Adam Johnson - Emporium

My father is dying in Zaire, though I don’t necessarily know that yet as I drive to Vegas with Jimbo. I do know my dad is a Rover driver for Mobil geologists and, instead of seismic surveys, he carries two ammo clips and a military discharge that’s semiautomatic. This is 1985, and I’m going to Vegas because I’m still in those hazy couple years after high school when I read a lot of racing magazines, drink with secretaries at Bennigan’s every night, and take things at face value. I’m failing mythology, my lone course at Riverside Community College, and Jimbo and I test diodes all day for Futron, an electronics firm that makes black-market cable boxes and will shortly be shut down by the FCC. Between us, we have 244 TV channels.

My favorite viewing is always the live coverage on the Canadian Motorsports Network. Jimbo prefers the Playboy Channel, whose only movie I remember liking is The Black Box , a soft-core in which, following an emergency landing on a desert island, naughty stewardesses screw survivors on inflatable rafts, yellow escape slides, galley carts, and even a thirty-thousand-horse pulse-injector tail engine. What the crew doesn’t know is that the sex is being transmitted by the flight data recorders, which leads to hilarity when the Coast Guard comes to “rescue” them. Getting the Playboy Channel free for yourself is simple; just connect two parallax converters in tandem with a P-9 capacitor, then bridge the diode with an alligator clip.

Jimbo’s from Vegas, and we make the hop every couple weeks, though our thing is usually to get a United flight that leaves us about eighteen hours of solid bingo-bingo before we sleep on a flight home to six hundred transistors waiting for the green light. On United, I fly free. For Jimbo, the best I can do is drink coupons. Today we drive instead of fly because of FAA rules: you can’t take poisonous animals (scorpions) on commercial airliners. Jimbo has a whole box of them, a ridiculously large cardboard box for the dozen red scorpions the label says are within. They’re a special gift for a friend who has a “death thing,” Jimbo says. The box doesn’t have airholes, and is so light I don’t believe there’s anything in there — there can’t be. Jimbo’s excited to see what’s inside, keeps talking about opening it, though he wants me to do it. But the trick to life, it seems to me so far, is learning to tolerate the not knowing. I can take that box or leave it.

Jimbo’s big into thrills, and our hotfoot to Nevada is all him describing this new indoor skydiving attraction we’re going to try when we get there. I don’t tell him my mythology teacher says thrill rides are a mix of sky worship and disaster simulation, both primitive kinds of foreplay. I can’t explain it the way my teacher does, so outside the state line, I just tell Jimbo, “Let’s piss already.”

Detouring over Hoover Dam, Jimbo leans hard into the canyon curves, chuting the two-lane fast enough that the scorpion box slides back and forth in the hatch, cornering tight enough that we flirt with guardrails and great heights. Such driving does not appeal to me. The thrills I go for are more predictable — a pistol kick, a sudden loss of cabin pressure, the way a secretary or nurse at Houlihan’s will try to lay you by chewing ice from her drink and saying things like, “Grrr.” Thrilling driving takes place on oval tracks, especially thousand-lap endurance races that stretch late into night — tight, boxy circuits — spinning long after you turn off the TV and go to bed, races in which the victor is a mystery until the last lap, when you’re crashed already and dreaming.

Entering the shadows of great saguaros and graffiti-covered rock faces, we pull over to take a leak in the bluffs above Lake Mead. The outcrops are like lava, and we walk through the shoulder’s gravel and ground glass to stand among barrel-chested Joshua trees. “My old man used to take me up here when I was a kid, to see the bomb tests,” Jimbo says, unzipping. Jimbo keeps his dope in his Jockeys, so he holds the Baggie in his teeth as he points. I look up through outstretched cactus limbs to the bluffs, which are low and could not offer much of a view, then scan the distant scrub plains and tawny hills below.

“You’d need some L-5 optics for that,” I say, using a testing term from Futron.

“We’re talking about nukes,” Jimbo says, “which tend to be large events, and our binoculars were Bushnells, the best.” Speaking through the plastic bag, he goes on to describe how the military would build a little dummy city for every explosion, complete with town halls and fire stations. “My old man would flip. Some of the houses were two stories, with yards and barns. He’d look through those Bushnells and ask, ‘Is that a Cadillac in that driveway? Tell me that’s not a Caddy they’re gonna cook.’ But the white flash always shut him up.”

Talk of the white flash, which I imagine too clearly, shuts me up as well. We do not go on to discuss either bombs or fathers here among the Joshua trees; we just piss into their hairy arms and leave.

What would I have to say anyway?

Actually, I will never know if my father is pulled from his Rover and shot in a sorghum field in West Africa. My only confirmation comes from a man who arrives out of nowhere one day and claims to be my father’s best friend, who begins seeing my mother, and finally convinces her to move from Michigan to Acapulco with him. His name is Ted, and all I know about the whole deal is the sketchy portrait he paints of guarding Mobil interests from tribal warlords, and the general fact that Acapulco is a place where, in long streaks of flashing skin, people throw themselves from cliff tops into the frothy abyss.

Before Ted takes my mom to Mexico, the only time we see her is in LAX on Sunday mornings. Ted and I both find ourselves at the SkyLounge cocktail rail, eating prepopped popcorn and watching people go by until my mother’s red-eye comes through, a point at which we have thirty-five minutes with her before she stows tray tables and passes out pillows all the way back to her base in Detroit. The first time we meet, Ted tells me he and my father really took some heat from the local screws in Africa. “Things are different on the continent,” he says, and I watch his teeth. Ted has knuckles for teeth. “Those screws were coming at us from all sides. There was no dealing with them.”

I have yet to watch enough cable movies to know “screw” is prison talk.

Ted is going to become a saga, but that’s not a concern right now. It has no bearing as Jimbo and I drive to Vegas. This story is about amputation.

For these couple of years I am unshakable, so the back roads through Vegas speak nothing to me. I do not think about the people who wander the edges of sidewalkless causeways, the cars that shift and float as if unused to daylight, or the particular strains of Vegas trash that string wire-lined gullies. The power lines simply sink and rise above us, the sky is only October blue, and it seems perfectly natural that people hitchhike in the dips, where freshly blacked streets wash over with sugar sand.

The plan is to get stoned and ride a new attraction called Fly Away, which basically consists of indoor skydiving in a room shaped like a padded tube. There’s a wire net at the bottom that keeps you from falling into the DC-3 engine below. Actually, it’s Jimbo’s plan. I don’t smoke dope, and I’m a big guy. I don’t believe I will fly.

Key to the plan is going to see Jimbo’s old friend Marty. He’s the one the scorpions are for. The whole ride out is Marty this and Marty that, an old-school parade of Marty memories, but what’s important is this: Marty’s girlfriend, Tasha, is the preflight girl at Fly Away, the one who suits you up, so we’re headed to Marty’s to get some good dope and the VIP from his girlfriend.