Stuart Kaminsky - Melting Clock

“Sal, we’d better get going. Shel, you haven’t seen me.”

Briefcase in hand I opened the door to the waiting room. Dali looked back and said to Shelly, “Perhaps it is better that you do not gaze too deeply into the darkness of man. Eternity is too frightening for some and too blissful for others.”

“Remember my smiling tooth,” said Shelly.

“I shall paint you a smiling tooth,” said Dali gallantly.

“Make it look like that guy who paints for the Saturday Evening Post. Norman Rockwell. Now, he’s a great painter.”

Dali closed his eyes, breathed deeply. “I will consider it. Now we must get to Carmel. Tomorrow is the party.”

I had Shelly carry the clock down to the front of the Farraday and wait while I went back to Arnie’s and got the car. About ten minutes later, the clock between Dali’s legs and the briefcase under his feet, we were on the way to Carmel. We didn’t say anything for fifty miles and then Dali exploded.

“If you do not recover my painting, I shall swallow cups of paint till I die. I will become paint. I will pour it in my eyes, my ears, so I don’t see or hear the taunting.”

“You want to listen to the radio?” I asked.

“Yes, please,” he said softly and with great calm. “I believe we can still hear Snooks.”

Dali smiled through the show and nodded his head. Twice he looked at me when Baby Snooks said something that didn’t strike me as particularly important. Dali’s raised eyebrow suggested some profound depth to the statements: “But Daddy, Robespierre always eats bread and butter,” and “Robespierre, don’t sit on Mr. Goodwin’s hat.”

When the show was over, Dali looked out the window, asked, “What is the worst trip you ever took? In your life?”

I’ve been on some bad trips in my life. I told him about the time my father took me and my brother Phil to Lincoln, Nebraska, to visit his sister. I was five or six. We went on a train and had to sleep sitting up. I sat across from a woman in a black dress who took up two seats and kept eating little things she pulled out of her knitting bag. She smiled and offered me one. I was sure it was alive. I dozed off a few times but kept opening my eyes. Each time I did I found her looking at me, smiling and munching.

“Trains,” said Dali. “Ferrocarril. I know. You must come hours early, tie each bag to your body with a strong string when you get on so no one will steal them.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said.

“And sit as near the engine as you can so you will arrive earlier.”

“Makes sense to me.”

Dali told me about his worst trip in an automobile, ten years earlier, when he and his wife fled Spain. He was visiting his father in some place called Catalonia when the district declared its independence from Spain. Dali was convinced the civil war broke out because he had just spoken to his father after years and the gods were punishing him for his mistake. Gala had to find safe-conduct passes and a car to drive them to the French border through drunks and machine guns.

“I can still see the little village where we stopped for gasoline,” he said, looking out the window. “The men are carrying ridiculous but lethal weapons, while under a big tent people are dancing to the Blue Danube. Then I hear four men talking about our luggage. One of them looks me in the eye and says I should be shot. I fall back in my car seat.”

And with this Dali fell back, shaking the Crosley almost enough to drive us off the road.

“I gasp for breath,” Dali said, gasping for breath. “My little cock shrivels like a tiny earthworm about to enter the mouth of a great fish. Our driver shouts filth and orders the men to get out of our way.”

Dali went silent for a few miles, his eyes closed. I thought he had dozed off, but he suddenly said, “The driver got us to a small hotel in Cerbere, on the border. We found out later that as he was driving home, just outside of Barcelona, he was shattered by machine guns. It was the trap of that awful stupidity, civil war.”

“Hungry?” I asked.

“Androgynous,” he answered.

I didn’t ask him what he meant. I figured he was making up a word. I looked it up later.

We took Highway 1, stopped at San Luis Obispo for coffee. Dali wouldn’t leave the car. He got out clinging to the clock so I could slide out, and then he jumped back in the car, closing the door behind him as I ran into a place called Little Al’s and Big Mary’s Diner. I brought the coffee out along with three hot dogs, one with mustard, two with ketchup, all with onions.

“Hot dogs,” said Dali, looking at the one with mustard, “are obscene.”

He ate it obscenely and washed it down with coffee.

“When I came to this country I had the ship’s baker make a baguette three yards long,” he recalled excitedly. “What I should have had the cook make was a hot dog three yards long.”

I was on my second dog and losing my appetite.

“Yes,” he said, sitting back and finishing his coffee, “an enormous, obscene hot dog.”

Then, suddenly, the excitement was gone, and he whispered softly, “Find my painting, Toby Peters. Find my painting.”

Several miles farther along I pointed out the road to San Simeon, but he wasn’t interested. Since it was dark, there wasn’t much to see and not much traffic. Dali closed his eyes and I listened to a band playing live on an all-night Fresno radio station. Over the music I could hear the surf along the beaches except when we passed through Lucia and Big Sur, where the hills blocked the sound. We hit Carmel just before midnight. I touched Dali’s shoulder.

Without opening his eyes he gave directions to the house and added, “If one does not shave, one turns into an animal that soils his pants.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said, driving down the road toward the sea.

The house was smaller than I expected, but I could tell from the noise of the ocean nearby that in the morning when the sun came up the view would be better than I had imagined.

A light was on.

“Do not park in the back,” Dali directed.

“I don’t want anyone to see my car from the road.”

“Let me off at the door and then go to the back,” he said, then turned to me and whispered, “Here there are … grazhoppers.”

With that explained, I drove to the front of the house and slid out after him, reaching back for the clock and the briefcase. He hurried, being careful to stay on the stone path. The door opened before we could knock and there stood Gala and the massive figure of Jeremy Butler.

“Salvador Dali is here,” said Dali.

“Salvador Dali is here,” Gala repeated, taking his arm and touching his face to see if he had a temperature.

“There is a giant behind you.” Dali pointed at Jeremy.

“This is Jeremy,” said Gala. “A poet.”

Then she saw what I was carrying and sighed with relief. “Put him inside. I’ll welcome him later.”

We went in and Dali said, “This is a night of Lord Byron; he is the poet of this night. Terrors, creatures with tentacles all around us, and no comfort of the moon. I will not make such a voyage again without Gala.”

“Escargot,” Gala said comfortingly. “Snails with butter and garlic. Come.” She led Dali away by the hand.

“Thanks for coming, Jeremy. Everything all right?” I asked, passing off the clock before I dropped it.

“Yes,” he said, taking the heavy clock in one hand. “I read her some of my poetry, but she hears only one voice, that of Dali. She is very concerned that the costume party they are planning for tomorrow will be a failure and Dali will be ridiculed by the press.”

“Is there a place for us to sleep here?”