Asset Safari: After the Meltdown, Part III

It is now 107 days since we’ve had a home we can call a home.

Leaving NYC in a taxi on a gray day, we flew West and showed up in Palo Alto, hoping for a fellowship–no dice. Paused in SoCal to see me aging Mum and scope out the job market–no job market. After a week we hauled anchor for Hawaii, where a house awaited, collecting dust kitties and still stuffed with M’s late mother’s personal effects (including a fourth husband).

Now we are back in L.A.

In our last weeks in NYC, back when all this began, I had a flash about how to wrest control of this shapeless life of ours. My head was in an unusual place–having finished my novel Feb. 25, I’d gone straight that evening, without even a tot of celebratory whisky, into a frenzy of boxing and storing and throwing. For the next 45 days I had no time to read or write. Meanwhile, M was finishing her book, on double-drop-dead-line, since we had to vacate March 31 whether or not the mss. was finished on its April 1 due date.

All this left me plenty of time for one thing: thinking. And my thinking couldn’t be wool-gathering, either, or story-plotting. No, I had to assume the role of Captain Trips, master-planning our future moves even as our life morphed toward nebulosity, if not disaster.

The problem: How to turn a rout into victory? Since I’ve been reading a lot of military history for my novel, Dunkirk sprang to mind, but the analogy seemed risible; and as a rule one must be cautious about inviting comparison to Winston Churchill. Still, I conducted a staged withdrawal, trying to sublet the apartment, to sell our first editions of Eliot and Stevens and Cather and Bukowski, to find amid our possessions a liability to turn into an asset. And failed on each count.

To get myself through this initial period I decided to approach this entire episode–our "reset," as Obama might call it–as a four-star life detour, if the Guide Michelin reviewed lives like restaurants. I would drape it in flash econo-political symbolism, lard it with literary analogy, disguise the off bits with aggressive spices, like a cheap curry. Then call it an adventure. Turn suffering into material, the way a bistro chef takes offal and serves it up as tripes de Caen.

It wasn’t such a stretch. This is partly how it felt to be a magazine writer and editor, in the Latter Days of Journalism. Magazine people make sausage, almost without exception. I was good at it.

But I also was a fiction writer–which, in these times, is like saying "I whittle garden gnomes out of scrap lumber." Still, the fiction-writing habit seemed the only one still functioning after the meltdown. Freelancing a nonfiction story when staffers are being laid off by the hundreds is like a cow boarding a cattle car to the stockyards in expectation of reaching the next pasture.

Writing fiction, for me, for years, has been all about finding form in content, patiently sifting material and memories and associations until a constellation of truths emerge that one can shape into a whole. This was what I must do with my life, and our lives. Find the truth, and let that truth dictate the shape.

Or so I thought. For our content we had our life, which was about to become defined by movement and search and return, like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath or the knight and squire in Don Quixote or Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s On the Road–excepting iPods and laptops, of course. Having been away from our West Coast hometowns for over 20 years except for holidays and M’s odd magazine assignment and my football book, there was also a feeling of coming home from the wars. We were both like Odysseus, fumbling our way toward the past that was to be our future. (From the above it can be seen how quickly literary analogies lose their potency; in real life, as inspiration and motivation their return on investment is about the same, if not less.)

The magazine cliche came easily to hand: Road Trip! The skeletal excuse for filling any hole in the fashion/gear/travel section in any magazine is to scrounge up some skinny callow kids and take their pictures driving down Route 66 in a vintage convertible. (Hey, if it worked for Huck Finn, Cormac McCarthy, John Steinbeck, Lewis & Clark, Hunter Thompson, David Lynch and so on unto "Thelma and Louise," don’t knock it.)

Besides, in addition to the Road Trip format we’d have the overlay of nostalgia that would come from retracing our footsteps. Indeed: twenty-six years ago, the voyage out ended up taking us from Palo Alto to New York City via a sojourn at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. That had been Captain Trips’ greatest achievement as a strategic planner to date. Now that I was being called upon to unravel the Penelopean tapestry of that move, to pull on a thread or two and see if it led us back to our origins, it was hard not to question the point of it all. Even if those 26 years amounted to the heart of our life.

Anyway, go we must. And as the clock ticked down, it became increasingly important, for me, to define the deal going down before it defined us. Crisis control for the middle class meltdown.

Speaking practically, calling ourselves homeless in a fabulous-ironic sense would certainly have gotten attention and, who knows, perhaps even an article assignment. But it seemed overwrought, as well as likely to provoke retaliation, given the plight of the "real" homeless–even though we really were homeless. Anyway, my second thought was to (figuratively) put on an old Hermes scarf and call it vagabondage. In Greenwich Village of old this would be an acceptable pose; but weren’t we headed out into the badlands where the wrong scarf can get you strung up? Also, vagabondage by definition lacks a strategy, especially in a society that doesn’t tolerate 50-something workers, let alone unemployed gypsies. No, we needed something to tell people who asked who we were, who asked where and how we lived. Anything but the truth, which is that we were jobless and homeless, dragging our possessions in a laundry cart across the Great American Consumer Desert.

That’s when my flash hit, an echo of a Depression-era snatch of dialog between Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, who, as is well known, when faced with the insurmountable cried out: "Hey, let’s put on a show!"

In our case, coming from California, and being surfers at heart, the phrase I heard sprang not from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley traditions but from our own teenage years on the sand: Cue the Beach Boys! Check out Jan & Dean and those girls in clam-diggers leaning against a cherry ‘57 Chevy–throw the boards into the back of the station wagon, along with some blankets and extra wax. And by the way? Tell our teachers we’re going on a surfing safari...

What a difference a name makes. Among those who surf, and we do, "going on safari" is still as cool and popular as ever, and doing so at poverty level is still considered a badge of retro distinction. I began mentally toting up where we could rest, for days, weeks and even months, all within decent distance from a beach- or reef-break: Huntington, Laguna, South Shore Oahu, Bay of Biscay...

It’s all in your mindset. All in a name. Tell the teachers we’re surfing. Asset-surfing, U.S.A.

Grocery Cart SUV: After the Meltdown, Part II

So there I was, back in February, in March--pushing all our possessions in a laundry cart. I tried to wait until nightfall to make a series of runs to our mini-storage unit 3 blocks away. Over the 45 days coming and going, emptying out the unit and re-filling it from our apartment, I think I must have made 200 trips. Maybe more--the frequency picked up as we neared our day of abandoning the apartment, New York and 26 years in Chelsea.

If this sounds tawdry or "unnecessary"--i.e., over-dramatic--you're not and have never been a New Yorker. To a certain kind of city dweller, the laundry cart, purchased on 14th Street from a Nigerian or Peruvian, is their SUV. It's not just for laundry, or even groceries. You can move a piano with one, if you have three others to balance the load, that is.

My embarrassment was local, not global. When I got to the corner, I crossed 10th Ave to avoid being seen by my pals at the Empire Diner. I didn't care about the yuppie scum (a phrase curated from the 70s Lower East Side) at the tapas joint or the stragglers from the art galleries. For all they knew, I could be performing an "art installation." Right on!

Once as I was pushing my load on down the road, a Van Morrison song came on my iPod: "It Once Was My Life." And I dug it, dug myself, in an R. Crumb kind of way: Mr Natural-style. Sure, I looked like a homeless person. And in a few weeks I would be, technically. But I had my iPod, my irony, my style...

Back then I hadn't read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"--his after-the-world-is-over novel about The Man and The Boy pushing a grocery cart filled with canned food and blankets down a blasted highway. I like McCarthy. His dynamic deadly landscapes are mine, or at least, the deserts and wastelands of my Western youth. But I figured "The Road" wouldn't be a great work. Too Mad Max. I also figured it would be too depressing given my circumstances.

Now that I have read it, in anxious repose here in Hawaii, the similarity between my laundry cart and The Man's grocery cart is enough to give me the willies. "The Road" takes place after a nuclear strike, never explained. Nuclear winter has long killed off all living things: except for a dog or two kept for self-defense, there are no cats, rats, coyotes, birds, not even a cockroach. (Which is one of the only "unrealistic" notes in a pretty great novel; according to urban myth the cockroach will survive a nuke-out.)

Obviously "The Road" is meant to be The Last Road Novel, a windup of the genre that has given literature such long legs: Exodus, Don Quixote, Canterbury Tales, Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe and on up to Jack Kerouac and too many tired recent examples to mention. I believe "The Road" is also meant to expose to bitter ridicule the overriding American Male Fantasy--that we are a nation of Mr Goodwrench Survivalists who will overcome all setbacks and even thrive, become better family men, for having to live off canned food (while devising clever and economical ways to kill other survivalists who've gone bad or voted Obama).

Yeah, it's a lovely myth. As a boy, as a Boy Scout, a 12-year-old card-carrying member of the NRA hoping my Dad would anoint me with a .22 single-shot Remington for my birthday, I'd grasped the poetry of how Daniel Boone "barked" squirrels with a shot into the tree branch beside the victim's head, which a) didn't mess up the brains, high in protein and fats and b) allowed the lead bullet to be pried out with the tip of a Bowie knife after the kill. Talk about sustainability!

"The Road" is the dead-end of that fantasy. The caches of food are all ravaged, gone, except for a few that appear providentially--discovered under duress--just when our heroes are fainting of starvation. The successful survivalists are organized into tribes of cannibals and (favorite McCarthy turn of phrase) catamites--imagine if Mardis Gras and Gay Pride paraders suddenly sprouted vampire fangs and began dining a la "Night of the Living Dead". The NRA types, it is inferred, didn't last long; for their pains in surviving the meltdown, which they carefully prepared for with underground food caches and arms depots, they got buggered and eaten. Nice.

I have known a few survivalists in my time. As a boy scout, I encountered a charming doctor and a not so charming dentist who both produced bouquets of German handguns on different occasions: thus my only Luger, proferred with a "want to touch?" eagerness. Later, white racists handing out guns during the Watts Riots in 1965 looked on the verge of ecstacy. Black rioters bursting the doors at Poly High in 1969 looked just as over-the-top as they reduced civilization to a shambles.

Today, a couple of my friends mutter of their guns, and a couple actually do have arms caches, I'm told. They once were hippies. Shit happened, I guess. Glad I wasn't there for it. Hope I'm not around when it happens again.

Oh, wait a second. It did happen. Because... When I was pushing my laundry cart, back and forth, in the rain and sleet and covering darkness, so my pals at the Empire Diner wouldn't recognize me, wasn't I enacting the Cormac McCarthy scenario in its early, still-hopeful beginnings? Storing 45 boxes of writings and journals and taxes--for what? Maybe I should have been stashing tuna fish and ammunition for my .30-.30.

This meltdown, if it goes on, could easily reduce all of us to The Man. That's the fear, isn't it? And if we are indeed thrown upon our own resources, it won't be pretty. It won't be a cleansing rapture for the prepared and the devout, like those 7th Day Adventists who are required--yes, required--to keep a years' food and water in their houses.

No, as D.H. Lawrence said, "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, and a killer. It has never yet melted." As an aphorism, I've never bought it. As a prediction of life after breakdown, I can't get it out of my mind--like a cheap perfume or pop music hook. I know so many guys who secretly believe disaster would cause them to rise to the top, like some combination of Jason Bourne and Attila the Hun.

Make a nice reality show--unless we're already living it.