Ghost Town (A Rough Draft)

I figured I would post a draft of a  chapter for The Great Concert of Mr. Jimmy Jangles, just in case any of you were wondering whether or not I was still cranking it out. I think the answer is yes, but even I couldn't be sure. Enjoy.

               We came back to Chippichango the way we left it, crammed into Lazlo’s truck with me riding in the middle while Lazlo stared at the horizon, unblinking, muttering incomprehensibles. A storm chased us up the Grakley valley, thunderclouds rumbling behind us and lightning flashing in the rearview mirror, and overtook us as we were a few miles from the town. In the rarest of occasions the river swelled and the road flooded, the water kicked by Lazlo’s truck illuminated red by the tail lights.

                As soon as I saw the town I knew we had come back too late. The lights didn’t flicker the same way they did before. Lazlo was the first to notice the pattern was different, and pointed it out, the first intelligible sounds he had made in hours. He was right. There was no pattern anymore, no indication that anyone was around who cared to control it. Just a formless mad flickering, ripples of streetlights pulsating through the town.

                On autopilot, Lazlo drove up to his house, deserted like every other one. I wondered about Ari, even though she was probably more self-sufficient than my parents. They had probably gone west with the river, finding some of my mom’s old caravan friends, falling in with them again, my dad protesting but knowing they had no other option. But Ari could be anywhere. It was at that moment that it struck me how badly I had let her down, how she had to take care of me in my antics when I should have been, if not a role model, at least some sort of figure of stability. But I showed up drunk to her high school graduation and cheered like an asshole the whole time, so loud I got kicked out and nearly arrested. Not like she needed one to get by, but dammit Mosh if you could have only been something for her to look up for. Or, if you could have tried to be something for her to look up to maybe you wouldn’t have been such a loser yourself. At least maybe I wouldn’t have prompted all those “mom is worried about you” moments. And I even hoped that, if she was still somewhere halfway sane, she would end up marrying some guy with his shit together so he could give his asshole brother-in-law, me, a good chewing out and setting straight over Ghirosh festival dinner. If there was still going to be any kind of family dinners or brothers-in-law or if anything that the Prophet Kirk Korgarian did even mattered anymore in a world like this, even though the prophet’s name only meant something to me because I could use it for cursing. And the holiday that commemorated his last meal with his family certainly didn’t have any relevance right now. What did we eat the night before I impulsively got in Lazlo’s fan-powered truck? Mac-n-cheeze from a box? Mom’s infamous scalloped potatoes? And did I tell Ari that she gave me hope to turn my life around? Did I tell my mom that she deserved better than this? Did I tell my dad he was the reason I was going down the career path of a degenerate drunk? No. I shoveled food into my mouth like any other night, not realizing that everything was a blessing of time, and time is an asshole who takes away blessings because it feels good to make people squirm. Or something like that. Maybe I just missed Ari, because while I could outgrow my parents I could never outgrow my sister.

                Lazlo’s house was locked, so he rang the doorbell and then kicked the door a few times, then pounded it with his fists. A darkly bearded man opened the door. I could tell by his cloak and the tattoos on his forehead, depicting, in their hierarchy, the Sky Father, the raven, and the Earth mother, that he was one of the itinerant shamans that would roam the hills. He explained to us that once the people of Chipichango left (it was difficult to tell when this had happened, seemed like at least a few weeks from his description), he had taken up residence here, feeding off the electric energy for use in his contact with the spirits, until the Octo-Corp bulldozers inevitably rolled in.

                “This is my house,” said Lazlo. He wasn’t angry, he just stood slack-jawed in the living room, dazed by this paradigm. “Or it was. It was my house. I guess I left, just like everyone else did.” There were cracks in the roof under which the shaman, or maybe Lazlo’s family before they left, had put buckets to collect the rainwater coming through. The lightbulbs were shattered, every electronic device looked as though it had been fried.

                “Power surge,” Lazlo said. “We must have made some kind of horrible power surge.” He turned to the shaman. “Do you know,” he said, “if everyone is ok? I mean, did they die?”

                “No one died, they just left,” was his response.

                “Where? Where can we find them?”

                “They didn’t go anywhere. They just left.” It made sense then that we had been losing weight before we went to find Leyna. Our bodies were trying to leave too, unobtrusively fading out of physical existence. “Most of them are scattered in no particular place, and some might have disappeared for good. But I see you’ve come back.” Then, of all things, he offered us a pot of tea. He wouldn’t give his name, just asked us to call him shaman. He said he was a mitigator of the bird spirits. He claimed he knew all about birds, could even tell us what they were thinking.

He had set up a tarp in the back yard, over the little cement patio, under which he was keeping a small fire. The rain was coming down harder now and it ran off the sides in sheets. The smoke wafted up and left through a hole by the roof. There was just enough room for us all to huddle around the fire while he boiled water. (Eddy Sem can take up the physical space of up to three standard people. He seems to grow larger at inopportune moments.) We watched it boil in silence, as if our gaze itself would shoot energy into the pot.

                Except for Lazlo. Lazlo is bad at standing still under normal circumstances. And now in the ruins of the place he once called home, every part of his body was pure kinetic energy. He would be staring at the fire, fiddling with his hands, then all of a sudden reverse direction and dart out into the rain, put his hands up, put the heel of his hand against the wall or look up straight into the sky, then dart back under the tarp as abruptly as he had darted out.

                Maybe I should have been more outwardly sympathetic. I didn’t know if we were in this together or not. I didn’t know if our problem was the same anymore. Was he this way because of Chipichango being over or was this because of Leyna? Was this all because of Leyna? I wanted to slap the both of them right then. But unfortunately they were some of the only friends I had at the moment. That’s right, I was counting Leyna among my friends. After a year on the road with these guys, they were my family, their loves were my loves. And I may have begun to resent them like family.

                “Lazlo,” said Eddy Sem, “just get in here. Sit still.” He made the universal sign for calm-the-fuck-down, holding his hands out, fingers splayed, palms down, and subtly lowering them. “And put some fucking shoes on, it’s raining, stop pretending you’re all mystical n shit.”

                “Fuck you man,” said Lazlo, “don’t get this way with me man.” He had the look of someone who was ready to throw a punch.

                “Don’t start, don’t fuckin start. I will destroy you.” He had a really good point. In hand-to-hand combat, Eddy Sem could annihilate most anyone on Transgea.

                “I’m starting shit,” said Lazlo, “deal with it.”

                I told both of them to calm down, which made Lazlo think I was siding with Eddy Sem and made Eddy Sem think he couldn’t take a skinny shoeless punk like Lazlo. We all exchanged fuck yous and told each other to fuck ourselves, respectively.

“Problem with you,” said Eddy Sem to Lazlo, “you’re not doing what’s best for us, you don’t want what’s best for us. You want what’s good for you, and what’s good for Leyna and her people.”

“We’re all in this together,” said Lazlo, “me, Leyna, you, Mosh, everybody else, who went the fuck knows where.”

“Oh bull-SHIT! You wanted to help Leyna before helping any of us. Dragged us to Edge City pissing in a bottle, got us tied up in a cornfield, got us a criminal record, got us halfway to the other side of the world to meet two psychopaths, got everyone in Chipichango kicked out so it can become a warehouse or a strip mall or a missile silo.”

“Yeah, and that’s something I wanted? You think I wanted to come home to some squatter in my house – a very gracious one, I suppose” he added, “have Leyna ditch me, have everything I wanted gone. I take responsibility, and I’ll get us out of it, I’m just trying to figure it out and I don’t need you telling me to calm the fuck down.”

“Well what do you want? It seems to me like you can want Leyna or you can want the old boring, stable, and intact Chipichango. But you could never have both.” He had a point, the two were mutually exclusive. “And you think you can stop this? You think you can stop Octo-Corp and the Municipality and the powers that be? Because you think you’re some kind of wizard”

“Dynamo Monk.”

“Well whatever it is you aren’t one! Or is it because you and Mosh think your little clan makes you great inventors. You guys barely graduated high school!”

“Oh, and you did any better?” I chimed in.

“Hey man, I had my priorities straight. I was talking to some coaches at least, got some offers.”

“Yeah, at fucking Grakley Tech.” Some shitty two-year college an hour down the river. “And you were still too dumb to get in. And you didn’t even lead the team in points or steals per game.” That, of course, was held by me our senior year. So of course I thought it was bullshit that he was awarded MVP, which I told him to his face for the first time. We momentarily forgot about how we were mad at Lazlo and got mad at each other, arguing over who had been the better basketball player, which I still maintain that I clearly was because I didn’t have to rely on my size to move people out of the way and stop their momentum. To this day I still maintain that every technical aspect of my game was better than his. But he had that fucking dynamic presence by virtue of his size so naturally it looked like any time anything got done on the court, he was behind it. He told me that I was too flashy and a ball hog and inconsistent. But of course, we had to get back to chewing out Lazlo for our own respective reasons, and the argument morphed into three separate arguments, all of us yelling at all of us.

“What do you want?” Eddy Sem yelled at Lazlo, “You want to wind up with some unstable electric chick? You want to get married in this ghost town with me and Mosh clapping our asses off and then be a fucking cute alliterative couple? You want us to see you as some sort of savior? The last in a long line of Dirigibles who tried to make things better but really screwed us over with their tinkering?”

“Now hold on just a second,” I said, “I may be some of the dumbest to come out of the Dirigible stock, and that’s saying something.” I glanced at Lazlo. “And even if we have had some unfortunate encounters with their handiwork, even when you take Leyna and her people out of it, they’re good people. Marcel and Impa have several patents to their name, Valens saved the town, and even Farkas at least gave us basic cable.”

“Those patents got stolen, Valens ended up making some kind of clones that almost got us killed, and face it, even when we could change the channels when we wanted, there was nothing good on.”

“It was nice watching the Bombardiers play.”

“Oh you were just a fair weather fan and you know it.”

Lazlo spoke up again: “Our families, our friends are probably living in a refugee camp somewhere, and Mosh, you have no fucking clue where your sister is. But you guys are arguing about a fucking sports team?”

“And you’re standing in the rain barefoot more worried about some girl than you are about any of that,” I said. “You fall in love with the first girl that, even just a little bit, digs you back. And be honest with yourself, it was only to get you to help her. You never got what you wanted – I know you were jealous of me and Eddy Sem – and the first time some girl gives you anything close to that you act like she’s going to solve all your problems and make up for what you could never get because you’re a piece of shit who lives in his head.” I was laying into him but I dodn’t care. I guess it was some kind of catharsis. “And you couldn’t stand it to fall apart so you hopped in your fucking Gerry-rigged electric car and chased her to the edge of the world, and we were the ones who had to deal with it. You just found some kind of bullshit religion and kept lying to yourself. And you’re such a fucking woman you couldn’t even follow a sports team. And while we’re on the subject, you’re probably not even man enough to satisfy Leyna and you know it.”

“Mosh,” said Eddy Sem, “you were never the kind of person Lazlo looked up to. I got with at least half the cheerleaders. You were stuck with Mildy Dillard, and you know you were settling!”

“Oh you fucking take that back! You FUCKING take that back! She-”

“Gave you like, sloppy thirteenths, I know.”

“This,” said Lazlo, “is your fucking problem! All you care about is who sucked your dicks in high school, still! Well I got news for you. This town just ended! Everything you narrowminded fucks have ever known just ended! No one is even around to suck anyones’ dicks anymore. Except fate. We’re just caressing the shaft of the dick of fate.” Never a time for a Lazlo-ism.

“And you know who ended it?” said Eddy Sem. “You did. You and your fucking squeeze blundered this whole thing-”

“with your help-”

“Don’t fucking blame me. You blundered this whole thing and now everything just got worse. Marcel and Impa have left us with Lazlo and Mosh, the two most useless people this world has ever seen.”

                We might have come to blows, but the shaman intervened, politely tapping Eddy Sem on the shoulder. “Here is your tea,” he said. And with that our fight was at least put on hiatus. He handed us each clay cups with no handles and a round bottom, filled with an opaque liquid. He waved his hand, saying “drink, drink! It will soothe you.” It was then that it occurred to me Lazlo had been invited into his own house for tea, and I felt badly for yelling at him.

                Shaman’s tea tastes like fruit that’s just starting to go bad. It tastes like the water that collects at the bottom of plastic bags you’ve kept hot dogs in for a few days too long. It tastes like something no one would drink if it didn’t have the elevated status of pertaining to a shaman. I had heard wonderful things about these teas, the esoteric recipes blended from herbs and roots which you could only find when you weren’t looking for them. We all stared into our putrid tea, waiting for it to cool, all seething beneath the surface.

                As it cooled and we began to take tentative sips, my shoulders relaxed as a strange kind of warmth grew in my belly. As I took larger sips the feeling spread and my whole body loosened, as I felt myself slowly melt into what had once been Lazlo’s couch. The three of us looked at each other, flashed thin smiles. It was then that I realized how tired we all looked. And for the first time I realized that in Chipichango, the lights had gone out, like they too realized that they needed to rest after all this time. Like the power itself had taken a rest. Were we old men before our time? Couldn’t be, we were still just dumb kids having a pissing contest in the back yard only a few minutes ago. But maybe Lazlo was mature enough to know what he wanted, maybe Eddy Sem and I were old enough to finally get over high school sports. Maybe, like the rest of the world, we could move on from some little time and place, even if we were too damn attached.

                “Now that you are calm,” said the shaman, “I would like to tell you a story.” He leaned forward from his seat on the ottoman, holding his staff in his right hand. “Before your people came to this land, there were shamans, and whole tribes of people just like us, who were born here, made their homes here, and died here. Right along the banks of the Grakley. But they were pushed away when your people first arrived. And my people, I don’t know where they are. Most have vanished, some live on under many flags, writing their names on the roadside. But all are silent.

“But before we were here, there were herds of buffalo, antelope, even furry behemoth elephants. But we chased them here and chased them away. And they too have vanished. Before them this land was populated by a race of giants, and before them the rogue spirits who betrayed the matter sculptors in Dream Time. All of them driven out, all of them vanished. And now your people are being driven away by the corporation men. And you too have started to vanish. But some day, the corporation men will themselves be driven away by even more savage beings, and they themselves will vanish. It’s a process that is bound to happen. If you hold on, you’re only making it worse. There are a thousand places in the world into which one can disappear if one desires. Find a place to disappear to, but leave Chipichango to its fate.”

                We were all too sedated by the tea and too weary from the cumulative weight of our adventure to argue or question him.

                “This one,” he said, pointing at Lazlo “shouldn’t despair. My people once had a saying that the hunter who follows an antelope to the ends of the earth is the greatest asset to his family, even if he never comes back.”

                “You,” he said to Eddy Sem, “are the redwood tree.”

                “Haha, I get it, because I’m big and ginger.” He giggled. The big guy was slumped on the baraclounger in a pleasant stupor.

                “And because you cannot be moved, because you are a beacon on the skyline.”

                “But this one,” he pointed to me, “may be like the story of the man who lied to his own spirit and was cursed by having to switch spirits with a seagull with broken wings, which itself was once a man who tried to make love to his own reflection in a puddle and was punished by being reincarnated as the ugliest of birds.”

                “Wait,” I said, “am I the dude or the bird in that story? Or maybe the puddle?”

                “You are the one they call Moresby Lomax. But you are guilty of the same transgressions.” I wanted an explanation but he walked out the back door and started poking at the wet lawn with his staff. Maybe all of these mystical types were just as full of shit as Lazlo.

                I drifted off on the couch and I might have dreamt about a seagull right there in Lazlo’s living room. It was squawking at some other bird that dwarfed the seagull with its wingspan, on the branch of a massive redwood tree on the edge of the earth. I guess this tea was potent stuff.

               

                Once the tea wore off, Eddy Sem and I decided that we were going to settle who was the better athlete once and for all. We broke into the Chipichango High gym, and under violently flickering lights decided it would come down to a game of 1-on-1, full court, first to 21 points wins. Lazlo had stayed behind at his house (or was it his old house now?) drinking shaman’s tea. The guy needed a rest. We all knew it.

                “Alright,” I said, “you ready for this?”

                “Please,” said Eddy Sem, “this is what I do. You’re the one who needs to get ready.”

                “Wait, how do we want to do fouls?”

                “No fouls. We’re just gonna do this.”

                Before coming to the gym we had walked through Chipichango, past our old haunts, now filled with holes and burn marks. We walked through the looted aisles of Uncle Friendly’s, where we had once, supposedly, worked, although it never felt like work since we always managed to make it so we had the same shifts. We walked through the now overgrown Clambert Park, behind the tree where we used to smoke joints and down forties of malt liquor. We stood in the empty, unlit lanes of the Chipichango bowling alley. We sat at the two intact stools at Lulu’s diner and pretended that we were bullshitting just like old times in the interval between ordering and receiving chili fries. And now we were in the gym that had once defined the success and failure of our existence, about to play a game to decide the one thing that had really mattered to the two of us.

                And just as we were about to start, we heard two cars pull up outside. A few seconds later Lazlo comes in with, of all people, Dobkins. He was grinning, he was excited, he was practically jumping up and down. And he told us that we had to get going right away. No, no time for this game, no time to settle scores, we had a way to save Chipichango, we had a way to free the Ohmforcers, we had a way to shut down the entire power grid. But we had to get moving. Dobkins was driving a van, probably the same one that Leyna kidnapped us in. Lazlo telling us to get in, he’ll explain on the way. Dobkins was still the one Ohmforcer Eddy Sem and I still felt like we could really trust. Anyone else had shown up and we would have kept to our game. Hell, we even thought he might have been working alone at this point.

                “Maybe it’s best we never know,” said Eddy Sem. Maybe not. Was I supposed to be the dude or the bird? I’ll never know. I know I’m not either now, but I’ll get to that. But first we had a lot of hell-raising to do, and, of course, another cramped and smelly ride in Lazlo’s truck.