The Same River Twice: A Memoir

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The guts of America unfolded in every direction as I traveled the interstate bloodstream, dodging the white corpuscles of perverts, cops, and outlaws. Thumbing induced a peculiar form of freedom linked to terror. I could go anywhere, sleep anywhere, be killed anywhere. The only restrictions were fear and rain. Mine was the indifferent life of a barnacle: temporary attachment to a larger object at a pace dependent upon the ride. Lacking plan or destination, I was at last content. A job became as meaningless as food and shelter, a drab necessity.

I was roaming with my brethren, all the ragtag bums and bandits moving through the nation. Occasionally we met at a cloverleaf. After a visual sizing up, in which each of us tried to look menacing in case the other was an escaped convict, we claimed our hitching spots. Existence was reduced to a backpack, the highway, and the benevolence of utter strangers. I kept my journal buttoned inside my shirt. The pack and everything in it could be abandoned.

I slalomed the past, searching for a genetic base to my wandering. Dad had grown up in a genuine log cabin and had inherited a fraction of crackpottery. My own fisticuffs with the world proved that I bore my generation’s share of the family darkness. When I was twelve, Dad quit his job as a traveling salesman and came home for good. He grew a beard and wore mail order African dashikis. He tuned in to distant airwaves, turned on with bourbon, and dropped into the family. Our absent father had become a stranger who never left the house.

My brother and I spent all our time outside playing baseball, using plates from the kitchen as bases. Soon we ran out of plates, a fact that Mom accepted with an equanimity fed by years of facing cryptic boy-stuff. Lacking brothers, she’d had no experience with young boys. She was like a straw boss of immigrant workers — she didn’t speak our language, and regarded our alien ways as best left alone. Mom preferred not to tell Dad about the plate shortage until he was in a receptive mood, a wait that could conceivably require the passage of a season. He’d blame her, and we were too broke to buy new dishes.

Mom’s grand solution was paper plates. She’d gotten hold of a dozen somehow, probably through VISTA, since they prowled the hills giving away combs, key chains, and toothbrushes. To make the paper plates last, we used them over and over until they were heavy as hubcaps. Every Saturday we ate fried chicken, Dad’s favorite meal. For dessert he split the bones and sucked the marrow. He finally lifted his plate for seconds and the bottom dropped like a trapdoor, dumping his cache of bones to the table. He immediately accused me of having booby-trapped his plate.

“No,” I said. “Mine’s the same way.”

I lifted my plate and a chunk of mashed potato slid through the opening. My siblings followed suit, attempting to head off Dad’s phenomenal and unpredictable rage. When he got mad, which was not infrequent, the house was tense as a cancer ward until everyone apologized. To avoid these awful times, we coalesced to maintain the illusion of normalcy at any cost.

Dad hunched his bony shoulders, preparing for either a ten-hour tirade or face-saving laughter. His greatest fear was of duplicating Caesar’s deathbed epiphany, and each of us was a potential Brutus, Judas, or Delilah. Everyone looked at Mom. Affairs didn’t often come to this, but when they did, her reaction was crucial. She hated to take a side. Her usual stance was a balancing act between loyalty to her children and to her husband. She raised us, but Dad controlled us. If so much as a hound dog refused fealty, it disappeared in a South American fashion and was never mentioned.

Mom calmly tipped over a bowl of peaches. Thick juice ran across the old formica. Dad plucked a peach from the table and ate it. I stuffed a handful of beans down my gullet and we finished the meal eating like Romans.

It was late that night, lying in bed, when I decided to save my money and head into the world.

A decade later I was in it, facing the end of autumn. During cold weather bums and birds headed south, and I wintered in West Texas, working as a painter of houses built rapidly during the oil boom. Entire towns were materializing near oilfields. Trucks brought stud walls and rafter frames, predrilled for electrical wires. Young trees waited for holes, their root balls wrapped in cheese-cloth. Mats of damp sod arrived by flatbed truck. As soon as the interior work was complete, a family moved into the house.

Outdoor painting was the last stage, and I hired with a contractor named Bill, a former gunnery sergeant in Vietnam. Half the crew was Mexican and the rest were ex-cons or marginal ruffians. Bill paid us in cash at the end of each day, saying, “You have two choices, boys. You can save for a convertible or spend it on poon-tang. I’ll go your bail once. Just once.”

Bill always wore some article of military clothing-a hat one day, boots the next, a web belt on another day. He was prone to silent crying, apropos of nothing. No one mentioned it. He was also good-looking and gentle, very popular with the women whose houses we colored. After an incident in which a woman exposed her breasts to me while I was on a ladder, I asked him if he’d ever gotten laid on a job.

“The problem is what to do with your wet brush,” he said. “If you lay it on top of the bucket, it gets too dry. And if you stick it in the bucket, the paint gets up into the handle and ruins the bristles.” He glanced at the bleak landscape beyond the carefully watered lawns. “Indoor work with latex is the best.”

The woman whose house we were painting couldn’t decide what color she wanted. We had several different buckets, and were instructed to paint giant swatches on the front of the house. After lunch, the crew lounged in the shade while the other wives in the community congregated to give opinion. They carried infants, whom they regarded with the same detachment as they did the patches of color on the siding.

“You know, Judy’s baby has already got a suntan,” one mother said. “I’m going to get mine in the sun today.”

“I can’t make mine shut up crying long enough to dress it,” said another.

“Take and push half a Tylenol up its butt. That quiets mine right down. Regular, not extra-strength.”

The husbands took little interest in their homes, confining their aesthetic concerns to clothing. Boot toes ran to amazing points, as if designed to spindle a spider in a corner. They wore the biggest hats in the West, decorated with huge feathers. In local bars, the men spent most of their time accusing each other of having “knocked my feather.” Such an insult was tantamount to a Kentucky warning shot, the French musketeer’s slap in the face, or the New York faux pas of daring to look someone in the eyes for more than ten seconds.

“Hey!” someone would yell. “You knocked my feather.”

People backed away from the victim, who stroked his feather while glaring at the perpetrator. The accused man stared back. Each stretched his body to full height, squinting, jaw thrust out, gauging his chances in case things got downright western. After a minute of staring, both men turned slowly away feigning reluctance. After witnessing this rite, I spoke with the men involved. Each claimed to be a descendant of original settlers. One was a dentist. The other worked as an accountant. Both were a little put out that oil hadn’t been discovered on their land.

When occasional trouble actually erupted, it was the wrestling-across-the-floor sort, until one man exposed his genitals in surrender. A little while later they’d be drinking together. The Kentucky style of brawling is similar to the Viking berserker — all out, using whatever is at hand, aiming for the throat and crotch. Texans seemed to consider anything shy of a gunfight little more than sport. Since I couldn’t trust myself to follow house rules, I spent the better part of four months dodging feathers.

After work one Friday, Bill and I were in a tavern drinking beer and shooting pool. A neckless man with a body like a wedge called Bill a feather knocker. Bill turned away. The man followed, saying that Bill was a chicken with a yellow stripe up his back a mile wide. There were three guys backing him up. As casually as possible, I picked up an empty beer mug in each hand. Bill saw me and shook his head. The man stepped close, yelling so fiercely that saliva sprayed the air. Bill leaned to the man, their chests nearly touching, and began talking in a low voice. Then he walked back to the pool table and sank a combination shot as if he’d been concentrating on the game all along. The other man stood immobile for a couple of minutes before returning to his bar stool.

I asked Bill what he’d said.

“Simple,” he said. “I told him that if we fought, all we’d do was rip our clothes, and women didn’t favor men wearing tore-up shirts. I said there was nothing wrong with fighting but I didn’t feel like it today.”

“That’s all it took?”

“No,” Bill said. “I kindly had hold of his balls the whole time, squeezing tighter and tighter.”

After the war, Bill had stayed drunk for three years, then tried the rodeo circuit as a bull rider. He described it as wrapping your arm around a chain tied to the bumper of a car, then having the driver pop the clutch. The first two seconds were the worst. It didn’t compare to the exhilaration of combat, though, and it wasn’t until recently that he’d found an activity that did.

Twice a month, Bill went skydiving. He offered to pay the fee if I accompanied him, and we drove an hour to a small airstrip near a cattle ranch. Two other customers were there. Like us, one was an aficionado, the other a novice. An instructor outfitted us with boots and coveralls, then spent two hours teaching us to land and roll.

The four of us flew into the sky with the instructor. The main chute was strapped to my back. A spare on my chest made me realize the extent to which I’d finally taken the irrational. The little plane leveled out at three thousand feet, circling above a scrubby pasture. The noise made talking impossible. Wind rushed through the open hatch. Bill winked at me and left the aircraft half a mile above the earth. He was simply not there anymore. I knew instantly that this was the stupidest idea I’d ever had. I decided to stay in the plane, and shifted position to go last so the others would not witness my decision. Once they were gone, I’d feign cramps, a headache, or a case of the vapors.

The second man gave his buddy the thumbs-up signal and jumped. The next guy balked at the door. He fought the instructor, kicking and scrabbling, and huddled in the rear of the fuselage, his face wet with tears. The instructor looked at me, shrugged, and rolled his eyes. I realized that I had to go. I wasn’t as afraid as the other guy, but the instructor’s look of contempt would place me in the same category. Very slowly, I moved to the hatch.

Ten million years of genetic conditioning screamed in outrage and protest. Every molecule in me forbade the jump. I gripped a handle beside the door and closed my eyes. The plane was shaking and so were my knees, but I was too scared to be a coward. I leaned through the hole. Open fields flashed below. Free-fall lasted ail of four seconds, but they were long ones, rushing to earth at thirty-two feet per second. I yelled and the rush of air kept my mouth wide. The chute jerked open with a hard thump, and I squeezed the ropes as tightly as possible. There was a brief period of intense joy in which I realized that the only way to increase the feeling was to jump from higher up. Briefly I wished we had. I was already halfway down, and instead of wafting like a leaf, I seemed to be dropping at an incredible rate. Some huge mechanism was pushing the land rapidly in my direction.

I hit the earth, rolled as I’d been taught, and came up covered with flakes of last year’s cow droppings. Wind caught the parachute and wrapped me with lines. Bill bounded across the field, his face stained with manure.

“Did you piss?” he yelled.

I was so grateful to be sitting in dirt that I didn’t understand what he was talking about. He helped me out of the straps. I could smell dust and urine.

“I knew you would,” he said, pointing to the wet fly of my coveralls. “Some guys load their britches. It happens at impact. After another couple of jumps, you won’t anymore.”

A waiting truck trundled us back to the airstrip. When the plane landed, the guy who’d stayed aboard climbed out with his head down. No one looked at him. His presence was a reminder of our own unclaimed fear.

Bill clapped me across the shoulders. “That’s why you have to pay in advance,” he said. “Next time you and me’ll go at a higher altitude.”

He told me about his first brush with the enemy, an experience that had led him to reenlist. He was the first man behind the soldier walking point, leading their platoon through jungle. The point man gave the hand signal for VC and motioned Bill forward. Six enemy were walking toward a pond in a clearing at the bottom of the slight hill. They each carried a bucket in one hand, a weapon in the other.

The point man whispered to Bill, “Cover me with single fire. I’ll be on rock and roll.”

When the hostiles moved close, the point man began spraying bursts of automatic fire. Bill plugged away. His last thought, he told me, was wishing he was the one who got to use automatic. It seemed like more fun. After that, he always volunteered to walk point.

A month later, Bill didn’t show up for work, an unprecedented event. He didn’t answer the phone and none of us knew where he lived. A police car arrived at the work site. The cop told us that the night before, Bill had removed his clothes and stacked them neatly. He then drank a pint of kerosene, and Zippoed his mouth — reversing the favored method of Vietnamese monks protesting the war. There was no note.

He’d once told me that when a man died in combat, the survivors never eulogized him. Instead they insulted him for days, talking about how well rid they were of his presence, no matter how close they’d been, I considered taking his paintbrush, but decided it would be an affront. Sentiment, he’d said, only made you vulnerable.

I aimed myself north, a tricky move without benefit of interstates. Five days later a gay black man picked me up at an isolated exit along the North Platte River in Nebraska. He claimed to eat white boys like me for lunch. I told him I wasn’t fit for a meal. He laughed and left my lingam alone, nestled and trembling deep in its fur. A cornholing on the road was my greatest fear, worse than murder. He said his single regret was being born black in the South instead of red on the Plains, because the Indians accepted homosexuality in a more civilized manner. Then he laughed and said it really didn’t matter because they both got fucked hard.

He dropped me off near Omaha, where I found slaughterhouse work, herding huge steers down a narrow ramp to death. They walked steadily, without curiosity or comprehension. A man placed an electrical rod against their foreheads and literally zapped the crap out of them. It was boring and professional; at home we used a rifle. After one stench-filled day, I quit and walked to the vacant prairie at the edge of town, hoping to hear a coyote. There was nothing but bugs. Constellations spanned the sky. The moon moldered like a gnawed bone. Two hundred years back, someone asked Boone if he had ever been lost. He answered no, but that he’d once been bewildered for three days. I knew exactly how he felt.

Buried beneath my sleeping bag lay dinosaur bones mixed with bison, antelope, and Sioux. The barometer of intelligence is the innate ability to adapt, to tame for the conqueror. Maybe wild and dead was better, like bison, Crazy Horse, and wolves. I watched the sky, wondering if I was living at the edge of adaptability, cherishing the residue of death.

I thought of Bill’s belief that America’s greatest contributions to world culture came from the West.

“The all-night diner,” he’d said. “And the billboard. You can get coffee and talk at any time you want. The billboard always tells you where you are.”

“Time and space. Cowboy science.”

“That’s what I like about you, Chris. You’re so damn dumb you don’t know you’re smart. Like Mr. Charles in the Nam.”

He turned his head slightly away, enough so that I knew to avert my gaze. The tears were coming down his face. His breathing was normal and he didn’t sob. It was as if his head was so filled with sorrow that it had sprung a couple of leaks. When it passed he looked at me, his eyes hard and ancient as a trilobite’s. “The West wasn’t tamed,” he said. “It was corralled for slaughter.”

I woke early and on the move, despising Nebraskans for their cultural politesse. A man couldn’t buy a pack of smokes without being offered a lighter, exhorted to have a good day, and in general made to feel inferior for not being aggressively cheerful enough. Nebraska was symmetric as an equation, the pathetic result of living on land emptied of buffalo. Prairie dog towns had been reduced to tourist attractions.

I tarried hard in the West, eager to find a home. American boys are raised knowing that a horse between your legs and a low-slung pistol are a guarantee of manhood. It worked for Billy the Kid, who shot seventeen men in the back before he reached legal age. Montana was a beautiful state, but lacked employment. I met a guy with a graduate degree who felt lucky to have work mending fence. A waitress told me that if I planned to settle there, I should bring a woman with me. I was unable to find work in Wyoming either, which made me want to stay, believing that the citizens shared my propensity for freedom. The difference was that they had places to sleep. The people were open to strangers, perhaps because they saw so few. Instead of viewing me with eastern scorn or southern suspicion, they recognized me for what I was, more or less a damn fool.

In Colorado I got a job chipping mortar from bricks with a hammer and chisel. I sat in the dirt beside a pile of brick, making a new pile in a primitive form of recycling. The wage was fourteen cents a brick. After two days of squatting in the sun, my hands ached from gripping the tools, and my fingers were scabbed from mislicks with the hammer.

I collected my pay and moved south, crisscrossing the Continental Divide, trying to find the actual border. Rivers run east on one side, west on the other. My goal was to straddle it. Since we are three-quarters water, I figured that the simultaneous tow of both oceans would rip a hole in my soul for something worthwhile to enter. Black Elk said the central mountain is everywhere. From my vantage alone in the Rockies, centrality always seemed elsewhere. More and more, I depended on my journal. It was organic, I believed, even sentient. I came to regard the process of recording a lived life as the only material fit for writing. Somewhere in the Rockies, this shifted into a belief that the journal was my life, and the rest of existence only a fiction.

After two days of walking south, I was lucky enough to catch a ride to Flagstaff, and from there found — a job washing dishes at the Grand Canyon. The administrative staff took my photograph and sent me to a lightless cabin with no water. Each morning I joined the other workers in public showers at the end of our dead-end lane. At night we drank in the employee bar.

Washing dishes was the ideal work of freedom, requiring no focus save the immediate cleaning of a mottled pot or plate. It also provided food. The occupation was of such wretched status that no one bothered me. Cooks labored in hundred-degree temperatures, while busboys staggered beneath enormous loads. The best waiters were able to change demeanor extremely fast. Seconds after battling a cook or debasing themselves before a tyrannical boss, they had to be sweetly sensitive to a customer. Bartenders enjoyed a slightly higher rank, but the job entailed steady recruitment and coddling of one’s private circle of alcoholics. The dishwasher, in his perpetually soggy and food-flecked state, could remain true to himself.

The canyon gift shops employed Hopi women who sold copper-hued plastic dolls dressed in fringed felt. The hollow foot of each bore an inked stamp that read “Made in Japan.” A few yards away was a hole in the ground a mile deep and ten miles wide. Somebody jumped once a month. Every week, a foreign tourist clutching a camera raced through the pines with skunk stench trailing behind. Apparently the Old World has not a polecat to its name. They are cute, graceful creatures, ripe for a photograph. Sometimes an entire family received the spray.

After supper I watched the sunset from the canyon’s rim, sitting on the narrowest lip of rock protruding over the hole. I wrote in my diary there, looking down on clouds, trying to understand the strange impulse to step into space. It was not death that pulled me, it was the canyon itself. A jump was an urge to fill the void. Just before dusk, I witnessed an electrical storm from above, actually seeing the ignition of lightning and smelling the discharge. A sudden lance of fire cracked into the canyon’s bowels and disappeared. The air smelled of ozone. It cured me of the itch to jump.

Weekends, I walked to the bottom where the Colorado River continued to cut a path. The river has never actually sunk but remains in place, cutting the land as the earth rises against the water. My treks down were a passage backwards through time, descending through millennia layered in the geology of the canyon walls. Color marked each era. Red at the top faded to pink, brown, a delicate green, and finally the slates and violets of the bottom. Naturally there was a bar and restaurant beside the river. Every Sunday, I climbed out to my work.

I was the only dishwasher who was not black, Mexican, or Indian. We worked in teams posted at either end of a colossal automatic washer and rinser. One man fed the beast while two others stacked the clean plates. A fourth dried silverware. Since I was new, my chore was the worst — scraping food into plastic barrels. I saved the good parts to divide later among the crew. Willie, the head cook, offered me a job as short-order breakfast cook. I refused, preferring the simple world of water and dishes. Willie didn’t quite understand this. Each day, he asked if I’d changed my mind yet. He eventually offered a higher wage, but I remained loyal to freedom.

A new manager was shifted to the restaurant, a sneering spud named Jackie Jr. Like many dwellers of the West, he pretended to be a cowboy, in hand-tooled boots, expensive hats, and tailored shirts with pearl snaps. Accustomed to calling all dishwashers “boy,” Jackie Jr. enjoyed referring to me as a “hillbilly,” a term that put me off my feed. Hillbilly was what the people in town called us at home; that and worse — hick, ridgerunner, redneck, inbred ingrate, and my personal favorite, pigfucker. My mother is my sixth cousin. My brother and sister are also my cousins but nobody in my family ever seduced a hog.

I decided to quit after a week beneath the rule of Jackie Jr. On my final shift, he sauntered through the kitchen, amused at our miserable condition. I turned off the dishwashing machine and told him it was broken.

“What’s the matter, hillfuck?” he said. “Even Meskins know how to crank this sucker on.”

As he pushed the mechanized button, I opened the metal trapdoor that housed the soap jets. Jackie Jr. screeched like a kicked cat. Suds and water ruined his splendid clothes. I stepped past him and out the back door, where my pack waited beside a dumpster surrounded by skunks and ravens. Willie followed me. I turned with my arms spread and low, unsure what to expect. His face was lined as a washboard. He eyed the backpack strapped to my shoulders, opened his wallet, and handed me two twenty-dollar bills.

“Go while you can, kid. I’ll slow him down some.”

“I don’t need your money, Willie.”

“Don’t be a fool, kid. You’re too puny to back it up.” He shook his head, chuckling. “I was a goddam drifter once.”

He waited till I took the money, then stepped into the kitchen. I tried to imagine white-haired Willie being young. It was easier than seeing myself as old. I’d begun traveling with the vague belief that I sought something tangible. Now I wondered if I was actually running away, not toward. The legendary West, with its vast and empty spaces, had boiled down to just that — vast and empty, filled with people trying desperately to plug the gap with labor.

I carried my backpack to the single road that led away from the canyon’s south rim. In another era, Bill might have been a Texas Ranger fighting the Comanche, or a mountain man scouting the Rockies. People of the West suffer from a historical malady similar to that of Appalachians. They are deprived of the old outlets, but stuck with the need to live up to their heritage.

While waiting for a ride out of the park, I resolved to live in the West — settle rather than pass through — but not yet. I was still an outrider of the self. If I stayed, I knew that I’d become a feral hermit, climbing like the end of a species to higher ground. I didn’t want my bones discovered on a rocky ledge at thin altitude. There was still California to explore, the edge of the continent.