He went to his baby blue Continental—slightly revved up—slightly improved. A man has to spend money on his secret vice. That’s how you measure his devotion to it.
To his glee, she quickly left LaGrange Park heading northward for the lake. She might even be from out of town. Illinois plates. Soon they were on the Miracle Mile.
Traffic was very dense today. Soon everything came to a standstill. Something had gone wrong. Her car was two cars ahead. He could see her watch him in her mirror. This wasn’t how the game was played. It wasn’t any fun anymore.
He resolved that when things started up again he’d just drive straight home. Unless she followed him. No that was unthinkable. People began turning off their motors. He checked his tank—one quarter full. With the modifications the LTD consumed great quantities of gas. He turned off his car missing the air conditioning instantly. Windows went down everywhere. Not his. When he played the game he liked to feel cut off. Remote. Frankly he felt dirty. There’s a lot of dirt in a solitary vice, a vice that no one else even thinks of—let alone practices.
People began to talk. No doubt filling the silence with the cheap inventiveness of the bored commuter. He could hear the waves of the lake. It had been a long time since he had heard them. How long? Memory seemed uncertain. He was losing touch. Too much detritus from the gray world of the office. How could you tell Monday from Wednesday, or March from May? How could you tell what happened in which May or how many Mays had gone by? He needed real experiences. He would do the things he’d done as a child. He would begin as soon as this traffic jam was over.
No boats on the lake today. Some people, some irresponsible people had begun to leave their cars. How would these vehicles ever get moving if some of them were abandoned—blocking key lanes? He began to inventory his childhood experiences deciding which to re-create first.
Perhaps a noise, a siren or a gong sounded during his reverie. Everyone seemed to be leaving his or her cars. Let them. He had a good idea. When they were gone he would walk up to the young woman. Make a contact for once. A real human contact. In only seconds all the cars were empty. He walked to the BMW. It, too, was empty. He had expected her to stay, although he wasn’t sure why.
Suddenly he was afraid. A child of the nuclear generation he could imagine only one disaster. He ran for the nearest building, a tall round hotel topped with a rotating restaurant. It looked like a giant child-proof bottle. The lobby was empty. No emergency instructions crackled over the PA system. He went to the elevator. He must get down. To the core of the earth. It arrived and he descended to the sub-basement. Fluorescent light showed a jungle of brightly painted pipes. Maybe it was safe here.
Where was everybody? He returned to the lobby. He shouted. Shouting did not come easily to him. He had to warm up to it with several half-shouts. Finally he achieved full volume. No one here. At least, no one answered him. He walked to his car. The radio stations were off the air, except for one FM easy-listening station that was entirely automatic.
He came back to the hotel. He borrowed a room key. TV was still going. It lasted about half an hour. He locked his room but he didn’t know what he locked it against. He read What to Do in Chicago and the Book of Revelations. The lights flickered about nine and then went out. He was hungry. He made his way in the dark to a vending machine. He smashed the glass with a chair and picked up the display candy and peanut butter-filled crackers. He unwrapped them carefully—feeling the chocolate with his blind fingers afraid of swallowing a fragment of glass. He returned to his room, drank a lot of water, and locked his door.
The next day he ascended the fire stairs to the restaurant and ate a smoked chicken from a warming refrigerator. He watched the still city. The empty lake.
He decided he was singularly deficient of survival skills. He neither hunted nor fished. When he ran out of food—he would visit a nearby pharmacy.
The phone was dead.
He hadn’t thought of it ’til now.
He returned to his room. He could steal everything. He could be the wealthiest man in the world. Tomorrow he would explore things.
He went to all the shops of the Miracle Mile—seeing all the luxuries his life had denied him.
On the third day he woke to the sounds of motors starting. He ran out of his room. People had returned.
They were silent. They avoided his eyes.
He would never, never bridge the gap.
YOGA FOR BOLSHEVIKS
I believe that we need an aristocracy in which each person can be an aristocrat. That is to say every human being is entitled to a legitimate pride in his environment and antecedents. The Socialist vision is somewhat similar. However it insists too much on material values. Its appeal is to those people who cannot respect themselves without good clothes and well-filled tummies. That is a wrong assumption. An Indian no matter how dire his poverty can dispense hospitality with dignity. He is his own welcome. Roger W. Babson once asked me what I thought was the solution of the high cost of living. I answered, “The Indian system. Fewer wants.” He that knows he is as good a man as his neighbor does not need to impress by evidence of material wealth.
Professor Joe Gould
The New Atlantis Bookstore is a small oasis from downtown Austin, full of the delicious tang of yellowing paper and an astonishingly great number of used books crammed into its shelves. It is the last of a noble line fighting for life: Paperbacks Plus, Libby’s Used Books, Grok Books, Adventures in Crime and Space. The proprietor John Reynman sees the handwriting on the wall, but what kind of man derives truth from ectoplasmic graffiti?
John Reynman stood behind the counter thinking about how to tell Haidee about the day. All happily married couples give each other the gift of narration—a little story about their time apart polished with nice phrases, clever retorts and dramatic emphasis. He would sum up his current situation by saying that he had his best and his worst customers in at the same time. He sipped his coffee from a chipped white and blue coffee cup and smiled as the books piled up. It bore the phrase, “Think Big Be a Teacher Texas Teaching Fellows.” He had found it on the sidewalk four years ago. John is like that. He picks things up.
Jeff Williams stacked book after book on the counter. Jeff was a thin tall man with coarse black hair and the fevered brown bloodshot eyes of a Poe. He wore black denim pants and a black t-shirt proclaiming his loyalty to the Electric Luddites. His studied casualness was ruined only by the Rolex on his wrist. His stack of hardbacks would easily run seventy bucks and he kept going back for more. John was glad to see them go; Jeff was buying every book on yoga that John had. These books moved slowly, and occult titles tended to be stolen fairly often. Porn for the soul....
John began ringing Jeff’s purchases up so that he could get him out of the store quicker.
Frank Goldman claimed to have passed the century mark the year before. His head was almost without its white hair anymore, his wrinkles had wrinkles and his eyes had sunken so much that he looked like a revenant from a Poe story. Frank had very little money, and had never really had any. He had been beached like a whale in Austin during the Great Depression, when his cash ran out before he could make it to the fabled land of Hollywood, California. His life had been a series of questionable deals, dicey schemes and downright frauds. He had been on the fringes of oddball politics, music promotion, and other less identifiable industries for decades—which gave him a priceless commodity of stories. He could tell you about being an extra in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or sleeping with Janis Joplin, or selling counterfeit ration stamps during the Second World War. He had great drinking bouts with governors, made love to congressmen’s wives, smoked dope with Willie Nelson, and been a UFO watcher for Project Starlight International. Each story that he gave from his word-horde was a spell that John could enchant his customers with for weeks. Sure Frank never paid for his books, and got many free coffees over at the Decline of the West, but nobody felt cheated. Frank had chosen one book Civilized Shamans, a hardback about Tibet and was shuffling forward. Jeff nearly ran him over, as he passed the old man to grab the bright yellow Yoga for Dummies.