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Walton Predicts

WALTON PREDICTS

Walton Predicts graphic by David Jouris

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser June 2014)

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Niels Bohr

My friend David Jouris, an eccentric mapmaker, photographer and quotation collector, has for several years suggested I create a web site called Walton Predicts. This suggestion stems from David’s amazement at my uncanny ability to make predictions that always come true. I have resisted creating such a site because making predictions is a sacred art, such prescience granted by the gods, which gifts I dare not taint with commercialization or anything smacking of self-aggrandizement. I am but a conduit for these coming attractions, an English channel.

Then, too, I frequently suffer from Prediction Block and would feel tawdry were I to create demand for something I was subsequently unable to deliver. No. Walton Predicts will have to be a sometime thing, that poetic summation of the transient nature of existence courtesy of DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin.

“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” Jean de la Fontaine

Walton Predicts: Coffee prices will go way up very soon. Brazil, the world’s leading producer of coffee, is in the midst of the worst drought in three hundred years and this year’s coffee crop is paltry. Brazil also produces vast quantities of sugar, wheat, soy, and infectious dance music, much of which they export and all of which have been adversely impacted by the drought, so prices for those goodies will be going way up, too.

Our neighbor works for Peet’s Coffee and has the job I would have wanted when I was twenty-five had I known there was such a job to want. Now, as I enter my dotage, his job sounds like living hell to me, but if you love to travel, love coffee and love the places where coffee grows, this is the job for you, except my neighbor already has the job. He flies all over the world visiting plantations that grow coffee for Peet’s sake. He makes sure the farmers are growing their coffee sustainably, checks the quality of the beans, sets dates for harvesting and so forth.

He recently stopped by while I was weeding my vegetables and I asked where he was off to next.

“New Guinea,” he said, half-smiling and half-frowning. “Fantastic place. Lousy hotels.”

I mentioned the drought in Brazil and predicted soaring coffee prices.

“You’re right about that,” he said with a knowing nod. “I’ll bring you a bag of New Guinea beans.”

Which he did, and now I’m hooked on those beans that tell of bittersweet naked people with a different word for each of a thousand shades of jungle green.

“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.” Paul Valery

Walton Predicts: Fresh fruit will soon be a luxury item for most of us in America, not a dietary staple. I was in Corners of the Mouth, my favorite church turned grocery store, and was thrilled to find bowls of fruit samples amidst the plums and apricots. I tasted the flesh of a crimson plum. Ambrosia! The price? $5.99 a pound. I weighed one of those delectable fruits. A third of a pound. Two dollars per plum. Four bites. Fifty cents per bite. No can do. Prices at Harvest Market similarly exorbitant.

“The future will be better tomorrow.” Dan Quayle

A reader recently pointed out that my novels are rife with predictions, and that reminded me of a scene from my novel Under the Table Books wherein Derek, a homeless boy, asks Mr. Laskin, once the wealthiest man on earth and now a homeless savant, what can be done about the vanishing ozone layer. Written in 1992, but not published until 2009, Under the Table Books predicted many things that have since come to pass.

“Always the same basic story structure,” says Mr. Laskin, smiling up at the morning sun. “Somebody gets killed. Always several suspects, each with a powerful motive. The detectives, a man and a woman, always figure out who did it by studying the history of the place. The solution is always there. In history.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” says Mr. Laskin, excited by a sudden upsurge in lucidity, “that you must scale the whirlwind to the peaceful sky country and study the history of the world to find out what you need to know.”

“About the ozone layer? How?”

“I’ll make a wild guess,” says Mr. Laskin, feeling moved to oratory. “Pure conjecture, but then what isn’t?”

“Wait. I want to write this down,” says the boy, bringing forth a notebook from his back pocket. “Okay, go.”

“But first,” says Mr. Laskin, holding out his hand, “allow me to introduce myself. I am Alexander Laskin.”

“Derek,” says the boy, the warmth of the old man’s hand bringing tears to his eyes.

“So here’s what I would guess,” says Mr. Laskin, giving Derek a reassuring smile. “People lived under a brutal sun for thousands of years. We’ve all seen pictures of cities made of mud in the desert, and you’ll notice several things in those pictures. First, most everybody stays inside most of the time because there are no trees for shade. And when people do go outside, they cover their bodies from head to toe, except at night when they dance by their tiny fires. Tiny because wood is so scarce. Mostly naked, I’d imagine, night being the only safe time to do so. And they’re all skinny because they’ve learned to survive on very little. So maybe that’s what we’ll have to do when the ozone layer is mostly gone.”

Derek keeps writing. “So do you think the ozone layer will ever come back?”

“That you’ll have to ask the universal mind, if you make it up the inside of the whirlwind. No easy feat, I imagine. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must finish my mystery. The cause of the crime is apparently inextricably enmeshed with the manufacture of automobiles.”

 

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Dancing With Destiny

Fred & Ginger

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser July 2013)

“Do not blame others for things that you have brought upon yourself.” Alexander McCall Smith

Do we, indeed, bring things upon ourselves? Are we the masters of our own destinies or are we pawns of forces we have no control over? These are questions I entertain myself with while walking to town today.

Having learned from my trusty tide chart that there is a negative tide attaining negative zenith at 9:30 in the AM today, and being a lover of negative tides, I decide to begin my daily trek to the village by walking down to Big River Beach, communing with the oceanic sprits, and then accessing the village by climbing the seventy stairs from the beach up to the headlands and from there meandering along the little trail through blackberry bushes and wild roses to the Presbyterian church.

“But is this what I really want to do?” I wonder as I amble down the steepest stretch of Little Lake Road. “Or have forces I have no control over made me think this is what I want to do when, in fact, it is what they (whoever they are) want me to do?”

I make a left onto Clark Street and head south toward Big River Beach. I am excited about the prospect of exploring the mouth of Big River with the tide so low and…or is my excitement merely a trick of those forces that want me on that beach at that particular time because…

Two bearded men approach me, one holding a leash connected to a large brown dog. As they draw near I instinctively give them a wide berth, and I’m glad I do because the large dog lunges at me as they pass, and the man is barely able to keep the dog from getting to me.

“Sorry about that,” says the man. “He’s never done that before.”

“Well, I’m glad you have him on a leash,” I say, having heard that same He’s never done that before line from dozens of unconvincing dog owners.

The lunging dog behind me, I wonder what brought me to that place on Clark Street just in time to encounter a lunging dog? A few minutes earlier or a few minutes later, no lunging dog. Coincidence? Or are the unseen ones trying to tell me something? I dunno.

A hundred yards further along, I get a panoramic view of Big River Beach in the distance—not a human being in sight on the vast expanse of sand. I wonder why. Gorgeous day. Extremely low tide. Summer upon us. Where are all the people? Or where are some people?

And now for the most obviously dangerous part of my journey, a quarter-mile stretch of walking against traffic on Highway One down to Big River Road, which is the main entrance to Big River State Park. There is a wide shoulder here, but not wide enough as far as I’m concerned, as cars and trucks come hurtling toward the walker at sixty miles an hour, cars and trucks driven by people who are often oblivious to pedestrians. Having nearly been killed at least three times by people talking on cell phones while driving, I am extremely wary of putting myself in situations where such thoughtless people might kill me, but this is the most convenient way to get to the beach on foot, so I hug the inside edge of the shoulder and prepare to jump into the bushes should an oncoming vehicle appear to be making a beeline for me.

Arriving at Big River Road, I find the park entrance closed to vehicular traffic by several big white saw horses, three of which bear giant traffic signs reading EXAM UNDERWAY. I kid you not. The signs don’t say ROAD CLOSED or PARK CLOSED, but EXAM UNDERWAY. Seeing no sign saying DO NOT ENTER, I saunter down the steep drive to the beach parking lot and espy three uniformed park employees standing beside two white dump trucks. One of the employees, a muscular man wearing reflective dark glasses says to me, “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

“I’m heading for the beach,” I say. “Is that okay, or will I be disturbing the exam?”

“No, that’s fine,” he says. “We’re keeping vehicles out because we’ve got some folks undergoing heavy equipment operation tests, but we’re not using the beach.”

“Thank you,” I say, having solved the mystery of why there was nobody on the beach.

“No worries,” says the man. “Enjoy.”

Big River’s flow of fresh water is so little right now and the tide is so greatly withdrawn that I can, for the first time in my eight years of living here, wade all the way across Big River and back, which I do before wandering out onto the greater beach. A few folks have come down the stairs from the headlands, so I am not entirely alone on the vast expanse of sand, but nearly so.

As I follow the widening river to where the stream of fresh water meets the salty sea, an osprey plummets into the river and quickly rises into the air with a little fish in her talons—a breathtaking sight and reason enough to have made this trek to the beach.

I roll up my pants’ legs and wade out into the ocean up to my knees, the breakers perfectly formed for surfing, though there are no surfers in the water yet, no doubt kept at bay by the heavy equipment exam. The water is relatively warm compared to how I remember it being a week ago, and I smile at thoughts of going swimming in the ocean, one day soon if not today.

Finding a likely spot on a sandy slope some fifty yards from the water’s edge, I eat a breakfast of nuts and seeds and a juicy navel orange, and get out my notebook to write. A story grabs me and I have the feeling the hidden heart of the tale is the question of whether we are masters of our own destinies or merely pawns of forces we have no control over. And as I write, I think of Buckminster Fuller and his notion that wisdom is knowing how, after much experimentation and experience, to harmonize our efforts and actions and designs with Nature’s principles for our own good and the good of all people and things.

I fill several pages of my notebook, and when the words cease to flow I look up and see five surfers out in the water, one of them just catching a wave and having a lovely little ride. I also see several people walking on the beach, including a few who are both elderly and obese, which suggests the heavy equipment exam has ended and the parking lot is now open for business. There are mothers with children, a woman looking for rocks and shells, a man with a dog on a leash, and a woman with a dog not on a leash. Everyone is taking pictures with their phones. A woman strides by talking on her cell phone and I hear her say, “…yeah, it may go up some more, but let’s not get greedy and lose…”

Feeling nicely energized by the oceanic fumes, I traverse the warming beach and sit on a log at the bottom of the stairs to wipe the sand off my feet and put on my shoes. A ten-year-old boy wearing a Giants baseball cap comes skipping down the stairs ahead of his parents and shouts, “See? I told you! It’s perfect!”

I count the stairs as I climb, but right before I reach the top I lose count because I’m distracted by a homeless guy sitting on a log overlooking the beach saying to another homeless guy, “Seriously, man, I watched the game on my phone and LeBron was not to be denied.”

As I arrive at the Presbyterian parking lot, a dusty expanse the church generously allows the general public to use, I am met by a muscular young man with curly brown hair, his sternum adorned with a lifelike tattoo of a pink rose. “How you doin’, man?” he asks, frowning at me.

“Great,” I say. “Beautiful day.”

“Would you be interested in buying some hash?” he asks, nodding.

“No, thank you,” I reply, wondering what made him think the likes of me would want to buy hashish from him. Or maybe he asks everyone he meets if they want to buy hashish. Or maybe…I dunno.

I get a little cash from the ATM machine at my bank, Mendocino’s one and only bank, stroll to the post office and pick up the mail featuring this week’s Anderson Valley Advertiser, and transect the village to reach the hardware store where I buy three bolts to attach a vice to a table in our workshop. As I’m searching the bolt bins, two men down the aisle from me are having an animated discussion about a construction project. One of the men says, “You know, I think it might look better if we do that, but I’m afraid we’d be tempting fate. You know what I mean? I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

Home again. Gardening. Writing. Snacking. Practice the piano. Writing. Hours pass and evening approaches. Marcia has been away for two days concertizing in Santa Rosa and is due home for supper. What shall I make? I sit at my desk awaiting inspiration. I could heat up some rice and sauté some garden vegetables. That sounds good, yet I remain at my desk. I feel pleasantly ensnared, held in my chair by unseen powers. The phone rings. It’s Marcia calling from Boonville and suggesting she stop at Libby’s restaurant in Philo and pick up some superlative Mexican food. What do I think about that? I think Yes! and surrender to the beneficent spirits.

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My Big Trip, Part Three

Le Moulin de la Gallete by Pablo Picasso

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser February 2013)

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” William Shakespeare

My friend Scott made a good part of his living as a rehearsal pianist for musicals running on Broadway in the 1970’s and early 80’s, and he had all sorts of theater connections that gave him free admission to virtually any show on or off Broadway, a privilege he invited me to take advantage of multiple times on each of the ten trips I made to New York between 1976 and 1983.

In 1976, the reigning Broadway sensation was the play Equus with Anthony Perkins having just taken over the leading role from Richard Burton who had taken over the role from Anthony Hopkins. Scott knew the stage manager of the theater where the play was running and arranged for me to be among a few dozen audience members who sat on tiered benches onstage as a living backdrop to the play.

We were shown to our seats a few minutes before the curtain went up and told not to fidget, not to pick our noses, and not to make any noise. “You are,” said the man directing us, “a Greek chorus echoing the action with your silence, and you are also a jury listening carefully to the evidence being presented. And please remember that several hundred people can see you, people who have paid good money to watch this play and not to watch you scratching your butt. Have fun.”

I wish I could say that seeing and being in Equus on that Broadway stage was one of the great theatrical experiences of my life, but I found the play simplistic and boring and not in the least mysterious, the performances ho hum, and the vaunted nude love scene a brief and ugly tussle. However, I did not share my feelings about Equus with Scott because he was a devout Broadway loyalist, which meant he believed that if a play was a hit, the play was good, and if the play was a flop, the play was bad.

Now in the same week that I sat through Equus, Scott and I attended one of the early preview performances of Trevor Griffith’s play Comedians, recently transported from London and directed by Mike Nichols with the young Jonathan Pryce reprising his role from the London production. And seeing that production of Comedians truly was one of the greatest theatrical experiences of my life and would dramatically influence my plans for the future.

When the third and final act of Comedians came to an end, I leapt out of my seat shouting, “Bravo!” and applauding madly, though the audience reaction was otherwise tepid. Scott stayed sitting during my outburst and was obviously embarrassed by my behavior, but I didn’t care. I had just seen a superlative performance of a remarkable play and I wasn’t about to keep my feelings bottled up. Mediocre Equus had elicited a standing ovation and multiple curtain calls for its stars, so why shouldn’t I rave about this brilliant new masterwork?

Well…when we emerged from Comedians, Scott took me to a nearby bar filled with people who had also just seen Comedians and I eagerly asked several of them what they thought of the play; and they were all oddly coy and noncommittal, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked Scott. “That play was sheer genius. The writing, the acting, the direction, the levels of meaning, the…”

“Todd,” said Scott, sighing, “the play hasn’t been reviewed yet so…”

“So what?” I asked, flabbergasted. “You wait until the New York Times says it’s good before you think it’s good?”

“No,” said Scott, gulping his beer. “But…sort of. I mean…it’s subtle and very British. It was a hit in London, but that doesn’t mean it will translate that well over here.”

“Are you insane?” I gaped at him. “We just saw it. What did you think of it?”

“I…I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Jonathan Pryce would win a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in his role in Comedians, but the critics otherwise damned the production with faint praise and the show closed after 145 performances. I, however, was demolished in the best sort of way by Comedians and decided two things as a result of seeing that incomparable production: I was going to write plays again, and I was going to live in a city so I could get more involved in theater. By then I realized New York was not going to be that city, not yet anyway, for I lacked the psychic stamina to survive there—but I hoped Portland or Seattle might suffice to get me started.

“It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.” Winston Churchill

Two weeks later, having recharged my batteries by taking the train to Boston and spending a few days goofing around with my pal Jerry and attending a few of his scarier classes at Harvard Law School, I returned to Manhattan and immediately went to see Comedians again. To my delight, I thought the play was even better the second time, the cast now well practiced and sure of their characters. I was in seventh heaven watching that play and felt more certain than ever that I wanted to try to write plays that might touch people as Comedians touched me.

I was in love again with mastery, with originality, with courage, with everything that had made me want to be a writer in the first place; and for the remainder of my time in New York I was in a state of enchantment. For though I knew very well I might never succeed as a playwright (or as a writer of fiction), the experience of seeing that masterful production of Comedians filled me with a desire to try. I knew if I lived frugally, I had enough money in the bank to grant me a year of freedom from working at anything besides writing, and I intended to dedicate a good chunk of that year to writing plays.

The sad truth about our culture, and perhaps most cultures, is that for every masterpiece that somehow manages to gain an audience, there are thousands of awful things filling our stages and bookstores and movie screens and galleries. Why this is so I do not know, I only know that it is so. Which is why those rare new masterpieces that somehow manage to sneak past the cultural gatekeepers are so important, for without them we only have the masterworks of the past to deeply nourish us—and we desperately need the blood of brilliant new work to keep our culture alive and vital.

“You are what your deep, driving desire is.

 As your desire is, so is your will.

As your will is, so is your deed.

As your deed is, so is your destiny.” Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

I was bored to tears by the new art on display at The Museum of Modern Art, but never mind, they had Picasso’s massive and marvelous Guernica to gaze upon and Van Gogh’s magnificent Starry Starry Night approachable to within a few inches, and Henri Rousseau’s supernatural Lion and the Gypsy lit to perfection, so I visited these and a handful of other favorite paintings in that collection several times and felt wonderfully empowered by them. And I went to the Guggenheim to marvel up close at Picasso’s Moulin de la Galette and Modigliani’s fabulous Nude, and I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art again and again to gawk at their five fabulous Vermeers.

I had lunch with my brave and eccentric agent Dorothy Pittman on two occasions and we had a stirring time imagining selling one of my novels and then another and another. She said she would hunt for a play agent for me when I had a play to show around; and dear Scott got me into seven or eight more shows to fuel my drama dreams, though none of those plays could hold a candle to Comedians; and at last I realized I was done with New York for the time being and ready to embark on the next leg of my big trip.

So I took the train to Philadelphia and spent three lazy days visiting friends in Bala Cynwyd and Narberth and sleeping for twelve hours a night, recuperating from the physical and emotional toll of Manhattan. Then I continued south by train to Virginia and stayed with my pal Rico who had recently moved out from California to work for the federal government.

One night Rico and I were reminiscing about high school and wondering about the fate of our fellow inmates, when I was reminded of Mark Russell, my great friend I hadn’t seen since the early days of high school when he and his family moved away to where I wasn’t sure. So I did a little telephone sleuthing and came up with a phone number for Mark’s parents in Connecticut. I called them and they gave me a phone number for Mark in South Carolina. Then I called Mark and a woman with a sultry South Carolina accent answered the phone.

“Hi,” I said, “my name is Todd Walton and I’m an old friend of Mark’s. Is he there?”

“Hold on a minute,” she said softly. “I’ll fetch him.”

A few moments later, Mark came on the line, his voice two octaves deeper than when we’d last spoken thirteen years before. “This is unbelievable,” he said, laughing. “I was just thinking about you. I was throwing the ball for my dog and wondering where Todd is now.”

“I’m in Virginia and I’d love to come see you, if that’s a possibility. I could get a motel room nearby or…”

“No, no, we’ve got lots of room for you,” he said, chuckling. “Come on down.”

So on a dark cold night in early November, I stepped off the train at the little station in Camden, South Carolina and looked around for an older version of the Mark I remembered from 1963—a clean shaven young man much shorter than I. But the only person waiting there was a tall man in a trench coat sporting a bushy brown beard.

“Todd,” he called to me. “I’d know you anywhere.”

“Mark,” I said, shaking his enormous hand. “I would never have guessed you were you.”

fin

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Close Calls

Hawk pen and ink drawing by Todd

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser January 2012)

“Fate laughs at probabilities.”  E.G. Bulwer-Lytton

For me to be born, my parents had to meet at Beverly Hills High in 1939, which only happened because in 1932, when my mother Avis was eleven, she went on a long walk in Phoenix, Arizona and learned from the announcement on a hotel marquee that Tommy Dorsey and his band were playing there that very night.

Avis took that fateful walk because she was tired of being cooped up in a motel room with her seven-year-old brother Howard and her thirty-three-year-old mother Goody, and because she was sad and lonely and didn’t know what else to do. Avis and Goody and Howard were living in that Phoenix motel room, having hurriedly left Los Angeles some weeks before, because Goody was fed up with her husband Casey for failing for the umpteenth time to bring home enough bacon, so to speak, to keep the bill collectors at bay and put sufficient food on the table for two growing kids. Casey was a real estate broker and a gambler, and in the depths of the Great Depression things were not going well for him in either field. Goody and Casey were Jewish, their last name Weinstein, and so their struggles were compounded by the fierce anti-Semitism of those times. They would eventually change their last name to Winton so they could pretend not to be Jewish, a tactic they hoped would increase their options for housing and employment.

Why Phoenix? Family lore has it that Phoenix was as far as they got before Goody ran out of money. Goody’s parents were in Michigan where Goody was born, so perhaps Goody’s plan was to get back to the Jewish ghetto of Detroit where her relatives would not let her starve. But I think Goody chose Phoenix because it was just close enough to Los Angeles (an eight-hour drive) for Casey to visit every weekend to give Goody a little money, if he had any, and to beg her to come back to him. Goody was adamant she would not come back to him until he started making good money and giving most of that money to her.

So. Imagine a lazy Saturday in sunny Phoenix, 1932. Casey, a handsome fast-talking rogue with a Cesar Romero mustache, sat at the tiny table in the kitchenette of a little motel room, sipping coffee and speechifying to Goody and Howard about how very close he was to making several big real estate deals that would lift them out of poverty and into a life of luxury. How did my grandparents define a life of luxury? A nice house in Beverly Hills, a new car (Cadillac or Lincoln), music lessons for the kids, membership in a swank country club, servants, dining out at the best joints in town, and owning several apartment buildings providing endless rivers of cash.

“Name one deal you’re about to make,” snarled Goody, sick to death of Casey’s hollow braggadocio. “A real deal, not some pie in the sky.”

At which moment, my mother, Avis Gloria, returned from her walk. She was a slender girl with long black hair and huge brown eyes, and she was very serious, for her life had not been happy; and she strove to be perfect in every way so she might escape the wrath of her fiercely disenchanted mother.

“Well…” said Casey, clearing his throat portentously, “as a matter-of-fact, I had a call from Tommy Dorsey himself last week about a piece of property I own in the San Fernando Valley, and I would have closed the deal, but he was leaving the next day to go on tour, but when he comes back…”

“He’s here,” said my mother, smiling sadly at her father. “I saw his name on the hotel marquee.”

“Dorsey’s here?” said Casey, jumping up. “Fantastic! I’ll go see him right now.”

So Casey did go see Tommy, and the big band leader was so impressed with the charming young man for chasing him all the way to Phoenix (what chutzpah!), Tommy wrote Casey a check for fifteen hundred dollars (which in 1932 was a fortune) and Casey came back to the motel waving the check in victory. Hugs, tears, laughter, reunion, a celebratory return to Los Angeles and eventual matriculation at Beverly Hills High where my mother met the future conveyor of the spermatozoon that fertilized her zygote, etc.

Had my mother not gone on her lonely walk through downtown Phoenix, and had she not seen Tommy Dorsey’s name on that hotel marquee, I would never have been born. Or…one could argue that my mother had to go on that walk because her doing so was an essential ingredient in the unfathomably complex recipe of events designed by faultless Universe to produce…everything.

“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” Jean de La Fontaine

A fundamental precept of Buddhist philosophy is that our internal emotional processes create our outer experiences. Thus we may run away from unpleasant situations and miserable relationships, but until we change our psycho-spiritual landscape, it doesn’t really matter where we go, for new unpleasant situations and miserable relationships will inevitably manifest as reflections of our interior patterns.

In my former life as CEO of Avoidance Strategies Ink, a highly unprofitable one-person for-profit organization dedicated to running day and night just a few inches ahead of a murderous threshing machine of self-generated karma, the idea that I was responsible for my own troubles was extremely annoying to me. Indeed, I was absolutely convinced that other people were responsible for my unhappiness; that my sorrowful history was writ by scoundrels taking unfair advantage of my intrinsic kindness and generosity. True, some of these men and women had not, at first, seemed to be scoundrels or to be taking advantage of me, but eventually I was able to fit them all squarely into the scoundrel category. And then I turned thirty and stopped fleeing every year from one town to another.

“What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!” Charles Dickens

When we first become aware of a lifelong pattern of behavior that has caused us recurrent misery, we tend to think, “Well, now that I’m aware of the pattern I certainly won’t make that mistake again.” Ha! Conscious awareness of part of a deeply entrenched pattern of behavior does not mean we will be able to recognize subtle variations of that pattern, especially since we are almost certainly addicted to the emotional sustenance such patterns provide.

For instance, I am the child of two verbally abusive and highly intrusive alcoholics. Therefore, from an early age I was predisposed to form friendships and relationships with variations on that parental prototype. In textbook terms, I became a Grade AA co-dependent enabler who craved the company of people who constantly undermined my feelings of self-worth and required me to do my best to keep them in booze while maintaining the pseudo functionality of our dyad/family. When, at the age of forty-two, I finally became fully aware of my lifelong relational pattern, I was able to terminate a number of deleterious connections and avoid forming new liaisons with obvious alcoholics and obviously abusive people; but life, as I’m sure you know, has much more up her sleeve than the obvious. And so I embarked on a curious series of relationships with people who had developed passive aggression to a high art, and who were essentially unavailable to me, no matter how mightily I strove to please them.

“You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Wayne Gretzky

In 1970, hitchhiking across Canada from east to west, I got a ride from a middle-aged guy driving a turquoise 1966 Ford Fairlane. I had been camped for three days beside the Trans-Canadian highway in the middle of nowhere on the plains of Saskatchewan, and I was so desperate for a ride, I disregarded the stench of cigarettes and cheap wine and got in the car, though my every instinct said No Thanks.

Lon was a badly bruised bull from a small town in Arkansas, “a hunnert miles from Little Rock,” and had been on the run for three years, having thrown a policeman out a two-story window back home. “I don’t know if he died or not,” said Lon, rummaging in his glove compartment. “Didn’t stick around to find out. You see a baggy in there with some whites? I’m fading out. Need some speed.”

“I’ll drive,” I said, thinking I’d quit the ride if he refused my offer.

“Good deal,” he said, showing me his shortage of teeth with a weary grin. “I need sleep bad, but can’t stop until I get to Calgary.”

So I drove and Lon slept, Calgary eight hundred miles away, and I marveled at the exigencies of fate. Why this guy? Why not a pretty woman looking for love? Why not a groovy band looking for a guitar player? Why not a Lakota holy man looking for an apprentice? Why a smelly old drunk on the lam?

In the course of our journey together, Lon told me over and over again how he caught the cop in bed with his wife, threw the sombitch out the window, slugged his wife—“Purty sure I broke her jaw from the sound of it”—and figured he, Lon, was a dead man one way or another if he didn’t get out of Arkansas pronto. “Went to Florida first,” he said, lighting another of his endless cigarettes, “cuz I heard my brother Floyd was workin’ the carny circuit in the panhandle over there, but that sombitch always stays a few days ahead of me, not that he knows I’m lookin’ for him. Sombitch in Winnipeg said he heard Floyd was runnin’ a Ferris wheel at Calgary Stampede, and that party lasts ten days, so…”

We stopped for gas in another part of the middle of nowhere and Lon bought a fistful of candy bars for supper. He said he made his money working in garages doing oil changes and lube jobs and changing tires. Said he could change a tire in a couple minutes, “but I’m shit for a mechanic.” He said he also made money as a bouncer in bars where “fast women, pissed off men, too much booze, and terrible loud music spell trouble.”

“Dangerous,” I offered, stating the obvious.

“I like to hit people,” he said, nodding. “And I don’t mind gettin’ hit. Actually kinda like it. Wakes me up. Helps me focus. You know?”

Just as we were about to drive off with our candy bars, two raggedy longhaired goons came out of nowhere and asked if they could ride with us. One of them was a large blond goon with a big Bowie knife in a black sheath on his belt, and the other was a lesser brunette goon with a lesser knife on his belt; and their vibe, their gestalt, if you will, was bad, and I don’t mean good. They stunk of violence. Lon saw my fear, snorted contemptuously, and said to the goons, “Sure, why the fuck not?”

Every cell in my body screamed Don’t get in that car with those sombitches, Todd. Please. We, your every cell, would rather stand by the side of the road for a month than travel with those monsters.

But I did get in with those sombitches because I was desperate to get out of nowhere and because…well, because. Lon drove, I rode shotgun, and the goons rode in back. And I could feel those monsters trying to decide whether to force Lon at knifepoint to pull over so they could take the car, or whether to just kill us and take the car, or whether to get to Calgary before they killed anybody. I suppose I might have been imagining their violent intentions, but I don’t think so.

For a short infinity the goons seemed cowed by Lon’s bouncer stories featuring the breaking of many noses, arms, and heads, but then the stories began to ring with false bravado and the larger goon said, “Hey, man, pull over. I gotta pee.”

He made this demand as dusk was settling over the plains and we were in the deepest depths of the middle of nowhere; not another car in sight for as far as the eye could see in any direction.

“Yeah,” said the lesser goon. “Pull the fuck over, man.”

To which Lon replied tersely, “In a minute.”

“Hey, man, I can’t wait,” said the big goon. “Just pull the fuck over.”

“You heard him,” said the lesser goon. “He can’t wait.”

“In a minute,” Lon repeated. “Place right up the way here with a john. I gotta go, too. Number two.” And then he laughed a dry, brittle laugh, which ignited in him a horrid fit of coughing that lasted several minutes, which at eighty-five miles an hour carried us up and over a long rise and down into a valley at the heart of which was a blessed roadside burger stand where we parked amidst a bevy of trucks.

I was determined not to travel another minute with the goons, even if it meant homesteading in western Saskatchewan, so while the goons went to pee in the sagebrush and Lon used the modern facilities, I got my pack and guitar out of the Fairlane.

The goons came back to the car and the large goon said to me, “You gettin’ out here?”

“Maybe,” I said, looking him in the eye to see if I still thought he was a killer, which I did.

And then a most peculiar thing happened, something I am tempted to call a miracle, except I know the word miracle bugs the crap out of some people, so I’ll stick with peculiar. I became someone I hadn’t known was part of who I am—a kind of warrior actor.

“I get violent sometimes,” I said, looking at the ground and nodding. “Crazy. You know? Like I have so much fucking strength I’m gonna explode if I don’t do something with it. And I don’t like to be around other people when I’m feeling like this because I’m afraid I might hurt somebody even if I don’t want to hurt anybody, which I never do unless I think they want to hurt me.”

The goons listened intently—watching me.

“I can do impossible things with my strength,” I said, continuing to look at the ground and nod. “Like…”

I looked up and scanned the parking area, and about fifty yards away from us stood a big gray metal garbage can.

“You see that can over there?” I said, glaring at the big goon.

“Yeah,” said the big goon, glancing anxiously at the lesser goon.

“Watch,” I said, reaching down and picking up a black stone the size of a baseball. “Watch this.”

Then, with the briefest of forethought, I threw that stone at the garbage can, and the stone arced high through the purple dusk, reached the apex of its flight, and fell down into the can—a collision sounding like a gunshot.

“Fuck,” said the big goon, backing away from me.

“Yeah,” said the lesser goon. “Fuck.”

And those two, who were just people, did not travel on with us, but waved goodbye as Lon and I drove off into the sunset, the Fairlane purring like a huge contented cat.