Hob Broun - Inner Tube

Ellen slides’ over the fender and walks away, anomalous in her office clothes amid the scrub and rock. I watch her move down to the stream, squat to rub water on her face over and over. Powerful. And so much grief from a cat.

We stop at a place outside the city where the chili verde is supposed to be good. Ellen smokes irritably and leaves her plate full. I drink Tecate and lime and feel my admiration pass through stages, like an insect taking on protective colors, ending in spite. A distasteful image immobile in sepia, then disappearing into the noise of families all around us. The heart, I think, is just a muscle.

We drive in darkness now. Golden oldies are barely audible on the radio, but with spearing headlights and briefly impaled signs they substitute for conversation. “Don’t forget who’s taking you home and in his arms you’re gonna be…So, darlin’, save the last dance for me.” Abruptly, Ellen puts her hand on the wheel. I let go and she steers intently for several miles, her face a prow. But then it’s all relinquished. She fidgets with my lighter, thumbing silent butane at herself, loitering somewhere in her mind. I’d like to floor it, but we’ve reached the limits of the city. Ellen directs me in a flat voice, and on the radio a tractor pull is being promoted. She stares at adjacent drivers, some of whom speed up, some of whom slow down.

The apartment tower is unpleasantly sheer, an ugly spindle behind its landscaping. Some sort of complex tax deal for the company, Foley has intimated. Free rental to the workers and an open road for the accountants.

“Have coffee with me?”

I cannot allow myself to imagine…But as we cross the plaza and push through big glass doors, I feel like someone entering a seraglio in disguise. The lobby fountain gurgles. I am emboldened, elated by the odor of acrylic carpet and the glare inside the elevator.

“Home on the range,” Ellen says, letting me go in first.

So little in it, but a space that seems cramped. All the colors are pale. There are toast crumbs by the sink, smears of fat. There is a varnished bamboo screen by windows facing north toward the airport, a Max Ernst reproduction, dried berry branches in a blue bottle.

“Not much, is it?” she says, scuffling in the kitchenette. “I think of moving all the time, but that’s as far as I get.”

While the coffee drips, she shows me photographs, large color prints of wall murals over on the East Side. In some the artists stand in the foreground, raising their fists to la raza. She talks of Siqueiros and Diego Rivera with an excitement that lingers on my skin. But when all you do is watch, things pass by.

She has a little Dutch cigar with her coffee and speaks softly. “Part of the Seattle thing was having something under me. A kind of scaffolding. We were much involved up there. Aid for Guatemalan refugees, the Fremont Women’s Health Collective, volunteer time at the food bank. But the biologists say altruism doesn’t exist. I realized all that righteous solidarity was a way of comforting myself. Moral obligations were really emotional ones.”

She winces at herself, looks to me for a reaction. I am desperate in my obligations, seeing her once again as she squats beside the stream. I yearn for the dizziness of abjection, the smell of her secrecy.

“So how do I replace these things? With a practical attitude? Run your laps, cash your checks. Cut down on sugar and red meats.” She surrounds her empty cup for warmth. “Retreat, retreat. Rehearse yourself. There are all sorts of things to give up, but I don’t see anything pious in being solitary. Where are the fucking replacements?”

Clearly, she wants words and not my arms.

I say, in the irrelevance of my desire, “This is not a tender age.”

“Okay. What do we do about that?”

“We’re supposed to ‘play hardball’ and ‘stonewall it.’”

Ellen moves to the window and looks out. “You are a complacent, gutless asshole.”

“Yes, but I’m other things too.”

She ignores my hand on her back, glaring hard into the distance where runways are long and flat, where tower lights spin tirelessly and never retreat.

It begins to rain as I reach the car. A cold wash. Wipers and defroster on, I head through the strip zone for home, past a chain of mansard roofs, floodlights blaring on wet asphalt and chrome, savannas of plate glass, a fiberglass drumstick rotating atop a pole. The city’s population has doubled in the last ten years. In another five it will double again, pouring out hydrocarbons and sucking up the aquifer. I bless the sterility of the desert.

WHILE MANY MARCHED SMARTLY, even proudly, through the era of the airline hijacking and the happening, of self-immolations, lettuce boycotts, astrological medallions, and the aluminum can, I straggled. My hands were slack, my eyes un-watchful. I chainsmoked to the monotonous beat of history. Disposable history, as I discovered.

I was a tender of newswire machines, those tireless contraptions which, on white cylinders like massive rolls of toilet paper, recorded and arranged the soot-black dung smears of the day. The richly fertilized sheets which I distributed were inhaled and combed through for special nuggets; they were segmented and scribbled on, spiked on the wall, and soon enough balled up in the Dumpster. Event revealed Trend which grew into Crisis, all of which evaporated as soon as the next movement of tanks, the next celebrity drug arraignment, the next violated child thrown from an apartment rooftop. There really was no keeping up, so I straggled. And sometimes things turned up in the litter at the end of the line.

Also under my care was a wirephoto machine which, by some electronic process I could never grasp, transmitted images simultaneously to subscribers great and small. Unfurling one afternoon from its slowly turning drum was a picture of a former First Lady arriving at or departing from some airport, her glamorously delicate breasts clearly visible behind a gauzy blouse. Its caption was followed by the parenthetical slug “Editors please note: This photo may contain offensive material.” What, I pondered, could possibly offend? Those royal breasts, curiously upturned like a pair of Persian slippers, with their intimations of…All right then, into the wastebasket, so disposed. On to the next historical square — a ditch full of corpses or a race driver grinning in victory lane.

The wire machines were equipped with a simple menu of alerts: One bell for, say, the World Series final, two bells for a major disaster, natural or manmade, three bells for the assassination of a head of state, and four bells, which could only mean a nuclear exchange, so that every time the system kicked in it brought on a Pavlovian apprehension that this would be The Time, and that fourth bell would go off. What relief to find that it was nothing more than a prime minister fatally slashed.

Yes, many and varied were the mental contortions necessary to the profession. How, for example, to maintain the traditional hardbitten, seen-it-all demeanor alongside reverent gravity for information control and the public trust? How to reconcile instinctive skepticism with the “objective” approach? Much wiser to straggle.

Our newsroom, a large oblong space where bottling operations had taken place in the days of the old milk factory, was irrevocably, if invisibly, divided between the “radio side” and the “TV side.” These phrases were often spoken bluntly, challengingly, in the manner of a Maverick saloon rat, lacking only the casually accurate jet of tobacco juice. If the resentment of the radio tribe — purveying their drab and archaic product to cabbies, potato farmers, and the bedridden — was intense, so likewise was the scorn in which they were held by the glamour boys and girls on the other side of the line.