— Then why don’t you ask me out!
Mrs. M. has burst back in. And burst back out before I can answer. Which is good: all I have in mind to utter is How’s Tod’s bike? Which for all I know Mrs. M. is eating piece by piece in her Genie-guarded hot garage. There is a fine long red hair hanging from the doorknob. It lifts gently away and around the room in its random reach, not unlike a tentacle. A tentacle of rosy doom from the nice lonely octopus across the street. It is time, perhaps, for burglar bars.
Because once you decide anything, nothing is possible. Because…So I decided to hit the dusty trail, which is not dusty and not a trail but a web of human snail paths of mucus in the considerably lapsed garden. I had an appointment of sorts at the halfway house, where the sheriff expected me to surrender myself after I watered my plants, or some such nonsense I’d made up during the incarceration pro tem. I took some pills someone had prescribed and called Safety Cab and was met at the curb at dawn by the curiously agreeable purring, smoking cold cab driven by the curiously agreeable, smoking, cold cabdriver wearing his leather jacket and sporting his earthly wisdom. “I am supposed to go to Tacachale, but take me to the airport.”
“I got you. Wouldn’t go to Taco Charley’s my own self.”
And with chuckles all around, stopping at the Sprint store for coffees so large it takes two hands to negotiate them so my man at the wheel has to use a straw, we head for aeroporto. We pass the very hospital they expect me at: a fully respectable mental hospital once called Sunland now uplifted by the Amerindian moniker — is the suggestion here that Indians had mental problems? That they deserve to have large holding pens of adult retards named after them? — Tacachale. In two minutes it was renamed on the street of political skepticism Taco Charley’s. I was altogether calmed by my resolve to disregard.
“Naw,” my driver is saying, shaking his head and sipping his straw as we pass the compound. “You don’t look like no burrito to me.” The fix is in: Why do I not go to Mexico? Isn’t that the place for me? I do don’t see why not.
Allow me to explain a few things. It is not altogether unfitting that They want to have a look at me in the burrito bin. That much even you know given the little…dog trotting down the street. But I argue that once you let Them single you out, arbitrarily electing not to lock up every other person in the world today, all of whom necessarily belong in there with you, including Them, of course, which is why They have positioned Themselves at the front of the room with the clipboards and the whistles, you have allowed a gross injustice and you should not go gentle into that nightie. So go to Mexico. That is where I want to go.
“I want to locate me a fifty-pound Chihuahua,” I tell my driver, Nat. “Nat, I could stop the world I had me a fifty-pound Chihuahua.”
“Know you could.” He laughs. “Definitely stop it wid dat!” We are tee-hee tee-hee in the getaway car, enjoying the odd, scant pretense of racial harmony. (“Some cracker bust out Taco Charley’s get in the cab today? He gone go to Mexico, he say, get him a fitty-poun’ Chihuahua dog!” “What you do?” “Put him on the plane!” “Heard that!”) The whole goddamned world has gone into ten-four good buddy, give or take some melanin. I am not a Royalist, but I would not mind being the King. Is all. Have me some purlieu around the castle, and these lurcher dogs what hold the trespasser down, without hurting him but scaring the potty training out of him until the King’s men get there with the Pampers and the cuffs. In those days this lurcher dog hold down a man trying to get your deer; today a man will break in to eat your potato chips. Well he will certainly break in to eat your deer also, if you have it, but more likely you don’t. More likely you are not the King. The King more likely has marital problems, or something, a hole in the trailer floor. I have tried to live a good, clean, cogent life, but it has been hard, and I do not think the fault lies with me. Some people seem to know things, and I am not among them. Not among the people who seem to know, not in the seeming know. Not. Airport. Brokers, for example, lawyers. Don’t they just ooze with knowing? Their entire Being says, You don’t know. You take your psychoanalyst, by contrast a learned man who at least has the dignity to say, Tell me about it, there’s some things in your messed-up head I don’t know. And well, once you blubber them he of course knows all about it and then is paid to ooze his knowing in controlled dribble all over your prostrate grateful form, fishing out your money, but still he does not answer the phone: “Freud, Jung. Will you hold?” AeroMexico. Via Fort Worth. Get me some spurs en route. Spurs and sunblock, all I need, and a copy of Dog World.
Got me a set of sandals made from tires, arc of tread and some rubber-coated cable, look good for about another twenty thousand miles. Got these from a man in Matamoros walked on his knees on the same sandals; I know these are good sandals. I have sold my wardrobe by haggling with a boy over the price of a carved bird and a yo-yo while another boy selling his sister ran off with my valise — one calls it a valise if of European extraction and relieved of it in non-Europe. This I know, even if the odd American on the run from Taco Charley’s hardly qualifies. I got a red-striped shirt, or undershirt, that invokes a comic character in low Italian opera. I have never seen an opera. Does that matter? I am on the lam and it feels good. I dyed my hair red. Actually, I put a bottle of peroxide on it and before I got on the bus good it was red and seems to have arrested there. I look not unjustly like Mrs. M.’s husband, had she one. She has sent her deprived need warping after me. She’s in for a certain disappointment, for this husband looks distinctly homosexual. And I already have wondrous searing hallucinatory dysentery, a truly fevered poop. I feel like Zebulon Pike, of whom I know not one fact, and that I say I feel like him has as much to do with me and his ghost as with any nitpicking biographers who want to challenge us. Those who choose to are free to challenge a dead man with his name on a mountain if they want to. There is not going to be a lot of challenging me from here on in. I am bound for Chihuahua with a icee on my knee. Don’t you cry for me, I am bound for Chi-hoo-wa-wa with my Dog World on my knee.
There are more important matters than Chihuahuas, fifty pounds or otherwise. I like the open window and a breeze. Inclemency is important. Dolls and their effects on children, not to mention adults. Fiscal policies, particularly those that oppress the indigent, are “more important” than the fifty-pound Chihuahua. Violations of human dignity in general and in all forms are “more important” than a dog, however spectacular it may be with its apple-dome cranium and wide-set bugged eyes and tiny feet and nervous happy prancing mince, looking, at fifty pounds, like a Doberman on nicotine and steroids. Yet for me no human concern is worth a damn next to the matter of a fifty-pound Chihuahua. Only my wanting one is on scale, in terms of human gravity, with the fifty-pound Chihuahua itself.
The bus I ride with my rubricated hair is all colors, I noticed getting on. It appears to have been perpetually painted, like a ship, but unlike a ship the bus is painted with whatever is at hand. It looks industrial hippie, naturally a tad garish but not deliberately so, in the interest of preservation rather than political statement. It is a scrambled color chart shambling and rusting withal down the dusty trail, which here is a dusty, mighty dusty trail, yessirreebob. Even the chickens in the good seats are hunkered down in their necks looking to be having difficulty breathing. The five men who entertained me by indiscreetly passing a switchblade back and forth among them are now not disapprovingly passing among themselves, taking swigs after studying the label, my bottle of peroxide, which I offered by way of greeting. Calloused feet abound, and the bloodshot eye, and the patient mostly overweight Madonna, and the knotty, fly-on-sore, rather-more-mucusy-than-not Child. And the squinting Chicken. And the open-eyed Me. Yes, Me, a virtual sunflower of perceptive acquisitiveness bouncing in full mental jacket on the bus with everybody else destitute enough to be in northeast Mexico without any prospects of visiting the beauty parlor or clocking in or calling the travel agent or writing the proposal or calling the agent or going to the doctor or the theater very soon. No, we are riding the bus; for now we are riding the bus. The Switchblades will find a 99-bottles-of-beer-on-the-wall pulque bar, the Chickens aroost in the dark where they will keep one eye open, the Madonnas a place to bed the sluggish Children and conceive some more. And I want a Dog.