Fish Lake Oddyssey; Un Novellette

Whenever Randall thought of Fish Lake, he thought of the trees, lots of them, crowding against the shore as if they were about to jump in, like pilgrims at the banks of the Ganges, or Ganghes, or however it's spelled. But they didn't jump in - they were trees, and were hardly about to start moving around, why did he have such thoughts?

The trees also reminded him of the time that he'd been out on the lake with his father and had to go do his natural thing, and when he told his father his father couldn't believe it, and sighed and looked up at the sky for some kind of sign, maybe for an angel to descend out of the sky and hover over their boat and tell him that it was all right if he wanted to hold his son over the edge of the boat and let him do his natural thing into the lake, nobody was watching... But no angel came down and his father grumped and told his older brother Rick to pull in his line, and his older brother Rick cried "What? Why?" and when he heard why he lunged across the boat to slug Randall in the arm and their father squawked and tried to karate chop Rick's arm and missed and stumbled and hurt his shin on one of the planks they had to sit on and he made a sound like a tire hissing and then he took off his hat to smite Rick and missed and caught his thumb in one of the little hooks in his fisherman's hat just like the TV show dads.

"Ga-Ah-Ah!...Rick!" he hissed between his teeth. "Just pull in the line!"

They pulled in their lines and then their father picked some things up and put them down in other places, and moved his tackle box, and manuevered their fishing poles around and shook his head and grumbled and picked up one of the fishing poles and put it down somewhere else and he told Rick to sit back down and he told Randall to move a little left and Randall looked at him and he told him to move again and Randall moved right and their father told him to move back and he leaned backward and their father made a sound like a tire hissing and told him to just stay where the hell he was and then he told Rick to sit back down and he made Rick move the cooler down below his seat and then he told Randall to hold on and he crouched by the motor and unhooked something and pulled something down lower out a little and then he pulled on the cord and the motor didn't start so he did it a few more times, and his hat fell off and his hair stood up in a manner undignified for a man with receding hair and Randall tried very hard to stifle a laugh and Rick hit him and the motor started for just a second and then it stopped and Rick stood up again and told their father that he had to choke it and their father suggested something else he could choke and told him to sit back down. But he did apparently choke it because then the motor started and he revved it up and checked something and told Rick to sit down and told Randall to hold on and the boat started off with the motor revving and roaring like they were going 100 miles and hour but they were doing about 15 but Randall found it thrilling and enjoyed the spray of water but only too soon their father let the motor die down and they drifted.

Randall could see the trees of the East shore only twenty yards away, slowly drifting closer and closer. Their father had a paddle out and was sweating and huffing and splashing and the boat moved very slowly toward the trees.

As they approached the trees and the shore, Rick let fly a remark suggesting the possibility that there might be bears in the trees, and suggested Randall carry a couple rocks in with him.
"There's no bears," their father said, gasping and panting. The approaching trees took on a looming, darkening aspect as Randall considered the possibility of the bears. They were a few yards from the shore when Randall suggested that he'd rather go use the bathrooms in the lodge. Their father responded by swatting Rick with his own baseball hat, an impressive maneuver that caught both boys by surprise by its misdirection.

"Rick! Go with him!"

Their father clambered up to the front of the boat and hopped into the shallow water and held the boat by a rope and told Rick to climb onto a nearby rock and Rick clambered onto the rock and Randall asked if he could move the boat around the rock so that he could hop onto the shore and his father assured him that they couldn't and told him to climb out and Rick shouted for Randall to hurry and Randall asked if they could move around to the other side and his voice took on a higher pitch that signified panic and his father spoke soothingly and held out his free hand to give him a boost and Randall ended up clambering onto his father's back and putting a shoe into his kidney and scrabbled onto the rock and up the slope to where Rick had already turned and started into the bushes and told Randall to go over to the other bushes and no he couldn't use the same bush and Randall found a bush and began to do his natural thing and looked up and could see another fishing boat clearly through a gap in the trees about twenty yards away.

Now adult, Randall smiled and sighed at the memory and shook his head when Captain Lance asked him what was so funny and tugged on his pole a little and looked out over the lake and dug on the natural beauty all around him and reflected on the bittersweetness of memory and the past and time and smiled at the First Mate and the other Passenger tossed back another big gulp of his Cold One and realized that now all of the sudden he had to do his natural thing.

Dream 1: Mickey Mouse is Real (from Hagenart's Five Favorite Dreams)

This dream occurred during a family party at my parents' home. I believe I was living at home at the time, in 1991. I had to use the bathroom, and went downstairs to use the restroom in the basement. My nephews were watching TV and trying to pull the arms off a stuffed gorilla which I'd given to my mother for Christmas a few years previously. I went into the bathroom, and discovered that whichever nephew had previously used it had not flushed the toilet. Sharply annoyed, I flushed the toilet and imagined dropping the nephew head-first into the bowl. As I used the bathroom, a plastic sword emerged from under the bathroom door.
"Who's that?" I said. Then I heard a thud like someone's forehead hitting the door, and the sword slid free, a foot or so forward from the door. A moment later, a tiny hand reached under the door jamb, trying to reach the sword, unsuccessfully. I flushed the toilet and grabbed the sword, gently poking at the tiny hand with its tip. The hand retracted with a squawk.

When I emerged from the bathroom with the sword in hand, no nephew was in sight. I walked down the hall to the family room, where all three nephews were watching TV. "Whose sword is this?" I asked. None of them replied. I put the sword on the table at the end of the room and walked back down the hall to my bedroom. It occurred to me as I walked down the hall that the sword belonged to Mickey Mouse. I laid down on my bed and realized that it had been a long time since I had taken a moment to sit or lay down and do nothing. It had been days, maybe weeks, maybe months. It felt good to lay on the bed and do nothing and not think about what I should be doing. At that moment it occurred to me that Mickey Mouse had given the sword to me. It was getting dark outside, but I did not turn out the light. The room became dim, and at that moment I realized that Mickey Mouse was as real as I myself was. I realized that all the characters in all the cartoons were real. I felt that I myself was a cartoon. This realization gave me profound peace.

I eventually walked back down the hall and saw the nephews running up the stairs. My sister was calling for them get in the car. I looked for the sword on the table but someone had taken it. I assumed one of my nephews had grabbed it, but when I went upstairs and asked my sister about the plastic sword she furrowed her brow and looked confused. "I don't think so," she said. "I don't know."

That night I dreamt that had an enormously long right leg and that my right foot had giant wheels like a tractor and I skated everywhere on it. The tall witch on the tricycle could not prevail upon me and everything I touched turned to plastic.

Interpretation:
The nephews symbolize family fertility, nature, and also filth and bugs. The plastic sword represents the sterile beauty of commercialism. I claimed the sword as a mission to protect the world from all monsters that can be killed or scared off by dull-edged weapons. The bathroom indicates my tower, my refuge of strength and security. The toilet was not flushed because nature is unreliable and has terrible manners. Mickey Mouse is real. My intense vision-like moment of crystal realization symbolizes what a great idea might feel like to a genius like Einstein or Archimedes. The plastic sword's disappearance indicates that I have sneaky nephews. The giant right foot in my dream symbolizes cool ideas that may someday be possible with advances in prosthetic technology.

The Foothill Dark Wooden Box (From 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

Eventually I moved into a horrible dark wooden box on Foothill, near a gas station and the liquor store and walking distance from a supermarket. The dark wooden box had fake dark wood interior panelling with such an extraordinarily unpleasant texture that I couldn't bear to touch it or even come within two feet of the walls, the decorating of which I left to the spiders.

While living in the box and working at an architect's office I experienced a brief spasm of relatively lucid thought and decided to quit my job and pursue my dreams of becoming an artist for as long as I could live off my credit line. I pursued those dreams by long morning walks, feverish hours of artistic composition, and occasional trips to the liquor store. I sustained those dreams with regular trips to the gas station's ATM for hits to the old Available Cash Credit Line.
The long morning walks became longer and longer, extending into the early afternoons; the feverish hours of artistic composition became desultory evenings, and the occasional trips became middling to frequent to some cherished friendships with the staff and other regular customers of liquor store #51.
The regular trips to the ATM and the artistic dreams and the walks and everything else ended all at once on one afternoon when I discovered that credit card companies can change their mind about your credit line whenever they feel like it - unlike a savings account, which they can only change their mind about once. So I had to go back to work.

My landlord at the dark box on Foothill was an incredibly vigorous and healthy man fifty years my senior named Chuck (name changed, I don't know why, I'll never see him again and he'll never read this). Chuck originally lived one floor above me and was always running up and down the stairs on his way to the gym where he vigorously pumped iron and told people how happy he was to be divorced. He was especialy happy to talk about the joy of his divorce with the fifteen or so college-aged young women who lived directly above my dark box and across the hallway from Chuck. He made fast friends with all of them and dragged his telescope over to their apartment and helped them with various furniture moving and handyman type projects. He eventually became the apartment manager by complaining to everyone about how badly run and organized the complex was and blaming it all on the previous apartment manager until she'd left and he'd been chosen by whatever mysterious process stupid rich people have to choose their underlings and flunkies.

The fifteen or twenty or so young women who lived above me made an incredible amount of noise all the time by synchronizing their television, stereo system, vaccum cleaner, and mindless screams of youthful abandon to reach maximum volume at unpredictable intervals throughout the course of the day or night in order to fully establish their presence in the ears and minds of all the apartment dwellers in the complex and the surrounding neighborhoods, all in the hopes of someday being discovered by some big shot in the Noise business who would hear them and appreciate their decibelic potential and pay them money to keep people awake all the time.

But they didn't bank on having a creepy unemployed neighbor downstairs who always wore bathrobes and never shaved and sometimes staggered upstairs to knock on their door and smile apologetically and creep them out and after a few visits from el creepo they gave up on the noise business. But they schemed revenge, and eventually managed to insinuate to Chuck that the peeping tom that some of the tenants had complained about might be the creepy unemployed guy in the bathrobe who lived below them.

So one day as I returned from my daily walk, sweating and tired and wondering how it could be that I could walk myself half to death every day and still be gaining weight, I ran into Chuck, who just happened to be coming out of the apartment complex and poking around the front lawn and making as if to be examining the grass or something like any normal apartment manager would pretend to be doing so as to arrange a chance meeting with a tenant that they had some kind of vague problem with.
"How you doing, Andy?" Chuck asked me. I replied something or other, I liked Chuck all right and actually kind of welcomed having any human to talk to as my life was somewhat hermit-like at the time, but I had no interest in anything he said and couldn't think of a single thing that we could really ever say to each other because I thought he was a moron. We talked for a bit and then he told me that some of the female tenants had complained about a peeping tom. He shook his head angrily. "Boy, I'd like to catch the guy doing it," he said. "I'd hit him. I'd punch him right in the face." He made a significant look to me, as if he'd said something that only I in the whole world would find meaningful. He also told me the peeping tom had been seen in a baseball cap. He went on for a while and then left me to go prowl around the lawn again.
Only later did I realize that he might have suspected me of being the peeping tom, and that he might have been trying to scare me into making some kind of admission, or into guilty sweating or something. By the time I'd realized that he'd caught the actual peeping tom, or thought he had, and confronted him in front of the complex so loudly that I and several others came out of our apartments to see him shaking his fist at a much taller and younger man, threatening over and over again to "knock you right on your back." I was glad for Chuck to have found the villain, but the possibility of violence unnerved me enough that I crept back into my dark box.

Eventually after having to get a job and actually look at my finances I decided that I couldn't afford to live in the dark box anymore. Chuck told me to make sure and clean behind the oven and fridge and described the complicated and physically stressful process whereby these appliances might be moved away from the wall so that the black disgusting substances that tended to accumulate behind heavy appliances could be cleaned out with various chemicals and abrasive devices. He told me that if I cleaned behind these appliances that I would surely get my full $300 deposit back except for the $25 fee which was not refundable.

The friends who'd agreed to help me clean the dark box ended up watching a Karl Malone movie on old channel 20 and didn't come by until it was dark and I'd exhausted myself by looking through some of my personal papers and giving myself philosophical vertigo over the vanity of existence. They came way too late to help with the cleaning so we vacuumed a little and tried not to disturb the spiders on the fake wood walls and then we decided to go get some dinner and we got in my car and pulled away and saw a little boy carrying a gas can.
My friend Brian said we should stop and help him and I said something about Nature's Way and kept driving because I was still bitter about them coming over so late. We didn't clean any after dinner either and we drove to my new home which was Brian's couch.
Chuck probably still felt bad about suspecting me of being the peeping tom, so he only deducted $30 from my deposit and must have cleaned the back of the oven himself.

Relocation 5: South Temple (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

At some point my friend Amir talked me into moving in with him and another roommate in their house on South Temple. "You can't live with your parents forever," he told me.
"Well of course not," I agreed. "Eventually, I will die."
Amir took me to see the house even though I remember that I'd already decided, or I should say my girlfriend at the time had already decided, that I would move in with them.

It was one of those classy old style pioneer type houses with an ornate wooden railing on the stairs and a very convenient toilet in the laundry room. An indescribable smell permeated the house, a kind of grand old house moldy-wood type smell mixed with spilled beer mixed with garbage. It reminded me of places I'd visited as a child that I'd been glad that I didn't live in. The smell did, not the house. Well, the house did too, but since I was never able to experience the house without the smell, except on the very last day after we'd cleaned it for the first time, it's difficult to judge fairly, except to try and imagine how the house looked in my mind while standing in an open field far away from it.

I don't remember much about visiting the house with Amir when he was trying to talk me into moving in even though I was already going to, except that we went upstairs and took a look at the bedroom where I would be moving in and I met the guy who was moving out. I don't remember him at all, but I remember he had all these comic book style illustrations on the walls that I thought were really cool - mostly elfin people with swords - they were copied from Japanese comics. For some reason those illustrations and the guy's furniture made me view the room as hip and an adventurous place to live.
But he took all his illustrations and hip drawing tables and I moved in and filled the room with my banker boxes of books and papers and junk and baskets of clothes. And the bunk bed, the only furniture left in the room when I moved in because it belonged to the landlord, and the previous tenant had told me it was cool to sleep in it because his girlfriend liked to sleep in the top bunk. I thought he was referring to some kind of hip sexy stuff but I didn't get it.

I hated sleeping in the bunk bed because I didn't want to sleep on top because I am afraid of heights and I didn't want to sleep on the bottom because I couldn't see the top and I produced several horror movies in my mind that featured demonic little ghost kids lowering their evil little heads over the side of the top bunk and grinning at me like the little kid my brother and I met when I was young and church-going and my brother dragged me to do his home-teaching with him and the family we visited was a prominent family in the ward and they had three sons and the youngest would jabber to us in a satanic tongue and run around the room in a pcp-related state of agitation and he swatted his older brother's head with a ruler and the older brother glared at him for half the lesson before he took an entire fisher price parking garage and brought it down on his little brother's head and my brother and I were speechless with shock and also with half expectation half dread for some kind of supernaturally evil reaction from that little brother but he only screamed and cried and the father looked sadly at the older brother as if he'd said something mildly out of line.

Another anxiety was the window of my bedroom which they told me not to open but I did because I like the fresh air and I suffered an invasion of box elder bugs from the tree that grew against the house, and I shut the window and breathed the rancid stale air of the house but during their mating season they kept coming in through the cracks between the molecules of the window and they kept coming and dying on the window sill and then the floor around the window and I bought raid and I sprayed the window and the floor and the room stunk and I thought maybe I would sustain brain damage from the fumes and I took to sleeping on the couch which smelled like beer but the dining room at the end of the couch had a giant painting by the landlady of two frogs kissing over a fiery red background which I did not sleep well under. So I went back upstairs to sleep.

The kitchen gave me anxiety because it stunk and I could not eat from my roommates' plates because I suspected them of being bad dishwashers and leaving their plates crawling with germs, and when I discovered in the course of my first week that the kitchen had no microwave but had a nice stove (which Kevin [name changed] demonstrated for me by lighting the pilot light and at the moment he crouched down with the match in his teeth I knew I would never be using the stove) and then also I knew that 75% of all the meals I liked to prepare for myself I would not be able to prepare because they required food irradiated by microwaves. So I ate mostly peanut butter sandwiches and beer, which helped with my anxiety quite a lot.

And at another point Amir achieved a girlfriend, an amazing coup for a man who'd come to this country from Malaysia to study engineering and ended up sleeping mostly under his desk in the engineering building at the U or on the couch at the band house, an incredibly filthy house lived in by the members of two local rock bands and the least particular of their girlfriends whom I happened to know because one of their girlfriends who was too particular to live there also happened to be dating myself at the time along with several other people, which is how I met Amir.
Who in any case finally met a girlfriend of his own, who moved in with him/us and ignored Kevin (name changed - no actually that might have been his name after all) and I until Amir went on a trip for a couple weeks and she began wearing exciting clothes and talking to us more and two-timing Amir with a creepy guy in a cowboy hat. She told me about Detroit and her brother who would only sleep with virgins, which mathematically tended to keep his relationships to a short overall average duration. She told me that Detroit was segregated and her family lived in the white part but she wasn't like that because of Amir, who her perverted brother didn't like and spoke of with racial epithets.
She eventually broke up with Amir and he eventually gave up looking for jobs in America because his student visa expired after he'd made friends and slept on couches and under desks and received a Master's in Engineering and given up his religion for booze and loose women, and after all that he cursed America and moved back to Kuala Lumpur to live the good life.

But this is all getting ahead of myself, because the landlady who refused to put in a sprinkler system and watered her lawn the "natural way" with a hose in one hand and a cigarette in her other hand and who enraged her South Temple neighbors with their BMWs and million dollar houses by never fixing up her house and renting it out to loser college guys finally decided that enough was enough and she gave us until the end of the month to move out, which coincided with Amir getting on the plane for Malaysia - almost. Actually he wouldn't be getting on the plane until a week after we were kicked out. So he planned to go stay with his ex-girlfriend for a week, in Detroit, and then take the plane back to Salt Lake in order to take the plane to Malaysia.
"Will you have time to hang out in Salt Lake before you get on the plane to Malaysia?" I asked him.
"Why would I do that?" he asked me, honestly puzzled.
So we had a party on the last night before we cleaned the house and moved out the next day, and Kevin (I guess that was his name) and Amir and I bought tequila, and we discovered that the liquor store sold margarita mixes that were 17% alcohol, because the tequila was already mixed in, which we purchased to mix with more tequila. We also bought juice and fruit and vodka and other cheap liquors and mixed jungle juice, which I'd never tasted but an hour or so before the party started and at least two hours before any guests arrived, I tried some of the jungle juice and was surprised at how delicious it was, so I poured myself a tall glass of it, and Kevin and Amir also poured themselves a tall glass. It was like punch.

We had a few more tall glasses, and then eventually guests started arriving, and about 15 minutes into the party I was drunker than I'd ever been in my life, and about 30 minutes into the party I made offensive remarks to a woman at the party that I'd worked with at the time, and about 45 minutes into the party I felt sick enough to stagger upstairs and try to take a nap. And by about an hour after the party had begun I'd crawled out of my room and barricaded myself in the upstairs bathroom, where I spent the next six or seven hours hyperventilating over the toilet in a desperate effort not to throw up, and ignoring the repeated pounding on the bathroom door from party-goers who'd not been able to find the laundry room, or didn't know the laundry room had a toilet, or who'd tried to get into the laundry room and found someone else using it. Eventually the pounding grew more faint, as people began to give up on the upstairs bathroom or began to leave the party.
Amir got so drunk and sick that he began to pack for his trip in the middle of the party, dragging luggage from his bedroom downstairs, through the mass of people and out to Kevin's car. I later heard, from Kevin, that he'd been sick the first time in the middle of the dancing, then on the stairs, then in the laundry room, then his garbage can, and all over his sheets. He'd slept on a bare mattress that night. Thinking about my time in the upstairs bathroom, and reflecting on the number of people who must have been going through the laundry room, I couldn't help but feel a little guilty as Kevin told me this story, all the while he staggered around the house helping me clean the next morning, still terribly pale.
"I'd take Amir to the airport, if his stuff would fit in my car," I told him.
He told me he'd already taken Amir in. Amir had wanted to leave an hour early, and they hadn't been able to wake me up even though they'd knocked on my bedroom door. "You must have been passed out," Kevin said.
"Oh yeah," I said, or something like that, remembering how weak I'd felt that morning and how it hadn't been too difficult to keep my eyes closed and ignore the knocking, even when Amir had opened the door a crack and said my name. But it was difficult to meet Kevin's glassy, bloodshot eyes, and I was relieved when he turned away to lift his side of the couch.

Dependent in Denver (From 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

After living comfortably at my parents' home for a few years, I lost my head and moved to Denver to stay with my brother. I think I may have done so because I felt bad about mooching off my parents when I had so many brothers to help shoulder the burden. I also had some vague notion that to be a writer I should go out into the world and suffer a little. Not too much, just enough to stir up some good press, maybe.

My brother Michael (name changed) had just graduated from law school in New York, and gotten a job in Denver from some big firm that would eventually fire him for sleeping in his office during his lunch breaks, or maybe it was for telling people he could sneeze at will, I couldn't remember for certain. But at the time I moved in with him he seemed to be doing all right. He had ESPN and some folding chairs and lived in an apartment building for old folks in a predominently gay district near downtown.

The apartment building attracted mainly old folks because it had a supernatural tendency to stay a little too warm all year long, whatever the outside weather. My brother never even turned on the heat, and usually left the windows open, even when it snowed.

As a result of his massive lawyer-level salary, my brother could afford to keep well-stocked with Uncle Ben's beans and rice, which he would prepare for us every night after coming home from an exhausting day of sleeping and sneezing at will. He would spoon my share into the only bowl and eat his share from the pot with the serving spoon while watching baseball games and baseball highlites and baseball recaps and baseball highlite recap shows on ESPN.

Since I'd moved in with my brother to "get some writing done", maybe finish a novel or two, I would spend part of my afternoons typing gibberish with an old typewriter I'd borrowed from my girlfriend, and trying to avoid calls from a groupie I'd picked up from my brother's church group who would call me from her work incessantly all day long whenever she'd come across information about jobs, or magazines that accepted submissions from freelance writers, or apartments in the Denver area - it was all fairly annoying. I appreciated her efforts on my behalf, but I couldn't understand why she had to keep telling me about them.
"Spare me the details and don't call me until you have something concrete," I wanted to tell her. But I didn't, because frankly the novel just wasn't working out, and the phone calls were a bit of a relief from having to pretend to work on the novel and giving myself stomach pains because I hated it so. "Thanks, I'll have to check that out," is what I told her. Then she'd chatter on about it.

Then sometimes after an hour I'd get up and walk around the nearby park which was apparently a famous pickup place in Denver but which I didn't ever realize at the time except there were a lot of cars and people on bikes and I did see a naked man with a turban on his head, reading a book and taking a terrible risk of sunburn and possibly skin cancer in later life.

Eventually I got bored with the trying to write a novel charade and got some temp jobs which were not nearly as impressive to tell about as the failure to write a novel but which paid slightly more and got me out and about. My favorite temp job in Denver was at mailing business in their printer room because my job was to watch a gigantic printer print things and if there was a problem to go see Mr Gonzales and tell him. Mr Gonzales was a nice enough fellow who waxed his mustache and seemed embarassed to have to give me things to do. I went to lunch the first day and when I came back from lunch I couldn't remember how to find the printer room and so I wandered around the office looking and the office was all one floor of a building all around the elevator and it made a full circuit around the elevator with no dividing walls, and I kept going around and around and seeing the same people with every circuit there were more people looking up from their work to stare at me as I passed and with each circuit the mild curiosity of the stares turned to confusion, and the confusion to consternation, and annoyance, and hostility, and finally to uncontrollable laughter, and then I began to panic, and sweat uncontrollably, and I decided to get back on the elevator and go home and then I ran into Mr Gonzales who seemed somewhat embarassed but smiled a confused smile and I told him I was lost and he pointed to a room in the corner where the printer was.

My almost favorite job in Denver was through a friend of the groupie, helping models dress at a fashion show. It sounds like an absurdly fantastic job for a young man, and I can't quite remember why I turned it down. It might have been too early in the morning or something.

I eventually met the groupie's circle of friends and decided I didn't like them very much, and the groupie eventually got a job writing comedy for Bill Marr (name changed slightly). Jeff (name unchanged) got fired from the law firm and we drove back to Salt Lake together. He asked me if I finished the novel and I made some uncomfortable jokes and he asked me if I remembered how much I used to throw up on family trips when I was a kid, and I told him I did. Then he told me that the fellows who lived next door to us in the apartment building in Denver had been a gay couple who thought we had been a gay couple as well, and had been shocked to learn we were brothers.
"Are you sure they were gay?" I asked him. "They were always wearing baseball caps and talking about the Giants."
He told me that gay people often wore baseball caps and were sometimes San Francisco Giant fans. Then he asked me if I'd had any trouble from people when I walked in the park near the apartment. I told him about the naked man in the turban, and he made a pained look, and told me he was sorry I hadn't finished the novel.

12th East; Beginning of the End (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

I moved into a duplex on 1200 East and around 600 South in my last year of college, it was near enough the university that I could have walked but I usually drove anyway, because I didn’t want to waste my parking pass and I worried that the manager of the duplex would do something strange to my car if I left it on the curb. He wasn’t a violent man, but he used power tools after midnight, and seemed to prefer to do his yardwork at around that time as well, and carried a fake gun wrapped with duct tape around with him and I therefore knew him to be not entirely reasonable.
But I knew that Waylon (name changed) wasn’t a violent man because if he had been I surely would have perished at his hands a few days after I’d moved in and poured a vat of spaghetti down the garbage disposal in the sink that had no garbage disposal and clogged the pipes and brought in Roto Rooter and I apologized to Waylon for the disaster and told him I would in the future make certain to pour the spaghetti down the drain with the garbage disposal, and he looked at me and I asked him; “which sink is the sink with the garbage disposal?” and he looked at me and then he pointed at the one that I’d poured the spaghetti down and I told him that I’d poured the spaghetti down that sink.
“Uh oh,” Waylon said. Then he installed a garbage disposal in the sink I’d poured the spaghetti down and he showed me the switch that I hadn’t been able to find the previous day after I’d poured the spaghetti because it hadn’t been there the previous day and I’d looked all over the kitchen for it like a defragmenting robot because I’d never lived away from home and could not conceive of a kitchen sink without a garbage disposal unless it was a sink that had another sink right next to it with the garbage disposal. Waylon flipped the switch and the disposal roared and he smiled at me like I was a child. “Hello,” he said beatifically, because he said that when he didn’t say “uh oh.” And I smiled and never poured anything down either sink but water as long as I lived there.
I shared my half of the duplex with a law student or maybe he was a pre-law student but he’d gone to school in Oklahoma for some reason, and learned how to mimic a southern accent there for Hook-up purposes and I can’t remember his name for sure but it may have been Sergei (name changed). I had some troubles with Sergei because all the women I knew seemed to like him a little too much and because he and his large hulking cousin would sometimes get drunk and pick up the Plymouth Champ I drove at the time and put it in places awkward for me to drive out of and in the morning they would be too sick to put it back and I would have to call my girlfriend and ask her to come get my car out of the tree.
I didn’t last at 12th East because I began to realize that with the move I’d taken my first few baby steps out from my mommy’s apron strings and out into the big real world and it felt horribly wrong, and Sergei began to remind me of my brothers and Waylon began wearing a salad bowl on his head and a lead apron whenever he used his PC and one day my girlfriend told me that it was almost a year since I’d moved out on my own and I began packing my dice and my stolen sci-fi paperbacks and my reams and reams of notebooks with secret notes and a few rotting shirts and moved the hell back home.

Relocation 2; Down to the Basement (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

For most of my youth I had to share a bedroom with my older brother Jeff (name not changed), and in that time developed a powerful and ultimately destructive urge for a privacy denied me by the overpopulated conditions in our family. I would have been a much happier child, I'm convinced, if I'd not had any siblings, and my parents had confined theirselves to a single birth event in the late sixties and concentrated on the challenges and obscure rewards of raising a single creative genius.
But, like Finwe, the King of the Noldor who couldn't be content with the one genius child (Curufinwe), and had to remarry that Vanyar woman and spread his brood through half of Valinor, my parents chose the evolutionarily safer path of multiple offspring, thinning the family gene pool considerably.
In their defense, and unlike the foolish Finwe, they'd already had four other children when their genius came along, so it would have been somewhat difficult for them to make the one-child decision at that time (but not impossible, as I've pointed out to them on several occasions).

So I had the four older siblings, and there were only the four bedrooms in the house, and Jeff and I were the youngest and by the remorseless illogic of primogeniture forced to share the last bedroom. Trapped in cramped lodgings with a domineering and intrusive older brother, I sought privacy in the last refuge left to me; my own mind. Thus at the very beginning of my life's journey, I diverged into a disastrous path, and developed the habit of interior monologues and dialogues, and interior tribunals, and interior shouted debates that has rendered me unfit for most social intercourse and any meaningful employment.

Of course I exhibited few symptoms of the condition at the time; my nightly prayers tended to go on for a while, so much so that I often fell asleep in mid-prayer, especially after I'd begun giving the prayers on my bed, under the covers. Jeff would wait patiently while I prayed, until he could hear the sound of snoring. Then he would leap out of his bed and slug me in the arm until I came out of my religious stupor.
My only other symptom was a tendency to sleep under blankets tucked in around the entire perimeter of my recumbant body, from head to feet, after an indescribably difficult and time-consuming self-tucking procedure.

About the time I turned eleven, the twins went on missions and left us with a wealth of bedrooms, and Jeff moved downstairs and I was left with my own room, my own empire, a space of my own to mold as I saw fit. The exhilaration of my sudden accession to all that power went, I am ashamed to say, to my head. I forbade any other family members to enter the space, especially my mother, and remodeled the room along strange, fascist lines. The blue of the carpet was declared by my Ministry of Truth to be ocean, and nobody - including myself - could walk on it except by putting books and papers down as stepping stones. The closet was declared to be an evil area, the room's slum, where I was afraid to be at night but enjoyed the occasional tittillating excursion through by the safe light of day.
Sensing my peculiar dread of the closet with an older brother's uncanny instinct for the younger's weakness, Jeff would often hide in that closet and wait for me to return home from school. After I'd had time to retreat into the safe, privacy of my room and relax for a few minutes, he would leap out of the closet to enjoy my harrowed shrieks.

Eventually the twins returned and Jeff went on his own mission. The twins took no interest in acts of terror against my room-state, and I enjoyed a long spell of peaceful detachment from the rest of the family and the world in general - except for school. I molded an army of clay soldiers out of the insulating clay my father sometimes took home from work, and equipped them with screws and razors and sent them out on murderous errands throughout the room, looking for a fight. Usually they ended up hacking each other to pieces. I had an old nerf mini-basketball that I sometimes played with that the soldiers worshipped as a god. I would speak through the nerf mini-basketball to give them their orders.
I also instituted sports leagues for the room, with sports pages full of stats and scores that I would generate by rolling dice and writing down the results. Sometimes my mother would knock on my door and ask if she could come in and I treated her like a foreign reporter that could topple my regime by seeing my secret sports-score generating technique or seeing that the god my soldiers worshipped was a nerf mini-basketball and telling everyone, so when she knocked I would shout and plead with her not to come in and would try to hid the dice and the notebooks full of numbers and the nerf and the soldiers and walk around the room nervously while she came in with my laundry and occasionally pointed at some strange appurtenance in the room.
"Why are your books all over the floor?" she would ask, and I would sullenly answer some lie and try to get her to leave and assure her that there were no human rights violations going on and everyone could vote whenever they pleased.
"I'm reading them."
"Are those little clay men?"
"Yes."
"What are you doing with them? You need to clean those sheets. Help me take them off"
"No! Wait! I'll tell you everything! Let me get the sheets! I'll talk, damn you!"

Like Hitler in the bunker, I took to spending longer and longer periods of my days and weekends in my room, brooding over the wrongs done to me at school during the day, plotting some kind of dark overthrow, imagining secret weapons to turn the tide, postulating the existence of extraterrestrial intelligences that might possibly be induced to invade earth and destroy Washington DC and take my school and my brothers away in flying saucers.
The room, denied competent cleaning for long periods of time, became dingy and subterranean in appearance, despite being on the second floor, with grimy walls and dusty shelves and dark blue cowboy drapes always closed and, truth be told, a strong odor. I'd become an adolescent.

This dreamlike existence ended with a terrible onrush of events: My grandmother moved in with us, and I was moved kicking and screaming down into the basement with my older brothers, and forced to share a room again (albeit a more clean and spacious one). This cataclysmic event shaped and confirmed my world-view not unlike the expulsion of the Israelite tribes from Zion. And as the Israelites lamented at the rivers of Babylon, so I lamented in the shower my expulsion from the room - for as long as I could before my brothers would pound apishly on the bathroom door and howl for me to finish the shower.
And as the expulsion of the Jews from Zion confirmed the words of the doomsayer prophets and won the allegiance of the backsliders wholeheartedly to Yahwism, so my expulsion from the room won my wholehearted allegiance to the path of living inside my head and ensured that rednecks and troglodytes would persecute me for my views and flick spitwads at the back of my head in school.

My grandmother turned out to be a tower of ancient wisdom and taught me about life and coaxed me out of my shell and told long annoying stories over and over and kept doing the dishes all the time when she couldn't see the dirt on them and so my dad had to sneak into the kitchen at night and re-clean them all except when he was irritated at her and would clean the dishes during the day loudly so that she heard and he could tell her she hadn't cleaned them well enough. Once a balloon from my mother's birthday party drifted around the house on the heating vent currents and crept up behind her while she was doing the dishes and scared the bejesus out of her when it touched her shoulder.