Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

There was the little house behind the house where he could go!

The tractor hummed. Birds. There were the hogs squealing at the hog farm. He placed his head on his fist, his elbow went into the mattress and he looked at her good. There was so much time to one day, one morning. A life. Her mouth was dead closed and she breathed in her throat like little pigs talking in the air. He looked at her hair.

OUT THERE(out there, out there, out there — I am going to level with you. Worst story in the book is this story in the book. So I am going to spruce it out, spur it up, add some kitchen spice. Hey, I'm back. The spice is in the RV here, at my table, in the motor coach, overlooking the old Cliff House in San Francisco at Land's End. Here's a tip: San Francisco is over. There's a moratorium on the old hunting grounds. There isn't lunatic delight or rose heaven or anything left here up north of LA. Nights ago, I was at the Malibu Beach RV Park after six days of going nuts inside Los Angeles, wrecking a Japanese car with my 31-footer, losing my status as the great conductor of the West, of my time, of my mind, chasing girls, meeting some first class women and one in particular, a great artist, no Catherine, but Irish, at least, and she and I were at the RV Park in Malibu after no sleep for days running around LA and staying with the Motor Coach parked in her gated community next to so-and-so famous lady actor's house and parked at the park overlooking the great sea below crashing full of breakers, naked in the Coach smoking, listening to the old soft music of the songwriters singing of this great country and its impossibility of being understood, being held, all of it escaping the grasp, too far to reach, and having reached the sea, the whole sea crashing and no more land, the end of a great and mighty journey in an unsafe, definitely unsafe rig, wheeling around half cocked wild and manic and pissing off everyone in sight, under the police radar, a great airplane coach on the road with no insurance, no license to be as nuts as I am, her and I nude smoking and seeing that sea — out there — the madness in me — and in her — the inevitable end of journey, a moment to rest and sleep like a child overlooking the slamming of sea — you know — to feel, before sleep, the listening, to listen, listen — and see and feel what is lost and cannot be regained, what has escaped the grasp, what every journey feels at the end of a long wild stretch where nothing is held and all is lost and fantastical. America still exists when you do it all wrong and wild and mad and manic in a big long probably unsafe, absolutely unsafe, American automobile home scamp pad Bounder whale yacht — shocks blown — bushings bushed — one wheel on the left rear in the two hollow without air — if the other blows: explosion city — flip city — death trap — and the next day I spent the day tearing my hands apart in Oxnard, California, with a pack of Mexican guys in an old gravel lot beside the Oxnard Airport beside the animal shelter with the dogs going nuts in agony in the heat and abandonment and captivity in their wild hearts— out there —learning to fix lights and fiberglass and tires on old Bounder, the MC, Motor Coach, the thing my brother bought me, ((without knowing he bought me)), to see our great nation. While fixing the Bounder ((turns out I didn't fix it because I am here in SF with air leaking from the tire on the back left, chasing auto-part-store personnel and Firestone Tire Co. employees like a madman shouting and taking off the hubcaps, frinking with the screws and after taking the screws out by chiseling notches into the heads to hammer and chisel these from their grooves, and getting lug nut covers off, then on foot chasing a size 38 (1 and ½ inch) socket at the auto parts stores up and down Geary because the good old mechanics in this town are children, because there is a moratorium on anything real in this city: real mechanics, real wildmen, real girls, real anything — plus my lug nuts are commercial and I'm off the semi-trucking routes, here on Geary — and I'll tell you what I saw above Malibu, people they call lunatics and hippies and “out there” people, doing nothing, camping on the beach, on the shittiest beaches, above the sun, up before Ventura, Scuzz Beach, Thornhill Broom Beach , doing nothing, just sitting there in little shit motor coaches, short little rigs, lying on their backs on pool chairs, and then here, SF, and coaches all down Fulton, coaches galore, all mildewed and needle coated, spray painted, graffitied, destitute, this town asleep, or dead, nothing how I left it so many years ago, nothing like when my teacher got here, even more years ago — when it was city and sun and kid delight, us all free, and both sexes, all sexes, delighting in tomfoolery and the sky ceilingless and Jupiter-like and pre-New World, us all kids from childhood city being kids as adults, and me fixing the coach)), Coach calls, old teacher, while I'm tearing up my hands in the sun, my dog run off, my teacher phoning, and I answer and tell him I'm out there in a 31-foot coach and my dog Jewely has run off and that's Oxnard Airport in a field with Mexican guys and me tearing my hands apart like a nut. Out there , I tell you. I tell him. He laughs. When he does it he says, Ha. He wants me to send him a personal hygiene product, Look, marital aid, he instructs. He can't find it. In all of old NY. Our running prank. Me buying it for him. It's his way of telling me he is out of the stuff he needs but not out of his real stuff he needs for the fucking. This select product is appreciably better, as he has explained to me, than all the other near infinitudes of selectables from its category. This is to say, he knows one thing from another — and this one from all the others, the others he doesn't like nearly so much as this brand. Is this to say, he wants to impress me with what he knows or to impress upon me that I am beneath myself buying an old guy his marital aids? This is to say, he is a connoisseur of this field and that variety amidst the folderol of unoffending-looking other products in the category of the shelf facings of this category — is best? Saying he still has the fucking down as far as the being able, and he still has the itch to go out there going up and up and up — none of which matters, in the talking, except two guys trying to push each other to keep the game going, which is stupid. He is going in for surgery, he finally gets clear and simple. He sounds nervous. He's never told me about anything like this, but I've heard about this from others. He has got bad health going with his health. Doctors! I think of him, and I think of me, in Oxnard, secretly happy as hell to be me laboring at the task, with the Mexicans, hands covered black in grease and with them smoking and spitting and speaking Spanish and working on the rig in the hot sun for six hours, their tools all a mess, fixing what hell I tore up on the coach hitting that other car, having driven like a nut all over LA in a 31-foot plane, meeting girls, Jewely getting everyone's attention, her blue eye with the star in it, the mandala around the eyeball, her genius looks and pure spirit, from heaven, us chasing tail, dealing with cops, pistol in the back bedroom, bullets, the big radio and a lot of highway behind, a lot of grainy nights, pitch black with moon and stars and rock and roll, old tucked away DJs and radio shows of lost America through the open nothing nights, charging onward… feeling that my teacher wishes he were out in freedom and not facing the knife — him who is always with me at the wheel and sometimes the keys, and I said, I'm with you, always, Coach, green bananas and tiger milk —I told him from Oxnard— Hugs and Kisses as he always signed off — the wild famous genius who saved fiction — and I thought of him as I drove up the 101 with the purple mountains in the post-dusk falling night…. He was the one I called when I lost my brother. Listen, Listen, dammit, should you want to know the truth. I feel lousy as hell about chasing girls and talking the way I talk. You want to know the truth? As one man to whoever, I feel compelled, urged, to show off. Talking about roses and girls. These lunatic stories. Give me a break. What a joke. Pussy heaven. Ha. The world won't want to hear this shit out of me, but the truth is I feel lousy. Those dogs howling in their kennels. The whole world aching to come back to life from the life we are all in up to up to our eyeballs. Everyone splintered over this and that word because they can't change a light bulb in terms of getting a new joke together. I feel bad to God, when the truth is said, God's honest truth: I want to be there for the world and for the people I love and for the people I don't even love. All this talk about nishy is just, for me anyhow, just talk — unless I can find someone to spend some time with and then you know… make things better. But really I am thinking about my teacher, and worrying for him, though I know he will live on, I am sure, unkillable as he is, but then I have been wrong.