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jack_babalonThis morning I had the perplexing experience of an anxiety dream in which there was no anxiety. They were after me. Coming out of their gray bunkers, scrambling over the barbwire fences, sprinting wild across vast emerald lawns through sprinkler rainbow mists with howls... distant figures in immaculate white rags gave wild chase. The sun and the expanse of the sky told me I was back in South Florida. There were shouts and screams and incoherent threats coming from all around me leaving no doubt that in their hands a terrible fate awaited. Yet I simply walked on, as if on a casual Sunday stroll and the lackadaisical tread of my steps proved to be no much for the men in immaculate white rags to catch.
It was as if I was in some sort of bizarro horror movie where no matter how fast the slasher gives chase it ultimately proves futile as the prey strolls blissfully slow forever safe from pursuit.
Which is when it occurs to me that that was the secret all along.
In the horror movies no one ever tried to just walk away from the slasher or the cannibal horde. Had they done so they would have immediately discovered that the Conservation of Nightmare Velocity. The faster you run from your death in a dream the quicker it gains on you. Yet just walk away smooth from the Reaper in whatever mask it may wear and you'll walk an entire lifetime longer than those who ran for their lives.
"Barbara escaped." My passenger tells me as I pull up to a red light.
"Who?" I say strumming my fingers.
"Barbara, from 'Night of the Living Dead'." My passenger smiles in the seat next to me and clarifies, "Not the original. The remake. I mean not the latest remake. The Savini one. Remember?"
"Yeah, I liked that one actually."
"So remember at the end how she survives?" My passenger lights a cigarette. "She just calmly walks right out of the house and through all the zombies. Doesn't even fire a shot. She just keeps her shit together and... green."
"Huh?" The car honks behind me and I focus back on the road.
I know my passenger from back in the couch-surf years. When I wore boots wherever I walked and black t-shirts with skulls on them like a supervillain henchman. Even at the telemarketing and customer service gigs. I'd have my army-navy jump boots peeking out of the cuffs of my slacks and when it rained you could see a smiling Jolly Roger under my button-up. She was the girlfriend and femme fatale for one of Bud's lieutenants. We got along amiably enough, she got my jokes even the ones she didn't laugh at.
We ran into each other down in Vampire Country by chance. I was doing my whole lost-in-a-crowd thing and composing my next tale of woe-is-me for the Internet in my head. Hardly recognized her with her Catastrophe Blonde now a Business Brunette and the oversized leather jacket she wore like the hide of some great bear she skinned replaced with just off work casual.
She recognized me immediately and it took three names from her lips for the sentry at my gate to finally open the mental gates of recognition. "Germ. Marshal. Bud."
We caught up. She had gotten married on a road trip west with the drummer of a punk rock band gloriously going nowhere fast until the years settled them down. When it did the kid came next and with it a heroic sobriety which though never ending in withdrawal did have the unfortunate consequence of revealing how much each bored the other without the drugs.
She moved back. Started taking some classes at Hornet University. Found a job that managed to put a roof over her head and enough to keep the lights on.
"What about you." She asks. "Did you ever become a writer."
"Never stopped." I chuckle the way a man who is no longer a young man chuckles.
"You know what I meant?"
"Yeah... got a book published and everything."
"Is it any good?"
"You know... I think you're the first person who's ever asked me that."
We laugh and she directs me to the next light, to a left on a street named after a dead man of forgotten importance, down four houses to a glow of flood lights through a barbwire fence across the street lighting up a gray bunker of an apartment block.
It was only chance I was by her work when I got her text asking for a ride home. It was only chance that I worked a few hours later than normal today. It was only chance that I had the car today instead of tomorrow like I usually do.
"My knight in shining Toyota armor." She laughed when I pulled up to the parking lot of her cube farm.
She was supposed to get a ride from her roommate but she flaked on her at the last minute when her boyfriend started having some sort of existential meltdown. The last time I saw her she had given me a ride home from the Yacht. She pulled us up to the gate. We had been laughing over some old Bud story.
They were good days. But for all the craziness of those days back in the scene, the guns, the drama and the good times, no matter how 'gonzo' it ever got I never felt like a Hunter Thompson.
I always felt like a rookie reporter who had the strange fortune to find himself embedded in a rebel squadron of the drunken Vikings.
If I regret anything from those days, from knowing those men, is that I didn't have nearly enough time with them before we had to leave. To become the men and women we became or the nagging absence of what could have been.
When we stopped laughing we were very quiet in that way grown-ups are quiet before the kiss and when she closed her eyes for a kiss I scrambled out of the front door.
"Well this is me."
And now we're sitting here parked in front of her house. Me behind the wheel and nowhere to run.
"Can I ask you something?"
"I don't know why I didn't kiss you that night." I answer the question. "I don't know why I didn't kiss any of you. I was so scared. Scared of letting you, them, everyone down. It's no way to live, I know. Fuck, I wish, I wish, everything was the way it was. When I didn't have to dimes to rub together in winter and life like I've never had before or since."
I laugh. "When women were scared I would try to kiss them instead of me being scared of them."
My passenger nods at my answer and after tossing her cigarette out the window. "Actually I was just going to ask you what the name of your book was again?"
"Oh." And I tell her and she does her best not to laugh.
"Well... this is me." And she gets out of the door after a quick hug.
She walks calmly, untouchable, as if through a horde of ghouls or a relentless killer who can never catch up with her. She arrives at the door. She turns around. She's exactly the way she looked twenty years ago. She waves at me and steps through the bunker. Vanishes.
I wave back at the closed door stupidly. The apartment isn't her apartment anymore. The street not her street. I'm sitting parked along the train tracks right before Park Station. I'm on Seaborne Avenue, just a Molotov Cocktail throw from L5P, where we first met all those decades ago. Where I last saw my 'passenger'. Back when we were threats without promise. Back when I was a shy poet moonlighting as an accountant for a drug dealer who would turn into one of the best friends I would ever have.
Back when not only he was still alive but she was as well.
I Start up the car. Turn on the radio. Dial it to bluegrass off the AM. Look up out the window. Pull out slow. No rush. As always, nowhere to go but forward for as long as it is my privilege to do so.
It was as if I was in some sort of bizarro horror movie where no matter how fast the slasher gives chase it ultimately proves futile as the prey strolls blissfully slow forever safe from pursuit.
Which is when it occurs to me that that was the secret all along.
In the horror movies no one ever tried to just walk away from the slasher or the cannibal horde. Had they done so they would have immediately discovered that the Conservation of Nightmare Velocity. The faster you run from your death in a dream the quicker it gains on you. Yet just walk away smooth from the Reaper in whatever mask it may wear and you'll walk an entire lifetime longer than those who ran for their lives.
"Barbara escaped." My passenger tells me as I pull up to a red light.
"Who?" I say strumming my fingers.
"Barbara, from 'Night of the Living Dead'." My passenger smiles in the seat next to me and clarifies, "Not the original. The remake. I mean not the latest remake. The Savini one. Remember?"
"Yeah, I liked that one actually."
"So remember at the end how she survives?" My passenger lights a cigarette. "She just calmly walks right out of the house and through all the zombies. Doesn't even fire a shot. She just keeps her shit together and... green."
"Huh?" The car honks behind me and I focus back on the road.
I know my passenger from back in the couch-surf years. When I wore boots wherever I walked and black t-shirts with skulls on them like a supervillain henchman. Even at the telemarketing and customer service gigs. I'd have my army-navy jump boots peeking out of the cuffs of my slacks and when it rained you could see a smiling Jolly Roger under my button-up. She was the girlfriend and femme fatale for one of Bud's lieutenants. We got along amiably enough, she got my jokes even the ones she didn't laugh at.
We ran into each other down in Vampire Country by chance. I was doing my whole lost-in-a-crowd thing and composing my next tale of woe-is-me for the Internet in my head. Hardly recognized her with her Catastrophe Blonde now a Business Brunette and the oversized leather jacket she wore like the hide of some great bear she skinned replaced with just off work casual.
She recognized me immediately and it took three names from her lips for the sentry at my gate to finally open the mental gates of recognition. "Germ. Marshal. Bud."
We caught up. She had gotten married on a road trip west with the drummer of a punk rock band gloriously going nowhere fast until the years settled them down. When it did the kid came next and with it a heroic sobriety which though never ending in withdrawal did have the unfortunate consequence of revealing how much each bored the other without the drugs.
She moved back. Started taking some classes at Hornet University. Found a job that managed to put a roof over her head and enough to keep the lights on.
"What about you." She asks. "Did you ever become a writer."
"Never stopped." I chuckle the way a man who is no longer a young man chuckles.
"You know what I meant?"
"Yeah... got a book published and everything."
"Is it any good?"
"You know... I think you're the first person who's ever asked me that."
We laugh and she directs me to the next light, to a left on a street named after a dead man of forgotten importance, down four houses to a glow of flood lights through a barbwire fence across the street lighting up a gray bunker of an apartment block.
It was only chance I was by her work when I got her text asking for a ride home. It was only chance that I worked a few hours later than normal today. It was only chance that I had the car today instead of tomorrow like I usually do.
"My knight in shining Toyota armor." She laughed when I pulled up to the parking lot of her cube farm.
She was supposed to get a ride from her roommate but she flaked on her at the last minute when her boyfriend started having some sort of existential meltdown. The last time I saw her she had given me a ride home from the Yacht. She pulled us up to the gate. We had been laughing over some old Bud story.
They were good days. But for all the craziness of those days back in the scene, the guns, the drama and the good times, no matter how 'gonzo' it ever got I never felt like a Hunter Thompson.
I always felt like a rookie reporter who had the strange fortune to find himself embedded in a rebel squadron of the drunken Vikings.
If I regret anything from those days, from knowing those men, is that I didn't have nearly enough time with them before we had to leave. To become the men and women we became or the nagging absence of what could have been.
When we stopped laughing we were very quiet in that way grown-ups are quiet before the kiss and when she closed her eyes for a kiss I scrambled out of the front door.
"Well this is me."
And now we're sitting here parked in front of her house. Me behind the wheel and nowhere to run.
"Can I ask you something?"
"I don't know why I didn't kiss you that night." I answer the question. "I don't know why I didn't kiss any of you. I was so scared. Scared of letting you, them, everyone down. It's no way to live, I know. Fuck, I wish, I wish, everything was the way it was. When I didn't have to dimes to rub together in winter and life like I've never had before or since."
I laugh. "When women were scared I would try to kiss them instead of me being scared of them."
My passenger nods at my answer and after tossing her cigarette out the window. "Actually I was just going to ask you what the name of your book was again?"
"Oh." And I tell her and she does her best not to laugh.
"Well... this is me." And she gets out of the door after a quick hug.
She walks calmly, untouchable, as if through a horde of ghouls or a relentless killer who can never catch up with her. She arrives at the door. She turns around. She's exactly the way she looked twenty years ago. She waves at me and steps through the bunker. Vanishes.
I wave back at the closed door stupidly. The apartment isn't her apartment anymore. The street not her street. I'm sitting parked along the train tracks right before Park Station. I'm on Seaborne Avenue, just a Molotov Cocktail throw from L5P, where we first met all those decades ago. Where I last saw my 'passenger'. Back when we were threats without promise. Back when I was a shy poet moonlighting as an accountant for a drug dealer who would turn into one of the best friends I would ever have.
Back when not only he was still alive but she was as well.
I Start up the car. Turn on the radio. Dial it to bluegrass off the AM. Look up out the window. Pull out slow. No rush. As always, nowhere to go but forward for as long as it is my privilege to do so.