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X Marks the Spot From the book in search of a publisher,
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In the 1970s, when I was in high school, usually stoned, I would stare
out the windows of class. I would think, "Will I ever, ever, ever,
get out of here?" And for some strange reason, "When the year
2000 comes, I'll be forty-three."
I suspect it was a failure both of courage and of imagination that kept
me from envisioning what I might be like, what my life might be like,
at age 43 in the Year 2000. I was 17, and while I could discover that
the word LIVE was the word EVIL spelled backward, and be moved enough
to stencil this on the back of my denim jacket, I didn't have the creativity to daydream of hover cars or cities on Mars or violent urban dystopias,
like the one portrayed in A Clockwork Orange. In truth, I was not confident
that I would live to make it to age 43 in the Year 2000.
But one day high school did end. The very next day life started happening
to me. And yes, it all happened in the blink of a cosmic eye and suddenly
the Year 2000, dubbed Y2K, was nigh, and I was 43. I had survived high
school, my 20s in The East Village of 1980s-Manhattan, an elated marriage, a dispiriting divorce,
and a stint as a step-dad in training. These dramas and numerous lesser
scenes had been acted out on stages in New Haven, Connecticut; St. Augustine,
Florida; New Orleans; Bangor, Maine; Providence, Rhode Island;New York;
San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon. If there is a pattern in my life,
it is this: When I've been in a place long enough to make a mess requiring
vast expenditures of energy to clean up, I move. I once moved from an
apartment on the fourth floor of a building to an apartment on the fifth
floor of the same building to avoid cleaning the mess I had made in the
first apartment. But most often when I move, it is to a new city.
In 1999, I had been living in Portland, Oregon long enough to have created
a mess that only a vast expenditure of energy could clean up. It was time
to move to a new city. But I also wanted to reconnect with the stoned,
daydreaming kid I had been in high school, so I chose to move to a new
city by making a forgotten but rediscovered daydream of that kid's come
true: I would ride my bicycle across America.
The plan was simple. I would dip my bike's back wheel in the Pacific Ocean
then ride to Connecticut, where I had grown up, and dip the front wheel
into the Atlantic Ocean. Then I would get on a plane to San Diego, a city
I knew no one in and had never been to, and I would perform the dreaded
act of "settling down."
The Jews like to say, "Man plans; God laughs." In my case, five
weeks before my planned bicycle ride, it was the L-4/L-5 disk in my lower
back that began laughing.
I went from routinely hiking mountain trails all day, and joyfully riding
a bicycle 100 miles a week through rain and sleet and snow and gloom of
night, to being unable to even walk my Newton, golden retriever, around
the block without wincing in pain from each step. I was unable to simply
stand up straight. So I bought a car, and a bumper sticker. I loaded my $2,000 custom-fitted,
virginal continent-crossing bicycle in a U-Haul trailer. With Newton leaning
over from the back seat panting in my ear and drooling on my shoulder,
I drove the 1,500 miles to San Diego.
I have been downwardly mobile since the age of 28 so it came as no surprise
that my car, an Ancien Volvo, after successfully crossing several mountain
ranges in mid-winter and gamely tackling the last uphill of the journey,
began what sounded like its death rattle.
I gritted my teeth and chanted my bad journey mantra, "Oh, fuck.
Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck." Newton began panting in time with my chanting
and with this added karmic energy we made it up the last hill and to the
Hillcrest exit. Two blocks later I parked, turned off the car, and did
not know if it would ever again start. Across the street was the Friendship
Hotel. Painted on its four-story dun-colored stucco façade was
a giant mural of a hoop-earringed, head-scarved gypsy woman. An arcing
rainbow of stars and comets swirled above her profile. Newton and I walked
inside.
The desk clerk scowled.
I smiled. "Do you allow dogs?"
"Hundred buck deposit."
"How much for the room?"
"Shared bathroom?"
"Yuck."
"Then it's forty a night."
My spirits rose: Affordable Housing in America's Finest City!
"You can't stay more than two weeks."
"Why not?"
"The rules."
As I transferred my few possessions from the dead car to the dim lobby,
the clerk cautiously patted Newton on his big head and began to open up.
His name was Oscar. He was Mexican. He owned a one-ton dump truck, did
landscaping when not hotel clerking, was joyfully married to a woman named
Linda and had a new son, Oscar, Jr. Oscar then told me the entire history of The Friendship Hotel, and explained how, in its current incarnation as a short-stay only hotel, the cops and city's fine-dispensing bureaucrats
kept a close watch on it. So the hotel's owner, and Oscar, played by “the
rules.”
Newton and I stepped into a micro-room on the ground floor with a window
facing the sidewalk and a closet that had been miraculously transformed
into a vertical bathroom. There was a bureau made of red-painted cardboard.
The bed was so short that it made me think of the Grimm Brother's fairy
tale of the innkeeper who would amputate the legs of his sleeping guests
to fit the one short bed he provided.
But we were tired, and we slept soundly. Until just after 3am, when our
sleep was disrupted by a loud thud.
Both Newton and I sat up and stared all around the dark room. But everything
was still and quiet. Newton sighed, then resumed sleeping on the floor
beside the stunted bed. I lie staring into the low ceiling, listening
to traffic on University Avenue, a block away, sounding remarkably like
the ocean. I thought, "I'm in San Diego."
I was drifting back to sleep when I heard a calm male voice say, "Don't
move."
My eyes opened wide. A second calm male voice said, "Try to relax."
Were the voices talking to me? Where were they coming from?
Then I heard sobbing. The sound was coming from the sidewalk, right outside
the window.
I knelt on the bed and opened the slats of the blinds of the window. A
man lay crumpled in what bad novelists all seem to agree is best described
as a "painfully awkward position." The sobbing came from him.
Two firemen were leaning over him. In the morning I realized there was
a fire station one block away, which explained how the firemen had so
quickly and silently appeared, without a fire truck or sirens.
Just then a police car arrived. Two cops got out and stood beside the
firemen, their belt-mounted radios crackling with static and unintelligible
voices. One cop leaned over the crumpled guy sobbing on the sidewalk and
asked, "You jumped?"
The guy on the sidewalk keened in drunken, slurred speech, "She duzzent
love me n'more!"
The cop blew air out his nose. He put his hands on his hips like a pissed
off school teacher. He shouted, "You jumped from the roof of a four-story
building! What the fuck were you thinking? Why didn't you go downtown,
find a nice skyscraper?"
II
The morning brought a new day in a new city. Everything, everyone, and
everywhere was new. Newton and I wandered the streets, dazed and happy.
It was November 30th and 70 degrees. I wore shorts, sandals, a T-shirt
and a stupid grin. Just as Scarlett O'Hara solemnly swore to never again
be hungry, I inwardly swore to never again live in a place that required
Gore-tex and hunting boots to walk to a café for a cup of coffee.
Newton and I wound up at Claire de Lune's, a café in North Park.
We sat outside, soaking up sun and car exhaust, drinking coffee and reading
the classifieds of the Union-Tribune, a resolutely dull newspaper.
"Newton," I said.
Too relaxed to bother lifting his head from the sidewalk, Newton simply
shifted his gaze to look up at me.
"We're in San Diego."
Newton sighed. I got another cup of coffee. An hour later we pulled ourselves
away from the sun drenched café.
We walked to a small store inside a gas station.
I asked the clerk, "Do you have any maps?"
She was maybe Pakistani or Indian. Her burnished brown skin glowed with
health and her large black eyes moved with a slow intelligence. I followed
her gaze and realized that on the counter directly in front of me was
a rack holding a dozen maps.
I said, "Oh."
But on closer inspection, all the maps proved to be of the highways crisscrossing
America. I asked her, "Do you have any maps of San Diego? The city?"
I was poised, ready to see where her gaze moved to indicate local maps,
but this time she spoke. In perfect English, she said, "We do not."
A customer purchasing a quart of beer turned to me and said, "You
know what a Thomas Guide is?"
"Yeah,” I said. “A big book of maps of a city's streets.”
“That’s what you want,” he said.
“I know. But I can't afford one."
He looked at me, then down at Newton, then up at me. As if we had passed
a test, he nodded. "Come here," he said, and walked out.
We followed him. He went to a small pickup truck at the gas pumps. Newton
is always trying to jump into other people's cars, no doubt believing that if
he does, he will be magically transported to the beach. So as I kept Newton
from jumping into the bed of the truck, the guy reached in the window
of the cab and lifted from the seat a battered Thomas Guide to San Diego.
"This one's a year old now,” he said. “I just bought my
new one for Y2K."
He held Newton's leash while I briefly flipped through the well-worn book of street maps. "This is perfect. How much do you want for it?"
"Nothing," he said. "I got my use out of it."
"That's very generous of you." I held up the battered book of
street maps, turning to a two-page spread that had over a dozen small
X marks drawn on the roads and at the intersections. "What are all
these X marks," I asked. "Lots of pages in the book seem to
have these X-marks drawn all over them."
"I put an X every place I do a pickup," he said, smiling and
smacking his palm on the side of his truck.
There was something in his smile that made me ask, "What do you pick
up?"
"Dead people," he said. "And sometimes just body parts.
You know, an arm or a head."
I nodded, as if I understood.
"People die, right? Somebody's got to take them to the morgue or
the funeral home, right?" He smiled at me and said, "Been doing
it three years now. Pay's real good. In fact, best job I've ever had."
As he got into his truck he called out, "Welcome to San Diego. Happy
Y2K!"
In the weeks ahead I drove my credit-card-repaired car all over San Diego,
searching for a small apartment that accepted large dogs, and searching
for a job that paid enough to pay for a small apartment that accepted
large dogs. I used the X-marked Thomas Guide every day, navigating my
way from the Friendship Hotel to job interviews and apartments all around
my new city. On almost every page I would turn to, I would find an X mark.
One time I drove past a huge nursing home; that page of the Thomas Guide
had a forest of X marks.
Five years have passed now. I still have the Thomas Guide. When I need
to find my way to a part of this city I haven't been to, I sometimes come
across a lone X, or a cluster of X marks. Something about those X marks
makes me pause, makes me feel certain that the only way to settle down
is to become an X mark. I'm not ready. I'm still making a mess of things
and someday, inevitably, I will have made such a mess in San Diego that
the vast expenditure of energy required to clean it up may cause me to
decide it's time to move to a new city.
I've never been to Denver.
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