Poverty jet set: a

CAN

WHILE YOU

One and a half decades later my feelings are just as ambivalent and I sit on the front lanai of my rented bungalow in Palm Springs, California, grooming my two dogs, smelling the cinnamon nighttime pong of snap­dragons and efficient whiffs of swimming pool chlorine that drift in from the courtyard while I wait for dawn.

I look east over the San Andreas fault that lies down the middle of the valley like a piece of overcooked meat. Soon enough the sun will explode over that fault and into my day like a line of Vegas showgirls bursting on stage. My dogs are watching, too. They know that an event of import will happen. These dogs, I tell you, they are so smart, but they worry me sometimes. For instance, I'm plucking this pale yellow cottage cheesy guck from their snouts, rather like cheese atop a micro-waved pizza, and I have this horrible feeling, for I suspect these dogs (even though their winsome black mongrel eyes would have me believe otherwise) have been rummaging through the dumpsters out behind the cosmetic surgery center again, and their snouts are accessorized with, dare I say, yuppie liposuction fat. How they manage to break into the California state regulation coyote-proof red plastic flesh disposal bags is beyond me. I guess the doctors are being naughty or lazy. Or both.

This world.

I tell you.

From inside my little bungalow I hear a cupboard door slam. My friend Dag, probably fetching my other friend Claire a starchy snack or a sugary treat. Or even more likely, if I know them, a wee gin and tonic. They have habits.

Dag is from Toronto, Canada (dual citizenship). Claire is from Los Angeles, California. I, for that matter, am from Portland, Oregon, but where you're from feels sort of irrelevant these days ("Since everyone has the same stores in their mini-malls," according to my younger brother, Tyler). We're the three of us, members of the poverty jet set,

an enormous global group, and a group I joined, as mentioned earlier, at the age of fifteen when I flew to Manitoba.

Anyhow, as this evening was good for neither Dag nor Claire, they had to come invade my space to absorb cocktails and chill. They needed it. Both had their reasons.

For example, just after 2:00 A.M., Dag got off of shift at Larry's Bar where, along with me, he is a bartender. While the two of us were walking home, he ditched me right in the middle of a conversation we were having and darted across the road, where he then scraped a boulder across the front hood and windshield of a Cutlass Supreme. This is not the first time he has impulsively vandalized like this. The car was the color of butter and bore a bumper sticker saying we're SPENDING OUR children's inheritance, a message that I suppose irked Dag, who was bored and cranky after eight hours of working his Mcjob ("Low pay, low prestige, low benefits, low future").

I wish I understood this destructive tendency in Dag; otherwise he is such a considerate guy—to the point where once he wouldn't bathe for a week when a spider spun a web in his bathtub.

"I don't know, Andy," he said as he slammed my screen door, doggies in tow, resembling the lapsed half of a Mormon pamphleting duo with a white shirt, askew tie, armpits hinged with sweat, 48-hour stubble, gray slacks ("not pants, slacks") and butting his head like a rutting elk almost immediately into the vegetable crisper of my Frigidaire, from which he pulled wilted romaine leaves off the dewy surface of a bottle of cheap vodka, "whether I feel more that I want to punish some aging crock for frittering away my world, or whether I'm just upset that the world has gotten too big—way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we're stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers." He chugs from the bottle. "I feel insulted either

«

way.

So it must have been three in the morning. Dag was on a vandal's high, and the two of us were sitting on couches in my living room looking at the fire burning in the fireplace, when shortly Claire stormed in (no knock), her mink-black-bob-cut aflutter, and looking imposing in spite of her shortness, the effect carried off by chic garnered from working the Chanel counter at the local I. Magnin store.

"Date from hell," she announced, causing Dag and I to exchange meaningful glances. She grabbed a glass of mystery drink in the kitchen

MCJOB: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.

group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone-call relationships with people named Serge or llyana. Tend to discuss frequent-flyer programs at parties.

and then plonked herself down on the small sofa, unconcerned by the impending fashion disaster of multiple dog hairs on her black wool dress. "Look, Claire. If your date was too hard to talk about, maybe you can use some little puppets and reenact it for us with a little show."

"Funn ee, Dag. Funn ee. God. Another bond peddler and another nouvelle dinner of seed bells and Evian water. And, of course, he was a survivalist, too. Spent the whole night talking about moving to Montana and the chemicals he's going to put in his gasoline tank to keep it all from decomposing. I can't keep doing this. I'll be thirty soon. I feel like a character in a color cartoon."

She inspected my serviceable (and by no means stunning) furnished room, a space cheered up mainly by inexpensive low-grade Navajo Indian blankets. Then her face loosened. "My date had a low point, too. Out on Highway 111 in Cathedral City there's this store that sells chickens that have been taxidermied. We were driving by and I just about fainted from wanting to have one, they were so cute, but Dan (that was his name) says, 'Now Claire, you don't need a chicken,' to which I said, That's not the point, Dan. The point is that I want a chicken.' He thereupon commenced giving me this fantastically boring lecture about how the only reason I want a stuffed chicken is because they look so good in a shop window, and that the moment I received one I'd start dreaming up ways to ditch it. True enough. But then I tried to tell him that stuffed chickens are what life and new relationships was all about, but my explanation collapsed some­where—the analogy became too mangled—and there was that awful woe-to-the-human-race silence you get from pedants who think they're talking to half-wits. I wanted to throttle him." "Chickens?" asked Dag. "Yes, Chickens." "Well." "Yes."

"Cluck cluck."

Things became both silly and morose and after a few hours I retired to the lanai where I am now, plucking possible yuppie fat from the snouts of my dogs and watching sunlight's first pinking of the Coachella Valley, the valley in which Palm Springs lies. Up on a hill in the distance I can see the saddle-shaped form of the home that belongs to Mr. Bob Hope, the entertainer, melting like a Dali clock into the rocks. I feel calm because my friends are nearby.

"Polyp weather," announces Dag as he comes and sits next to me, brushing sage dust off the rickety wood stoop.

"That is just too sick, Dag," says Claire sitting on my other side and putting a blanket over my shoulders (I am only in my underwear).

"Not sick at all. In fact, you should check out the sidewalks near the patio restaurants of Rancho Mirage around noon some day. Folks shedding polyps like dandruff flakes, and when you walk on them it's like walking on a bed of Rice Krispies cereal."

I say, "Shhhh..." and the five of us (don't forget the dogs) look eastward. 1 shiver and pull the blanket tight around myself, for I am colder than I had realized, and I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather.... Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't help but suffer in comparison.

Maybe someone got cheated along the way. I wonder.

You know, Dag and Claire smile a lot, as do many people I know. But I have always wondered if there is something either mechanical or malignant to their smiles, for the way they keep their outer lips propped up seems a bit, not false, but protective. A minor realization hits me as I sit with the two of them. It is the realization that the smiles that they wear in their daily lives are the same as the smiles worn by people who have been good-naturedly fleeced, but fleeced nonetheless, in public and on a New York sidewalk by card sharks, and who are unable because of social convention to show their anger, who don't want to look like poor sports. The thought is fleeting.

The first chink of sun rises over the lavender mountain of Joshua, but three of us are just a bit too cool for our own good; we can't just let the moment happen. Dag must greet this flare with a question for us, a gloomy aubade: "What do you think of when you see the sun? Quick. Before you think about it too much and kill your response. Be honest. Be gruesome. Claire, you go first."

Claire understands the drift: "Well, Dag. I see a farmer in Russia, and he's driving a tractor in a wheat field, but the sunlight's gone bad on him—like the fadedness of a black-and-white picture in an old Life magazine. And another strange phenomenon has happened, too: rather than sunbeams, the sun has begun to project the odor of old Life mag­azines instead, and the odor is killing his crops. The wheat is thinning

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23