Stranded in the American Dream

For Dr. Thompson

WHEN THE SHIP FIRST BEGAN TO ROLL OVER, my attorney and I were too addlepated from our regime of highly illegal narcotics to even conceive of the ideas of ‘sinking or ‘lifeboat.’’

Make no mistake—our sense of self-preservation was as highly tuned as ever, and by the time our craft – a once lovely 74-foot wooden schooner turned floating barroom and low-rent tourist trap christened the Rusty Nail - was bubbling its last, my attorney and I had already secured the most indispensable items from our storeroom and were busy cobbling together a serviceable raft from the detritus of the sinking ship.

“This is bad,” my attorney said as we watched the electric lights of the doomed ship flutter beneath the roiling water of the Pacific Ocean. “I may not be able to get you off this time. There’s little doubt we sank that boat.”

“Impossible,” I said as I secured another buoyant article to our haphazard raft.  “That deathtrap failed every conceivable safety check known to civilized man. Modern vessels use technology derived from oil tankers and feature self-repairing multiple hulls. A few rounds fired through the floor from a 357 Magnum Python wouldn’t allow enough water into a ship boasting up-to-date safeguards to fill the ice buckets in the stateroom, never mind sink with all hands and all but two passengers. We just performed a valuable service for the owners; who knows what kind of lawsuits they would have faced had this ship gone under in more survivable circumstances.”

It was true; few of the passengers were in any condition to file for damages. Several of them, already expired, were now serving as flotation devices for the raft my attorney and me were currently using as a barrier between ourselves and the sharks, moray eels and barracuda that always swarm a shipwreck.

I lashed another bilious, bloated American tourist corpse to the raft. These poor bastards were so filled with gas from their regular feedings at the round-the-clock buffets that they would keep my 300-pound Samoan attorney and I -- and our suitcase full of essentials -- afloat for days. It all depended on the sharks of course. I had no illusions: two or more days adrift out here in the South Pacific beneath a blazing sun, no food, no water, and we’d see the sharks less as a threat to our limbs and more as competition for our only food supplies. I knew I would soon be faced with another of life’s imponderables, the kind of question that separates the survivors from the blubbering, shattered remains of men: could I tear a hunk of flesh from a two-day dead dentist and choke it down?

The raft lurched. I dropped the end of the leather belt I was using as a fastener and picked up the Magnum, thinking that sharks had begun to make serious inroads into destroying our collection of deckchairs, life preservers and drowning victims, when I realized that the shudder was just from my enormous attorney shifting his position. “Land ho!” he called, and I turned my face towards the setting sun, and saw, silhouetted in the violent red sky the black shadows of palm trees jutting up from a small land mass. “As your attorney, I strongly recommend that you begin rowing towards the island.”

#

Days pass. We make our camp on the beach, a shelter of dead palm fronds and faded Hawaiian print shirts stripped from the buoys of our raft. At first, we feast on seabirds and scavenger fish that swarm over the beached raft. My attorney scoops up crabs by the handful, and we boil them in saltwater and tequila. There’s no drinking water. The booze is dehydrating us at an exponential rate. The days have been long; the amyl nitrate makes them seem longer.

“You should be able to get us out of here,” I tell my attorney. “You’re Samoan. Your people populated these islands once, traveling on canoes gnawed from two-hundred foot tall cycads, dribbling your DNA all over these islands like fat, dark-skinned sperm shot from these circumcised palm trees.” My attorney doesn’t reply, just sits there, motionless, staring off across the water. I realized he hasn’t moved for some time. Was he dead? Or had the drugs, booze and dehydration driven him into a trance-state similar to what the tribal witch doctors of old Samoa used to experience? The old god Tagaloa, it is said among my attorney’s people, fashioned men and women from two grubs he had found in the rotted convolvulus of the primitive earth. Was my attorney even now in the court of that great old deity, standing before a throne of coconuts and skulls, making his case that we had come far enough from grubs to be worthy of rescue?

Yesterday, I had seen a ship crawl past on the horizon—an enormous Pacific-Princess cruise ship, crammed to the gunnels with Americans, white and swollen like larva, out here to escape the rumors of bombs and murder in the Middle East, on vacation from supporting our troops, getting their smiles into shape so when the latest generation sent across the sea on a bridge of waving flags to inject our culture on the tips of bullets and bayonets like poison comes home, they will be welcomed, for that is what not having another Vietnam means: wars are to be won, and the invaders who were once our children will be cheered, not despised. We have rediscovered the old trick of conquering without shame.

I’ve been through the booze and the drugs; all that’s left is the Magnum, the third thing I’d saved when I felt the world lurch beneath my feet, when our stateroom was filling with saltwater and small, silvery fish. The dehydration and heat stroke has simmered the bile off of my perception: It’s all clear to me, now; I’m not here to be rescued, I have already been rescued.

A gull perches on my attorney’s huge dark forehead, a lean, white, feathered, hungry thing, uncertain on its yellow webbed feet, a being wholly without remorse or reservations – it would pluck an eye out of a living man to live the next hour in greater ease than the hour before.

I raise the magnum and put an end to it.

The End

An Occurrence at Pole 69

The jump began, as so many things have before, on Haight Street, specifically in a brief alley where Rob, Gasper, Lincoln and Calf were sitting on the concrete, lighting up thier reward for a hard day’s begging.

Gasper, a longhaired Midwesterner with a wheezing laugh that earned him his nickname, seemed to know more than the rest of them, which is why he always got the girls. Gasper had Calf now. Calf was too smart to be living out of dumpsters, but Gasper had already convinced her that she was too smart for anything else, so she stayed, and she was his.

Lincoln, a tall, thin teenager with a beard more Amish than Presidential, was Gasper’s sounding wall. He phrased Gasper’s ramblings onto cohesive thoughts, without trying to claim the ideas for his own.

Rob was still Rob, for now. He’d been on the street in San Francisco for two weeks, and no one had given him a name yet. He came west to find himself, but the only thing he had turned up so far was Calf, and Gasper wasn’t about to give her up.

“How do you know?” Calf asked, her melodious voice unbearably out of place in the alley.

“Oh it’s true,” Gasper went on. “I’ve felt it.”

“Felt what?” Rob said. He hadn’t been listening until Calf spoke.

“Pole 69 isn’t where the most jumpers jump. The ones who jump from Pole 69 didn’t go out there to kill themselves. But once they get to that place, something pushes them over. Not with hands against their backs, but pushes just the same.” 

“You’re suggesting an incorporeal malevolent spiritual consciousness?” Lincoln asked.

“He’s suggesting bullshit.” Rob said. He was high and tired of Gasper’s voice.

“Let’s go out there now.” Calf said, her enthusiasm lighting up the dark corner they were filling up with smoke.

Gasper shook his head. “Not me. Not at night.”

“I’ll go.” Rob said.

“Bridge is closed at night,” Lincoln said. “No pedestrians.”

“So?” Calf said. 

“I’ll go,” Rob repeated. He felt kind of melted to the street, but he bet he could stand, walk to the bridge, and hoof it to Pole 69, if Calf wanted to go with him.

#

Calf ended up not going.

Rob wasn’t certain how it happened. Gasper didn’t want her to go, so Calf got mad and stormed off. When Rob moved to follow her, Gasper tried to stop him, but Gasper had been eating out of dumpsters too long to fight Rob. By then, Calf was gone.

Rob headed for the bridge. As he had left the Haight and peeled off over fences and through the shadows of Golden Gate Park, he saw fewer and fewer people, and as the fog gathered, the people he did see became less and less substantial. He began to feel as if he were walking through a dream. The sensation passed when he made the bridge. He was soon again focused on realities, beginning with not being seen, and ending with being alone with Calf.

When he reached Pole 69, Calf wasn’t there. Cars hissed by, but Rob was alone on the bridge. The wild thought came to him that Calf had jumped, victim to Gasper’s incorporeal malevolent spiritual consciousness, but he soon dismissed the notion. Calf was probably half-crazy, but he doubted she’d kill herself over Gasper, and there was certainly no force here. Nothing but wind, fog, and far down below, the waters of the bay.

Rob stood, hands in his pockets. His high had long since worn off. He had come out here for a girl, and had found nothing. When no other purpose suggested itself, he looked over the railing. The night was dark, but he could still see the whitecaps as they occurred beneath him. They seemed a long way away.

Rob had read somewhere that a person falling from such a height passed out before reaching the bottom; that the mind, seeing the end rushing forward, closed down. Rob didn’t believe it. The mind is tuned to survival: it would be alert, looking for a way out right until the hard smack at the end.

The hitting would be like striking concrete: the water was settled in place and would be reluctant to allow a falling body in. The jumper would certainly die; might even break apart. 

The vertigo came as a sickening, spine-melting, heels-over-head twisting that radiated out from Rob’s center of gravity and shot ice through his bones. His fingers gripped the railing so hard he imagined he could feel the layers of paint compress. 

The moment passed. Rob’s head cleared. He leaned back from the railing, steadying himself upon the cold steel spine of Pole 69.

Rob shook his head, and began walking back towards San Francisco. It had been a silly errand. He had come to the bridge, risking arrest, to play a game with kids who had nothing better to do. When had his life become so empty?

Rob didn’t know what he would do when the morning came, but he promised that tomorrow would be about something different than begging and getting high. He might even go home.

By the time his boots were kicking through the wet grass of the embankment, he was certain of it.

#

When the Coast Guard fished Rob’s body from the waters of the bay, he had no identification on him. They posted notices with his description, and it was Calf who came forward and gave him a name. It was a brave thing for her to do, as she was held as a runaway and sent home.

Calf couldn’t tell them why Rob had jumped. She insisted that he hadn’t gone out there to jump, but the Pole 69 security camera told a different story.

The video showed a young man who vaulted over the railing without a moment’s hesitation, as if he expected something solid to be there and catch him on the other side.  

The End