I.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been staining a fence for Jeff – a professional person with a wife and two dogs, who works (Jeff does) as an Art Director for big time Hollywood type movies. Let me just say that this was a pretty serious fence I’ve been staining – the kind of fence that perhaps nearly justifies an inquiry by the police, who want to know if the owner has been stock-piling arms. It elicits the word ‘Compound.’ But in any case all of this is just to say it was a very large fence and there was much staining to be done.
As we stained, Jeff told me many stories about Hollywood people with projected Nice Guy personas who are, in reality, unabashed jerks and perpetual sack-sacks. He and his wife fed me extravagantly nutritious lunches, the likes of which people in my income tax bracket are normally banned from eating. Plus his dogs are amazingly friendly and smart at many tricks. Also Jeff’s pool-owning neighbor was out of town so after spending each day staining in the domineering Texas sunshine, I was able to swim.
You know, sometimes I can trick myself into thinking that I could easily live a life of abject poverty – that I could live eating nothing but barley and water, earning trophies for how shockingly skinny I would be. I trick myself into thinking that living a life of Grapes-of-Wrath-Style dearth would be simpler, easier somehow than bogging myself down with complex hierarchies of like and dislike. I would like only barley and water. I would spend my life living under a tree where I would probably die. They would prop my skeleton up against the tree and people would come and take pictures with it (the skeleton). Foreign tourists would come. A big sign would say, “$5 Come have your picture taken with the man who died unnecessarily!”
But being in the presence of the very nice Jeff and very nice wife and his two dogs and fence and extravagantly nutritious lunches makes me punch my fist into the air and say, “I WANT TWO DOGS! I WANT FENCE! I WANT LUNCH!” And lunch is not a whole lot to ask for, I would guess.
II.
Today Josey was helping some Chechen refugees buy clothes for their new lives as Bona Fide American Citizens. She took them to a thrift store and told them to pick out some pants. These people were apparently exceedingly friendly but unable to speak much English at all. Josey found them laughing in the pants aisle. She said, “What’s so funny?” The Chechens stretched their arms in that, ‘I caught a fish THIISS BIIIIG,’ fashion and, laughing, said, “Americans!”
Jim, Andy, and I borrowed some mountain bikes and made our way to the State Park in the middle of the night. We rode through industrial parks and street lights and empty roads and wooded thickets until we came to a water fall and rock formation. After sitting for a long old sit under a real crescent-moon with real and awful wolf howling, Jim and Andy decided they wanted to do some rock climbing. I am not a rock climber. I stayed behind with the moon and the wolves, looking out of place in this scene akin to that on a Native American t-shirt. I have somewhat bad night-vision and would probably be the likely first person picked off of a party of teenagers by a madman–my final words being, “Hey Guys! Wait Up!” Then: Knife in the Throat! Other teens yelling, “Billy? Billy? Where’s Billy?” Etc.
But anyway I sat there for maybe exactly 25 minutes or so–watching the rock formations on the other side of the water and convinced wholeheartedly that there were probably genuine werewolves over there. I started pacing in the moonlight, whistling with hands in pockets.
Then I began to hear the voices of young men approaching: Jim and Andy return from their rock climb, saying something like That was some Rock Climb! We sit under the crescent-moon talking introspectively for some time about politics or god or whatever. So then they are tired and I am tired and we eventually decide to book it back to the house for some after hours ping-pong or something. It is midnight. Werewolf Hour.
The footpaths back are dark and winding and at some points far too narrow to be considered bike-able. Jim in speeding out ahead, disappearing and then reappearing in bleary, hazy moonlight. Then he disappears for good, leaving Andy and I at some critical juncture with no frame or reference or clue as to which way is the right way and which way is the werewolf way. I would characterize these footpaths as genuinely spooky in a very classical sense.
Biking and biking on an unfamiliar mountain bike on unfamiliar trails in the dark, one’s mind begins to wander: imagining fallen tree stumps to be evil old women, imagining rock formations as genuine werewolves, imagining shafts of light to be Heinrich Himmler, etc. The path before us seemed to not have existed until we were just about to tread on it, as though God is inventing it with haste so we won’t fall off the edge of his creation into outer space. And you have to remember, this is the stroke of midnight: the time of night when bearded men take up axes for reasons they themselves do not understand and set out into the woods, looking for victims to axe to bits. There were moments of genuine, movie-quality terror out in those woods. But then we found Jim: laughing and telling us of his bike wreck and flat tire. Then we found the trail back more or less, and ate late night Tai Food at a Tai Food Restaurant.
