Three Fathers
-1992 -
There are three men who call me
their son. Each man introduces me: "This is my son, Jerry."
- 1939 -
1. When little Gerald Truman Smothers
Jr's. cat scratched him, he threw it hard into the bathtub and
ran scalding water. The cat paddled as eight-year-old Truman
pummeled its head with his fists. When the cat was half dead,
Truman strangled the cat. Gerald Truman Smothers, senior, owned
several banks in Arizona and Nevada. Little Truman was an only
child, spoiled by his mother. Truman wrote a sweet essay in the
third grade called "Why I love my mother" and won a
prize. Truman: my biological father.
2. Young Leroy Jack Steiner, wearing
the suit his parents had bought him for his bar mitzvah, was walking
home from temple. He cut through the park, where he noticed a
boy walking on the frozen surface of the lake. The ice cracked,
and the boy fell in. The boy was drowning, so Leroy jumped into
the freezing water and saved him. When Leroy got home, his mother
made him take a hot bath. She held his head under water and almost
drowned him for ruining his new suit. Later, she whipped him
with the cord from an electric iron. Al Steiner, Leroy's father,
was a watch repairman who moonlighted as an elevator operator.
He pickpocketed watches in the crowded elevator and never got
caught. The Steiners were a poor family in the Bronx of New York.
Leroy was beaten if he got caught stealing, but not for stealing.
Leroy read the family's set of Encyclopedia Britannica
from A to Z before he turned 15. He had a fantastic memory.
He taught himself to play the trumpet. Leroy: my first stepfather.
3. Richard James Dunham, using only
a screwdriver and a hammer, was changing a tire on the Model A
flatbed Ford. His father, Charles, sat on the truck bed looking
down at little Richard, who was furiously trying to turn the lug
nuts by driving the screwdriver into them at an angle. Charles
had forgotten the lug wrench at the cabin. They were driving
over the Arizona desert looking for old radiators to sell in town
for the copper they contained. "You stupid little bastard,
let me do it!" screamed Charles. The father grabbed the
tools from his 11-year-old son and set to work, shaking with anger
at himself. He missed the screwdriver with the hammer and tore
his knuckles. Richard laughed. His father chased him around
the truck, screaming at him, and tried to hit him with the hammer.
He threw the hammer at Richard as hard as he could. It missed
and went flying off into the brush. Silently, Charles got into
the truck and started off towards the cabin, driving on the flat
tire. Richard ran to catch up and jumped on the back.
When they got home, Richard's mother
and sister were miles away, camping with the bee hives to protect
them from poachers. Charles made Richard dig a hole behind the
cabin. Richard's punishment was to be buried up to his neck.
Charles tamped the dirt down, stamping around Richard's head
with his big boots, and drew his foot back to kick Richard in
the face. Richard winced and closed his eyes as tight as he could,
waiting for the blow, but it didn't come; the father turned and
walked back into the cabin and left him buried like that all night.
It was a terrifying night. He couldn't
fall asleep or coyotes might eat his face. Every time he'd think
he heard coyotes, he'd make terrible sounds to scare them away.
Charles took off in the truck early
the next morning. Richard was left immobile in the rocky sand
under the Arizona sun that heated up the sky as soon as it rose
above the mountain. He cried and sweated and became delirious,
seeing coyotes and lizards coming to get him. Finally, after
school was over, an Indian kid came and dug him out. He'd heard
the strange sounds during the night, even though his family's
cabin was almost half a mile away. The water pump was broken,
so Richard used rags to clean himself, and he went to school the
next day with a red, sunburned face that embarrassed him more
than his shoes with the soles taped on. Richard Dunham, my second
stepfather.
1950 - 1970
1. Truman Smothers became a newspaper
reporter. He worked in Albuquerque, Phoenix, and in Las Vegas,
where he met my mother, who looked like a movie star. I was born
nine months after they married. They were Unitarians and then
Christian Scientists, and Truman experimented with yogic meditation.
I remember sitting in a little car seat that was clamped onto
the front seat of his big Buick and running my fingers around
the frame of it in front of me, where the plastic coating was
bunched up around the corners. I sat between my parents as they
screamed at each other. Truman's face looked purple as he drove
and shouted. They got divorced while he was going to chiropractic
school when I was three. Truman was devastated by the divorce.
He moved to Arkansas to avoid making child-support payments,
and he enrolled in a Bible college.
2. Leroy Steiner met my mom when
I was three and a half. He was a rough and loud intrusion into
my life. He took me fishing and mountain climbing when I was
only four. Leroy was an explosives chemist. While we were growing
up, he lectured to my brothers and me while our family ate dinner.
He used a chalkboard beside the dinner table to illustrate his
points. When I was five, I already knew the orbits of the planets,
what molecules and atoms were, and I probably knew more than any
other five-year-old about the construction and function of land
mines used in the Korean War. Leroy Steiner, who had trouble
getting Top Secret Clearance from the government (because his
mother had signed a socialist document in the late 30's to get
a free can of food) did finally get Top Secret Clearance. When
I was 12 or 13, he developed an explosive charge to work in conjunction
with some other kid's father's invention, a device which sensed
when a napalm bomb was 50 feet above the Vietnamese ground. The
idea was to scatter napalm as far as possible. This work didn't
sit well with Leroy, especially after he smoked marijuana. He
took my brothers and me to peace marches on the weekends. Once,
for variety, he took us to a pro-war parade. Some people had
carefully painted signs which they taped to the sides of their
cars in the parade: "Kill a Commie for Christ." Leroy
stole explosives from his employer sold them through a fictitious
corporation. We were the first family on the street to have a
color TV and a built-in pool. My mom had a wardrobe that matched
her white Cadillac. Leroy worried about money and screamed when
lights were left on. His neck got very red when he screamed.
Leroy and my mom got divorced when
I was 16. He went to live in Tahiti with a very pretty 21-year-old
woman. He brought along a book by Buckminster Fuller that showed
how to make geodesic domes. Leroy and the woman lived in a dome,
and Leroy hunted shark with a spear gun and planted marijuana
seeds wherever he roamed. His taste for women, good dope, and
good food eventually led him to Thailand, where he became an English
teacher.
3. Richard Dunham drank a Michelob
as he stood with the other white-shoed, gold-spectacled Chevy
dealers and their wives watching the Hawaiian dancers at a luau
at the Maui Sheraton. Richard's second wife, my mom, a beautiful
blonde with a surgically-rejuvenated face and silicone breasts,
stood by his side, smiling. I was happy that they trusted me,
now 17, to stay home and take care of my brothers without Richard's
mother coming over.
It was a good opportunity to try
LSD. It was supposed to be cool to see your face melting in the
mirror, but I found it quite horrifying. The walls and ceilings
were alive with changing patterns. The dentist's daughter from
next door, a Seconal addict, came over at three in the morning
to see if I had any lighter fluid for her to huff. I did, so
she squirted some on a sock and inhaled deeply. Talking with
her for the next few hours kept me from going out of my mind completely.
- 1981 -
1. Truman, now Brother Truman, started
up the old Jesus van, a '72 Ford Econoline. He clicked on the
CB radio and mentally went over the sermon he was going to preach
to truckers on Jesus Channel 19. He pulled off the highway at
a rest area atop a hill.
He strained and forced his faltering
voice, never for a moment doubting that there were scores of truckers
hearing his message. "You are teetering, my sinner friends,
on the brink of the flaming fiery furnace of hell," he rasped
into the microphone. "Imagine the smell of burning human
flesh, the sound of gnashing teeth and screaming; imagine burning
in the Lake of Fire for all eternity, where the damned
are lined up in long corridors and packed so tightly together
that they are unable to move; they are helpless even to remove
from their eyes the worms that gnaw on them! Imagine the blood
boiling in your veins, your brain boiling in your skull, your
heart bursting in your chest, and your eyes bubbling in their
sockets! There is only one hope and He is Jesus, the Son of God.
He loves you so much that He died on that terrible cross to save
you from your sins! Accept Jesus as your Savior and bind the
devil and his hellish demon spirits and cast them far from you!"
Bro. Truman had worked up a good
appetite by preaching. He decided to go to a truck stop for some
pancakes and eggs. As always, he carried a wooden cross, two
feet long by one foot wide. He and plunked it down on the table
next to the place mat. He tried to remember what he had said
over the CB so he could use it later in the day for his sermon
on the local radio station in Bandon, Oregon. Although he was
quite well-to-do, he left only a glossy Jesus tract as a tip for
the waitress. He budgeted the money he'd inherited from his parents
so that he'd be able to buy time on the local radio stations for
a long time to come.
I wrote to him occasionally, and
sometimes he answered. I met him, once, when I was hitchhiking
through Oregon, and he looked dangerous. I asked him if I could
borrow some money to buy a motorcycle, and he told me something
about Jesus riding a donkey, and I gave up.
2. Leroy went into the lobby of
a storefront in Bangkok, Thailand, and saw through one-way glass
100 or so lovely young women dressed in evening wear. They sat
on carpeted tiers, facing their own reflections in the opaque
side of the one-way glass. They were watching a big TV. Each
woman wore a red plastic badge the size and shape of a poker chip.
Each badge had a different number on it. Leroy had just gotten
paid for a week of teaching English at the Police Academy, so
he decided to splurge. On his far left were the younger girls.
There were a few 10-year-olds, but that seemed wrong to him.
He settled for three 14-year olds. He told the man at the desk
the numbers of the girls he wanted. The man tried to charge the
American rate and was surprised that Leroy could read the Thai
on the price list. Leroy said in passable Thai: "I live
in Thailand; I want to pay the Thai rate." The man went
into the carpeted room to fetch the girls and then led the girls
and Leroy down a hallway into a nice room with a high bed and
a sunken bathtub made of tile. The girls bathed Leroy and did
everything he wanted. He knew how to talk about sex and food
in Thai very well.
3. Richard had lost his Chevy dealership
in San Mateo, California, when people started switching to Japanese
cars. He lost his airplane and his money. Always ready for an
emergency, he still had a 12-million-dollar parcel of land to
fall back on in his hometown of Bauxite, Arizona. He and my mom
moved there to develop the land. They bought a honey business
and a gold mine. After a few years, their cash flow was back
to normal, and Richard bought a twin-engine airplane, which he
kept in a hangar on his own airstrip. He had over a hundred pairs
of fine cowboy boots and shoes in his closet.
Shortly after Richard became mayor
of the town of Bauxite, which he practically owned, my mom was
diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He kept her at home as long
as he could, but eventually she had to be hospitalized. Richard
had always worked long hours and had never had much time for my
mother, but now that she was 80 miles away in a rest home and
didn't even recognize him anymore, he was disconsolate. To save
his sanity, he fixated on singing. Every night after his 16-hour
work day, he would sing country music into a special amplifier
that had a tape deck built into it. He played tapes that had
the music tracks of hit songs without the vocal tracks, and sang
along in place of the famous singers. He sang with local musicians
in the little bars. It was an amazing thing how badly Richard
sang, but since he was mayor of the town, and everybody either
worked for him or owed him money, nobody ever told the emperor
that his voice was wearing no clothes. He screeched and stretched,
speeded up and slowed down. Even when he sang his favorite Merle
Haggard songs, he was a parody of a bad singer. "I got over
you, just long enough, to let my heartaches mend / Then today,
I started loving you again."
(Still 1981)
I traded my old Rambler to a guy
at a bus station in Medford, Oregon, for a one-way bus ticket
to Denver. I knew some rock musicians there, and I thought that
maybe I could play electric guitar in a band. I felt there needed
to be a rock band that played radical political songs. When I
first got to Denver, I didn't have a guitar or enough money to
buy a decent one, so I applied for a job as a taxi driver. Driving
taxi on Maui had been the easiest job I'd ever had, and I thought
that it wouldn't be too much different in Denver.
I was hired by the Zone Cab company.
The map test was harder than I'd expected, but I'd come prepared
with maps up both my sleeves. I'd only been in Denver for a few
days. Once I started working, I learned the city pretty quickly,
but it was hard to make money because I didn't pay off the dispatcher
like most of the other drivers did. Red, the night dispatcher,
was an ugly old man with a big red nose. He was an alcoholic,
known to go on long amphetamine binges that would end when he
finally totalled his big Pontiacs and wound up in the hospital.
During recuperation, he'd have to be carried up the stairs to
the dispatch office.
The day dispatcher used a child's
magnetic chalkboard with little plastic numbers in primary colors
to keep track of the 60 cabs in the company. Red didn't need
to use the board. He could keep track of the locations of all
60 cabs in his mind. He knew whether they had fares or were empty
and he knew their estimated times of arrival. He could remember
which driver was in each cab and how much of a bribe each driver
had paid him. I think Red could have been a grand master chess
player if he'd wanted to. If he got a great call, say a $40-dollar
run to a restaurant in Aurora, while I was first up on the radio,
he'd hold onto it until a crappy call came in. He'd give the
crappy run to me and then call out the good run to the second-up
driver, who'd tipped him at the beginning of his shift. He'd
call me: "Unit 35, pick up at Arapahoe and Larimer."
Great, a laundry run in the projects. A woman with four children
and great spilling bags of dirty laundry. After I unloaded the
laundry, the woman would pay me in change, counted out a nickel
and dime at a time, and wouldn't even be able to cover the amount
on the meter.
I always tried so hard to please
Red. For some reason that wasn't clear to me, I wanted his approval.
He'd mumble an address to me over the radio, and rather than
calling him on the radio and admitting that I couldn't find it,
I'd drive around looking for it for over an hour. I decided one
night that I was probably putting him in the role of a father
and trying to get a father's approval from him.
I leased the cab for $55 dollars
a night and paid for my own gas. Like the other drivers, I tipped
Kathy, the cute blond gas girl, a dollar when I filled up at the
end of my shift. If I played my cards right, I could make gas
money and cover my lease in the first five or six hours of my
shift. The rest of the money I would make would be mine, so I
usually drove 10 hours a night.
Once I got wise to tipping Red,
I usually made a hundred a night for myself. At the beginning
of each shift, I'd get out of the cab and look into the night
sky. If there were lots of jets, I'd gamble on waiting in line
at the airport. Otherwise, I'd hang out in front of the White
Spot restaurant on Colfax, the absolute center of strangeness
in Denver. I'd take the runs from Capitol Hill, where most of
Denver's gays lived. The other drivers didn't want these fares;
most of the cabbies were manly types who went to the dog track
at some point during their shifts to drink beer and play the dogs,
and they didn't like gay passengers. I preferred gay fares:
they tipped better and were more polite and more interesting conversationalists.
The musician friends I stayed with
were starting to make me feel less than welcome. I was kind of
an embarrassment to them because I was still a hippy. They were
part of the trendy New Wave scene. Musicians wore tight black
clothes and played World War Three music. Electronic keyboards
did most of the work. The lyrics sung by handsome lead singers
or sullen blondes in black miniskirts were not political, or just
political enough to be cool. I gave up on the on the rock scene
and bought a classical guitar like the one I had on Maui. I rented
a room in a house. The guy who owned the house had a large, padded
primal-therapy box. He'd go inside, close the door, and scream
and cry in there for half the day. It was creepy hearing muffled
screams all the time. I was happy to ride my new bicycle to the
taxi office every evening and go to work.
Instead of the affluent middle-aged
tourists who rode in my taxi on Maui, I now got to meet people
from all walks of life. But some of my customers wore me down.
I tired of the drunks with their hospital Zone Cab vouchers (no
tip). They usually reeked of vomit and/or shit. Prostitutes
were depressing. And it wasn't unusual to get ripped off by young
men who told me they had to "run into the house to get their
wallets," only to disappear through a side yard. Masturbators
were sickening, especially the ones who talked to you while they
did it. I felt degraded by drunk businessmen telling me in explicit
detail about prostitutes they'd just fucked, filling me in on
important data such as vagina tightness and whether the prostitute
"swallowed it" or not.
I had wanted to interview thousands
of people and find out, naive as this may sound, what America
was about, what was the General Will. It was making me pretty
cynical. With cocaine increasing in popularity, I guessed that
there would be an increase in motivated cab robbers. It would
be real easy to get a knife in the back or, like one young driver,
have my head pounded in with a hammer.
One cool summer night, I was getting
a lot of fares and having a pretty good time. I was driving fast
and getting into the rhythm of the night's business. Suddenly,
someone threw a brick through the front passenger window, showering
me and the black businessman riding in the back seat with glass.
I thought it was a shotgun blast. I felt a sharp pain in my
right elbow. I pushed the accelerator to the floor, praying for
speed in the old Checker cab. I finally stopped the car and gave
the businessman a Zone Cab business card, in case he wanted to
sue the company. He had some glass in his eye, he said. I found
the brick on my clipboard beside me. My arm throbbed.
My next fare was a prostitute.
I took her from place to place; she was searching for some heroin.
She kept smoking marijuana to take the edge off her craving.
After several good runs from the
airport, I decided to go off the road for a while. I was starting
to get cold. I radioed Red and told him that my window was broken
and asked if I could come to the taxi office and switch cabs.
He said there weren't any extra cabs that night. "You can
bring your cab in early if it gets too cold for ya, Jerry, and
I'll give ya a break on your lease," he said. I felt proud
that he'd used my name over the radio. I wanted him to like me,
though I certainly didn't like him. I didn't believe him
about there being no extra cabs, either.
I parked in front of the Mercury
Café and went in for a beer. The Mercury was a huge, dark
warehouse. A reggae band was doing a Bob Marley song exactly
like Bob Marley and the Whalers did it. "Get up, stand up!
Stand up for your rights!" Beautiful white kids from good
families, with their fists raised in the air in the power salute,
packed the huge dance floor. And there was blond, blue-eyed Kathy,
the gas girl, dancing alone. She wore overalls and a white T-shirt.
She danced right up front by the band, almost worshipping them.
I still hadn't had the courage to ask her out. I knew that every
cab driver in the company had a secret crush on her. At the Mercury,
because it was a hippy club, it was OK to dance alone, so I danced
near to the goddess of the Zone Cab gas pumps. She noticed me,
and I shouted hello. She recognized me and shouted hello back
and allowed me to dance with her. The room was dark, a blur of
noise and muted color. A large black bomb was suspended over
the dance floor by chains from the rafters. Kathy, hardly aware
of my presence, kept her eyes on the band, especially the lead
singer, who was a white guy with his hair in dreadlocks. The
other musicians looked like real Jamaicans. I finished my beer
and radioed Red that I was back on the road downtown.
I felt warm now from dancing in
the crowded club. The cool night air felt good. I drove by the
Tiki bar's neon palm tree sign and thought of Maui. The view
from my taxi there had been real palm trees, exotic green
volcanic mountains, rainbows, and magnificent sunsets over the
royal blue ocean. Now I was driving in an urban-industrial hell.
An urge to meditate came over me,
and I parked in front of the White Spot. I didn't care that it
looked weird for a cab driver to be sitting cross legged in front
of the White Spot restaurant on East Colfax doing Zen meditation
behind the wheel of a taxicab. I wanted to create a new reality.
I'd written some articles for a New Age magazine published by
a leftover hippy named Anand. Through him, I had met a bunch
of people who were, like me, stuck in the 60s. Their guru was
Amy. Anand (who used to be Ed) played sitar at Amy's church,
and his stunning girlfriend, Camala (who used to be Karen), sat
like a high priestess on Amy's left, to attract young men into
the congregation. Amy taught that reality was just something
that you created and projected; it was like a thick dream that
only seemed substantial. I was trying in my dismal cab to create
a less-slimy reality.
When I finished meditating, I opened
my eyes and saw an extremely attractive woman come out of the
White Spot. She came up to the open front window on my side and
said in a man's voice, "Hi, Jerry." I realized that
this was Paul, a "Christ Brother" who I had spoken to
months earlier. I had met him in a park while he was applying
antibiotic cream to a festering wound on the foot of one of his
disciples. I had told him: "Christianity doesn't require
that you and your followers go barefoot and wear identical white
robes and smoke the same kind of hand-rolled Bull Durham cigarettes.
Jesus is about flexibility. That's the whole thing," I
said, challenging his ego in front of his flock, "connectedness.
Look in the book of John: 'I and my Father are one.' It doesn't
matter what clothes you wear or what kind of job you have."
I told him about some cool cafés
in Denver that always needed waiters. He took my words to heart—the
next time I saw him, he was a waiter at Muddy's, a bookshop/café
where Jack Kerouac used to hang out. Instead of his Biblical
robe, he wore standard hippy clothes. He gave me a paper he'd
typed about Zoroastrianism. Now, months later, he was a sparkling
transvestite.
I smoked part of a joint with him
and dropped him off at a hotel, where he had a date with a businessman.
Then I cleared with Red and headed back for Capitol Hill. "35
off-and-on Capitol Hill," I radioed. "You're fourth
up," Red answered. Business was slowing down, and I knew
I wouldn't be getting any calls for a while, so I pulled into
a closed gas station, into the corner where two cement walls joined.
I was a little high from smoking
marijuana with the Christian transvestite, and I suddenly felt
so weary. I lay down on the gray vinyl seat. A faint smell of
vomit wafted up from the floorboards. I curled up into the fetal
position and listened to the hateful, metallic voice of Red on
the taxi radio. He was a poet tonight: "I need a cab at
Five Points / No rain no snow / A man with a gun is a free man.
Gotcha, 14. 51 pick up at the Brown Palace." I got up
and started the motor. I just drove around, thinking. I felt
a lot of evil around me, then noticed out of the very corner of
my eye a black bat-like wing move inside of the cab at the far
right of my windshield, as if some demon had almost materialized
right in the fucking car. Whooo. Jesus Christ, get me out of
here. Red, shut up! But I couldn't turn off the radio; Red,
my horrible surrogate father, was my link to the world at that
particular moment.
I felt an urgent desire to talk
to my real father. Maybe my father could help me decide what
to do with my life; maybe he could guide me out of this bleak
existence. This was problematic: I had three fathers to choose
from. Let's see now, Truman is out; I've had enough hell lately.
Leroy? I think he's somewhere in Japan or Thailand, and I still
don't have enough money saved to fly to wherever he is. Richard?
No way. He'd probably put me to work managing one of his trailer
parks for minimum wage. Or maybe he'd have me cleaning out bee
hives. Truman? Dad? Richard?
I took the cab back to the office,
too early to tip Kathy. When I got home, I noticed a letter from
Leroy in my mailbox. In it was a one-way plane ticket to Thailand.
30,000 feet over the ocean for hour
upon hour, lovely Malaysian women serving me free champagne and
bringing me hot wet towels and good food, life was already looking
up. The junk American movies I watched on the double-decker jumbo
747 reminded me of the land I was leaving, but I had no mental
picture of the place where I was headed. I really hadn't given
Thailand much thought. All I knew how to say in Thai was "Saw
wahdee, cop": hello.
I looked excitedly out the window
as Bangkok came into view. I quickly exchanged addresses with
a lovely young Thai woman who sat beside me. She was a business
major at Denver University on her way home to visit her parents
for the summer. Her eyes sparkled as we said our good-byes.
Leroy met me as I emerged from the
plane into the hot, crowded airport. He looked like a weird Thai
gentleman—he wore a luxuriant silk shirt with no collar, western
slacks, and expensive shoes. His hair was a lot grayer than I
remembered, and his mustache was bushy and came down past the
sides of his mouth in exotic points. His fingernails were very
long. It seemed like he was wearing a lot of gold. He hugged
me tightly, and I noticed that he was getting fat.
We got in his little Toyota. It
was so rusted out that I could see the road rushing by under my
feet. It had a great sound system, though, and he was playing
an Elton John tape. In Thailand, people drive on the left. It
made me feel strange to be sitting in what for me had always been
the driver's seat, yet having no control of the car, since the
steering wheel was on the right. It was disconcerting. I felt
giddy. We stopped in front of a standing Buddha the size of the
Statue of Liberty, and Leroy had somebody take our picture together.
I felt shy putting my arm around him to pose; we hadn't seen
each other for a long time.
We drove through Bangkok towards
Sam Prahn, 30 miles northwest. Everything in Bangkok looked so
very foreign to me. The Thai words on the brightly-colored signs
on the buildings looked psychedelic, curling every which way,
insane. The sidewalks were crowded with people, everyone with
black hair and brown skin. Tuke-tukes, noisy three-wheeled two-stroke
taxis, careened by belching clouds of gray smoke. The hot streets
were packed with people on bicycles, people on foot, and animals.
I saw a family of five riding on one Honda 50 motorcycle, the
baby standing on the floorboard between the father's legs.
After driving through a few miles
of farmland, we reached the town of Sam Prahn. A young cadet
on guard duty at the gate of the Police Academy saluted Leroy.
As we drove through the Academy, I felt as if I were on the grounds
of an American university. We parked, and Leroy carried my suitcase
up the stairs of an American-style apartment building. Inside
his apartment, there were books and Buddhas everywhere. On one
wall was a large framed color photograph of Thailand's king and
queen. I went to use the bathroom, a little tile room with a
hose for bathing and for flushing the squat toilet.
Leroy showed me where I could put
my guitar and backpack, and told me about his new computer. Then,
true to form, he said, "Do you wanna smoke a joint?"
I'd just had a one-day stopover in Malaysia, where they had recently
executed two Australian students for having less than an ounce
of marijuana.
"Is it legal here?" I
asked.
"No." I could see myself
rotting in a filthy Thai prison. "But we won't get caught."
"OK," I said.
It was too weird being stoned.
Leroy was trying to tell me about Thai money and a little about
the military governments that changed after each coup. The new
governments would always allow the king and queen to remain in
their palace. The Thai people loved their king and queen. While
Leroy spoke, I was transfixed by the royal portrait on his wall.
The queen was so beautiful, I couldn't believe it, and so incredibly
foreign, regal, and wise. The king looked like some kind of computer
programmer. Leroy said that the king had been a sax player in
New York until somebody died in one of the coups, and then he
was contacted and informed that he was the new king. The marijuana
had broken down my defenses, and I was starting to feel the strangeness
of a different culture too intensely.
The next day, Leroy left for Chicago
to translate for some Thai businessmen. They needed his help
to negotiate the purchase of some gigantic machines for making
tires. He gave me a little book called "Thai in 10 Minutes
a Day," and he was off.
I had his apartment and bicycle.
This town, Sam Prahn, was far from the tourist track, and I was
the only white person in it. There were no bilingual menus, and
not even the bankers spoke English. Every day when I'd get hungry
enough, I'd ride Leroy's bike out of the quiet grounds of the
Academy and into the bedlam of downtown Sam Prahn, reciting over
and over again in my head how to ask for an omelet with tomatoes.
The waitress (I found out later)
thought I'd said, "I'd like an egg with a hole in it,"
and started to laugh. She tried to understand, but gave up and
came back with another waitress.
"Koon poot alai? (What did
you say?)," asked the second waitress.
"Ow kow pahk kai cop,"
I answered. Still another waitress came to my table. Now three
of them stood and laughed good-naturedly as I tried to order.
Finally, one of them went and got me some spicy chicken, rice,
and vegetables, which was fine with me.
I went there every day and received
Thai lessons from the prettiest of the waitresses, Chandra. One
day, all three of them came up to my table, Chandra asked me which
one of them I'd like to marry. I didn't want to hurt anyone's
feelings, so I said in Thai, "All of you."
The restaurant was built on pontoons.
It floated on a brownish-river covered with water hyacinths.
The sky was always misty and yellow gray. Small, old people
poling ancient boats silently across the water passed by as I
wrote in my journal. Sometimes an ancient boat powered by an
American V8 would blast by, shattering the silence.
I rented a motorcycle and rode north
to Cheng Mai, where for a small price I joined a mountain trek,
about ten young Europeans, led by a Burmese tour guide. We hiked
through the mountains on jungle trails for two days, drinking
from bamboo canteens, which we filled with stream water. We reached
a village near the Burma border. Poppy fields were everywhere.
Lovely native girls wearing tribal dresses with angular patterns
in intense reds and purples used small knives with blades shaped
like quarter-moons to scrape the opium off the pods of the dazzling,
colorful poppies growing on the hillsides. Naked women washed
clothes on the rocks and bathed in a little stream. Girls took
turns removing the hulls from rice using a large crusher, a lever-and-fulcrum
device made from logs.
That night, I smoked opium with
the village chief, who wore a digital watch. We lay on our sides,
facing one another, and took turns smoking from a little round
water pipe that sat on the floor between us. My bed was the floor
of bamboo poles in a hut built four feet above the ground. Beneath
me, I could smell the chief's pigs and hear them moving around.
I was awake all night. The opium made my thoughts substantial,
almost as vivid as real things. Sometimes the movement of the
pigs or the coughing of children would disturb my ruminations,
but mostly, my mind was free to wander, create, and study.
I felt extreme loneliness. I had
come to see my father, and my father was gone. I wasn't feeling
bliss from the opium, only a heightened sense of alienation.
The United States, the Denver streets, Thailand, all seemed foreign
to me.
When I got back to Sam Prahn, Leroy
was home from his business trip to the United States. He had
a day off from teaching, he said, and suggested that we go for
a drive. It was a chilly day, and the sky was white with fog.
We drove for several hours, talking about our lives. Leroy parked
the car at the end of a wharf that extended out into the river.
The fog was so thick that we could see nothing outside of the
car. Occasionally, it would clear just enough to give us a view
of the dark river. We smoked a joint and listened to music from
the 60s and 70s, the Moody Blues, Jackson Browne, and Crosby,
Stills, and Nash, "Teach Your Children."
I told Leroy how when I was a kid,
I thought he was a cool guy, but that I imagined he would have
thought twice before running into a burning building to save me,
while somebody's real father wouldn't have even considered
his own safety. "Why didn't you ever talk about college
or careers with me like other kids' fathers?" I asked.
He took a big, greedy hit from the
joint, as he always did, had a prolonged coughing spasm, thought
carefully, and answered. "Because at that time, I thought
all that stuff was bullshit." He looked in the glove compartment
for a tape, found it, and put it in the tape deck. He fast forwarded
until he found the song he was looking for. It was a song by
Willie Nelson about a guitar player, a lover, a dreamer, who traveled
and wrote poetry. Willie Nelson was almost idolizing the guy
he was singing about, and I knew Leroy played that tape to try
to show me how he felt about me. The white mist surrounded the
car. I began to cry, sobbing deeply, and I wasn't embarrassed.
Leroy knew what was happening.
© 1993 by Jeff Syrop