Greg Jackson - Prodigals - Stories

But this was a place to be old-fashioned, I guess. It was, after all, the town of Elvis and Charles Farrell, the Rat Pack, Richard Neutra, of Jack Benny’s radio broadcasts from the desert, New Year’s at Sunnylands with the Reagans, and drives hooking off the fifth tee like the Laffer curve — a place in thrall to an era when the impulse was to leave the lush coastline for a desert town as seedy and plotted as an Elmore Leonard paperback, where pills were prescribed to be abused, drinks took their names from Dean Martin taglines, and the wedge salad never died.

We found ourselves, one night early on, in a bar dedicated to just this legacy, a place called Sammy’s with a clientele of corpulent besuited men deep into life’s back nine and their girlfriends. The men perched on bar stools watching their girlfriends dance, sipping drinks, and giving off the captured firelight of time spent in the timbered lodges of Jackson Hole. To a man they wore the same unadventurous red tie and spoke of Toby Keith in the hushed tones of boyish veneration. They had the vital febrility of coronaries survived and seemed happy enough to sit there, letting their girlfriends brush up on their laps, untroubled by the jobs they’d shipped to Asia or the liability they’d dumped overboard in the clear, forgiving waters of the Caribbean. The women, their consorts, were all blondes in what I guessed to be their fifties or early sixties. Their ages were hard to judge because they’d had so much work done — high-quality work, I hazarded, although it had frozen their expressions, as though to hedge bets, halfway between smile and pettish complaint. It was a fun night. A tuxedoed ensemble of what I assume were pain-pill addicts played louche numbers like “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” a song in which the narrator has fled to Tennessee, presumably for reasons of alimony or scansion. The women flirted with the sax player, a man rounding fifty with deep gelled furrows in his tow-colored hair and skin the color of wet drywall, and they sort of pawed the good-looking mixed-race lounge singer, not quite inappropriately, but close, while the men looked on equably, having made their peace with death, aureate in the power of knowing excellent tax lawyers. Our Manhattans came in highballs the size of cereal bowls with enough ice to treat a bad sprain, and although I was pretty sure all these people would be dead by the time I turned forty, I thought we had been granted a Jazz Age vision, a benedictory mirage, one that said so long as the bills in your pocket were crisp enough, the lights dim, and the band played on, you could be twenty feet out over the canyon’s edge with no one the wiser.

* * *

On the afternoon of day three, walking his dog, Lyle, Eli confessed to me that a good chunk of the financing for his new film had fallen through. One of the backers had pulled out, and now the production company attached to his script and the director and whatever hamlet-size retinue a more or less green-lit film accretes were all scrambling to gin up new money. Eli had it on good intelligence that a financier named Wagner was in Palm Springs that week, and so one of our running intrigues became Eli’s attempt to casually intersect with him. The movie sounded like a hard sell to me, a biopic about the economist Albert O. Hirschman focused on his war years, but Eli assured me that Wagner was their man.

“This guy—” Eli put his hands together as if in prayer. “You know Richard Branson? Okay, this guy is like the Richard Branson of nature and environment music. His wife’s cousin — or no, no, no. Here’s what it is. His wife’s mother’s sister, his aunt-in-law”—Eli chuckled—“Hirschman helped get her out in forty-one.”

It was not quite evening. The sun had fallen below San Jacinto as it did every afternoon, leaving us in a long penumbral dusk the color of a pinkish bruise. For the second straight day we’d missed the canyon hike we intended to take, arriving seven minutes after the cutoff, according to the park ranger, who took evident pleasure in disappointing us and had the air less of a park ranger than of an actor playing a park ranger — I doubted he did much “ranging.” And so to salvage the excursion, we’d driven around the tony western edge of the city, taking in the walled-off, single-story period homes, including Elvis’s strange bow window of a house, and we would have explored longer if we hadn’t wandered into a postmortem garage sale and found, laid out like memento mori among old Steve Martin Betamaxes, an assortment of superannuated chemotherapy supplies, which so depressed us that we each immediately took a bump off the key to Lily’s Nissan Leaf.

Walking now with Eli, feeling just a hair better, that whatever happened I would not die that night, that I could follow some twisting course of multivalent inebriation to the torchlit inner sanctum of the self-subsuming mood, where the need to make decisions would end, and the need to evaluate decisions just made would end, and I would exist in a sort of motiveless, ethereal Dasein , I was feeling a bristling love for my friend, who hadn’t said a word to me in five minutes, showing, in the understated way of competitive men, that our friendship transcended his need to sell other people on a garish idea of his life, that we could be quiet together and find peace in each other for the simple reason that we could offer each other nothing else. I was hoping badly that Lyle would pee on the Ferrari hatchback we were passing, when I looked up to see a slight Hasidic man pacing a jogger down the middle of the street. The Hasid was in full getup, shuffle-walking to keep up with the jogging man and pointing something out to him insistently on a piece of paper. The jogger looked at us with a grin or a grimace that was perhaps self-excusing, but he needn’t have. It became clear to us in the days following: Chabad-Lubavitch was everywhere, Crown Heights had emptied out into our corner of the California desert, bearded men in long black robes haunting our bacchanal, coy and twinkling with a great-avuncular look that seemed to say, You will understand in time, you will see — or maybe not.

But it’s also possible that I was losing my mind. It was day three, as I said, and the wheels were beginning to come off. Lily and I had made out for a while in bed the night before, humping a bit halfheartedly before she sent me away to sleep by myself — and I had felt grateful, because this way I would actually sleep and wouldn’t have to wake up next to her tired and noisome with a monomaniacal erection. But I’d also felt spurned, or confused, because whereas Eli had the goal of finding and wooing Wagner, and Marta had the goal of treating her body like a chemistry set, and Lily had the goal of having a man around to hold her purse, and the others in the group had various faintly boring goals that involved their partners and spa treatments, my only goal to that point had been to get laid in a state of near-primal cognitive decomposition. And so when I awoke that morning and realized just how seriously in jeopardy this goal was, I promptly ate an entire rainbow Rice Krispies treat of marijuana and lost track of everything but a premonition that the world was going to end.

I was lying motionless on the couch, under a protective throw that had become important to me, when Lily came over and started talking. She played with my hair while she talked, and I tried to think up one grammatical sentence to indicate that I was still a human being or would some day be one again. The only recognizable thought in my mind, however, was the sudden overpowering desire to have sex, and this wasn’t even a thought as such. If I had been in any state to speak, let alone make an argument, I would have brought a Christian martyr’s passion to the task of getting Lily spread-eagle and receptive, but all I managed to say, interrupting her arbitrarily to say it, was “I’m very stoned.”