“Dan O!” They called me Dan O then. They hauled me out of the trunk by the cuffs on my jeans. The car had its nose up, beached on the little hill that aimed it toward the screen. I slumped on the rim of the trunk sniffing the air, looking at the next swell of dirt, a line of cars surfing its crest, moored by the speaker cords to silver posts. It was wrong. I swore I would never do it again. I staggered up out of the trunk, afraid I was turning into some kind of juvenile delinquent. “Book me,” I yelled to my friends as they filtered between the cars toward the cinder-brick refreshment stand to buy overpriced burgers and fries with the money we saved sneaking in.
I was telling this to Chuck Heston in the greenroom of the convention. The greenroom was a trailer with no windows parked beneath the scaffolding of the podium. The crowd on the floor above sounded like the wind, and Chuck looked scoured and bronzed. He listened intently, his smile frozen on his face.
“Do you remember where you were from in Planet of the Apes?’ I asked him.
“From Earth?” he asked without moving his lips.
“That’s right,” I said. “But where on Earth?” I could see again the inquisitor ape in white robes interrogating the crazed astronaut. This is before we know about the beach with the broken Statue of Liberty buried in the sand. Chuck had been huge on the screen at the drive-in, his head as big and as brilliant as a moon. The screen is now a ruin itself, plywood plates have popped out of its backing, exposing the girders rank with pigeons. The box office is abandoned. The neon has been picked over and scavenged. The high fences are sunk in the weeds.
I saw them all, I told him. Planet of the Apes. Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Battle for the Planet of the Apes. I saw the first one with my high school friends at the Lincolndale that summer after law school. As a joke they put me in the trunk where I rattled around with the tire iron and the jack.
“I could have been disbarred before I was even barred,” I told Chuck. That night at the drive-in, my friends and I sifted through the rows of cars to the playground of swings and seesaws under the screen. I climbed up into the monkey bars and talked with my friends about the future. The huge clock projected above our heads slowly ticked down the time remaining until the movie started.
That night, before I had even seen the movie, I sensed that I was different from the rest, an alien walking among them. I imagined that the amphitheater of parked cars stretching into the dark had come to see me caught inside a cage. I looked out over the expanse of cars. Clouds of dust floating along the lanes were illuminated by the headlights for a moment before they were extinguished. There was the murmur of the speakers, hundreds of repeating messages reverberating in each car. I thought, I’m your man. I’m the one you’re looking for.
Chuck hadn’t moved. He had stared at me while I talked, his face sagging some as I went on with my reminiscence. Above us the convention crowd howled, a gale force. We would be on soon.
“You,” I said, “were from Fort Wayne in the movie.” And he looked a little relieved. “The astronaut you played was from Fort Wayne, and the apes took that as another bit of evidence of your hostile intention.”
“Oh,” he said, “I had forgotten.”
“I’m from near there,” I said.
I wanted to tell him that back then it had been important that someone like himself had come from that part of the planet even if it was all made up. And now I was here with him waiting for what would happen next.
His head was huge, I remember. As big as the moon. And when the news of his character’s nativity seeped into the cockpit of the car, we pounded fists on the padded dash, hooting and whistling. We flashed the car lights and honked the horn until the steering wheel rang. For several minutes, all the cars rocked and flashed, the blaring horns drowning out what was being said on-screen. It seemed at any second these hunks of metal we rode in would rise up and come alive. But they didn’t.
On Snipe Hunting
They told me to wait, so I wait. They gave me a burlap sack and pushed me out of the car into the ditch next to a field. I watched the taillights disappear. They told me they would drive the snipes my way. “Wait here.” And I do.
Stars are in the sky. I’m in a mint field. The branches of the low bushes brush against my legs, releasing the reeking smell.
I think, suddenly, they are not coming back. Back home, they are waiting for me to figure out they are not coming back. They are thinking of this moment, the one happening now, when I think this thought, that they are not coming back, and then come home on my own.
But, I think, I’ll wait. While waiting, I’ll think of them waiting for me to return home with the empty burlap sack. They’ll think that I haven’t thought, yet, that I was left here in the mint field, that I am waiting for them to drive the snipes my way. I’ll let them think that.
In the morning, I’ll be here, waiting. They will come back looking for me. Dew will have collected on the mint bushes. The stars will be there but will be invisible. And I won’t have thought that thought yet, the one they wanted me to think.
The imaginary quarry is still real and still being driven my way.
SEEING EYE
Highlights
This is my office. The clock on the wall is mine. It is in the shape of a black cat. Its tail hangs down. When the tail moves one way with each tick, the cat’s eyes move the other way. Usually, I am home by now. This is my salt tank and those are my fish. Those are my couches. Those are my chairs. This table is for the kids and their little chairs. This cigar box full of broken and dull crayons is mine. I am waiting for Mrs. Gustafson to bring Bobby in after football practice so I can fit him with a plastic mouth guard. The Formica tabletop and the waxy scribbles are mine. The stack of magazines is mine. This Highlights is mine, and no one has circled the hidden pictures in the Hidden Pictures. I have already found the comb in her bonnet and the bird in the elbow wrinkles of the man. I have yet to find the spoon, the lightbulb, the banana, the pencil, the loaf of bread, the carrot, the ball, the vase, the mitten, the umbrella, the ladder, the iron, and the flashlight. It is a picture of the gingerbread man running away. They hide everyday things in a picture of a fairy tale.
I treat kids, mostly, and the roller skaters who wander in from the boardwalk with a chipped tooth from a fall. A bloody incisor in the palm of my hand. I wear a smock with bunnies sometimes or bees. Bright colors, never white. I keep rubber spiders in the light wells to cast shadows overhead. Mobiles twist in the salt breeze. I warm the explorer in my hand. Have three flavors of fluoride from which to choose. I let the children use the hand mirror and look at my teeth. I keep a treasure chest behind the desk filled with plastic dinosaurs, airplanes, and toy soldiers. They bring me their baby teeth. They think I am the tooth fairy. I give them quarters and take the teeth home to Suzy, who says one day she will think of something to do with them. But I find the teeth everywhere, little bits of bone. They will last longer than anything else in the world. The smiles I see here in the chair are all spotty, only temporary. What future do I see in it but braces, orthodontia? All my work gone when the kid’s eleven. The baby teeth just hold open a space in the head. Washing out a mouth I tell its owner to rinse and say my name into the funny sink next to the chair.