Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

Until today it was working pretty well for the Kid — since the night he got busted by Brandi and her father he’s had no desires to watch porn or whack off and no cravings either that he couldn’t make dissipate by thinking deliberately of something else. But finding himself in the middle of the Panzacola wilderness alone on a houseboat with Annie and Einstein and feeling first like he was in Paradise and then having to fight his way out of a densely tangled dream of slaves and dead Indians and alligators and other wild animals and reptiles have left him feeling the old cravings for porn again and desire for what has passed for sex since he was ten or eleven years old.

Glumly he anchors away and steers the Dolores Driscoll out into the slough on a northwest heading in the direction of the Turner River which flows into the slough from what appears on the map to be a chain of small lakes linked by streams wide and deep enough to accommodate a houseboat. By noon he’s already bored with this adventure. It sounded exciting back when he and the Rabbit were discussing it under the Causeway and when he told the Professor of his plan and later when he rented the boat and bought all his supplies from Cat Turnbull. But now it just feels weird and lonely to him in spite of having Annie and Einstein aboard. It’s just water and mangroves and the occasional stand of trees and some jungle flowers and birds he doesn’t know the names of. It’s thickets of mosquitoes and heavy wet heat. Sometimes it’s open water and sometimes it’s dark tunnels winding under overhanging mangroves on streams that curl through the jungle to another stretch of open water. There are plenty of alligators to look at as he passes along the muddy shores of islands and now and then water moccasins and turtles and twice he sees a large silver long-nosed fish with a mouth full of saw-teeth that reminds him of his dream. But the landscape and waterways and the animals, birds, and reptiles and the abundance of tropical and semitropical vegetation and the blood-sucking mosquitoes don’t distract him from his cravings or desires much because even though he’s only been doing it for one night and two days, being on a houseboat in the Great Panzacola Swamp is basically boring to him.

Maybe what the psychologists and the shrink in prison were trying to get the addicts to overcome was boredom instead of desires and cravings and in reality the main cause for addiction is being bored and his desire for porn and his cravings for a good chub-a-dub are only ways to make his life seem interesting to himself.

By late afternoon he’s made his way up the Turner River into the second of the chain of three Mullet Lakes, the one called Little Mullet. He decides to put in there for the night and instead of fishing for his supper he’ll heat up a can of Dinty Moore beef stew. He’s already sick of fish even though since he shipped out on the houseboat he’s only eaten it once. Fishing in Little Mullet is boring. Eating fish caught in Little Mullet is boring. He’s thinking that maybe after supper he’ll flop a while in his cot and try running a porn flick in his head and go for a blanket bop and afterward smoke his ninth and tenth cigarettes of the day.

Then he remembers that he should give Annie a land-walk so she can do her daily business, an idea that partially distracts him for a while. He draws the boat up to an island campsite close enough to step ashore without getting his sneakers wet with the dog in his arms and Einstein perched on his shoulder like a pirate’s parrot and stands at water’s edge watching Annie circle the open sandy space where people who are obviously not scared of alligators or snakes pitch their tents and sniff at the blackened fire pit until she finally squats near a clump of palmettos and does her business. The Kid uses a stick and buries the turd in the sand.

When he gets back aboard the houseboat with Annie and Einstein he realizes that for about five minutes he didn’t once think about watching porn or jerking off, confirming his theory about boredom being the main cause of addiction because during those five minutes he was wholly and solely interested in watching his dog take a shit and for part of it pretending he was a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder looking for a good place to bury his ill-gotten gains although all he had to bury was a fresh dog turd, and that was all he thought about until he got back to the boat.

While he cooks and then eats his supper of canned beef stew and drinks two warm beers he wonders what the Professor would think of his theory. One good thing about being with the Professor is that the Kid was never bored. He was sometimes pissed, once in a while suspicious, occasionally admiring, and most of the time confused. Which causes him to remember the crank-powered portable radio that the Professor gave him when he first visited him at Benbow’s and he realizes that he can kick back and be distracted by listening to the radio as long as he’s not too far from so-called civilization to get any reception and if he is then he can always wave off his cravings by doing a little reading in the Shyster’s Bible instead or maybe he’ll check out the Shyster’s briefcase full of papers that’s still in his duffel and which he only glanced at quickly the night the cops raided the Causeway and busted Rabbit’s leg and killed Iggy.

Okay, so his situation isn’t perfect here and he’s spending a lot of time and energy just fighting off boredom and addiction and still going through porn and masturbation withdrawal but he’s glad all that’s behind him now — living under the Causeway and getting fired from his job at the hotel and camping at Benbow’s and the deaths of Iggy and Rabbit bound together forever beneath the dark waters of Calusa Bay and the hurricane that wrecked the Professor’s planned community for homeless sex offenders. Maybe he was never bored back then like he is now and therefore wasn’t tempted by mental porn flicks and a real-life woodie waiting for his wet hand but he was definitely in a lot of continuous ever-complicating mental pain.

He digs through his duffel and comes up with the little red plastic radio with the crank. He turns the crank for five minutes or so until he’s generated enough juice for the power indicator to register green. Switching the radio on he runs the dial up and down without locating a station anywhere except for one signal that’s reasonably free of static and turns out to be the National Public Radio affiliate broadcasting from the town of Belvedere where there’s an air force base and not much else about forty-five miles north of Little Mullet Lake. NPR — the Kid hates that network and all its affiliates that you can’t get away from no matter where in America you go and has never been able to stand listening to it for more than twenty or thirty seconds before flipping the dial on to something else, anything else, even soft rock like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell or college baseball, anything other than National Public Radio with the puzzle-master Will Shortz setting little language-and-number mousetraps designed to make you feel stupid and that weird deep-throated guy who sings folk songs his grandparents liked and tells definitely not-funny stories about pie-eating Lutherans from Minnesota and some breathless woman interviewing writers and politicians you never heard of and of course constant news, national and local news and weather told by people trying to sound like they’re English.

But it’s the only signal he can get way out here in the Panzacola so he leans back on his cot with the one pillow propped behind his head and smokes his ninth cigarette and listens to news about the stock market and the Federal Reserve Board that makes no sense to him since he has no idea of what they sell at a stock market or what’s reserved at a reserve board. As the newscasters drone on and on from national to regional to local news the Kid starts to nod and his eyes close. His cigarette drops from his hand onto his belly and burns through his T-shirt and abruptly wakes him. He slaps at the hole in his shirt and rubs the still-burning cigarette out in the empty Dinty Moore can and says aloud, Dude, whoa! Fucking bad idea, smoking in bed!