Charlie Huston - The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

He stopped at the door, pumping his groin at me.

– Gonna git our fuck aaawwwnnn.

I walked past him into the shop and locked the door. He grabbed the handle and shook it.

– Let me in, dick.

On the counter, his phone began to buzz and I picked it up.

– Want me to get it?

He stuck his finger against the glass.

– Do not answer that.

I looked at the number.

– Caller unknown. Probably a customer. Let me get this for you.

– Do not pick that up.

I flipped the phone open.

– White Lightning Tattoo.

Chev jammed a hand in his pocket, going for his keys.

– Asshole!

I nodded my head, phone at my ear, backing from the door.

– A string of barbed wire? Around your biceps? Yeah, sure, we can do that.

Chev turned the key.

– Do not say another word.

I covered the mouthpiece with my hand.

– No, it's cool, I can handle this.

He pushed the door open.

– Give me the phone.

I took my hand from the mouthpiece.

– Sure, sure, we can do that wire around your arm. We can also tattoo lameass foser wannabe on your forehead.

Chev came at me, grabbing for the phone.

I held it over my head, screaming.

– Or how about you just get a unicorn on your hip so people will know what a real man you are!

Chev snagged my wrist.

– Asshole.

I jerked my hand free, yelling at the phone.

– Or a rainbow on your ankle!

And it flew from my hand and hit the polished cement floor and cracked open and the screen shattered into five pieces.

We stood there and looked at the phone.

I toed one of the pieces.

– So, I guess I won't be blowing off Po Sin in the morning.

Chev's mom and dad are dead.

Which is why I can't make jokes about fucking his mom when he starts making jokes about fucking mine. It's also why he's constantly in my ass about calling my mom and being nicer to her and being more responsible so she doesn't have to worry about me. Like my mom worries. Like she can retain a single coherent thought long enough to work up a good worry. Not that I want to rag on her or anything, I mean, she's my mom. But life hasn't disrupted her mellow since, like, 1968. How is anything I do or say gonna break that trend?

Chev doesn't see it that way. Which makes sense. You take someone who doesn't have something themselves, they're always gonna put more value on it than the person who does have it. So, sure, I love my mom. But Chev may love her a little more than me. Which is maybe not as fucked up as it sounds like at first.

– Hey Mom.

– Who is it?

– It's me, Mom.

– Web? Is that you?

– It's me, Mom.

– Cool. That's cool.

There was a pause. A long one. This might mean she was:

A) Waiting for me to tell her why I was calling,

or

B) So stoned she had forgotten I was on the line.

– So, Mom.

– Who is this?

Which was pretty much a dead giveaway that the answer was B.

– It's Web, Mom.

– Heeey Web. How you doing, baby?

– I'm cool, Mom, how about you?

– Alright, alright. The blackberries are ripening nicely.

– That's cool.

– Yeah. I could send you a couple quarts. Or some pies. Should I send you

some pies?

Every time I talk to Theodora Goodhue of Wild Blackberry Pie Farms, she offers to send me some of her world-famous, all organic, bush-ripened blackberries. Or some of her equally famous pies. Then she hangs up the phone and, her short-term memory impeded as it is by the intake of her far more famous Wild Blackberry Cannabis Sativa, she promptly forgets.

– No, that's cool. I still have some of the last batch you sent.

– The crop's gonna be something special this year.

I never have any illusions about which crop she's talking about. Mom may have dropped out and headed to Oregon to pursue her dream, one in a long line of dreams, to start an organic berry farm, but it was only when she started cultivating some of her land with seedlings supplied by a friend from upper Humboldt County that her operation showed a profit and became self-sufficient. Not that she cares about the profit part of the equation.

– I'm sure it is. Hey you know, I got to roll here soon, but I wanted to ask you something.

– You go on. We can talk later.

– Sure, but I wanted to ask something first.

– Sure, baby sure.

– Chev got in a little fender bender and he's, you know, embarrassed to ask, but I knew you'd want to help if you could, so I wanted to ask if you could help him out with the repairs. And stuff.

I sat at the kitchen table, playing with the phone cord, looking at the bills stuck to the fridge with magnets, my share of each bill circled heavily in red. A thick sheaf of IOUs clipped to a magnet all their own. My signature at the bottom of each.

Mom inhaled deeply, exhaled long and slow. A cloud of smoke no doubt drifting to the ceiling.

– What about Chev, baby is he OK?

– Yeah, he's fine. But his truck, you know.

– Yes. I know. I know, Webster.

Webster. The name my dad picked. As opposed to the name she wanted. Fillmore. Not for the president, mind you, for the rock venue where they met. Webster, the name she hates to use now. Because it's a reminder that they ever met anyplace at all.

Crap.

– If you could help it would really… help.

– Webster.

– Yeah, Mom.

– Do you need money?

– Well, yeah, I can always use. But that's not why, I mean, Chev is the one. I mean.

– Webster Fillmore Goodhue.

Oh, double crap.

– Yes?

– Do you need money?

Stoned as a sixty-year-old Deadhead, berry growing, commune founding, transcendentalist yogi pot cultivator can get, Mom still sees right through me. Part of the science of being a mom.

Again, crap.

– Yeah. I do.

– Well. I wish you would just ask.

– Yeah.

– Well?

More crap.

– Mom. Can you send me some money?

– Of course I can.

– Thanks, Mom.

– Web, Web, I wish you'd call me Thea.

– It's weird. I don't like it.

– Chev does.

– Chev's not your son.

– Not biologically.

I looked at the photographs stuck on the fridge next to the bills. Looked at the one of me and Chev up in Oregon with Mom three years ago. Me on one side, Chev on the other, Mom, almost as big as Po Sin, between us. A joint between her lips. Three years ago. The last time I'd seen her.

– I just don't like calling you Thea, Mom. That's not gonna change. I'm almost thirty and it's not gonna change. OK?

– Of course it's OK. I just wish you would.

– I know. So. OK. I'm gonna go. I gotta go… do something.

– Web.

My turn to pause.

– Yeah.

– I could send you a ticket. A plane ticket, I mean. You could come up. For the harvest. Spend some time. Get a break from that place. Breathe some different air. Be away from all the unbalanced energy still floating around you.

– I don't need a break.

– But if you're not working anyway, you should think about shifting your position over the center point. You know, the earth, she knows where you are, and you can change her attitude toward you just by changing your physical location on her skin.

– Yeah. Sure, Mom, I know that, but the thing is, I am working. I'm working for a guy me and Chev know. Just that the job's just starting so I need some extra cash.

– You can have whatever you want, baby. You know that.

Sometimes it's hard to know if she means that literally. Like as a philosophy or something. The kind of thing she would tell me when she tucked me in at night when we lived in the house in Laurel Canyon, before she took off. You can have anything, Web, anything you want. You just have to want it, wish for it, dream it, and it will happen. That's how I got you. I wished for you and there you were. A story that ignored the fact that she got pregnant with me one night when she was so fucked up she forgot to put in her diaphragm. At least that's what my dad told me.