The Plan
The Plan is to try to jumpstart a novel.
ArrrrArrrrArrrrArrrr … ArrrArrrArrr … Damn. Maybe the battery has finally just died. … ArrrArrrArrrArrrArrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr …
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1.
Apparently I have been trying to unlock The Mystery with the spare key to my dad’s ‘59 Chevy Wagon.
This according to my pierced pal, Spook, the only sixty-year-old you’re likely to meet with a barbell stud in his tongue. He’s twisting my tail with this, trying to get me to squeal. We’re deep into our Wednesday morning Biscuits and Gravy therapy at Erma’s Place, the morning after I got back from Esalen. Yeah, that Esalen. The one where you can pay fifteen-hundred bucks to sit through a three-day conference called “From Hoodoo to How-To: Common Sense Voodoo for Practical People.” I left early. Later today I’ll be on their website checking the refund policy. The dude sitting next to me woke me up for snoring twice during the first morning session.
I know you can imagine Esalen if I say “Big Sur,” but you can’t imagine Erma’s Place without a little Esalen-style guided imagination.
Imagine it’s 1959 and Erma LaRue just opened the doors to her diner on Water Street, in Port Monson, a little seaport town that never quite lived up to the “Port” end of its name, on the westerly shore of Puget Sound, County of Madison, State of Washington. Imagine being seated by Erma herself at one of the dozen booths with the homey tablecloths and dinnerware. Erma is pretty in pink, except for the boxy white work shoes.
The menu is loaded with starch and sugar and fried things. There’s a little jukebox at each table, the only place in Port Monson where you can punch in “Jailhouse Rock” before you order the Chicken Fried Steak. (Just don’t try jitterbugging in the space between the booths and the counter. That and loosening the top on the salt shaker will get you eighty-sixed.) The black-and-white checkerboard tiled floors gleam, no scuff marks or coffee stains yet. Same goes for the chrome and red naugahyde barstools at the counter. Look up at those high ceilings, with mushroom shaped globe lights dangled with fifteen-foot cords above each table. That’s knotty pine panelling on the walls, and you have to step up to get into your booth.
Now imagine nothing of consequence has changed in the fifty years since the Grand Opening, except Erma doesn’t wear nylons with crooked black seams any more and her estimable bosom has taken the tiniest bit of slippage. Those could be the same ugly shoes she’s wearing.
Spook knows I have been trying to unlock The Mystery since we roomed together forty-two years ago at Puget Sound Bible College. Don’t ask. I couldn’t tell you, myself, how we ended up in a Lutheran seminary, except we both had small basketball scholarships and went to the same Lutheran Church in Port Monson, when everybody went to church on Sunday morning and watched the NFL on Sunday afternoon. We sure as hell didn’t matriculate for the women at PSBC, of which there were maybe six out of a freshman class of sixty-two.
I suppose I thought I could penetrate The Mystery with something I found in the King James Bible. For a few months I contemplated signing up for the ministerial track at PSBC, but blew that off the first time Spook and I dropped acid. Which only darkened The Mystery for me, but seemed to be an illumination for Spook. Of course the only spiritual Mystery Spook ever cared about solving is how they perform some of those acrobatics in the Kama Sutra in real time, without breaking something important.
“Dude, why do you want to unlock The Mystery?” Spook’s tongue stud made this come out ‘Mythtery,’ and I couldn’t stifle a giggle. “Don’t you think it’th more fun to let it be, uh, let me thee … a MYTHTERY? Duh.”
“Don’t start on me with your Buddhist bullshit, Spook,” I countered. “We’ve covered this before. You’re always talking about ‘living in the moment.’ Well, I’ve got a question for you, Roshi: Where the fuck does the ‘next moment’ come from? Did you ever think about that? I’m just saying.”
“IT’TH A MYTHTERY, ath-hole.”
Spook is no more a Buddhist than I am a Christian. But Spook had read Alan Watts’ The Book during his sophomore year at PSBC, in his Modern Cults class. This would have been just before he and I were booted from campus for skipping an entire quarter of classes. Ever since The Book Spook has claimed to be a Buddhist, even though he thinks meditation is some kind of seance and refuses to even try it.
Me, on the other hand, I’ve meditated until my legs froze up in full lotus. The problem is, I can’t stick with one spiritual practice for more than a week. One week I’m reading Tarot cards, the next I’m buying a personal mantra from the local TM rep.
But this morning I have come to Erma’s Place with The Plan. A plan which I intend to woodshed with the Spookster, but I need a segue.
“Look, Spook,” I began, “my problem is there’s nothing I’m passionate about. I sure as hell don’t care about work.” Which should have been obvious, even to the casual observer. It was ten-thirty in the morning on what is customarily treated as a workday, and I was wearing cargo pants and an aloha shirt. In February.
Spook held up a cautionary palm. He’d heard more than anyone, including a best budster, should have to hear about how much my ill-considered decision to go to law school had screwed up my life. This resistance to meaningful engagement with the only work anybody would pay me to do had cost me my (no kids) marriage to Sophie. Which brings me to the only thing I am passionate about. Even Spook doesn’t know about this, it being one part of The Plan I’m about to reveal. Getting Sophie back has become my raison d’etre. After five years of working my way to a place where I didn’t care anymore, I woke up one morning caring again. A lot. Let the courtship begin. Even though she’s been living with Lenny the Loser since the first week after the divorce, she still hasn’t married the little turd.
“I have this theory, Spook,” I continued. “Instead of trying to work up some phony “passion” about shit I “should” be passionate about, like practicing law or home maintenance or personal finance, why shouldn’t I be able to focus just on things I really am passionate about, as small a collection as that might be?”
That’s where my Dad’s ‘59 Chevy Wagon comes in. The second part of The Plan. When my Dad died last year the only thing he left me was his 1959 Chevrolet Kingswood 4-door station wagon. This was the car that we took camping, drove to Disneyland, used to haul garbage to the dump. The car I borrowed to move my stuff out of the dorm at PSBC. And then to the dump. This was the car where Sophie and I invented our own Kama Sutra when we were seniors in High School and you couldn’t Do It at your own house, because in those days there was actually a parent likely to be home twenty-four/seven.
When I went to Spokane for my dad’s funeral, my mom told me to take the bus over and plan on driving the station wagon home. One problem: When it came time to leave, we couldn’t find the key. That’s when my mom started laughing, then crying, then laughing. Turns out the key was probably in a pocket of the suit my dad was wearing in the coffin, the one he’d been wearing the night of his heart attack. My mom swore there was a spare key. How else had someone brought the car back to the house the night of the heart attack, without using Dad’s key? We spent half-a-day looking for the spare key. Finally we called a locksmith and had a new one made, which I promptly lost the first week I had the car. I hadn’t planned on driving the beast much, anyway, so I put “call locksmith” on my To Do List and forgot about it.
Hence Spook’s joke about trying to unlock The Mystery with the spare key to my dad’s ‘59 Chevy Wagon, yadda, yadda, very funny Spook. What Spook doesn’t know is that the same day I left for Esalen, I got a UPS delivery. No clue who sent it. All the UPS guy could tell me was it had originated at the UPS Store in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Whoever did up the package fancied themselves quite the little jokester. There were five boxes inside the outer box, like one of those Russian nested dolls. When I got to last box, it wasn’t much bigger than a pack of chewing gum. Inside was a worn Chevy key. You guessed it, the key fit the wagon.
So, I guess I have two things I’m passionate about. Getting Sophie back and resurrecting my dad’s 1959 Chevrolet Kingswood 4-door station wagon. That’s The Plan.
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Cheers,
Steve
