From Visions of
Garleyville
I met her at the counter of a Route 3
diner in
It was early on a Saturday morning,
that in-between time after the bars closed and before the fleets of trucks
began their ride out of
I couldn't sleep for numerous reasons.
The insurance company had revoked by car insurance because the state had
revoked my license, both stemming from my failure to pay a street sweeping
ticket and numerous reminders from the city.
Small things like that annoyed me, and
drove me to revolutionary plots I carried out in my head, a modern day French
Revolution in which only bureaucrats would lose their heads.
I was still fuming over a hot cup of
coffee when she approached, her pretty face floating oddly among the rising
fumes as if a genie seeking to grant me a wish -- only with a closer inspection
I noticed her eyes had a similar troubled expression as my own.
Mutual misery, I thought, recalling a
famous painting by an American named Hopper, of lonely people sitting around a
counter in an all-night diner such as this.
"More coffee?" she asked.
"Sure, why not," I said.
"I'm no nearer to getting sleep now than when I came in."
"That bad?" she asked as she
refilled my cup, sloshing a little of the brown liquid onto the counter.
"Not as bad as I make out,"
I said. "But everybody has something to complain about. Even
you."
She looked startled, as if her
expression didn’t broadcast her inner-thoughts.
"What do you mean?" she
asked.
"Patrons aren't the only people
with problems," I said. "Especially on the late
night shift."
She looked for a moment as if she
would leave me to my own troubles, then sighed and sagged, then leaned against
the counter.
"I don't have troubles
exactly," she said. "I'm just confused."
"Confusion can be a
problem."
"I thought I knew what I
wanted," she went on. "I thought I could count on something being
permanent in my life."
"That's ridiculous," I said,
having previously thought the same thing about my car insurance.
"Everything changes. Sometimes you even change your mind, about life or
religion."
This time her look was so startled, I
thought she might faint. "You know about me?"
"It's hard to hide with your head
shaved like that."
Her hand rose to touch the bristly
surface and she smiled. "Oh, I forgot," she said. "I'm trying to
grow it back. It's amazing how long it takes."
"How long were you
involved?"
She shrugged. "A
little over a year."
"When did you give it up?"
"Last Thanksgiving," she
said, in a tone so definite, she startled me.
"Did something happen?"
"Yes," she said, then fell
into a silence making me believe she would keep the reason secret. I didn't
prompt her. I let the silence linger until she began to fill it with words.
"It was a cold Thanksgiving this
year," she said. "That's what started the whole mess. I know
Thanksgiving's supposed to be cold, especially on the streets of
"Not that anybody noticed. I
guess that bothered me, too. For all our holy work, the world seemed to go on
just as it always did. Richard Nixon got elected despite all we did to stop it,
and I was feeling pretty empty, the way I had just before I left home. Why
couldn't I do something more to change the world?
"I stopped coming home to
"`My only daughter getting
involved in orgies,' he complained. `Any day now, I expect you to call home
from
"I tried to tell him I had no
inclination towards orgies, but only towards fulfillment. Perhaps I tried to
convince myself after four hard years in high school as someone rather awkward.
Not being popular, I told myself I did not desire sex. Even when people told me
I was pretty, I didn't believe it. Sometimes I think I wanted to make this true
when I cut off my hair and put on robes, chanting for the world's salvation
when I could not find salvation of my own.
"Maybe I even believed it for a
while. But all that ended when we went out to chant and dance on the sidewalk
near the parade: all those Thanksgiving floats making me feel like a little
girl again, making me wish my father could hold my hand or buy me a wad of pink
cotton candy.
"But it was the cold that
bothered me most. I clapped my arms. I chanted and danced, yet couldn't keep
warm, and nothing we did could get us heard over the blare of the bands or the
cheer of the crowds. People kept shoving us out of the way and I kept thinking:
`Oh, what's the use?'
"That's when I heard the singing.
"It's remarkable with all that
noise, all those bands, all those people, I could
still hear two young men singing silly pop songs on the sidewalk.
"At first, I thought someone's
car radio was turned too loud, but the sound was too sweet and fresh for that.
Then, I saw two figures weaving through the crowd, both dressed in jeans and
denim jackets, one wearing a world war one military
campaign hat, the other a black bushman's hat.
"Their singing sounded like our
chanting, only remarkably more sweet. We always seem a
little robotic, as if we didn't really believe so much in something behind the
chant as in the repetition. But these two -- singing songs from the radio --
seemed to have a strange spirit alive in them, that seemed to warm them even
with their think jackets, warm them from the inside.
"I stopped chanting and started
to listen to them.
"They sang a lot of Simon and
Garfunkel songs, and a lot of other folks songs I
didn't know, from before the Vietnam War made so many people so bitter they
couldn't believe in singing about being free, before the National Democratic
Convention in
"They just sang, giving their
songs an unusual harmony that wasn't on the original record, harmony that
turned other people's heads, too. The two sang and stared up at the passing
floats, looking so happy, I could have burst.
"Naturally, I smiled. You would
have, too. And they noticed me, and noticed how cold I was, and they stopped
singing and came over to me, and asked if I was all right.
"`Sure,' I said, though I
obviously wasn't.
"`Maybe you should come inside
one of the stores with us," the boy with the campaign hat said, his
crooked front teeth making him look a little strange -- but a good strange, a
jack-a-lantern strange. `We'll buy you a cup of hot chocolate.'
"I felt guilty, even as I said
yes, knowing somehow I had opened a door in me which I could never quite shut
again. But I was so lonely and there two seemed so close to each other. No one
of us chanting people ever got so close as that, not
with each other. All our affection and wants were directed to the Godhead, and
these two had actually acknowledged me as a person -- which was more than my
father ever did.
"Oh, I vowed to do extra
chanting. It even crossed my mine that I might convert these two and bring them
and their energy into our fold. I could imagine the life we would have with
them at our side. Maybe then, we could even change the world. But to my own
horror, I felt their attracting me, pulling out of my long hidden sense of
humanity, something which had never hit me quite so hard before.
"They knew it, too, asking me if
I wanted to go with them after the parade.
"The
temptation was immense. What was the point of having universal love and balance
if I couldn't find either in my life?
"I resisted.
"The Godhead still had enough of
a hold on me to make me send them away. They laughed and said they understood,
giving me their phone numbers where they lived in
"No, I didn't keep the
numbers," she said answering the question before I could ask. "That
would have ruined me entirely. I couldn't have lived with the guilt. But I
can't live with the emptiness either. And maybe I was thinking of them,
thinking of the joy in their eyes when I called my father and begged him to
take me home. My father got me the job here. I keep hoping one of those two
boys walks in sometime, just so I can tell him: thanks."