18.2 – Pop Goes the Culture

The first rains of November released the scintillating scent of wet redwood needles.  Once again the dust was rinsed off all the trees around the driveway, and everything smelled spicy and fresh.  The cinnamon duff covered their little cabin as icing frosts a gingerbread house.  Autumn meant falling needles instead of leaves in their neck of the woods, and with Marty’s excellent sense of balance, he became the official roof-sweeper.  Using the same technique as Shirelle, he scrambled up the ladder and began sweeping the debris down from the top, until he was pushing large drifts of needles as he got lower.  At the edge of the roof he tipped off the piles as if they were haystacks.  He could have easily fallen through one of the glass skylights, or broken his neck in a dozen different ways, but he didn’t.  He just watched where his feet went, anticipated his balance, and pretended he was hiking firmly on a steep slope.  It was fun to be elevated in the forest, above all the scruffiness, sweeping in time to the furious beat of Foghat or Jimi Hendrix.

 

Rock & roll had ruled the airwaves for as long as Marty could remember, but now popular radio stations were playing a lot of disco.  He appreciated that the colorful, syncopating rhythms were a happy distraction for some people, but he didn’t enjoy public dancing himself, being way too self-conscious.  He could boogie on the roof of a lonely cabin in the woods, but not on the dance floor in front of others.  The electric guitar was his siren’s song, and he savored every six-string solo like a scintillating symphony.  The crescendo of a solo would find him at the peak of the roof, using the broom as an air guitar.  He didn’t feel an attraction to learning how to play the instrument, but he sure enjoyed listening to it!  He reveled in the mastery of giants like Clapton, Page, and Hendrix, but sought out the lesser-known but gifted artists who shredded in obscurity, like Les Dudek, Hughie Thomasson, and Joe Walsh.  Chas was the one who really turned him on to Joe Walsh, and some of his early work with the James Gang they considered to be the best guitar work ever recorded.

 

From his lofty perch on the roof, Marty could see activity through the trees towards the China House, and wondered if perhaps Frederick and Camille had returned.  He climbed down and sort of moseyed that way, gathering sticks and limbs that had fallen off the trees as an excuse to work his way closer.  He could see several heavy duty trucks on the upper road, and a bulldozer in the garden area.  Those weren’t the types of vehicles that would be driven by nudists, who could lose a few important parts if they weren’t careful!  Soon the sounds of hammers and power saws filled the air, drowning out his ambient rock & roll.  Emboldened by the bizarre prospect of meeting a naked person using power tools, he piled up his sticks and walked over to meet the new neighbors.

 

A rotund older man in a t-shirt and overalls was unloading cement sacks from a flatbed and sweating profusely, even for a foggy day.  His face was fire engine red, big-jowled and squinty-eyed like a hog, with waxy yellow hair, whiskered lips, and a veined, bulbous nose.  He stopped working in a friendly way, and took off his CAT hat, wiping his brow with a bandana from his pocket.  He wanted to speak, but was out of breath, so he just said, “Lucas,” and thrust out a thick driftwood hand.

 

“Marty, from next door,” he said, “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

 

Lucas peered at his hair. “Y’all a bunch of hippies over there?”  The swelling in his face was going down, and Marty could tell from his expression he was joking.  He winked, “Just kiddin’ boy, (huff, puff) I don’t care if yer all Hairy Krishnas over there, (cough) I’m glad t’meet ya.  Have a beer, and help me unload these sacks, willya?”  Marty didn’t tell him he actually had a hairy cat named Krishna, because he felt it would only confuse the situation.  Instead, he grabbed a pair of gloves and tried to act as if hoisting 90 lbs. of dusty dead weight was an everyday occurrence.  Lucas got his wind back now that Marty was helping, and told him all about the Louisiana bayou where he was from, and his plans for restoring the China House and renting it out like a hotel.  “Haw-haw, I could dig out a pond with the backhoe, and raise some gators back there!” he gestured to the garden, which now looked like a construction site full of heavy equipment, instead of the peaceful, productive plot that Camille and Frederick had designed.  When the last bag was unloaded, he bellowed, “Break time!” and dragged a large plastic cooler out from the back of a nearby pickup truck.

 

Two identical bearded men in overalls appeared, and Marty realized they were the ones responsible for the hammer and saw noises.  “Hi, I’m Buster and he’s Baxter,” said the one on the left, and shook his hand.

 

“No, I’m Buster and he’s Baxter,” countered the one on the right.  They grinned at each other openly, as if they were accustomed to introducing themselves that way, and it was the funniest thing ever.

 

“They look so much alike, even they can’t tell which is which,” offered Lucas by way of scripted explanation, tilting back his cap and scratching his forehead.  They all pounded a few cans of Schlitz and shot the shit, and then Marty told them he had to finish his work back at “the ranch,” and they grinned amiably, knowing the honest satisfaction of working on one’s own spread.  Marty was smiling as he gathered up his sticks, reflecting that the China House had gone from being a nudist camp to a redneck resort quicker than you can flick a fly off a sow’s ear.

 

Thanksgiving was approaching, and the White tribe was pretty hard up.  Jimbo had spent most of their meager savings getting a new furnace for winter, which was a welcome improvement, but left them without funds for the holidays.  They were using an envelope system to make sure they had enough money to pay the bills.  Each one was labeled for a different monthly expense, then they would cash their weekly paychecks in small bills and put a few dollars into each envelope, so by the end of the month they’d have enough put aside.  Marge traded a bag of dog food for an enormous 26 lb. turkey, and Jimbo brought sack of potatoes.  Mike collected some discarded onions from work, and Rabbit rustled up a few carrots at the food bank.  Julie contributed a scratch pumpkin pie for dessert, and it looked like a real Thanksgiving dinner was shaping up, until their range died… with the holiday dinner inside!  It buzzed and smelled like an electrical fire, and Jimbo quickly unplugged it.  The turkey had barely been in the oven long enough to get warm, and a huge pot of taters needed to be boiled.  Only Susie was happy, because now she could go out with her friends.  They set up the trusty camping stove on the deck, where they could cook the vegetables without burning the house down, too.  The turkey needed a bigger fire, but there was no grill because it got thrown into the creek during the last kegger party.  Otter pulled an “old Injun trick,” and rigged a rotisserie from stout green alder branches down at the campfire ring.  It was such a nice afternoon, they brought all the fixings down to the picnic table and had a real frontier-style Thanksgiving at the Rusty Bucket Ranch, as if Norman Rockwell and Frederic Remington had gotten drunk and done a painting together.

 

The tribe made the most of that bag of potatoes in the next few days, and every ounce of protein was gleaned from the bag of bones formerly known as a turkey.  They continued using the camp stove and outdoor fire for cooking.  Marge made some soup out of the turkey carcass when it was picked clean, and Otter got drunk and insisted on baking garlic bread in the campfire, something Marty just had to see with his own eyes.  The old Inuit rattled and thrashed in the kitchen for a while, emerging with two big loaves of sourdough bread wrapped in aluminum foil carried in his beefy arms like salmon.  With his head cocked to the side to correct the skewed direction of his footsteps, he managed to get out the front door and down to the campfire, which Mike had tended until it was glowing coals.  The wrapped loaves went right on top of the coals, and they managed to keep Otter from joining them.  Mike propped him up on the bench of the picnic table with a quart of Miller High Life as a storm anchor.  The toasting bread smelled so good!  Unfortunately, due to Otter’s impaired culinary skills, the large dose of paprika with which each loaf was garnished turned out to be cayenne pepper, which rendered it nearly inedible.  They scarfed down the greasy chunks of lava with many beers, and bowl after bowl of turkey broth (after picking out all the bones).  Marty boasted that they could cook for Lucas’ new redneck resort, with their famous “bone soup, beer, and fire bread” menu.

 

The next day, Annie showed up with a surprise plan.  She told her parents she was going to Tahoe for the weekend with her friend’s family, but really she intended to stay in Mike’s bed the whole time.  A vacation is in the mind of the tourist, Marty thought glumly, wondering how he was going to get any sleep.  He noticed that lately they hadn’t been getting along as well as they used to, and were more likely to be arguing then making out.  She still found a way to spend the night occasionally, using the old “I’m sleeping over at a friend’s house” trick.  (Why her parents didn’t simply call the “friend” and expose her deceit was beyond Marty’s ken.)  Those teenage trysts were always awkward for him, because he and Mike still shared the same bedroom.  Their beds were separated by a half-wall divider, but sounds carried extremely well in the silent forest, and Marty could discern every squishy nuance.  Thankfully, he had procured a pair of official U.S. Army ear protectors at the Marin Surplus store.  These had the appearance of two ostrich eggs cupped to the sides of your head by a wire, but were very effective at blocking out the carnal sound effects of passionate young lovers.  Still, it was a uniquely uncomfortable feeling to be in a room filled with surrogate orgasms.  At times he just slept on the couch next to the fireplace, feeling sorry for himself.

 

Predictably, Mike & Annie got in a huge fight over the weekend.  Mike could only take her suffocating personality in small doses now, and when the lights were on, all he wanted to do was get away from her so he could breathe again.  That led Annie to believe that he was seeing another girl, which only served to escalate the argument.  Pretty soon she was in tears, and the blue and white Bronco was spraying mud in the driveway in her haste to leave in a huff.  Mike sighed heavily and lit another cigarette, even though he already had one going on the coffee table.

 

“What’s going on?” Marty asked with brotherly concern, because Mike never offered anything about his feelings without being pressed.

 

“Nothin’ man, forget about it” he replied gloomily. “Let’s watch some football.  Party, party, party!”  He recited the Federation’s tired old slogan, chugged his beer, turned on the TV, and retrieved the rest of the 12-pack from the refrigerator so he wouldn’t have to get up as often.  Marty could see why Annie was frustrated with him.  She liked to talk, and explored every corner of a conversation, while Mike was taciturn as a stump.  In the early days of their relationship, all he had to do was put his hands on her to bring her hormones to a boil, but now their rapport seemed tepid.  Marty sensed that Annie wanted to go deeper in their relationship, and forge a bond between them that might eventually lead to marriage.  For an 18-year old stud like Mike, that was akin to kryptonite.

 

“I’m going for a hike, you want to go?”  Marty figured getting him outside would help his point of view.  Besides, he didn’t want to sit and watch the Raiders (Mike’s favorite team), when the Forty-Niners (his favorite team) were the worst in the league.

 

“No way, man!  It’s the Raiders!” he exclaimed incredulously, as if he were an altar boy and Marty had asked him to leave church early.

 

Marty walked down past the China House and into the State park, following the old railroad bed as he had done so often.  The ground was still damp from the recent rains, and the redwoods smelled fresh and earthy.  Traffic was light for a holiday weekend, and the forest flushed the accumulated toxins of work, school, and society from his blood, invigorating him with their pervasive sense of belonging.  He suddenly noticed that he had been brooding because Mike had a girl who loved him with every ounce of her being, and he was letting her slip away…  How he longed to have someone love him with such devotion!  Meanwhile, all around him, Mother Nature was playing her affectionate tune through her instrument of the natural world, but his heart was too deaf to hear.

 

When Marty returned to the Ranch he heard the rumble of Lucas’ bulldozer on the hillside.  The old redneck was apparently grading the upper road that connected the China House to the pockmarked, tire-eating “hungry road” that led to the highway.  That would be a welcome change, he thought, if the whole thing were graded… but Lucas was drunk (as usual) and got the bulldozer stuck somewhere above their driveway.  Buster and/or Baxter had to pull it out with the backhoe.  The grunting machines and shouting rednecks sullied the serenity of the forest, while down below, inside the cabin, Mike was screaming about a crucial penalty in the Raiders game, so Marty continued down to the McAuliffes’ to see if he could find some peace.

 

Only Earl the Spook was there, and he looked so glad to see him, Marty didn’t have the heart to make an excuse and leave.  That’s what people usually did when confronted with the prospect of an extended conversation with that loquacious little gnome, who was so incredibly intelligent, knowledgeable, and insufferable.  He invited Marty down to his secret hideaway in the McAuliffe’s basement, which used to be Little Billy’s pot farm.  They entered by swinging away a large bookcase that had been fixed to a post with freezer door hinges.  Earl’s hookah was gone, and he saw that Marty noticed it was missing, and eagerly launched into a long explanation of how he had quit smoking hashish to perform secret government experiments on psilocybin as a means of population control.  His pupils were dilated like a pair of 8-balls, and magnified by his thick glasses, and when Marty looked directly into them, it seemed as though he could see constellations and galaxies inside.

 

The subject turned to aliens.  As often happened when he was listening to Earl, Marty wondered where the previous topic of conversation went, and how they had gotten onto a new one.  “I was on the crew that installed the computers for Area 51,” Earl confided in a low voice, after closing the curtains on his one basement window and turning up the stereo to cover his words.  “They’ve been conducting secret experiments on captured aliens there for decades.”  He pulled his head back and looked pointedly at Marty for emphasis, who opened his mouth to say something, but was quickly cut off.  “There are alien explorers among us right now,” Earl confided with overbearing confidence, causing Marty to wonder suddenly if perhaps he was going to reveal himself as a secret agent from Neptune.  “They come down to earth regularly, just to keep an eye on us – to see if we have advanced far enough to be worthy of revealing themselves and sharing their secrets with us.”

 

“Well, there were the Pyramids, and penicillin,” he ticked off his fingers, “Transcendental Meditation, hovercrafts, Twinkies, microwave ovens… and video games.”  Ah yes, Marty concurred, Pong was one of those new-fangled “video games,” and they had been playing it during his entire discourse.  It was a console that plugged into his TV, and showed a picture of a green dot traveling across the screen.  Two plastic devices like the joysticks of an airplane were also plugged in, and they controlled two green vertical lines, or “paddles” that slid up and down, batting that green dot back and forth at different angles, as if they were playing table tennis on the TV screen.  “Beep!  Boop!  Beep!  Boop!”  It emitted electronic noises when the dot was struck with a paddle, and bounced off the edges of the screen like air hockey.  Woo hoo!  Typically, Earl ruined the fun by explaining that the green dot actually proscribed precise trigonometric parabolas in its travels, which could be deciphered with alien technology to reveal the mysteries of faster than light travel.

 

“The guy at Radio Shack who sold this to me is one of them,” Earl leaned over and whispered furtively, to try and distract Marty from winning the match.  “There are extraterrestrials all over the place, acting like real people. They usually don’t wear any clothes because it makes them break out in a rash.”  Marty would have laughed at such a ludicrous statement, but suddenly he thought of Frederick and Camille.  They were naked almost every time he saw them, and they knew things in advance, and then they disappeared…  Nah, it was just too kooky – even for a cartoonist.  Marty was definitely getting a contact high while crammed into that junk cave of a basement, playing video games with a certified shroom head.

 

“Wait, just one more game!  Best 13 out of 25!” his huge eyes were pleading, imploring Marty to stay and save him from his own mind.

 

Marty stopped at the door.  “Some other time, Earl.  It’s been fun though.  I’ll let you know if I see any aliens.”

 

“Shhh!! Not so loud!” He quickly ducked backwards into his gnome cave, as a gopher retracts into its hole.  Poor Earl, Marty sympathized as he walked home; the man has so much to offer if he would just calm down and not try to bury people with the avalanche of his personality.