind of thing she would tell me when she tucked me in at night when we lived in the house in Laurel Canyon, before she took off. You can have anything, Web, anything you want. You just have to want it, wish for it, dream it, and it will happen. Thats how I got you. I wished for you and there you were. A story that ignored the fact that she got pregnant with me one night when she was so fucked up she forgot to put in her diaphragm. At least thats what my dad told me.

– I know.

– Ill put some money in the mail. And those berries. And a couple pies.

– Great, Mom. Thats great.

– I love you, Web.

– Love you, Mom.

Another long pause.

– Love you, Mom.

And the sound of the phone hanging up.

She never forgets the money. Not sure why that is. Some part of the mothering instinct that wont let her fully relax until the cub is cared for. Or something. I mean, it may be a month before it shows up, and theres no telling what shell send (could be whatever is in her purse when she drives past the post office on a trip into town, or it could be a rubber-banded roll of twenties in a FedEx envelope, no note, just the cash), but shell send it.

But no berries or pie. Which will bum Chev out more than it will me. Thats him missing things he didnt have.

I put the phone back in the cradle. Its a big yellow Bakelite phone with big old push buttons. Id found it in a pile of garbage someone left at the curb when they moved out of the building, and took it inside and tinkered with it till it worked. The timing had been excellent because the night before Chev had come home with a girl hed been seeing and after they screwed he had broken up with her and shed thrown our cordless at him and itd broke. She wasnt so much pissed at being dumped as that hed waited till he got off, but before she did, to do it. Anyway, the way we go through phones, a heavy-duty model is the best bet. As long as it doesnt get thrown at anyone.

I looked in the fridge and the cupboards, but there wasnt really anything to eat. Just half a box of oatmeal, some brown iceberg, a big can of coffee beans, a bunch of takeout condiment packets of catsup and mayo and soy sauce and duck sauce, a frosted bag of Green Giant peas, and some crusty brown rice left over from a Genghis Cohen doggy bag.

I thought about putting the rice in the microwave and mixing it with the duck sauce, but did the dishes instead. Then I emptied the wet grounds from the coffeemaker, ground some fresh beans and put them in the hopper and filled the reservoir with water. The linoleum in the kitchen was gritty so I sprayed window cleaner on it and gave it a mop. Then I got the vacuum from the hall closet and ran it over the brown wall-to-wall semi-shag.

I really do take care of the cleaning and the cooking.

Then I sat in the canvas directors chair in the living room and cycled through the 157 TV channels a few dozen times without watching anything for more than two or three minutes at a time. Then it was close to six. The sky was still bright and the air hadnt started to cool yet and Id gotten a little sweaty cleaning, so I unbuttoned my shirt and walked around the apartment. I rearranged some books on the shelves that covered two of the livingroom walls. Chev had borrowed a couple of my biographies, Houdini and Groucho, and put them on his shelf, and put some of his volumes of ReSearch on mine. I put them where they belonged. Then I stood there and flipped a few pages of one of his back issues of Gearhead and looked at the clock, but it was just a few minutes after six now. I put the magazine back and went in the bathroom and stared at the tub and thought about cleaning it. It was gonna be a biiig job and I didnt feel like it. But I thought about it for awhile.

I looked at the clock again. Just a few more minutes had passed.

It would be getting busy at the shop soon. I could walk over and give Chev a hand shooing out the kids and keeping the drunks in line. I could go down to my parking space in the driveway and uncover the 510 I bought last summer and take the boxes of parts out of the backseat and the trunk and start working on it. I could turn on my computer and play a game.

I looked at the clock and it was just about six thirty.

So I brushed my teeth and got undressed and lay down on the futon mattress on the floor of my room and read the rest of my Fangoria and then it was seven and I turned out the light. The homeless couple living in the alley behind our building were drunk and screaming at each other, so I listened to them for a little, and then I fell asleep and I slept for eleven hours straight.

Which was several hours less than Id slept in months.