Greetings from Xenon
by Terry Sanville
And you think I’m bad! I’ve got friends who have ID cards printed up that say they’re from the planet Xenon. That’s way out past Ursa Minor you know, maybe three or five hundred light years away. Everybody knows that in the time it would take a spacecraft to reach earth, they’d be old as dirt. But at least I know I’m crazy, while these fools are just trying to do spin control as they descend in their Buck Rodgers saucers, spinning down through purple atmospheres and saffron yellow sunrises, all the while their small alien hands beating out steady rhythms on computer keyboards. I think it was Faust who said something about beatings. Maybe it’s the fact that the faster you press the computer keys, the more you can dissolve away the inhibitions and feel more confident in what you do, what you are, what you say, what you think.
You know, I had lots of childhood inhibitions, what with four older sisters and a mother that who was never around. I was ten before I figured out that every time a girl, woman, female, bitch, you know what I mean, says something you don’t have to jump;, you don’t have to respond at all. In New York City, I’d ride the subway out to Coney Island, and these slutty smutty women would get on at 151st Street and hike up their skirts, then glare at me as if I were some whacked out piece of shit, so I’d flip them the bird. The Gestapo transit Transit Ppolice finally threw me off the train, and I took to holing up somewhere in Brooklyn in back of a dumpster where there were definitely no women, I can tell you that – but then you probably already know that. That’s where I got this jacket; a perfectly good jacket that keeps out the rain, although I’ve never been much into sports, and the Mets really suck anyway.
Like the social worker they sent out on a rainy afternoon in Seattle to talk with me – I’d been there two or three years, months, weeks, whatever, and took to hanging out in the Gray Wing of the public library. They have a wonderful collection of art books, I really like the impressionistsImpressionists, the expressionsExpressions, the Ccubists, the Rrealists – I guess I like them all – and I was just minding my own business, although I was on a high and was motoring through a three footthree-foot stack of books every day.; I really like the rich glossy photographs of Gauguin’s work, and the Dutch painters aren’t bad either, although their dark tones and heavy brush strokes look clumsy to me, like they were painted by people with bad deformities. And then there’s that painting by Edward Munch that’s called “The screamScream” that really creeps me out, but then people tell me that’s what I’m like, which I can’t understand, because I try to be friendly and hold friendly conversations, just like we’re doing here, I mean now, I mean whenever, it doesn’t really matter and I know I can be repulsive, even disgusting to most people, but I don’t hurt anybody, I just like to talk which shouldn’t piss anybody off because they sit in front of TVs all day long anyway and listen to fat ass Oprah or Sally or Rosie or Ricky or Judy, or anybody else with a “y” at the end of their first name and take it all in and can’t even talk back or think, or do anything but be sedated by the blue light coming from the tube.
In college I used to clean out the chemistry labs at night; I’d ignite all the Bunsen burners, I used to clean out the chemistry labs at night; I’d ignite all the Bunsen burners, then turn off all the lights and watch the blue flames flicker. It was almost holy, like a Church, a cathedral, a mosque, a synagogue, a grove of redwoods or something, and I used to kneel on the cold linoleum floor and pray, but now God isn’t really high on my reality list, and I stopped that years ago and took up drinking sweet wine, calms me down a little when I’m high, but when I’m down, I stick to black coffee and cold pills, if I have enough money to buy them, which I usually don’t. I got caught stealing in a Save-On Drug sStore in Phoenix last spring;, I think it was the Ides of March, and the pharmacist was real nice about it, but the butthead store manager wasn’t and called the police. They took me in, and I yelled and screamed all through the first night – my cell was like a crowded closet full of old, smelly shoes, and the food they gave me had worms in it or something. Anyway, I guess I pissed off the jailers cause the guys in white took me to the Psych Ward at the University hospital, where they were really cool, and gave me a few injections of Lithium that stopped me from thinking crazy but made my hands shake so bad I couldn’t feed myself or whipe my own ass.
Hospitals are really interesting places; people come in sick, and some die, some give birth, some go away crazy, a few go away cured, but most just pay high-cost homage to the god-like doctors for their deft remonstrations, their blessings of the waters, for their skill with the knife, their bedside manner, their fucking superiority complexes, their car payments for their Porsches, Mercedes, Jaguars, and the occasional exotic Italian job, Lamborghini, Ferrari, MaserattiMaserati, Bugatti, you know. I can see through all of that bullshit, and I let them know, which I guess they don’t appreciate because, even at my worst, I’m never in the hospital more than a couple of days before they give me pills, sometimes a cardigan sweater, and send me walking. Sometimes they give me a bus ticket, sometimes I get explicit directions to the nearest freeway onramp, sometimes; sometimes I get explicit directions to the nearest freeway onramp, and sometimes I just walk out and roam the City.
I really like walking through residential neighborhoods, maybe ’cause in another lifetime I studied civil engineering at the University,, I did tell you that, didn’t I? And I like to watch the aftermath of families in action, you know, the toys strewn across front lawns, empty water buckets standing next to washed cars, garden hoses imperfectly coiled under lantana bushes, fuschias in pots hung from porch beams, the satisfied sound from washing machines churning away in garages with their doors open exposing all of a family’s discarded junk, and the red flags on the mail boxesmailboxes all erected, signaling that the residents know somebody or something far away that they communicate with – by paper. I like writing things, but I miss having clean whiteclean, white, or soft pastel paper to write on, and you can’t find a good fountain pen anywhere these days. Writing on a computer isn’t the same, ; you can’t feel the paper, you can’t focus on the perfect formation of the letters in the alphabet and how they smoothly connect to form your own beautifully stylized hieroglyphics. You know when you get a personal letter that it’s from a person, not from some damn machine, not from some facsimile of a human brain that’s always logical, precise, correct, and understandable. Where’s the fun in that, anyway? I mean, it’s the rough edges of things that are the fun part, especially the edges that resist being sanded down and have nothing to do with how much you know, or how well spoken you are, or how attractive a house you live in, or any of that other materialistic crap that we consider as examples of culture and the good life.
Not that I don’t like good things myself; a guy in Buffalo gave me a warm woolen overcoat a couple of winters back, and inside the left front pocket were two packs of Marlboros, a Zippo lighter, and a money clip with maybe fifty bucks in it, mostly fives and tens, but. I could be wrong, but I know there were no ones. The guy just handed the coat over to me and walked away, and it was snowing and fucking cold, and I thought about going to a football game to watch the Bills, but you know I’m not really into sports, . Sso, instead I went to a dingy little used book shop and bought three or four of Dostoevski’s novels, big fat thousand-page suckers that cost me less than a buck apiece and probably hadn’t been fully read by anybody, except maybe by some poor university student who was forced to as part of a literature class assignment, like I had to back in freshman year when we were required to write a critical essay on Melville’s Moby Dick and I kept waiting for the damn whale to finish Captain Ahab off. Now there was a messed-up dude; imagine wallowing around in the Sargasso Sea, or maybe off Puget Sound, or the South China Sea, or Baffin Bay, or maybe in the Gulf Stream with whale guts smeared all over the decks and a first mate with no front teeth yelling his head off to lower the damn boats, lower the boom, lower the nets, lower his guard and get swept overboard by the thirty-foot swells and the sea thick with sharks feeding off the whale guts, and the boat bouncing in the surf off some South Pacific island, and you manage to haul your sorry ass through the breakers, like the cook, or was it the whaler in Stephen Crane’s Open Boat, and make it to the beach, only to find a phalanx of native cannibals that grab you and strip you down and put you in a huge clay pot for their evening meal.
But the hot water feels good after the cold ocean, at least for a while. I felt that way, actually just the opposite, in Vietnam where they sent me to Cam Ranh Bay for R&R, you know “rest and recovery,” and I spent most of the time jumping up and down in the surf to escape the oppressive heat, heat so hot that the flies are easy to kill, and the mosquitoes are drunk with your blood and camp out on bare forearms or backs of necks and drink themselves to death, sort of like the lifer sergeants in the EM clubs did every night on 3.2 beer; but then that whole country was full of fucked up guys and I sort of fit right in, you know for the first time nobody hassled me because I did my thing and smoked a lot of grass, and did a lot of reading, mostly the hippie writers from San Francisco although I’d never been there before Nam, you know., I’m a real farm boy, I told you I was born and raised in Omaha, didn’t I?, I can’t remember, but I used to hang out at the train yards and write sonnets on the side of Grain Belt and Solid Cold boxcars; they have this smooth metal plate just to the rear of the main sliding door, and for some reason, they’re usually clear of that crazy gang crap that you now see scribbled all over everything. I used to write in white and yellow chalk and sometimes blue, if I could find it in the supply cabinet at school, where the secretaries would hide it from me on a top shelf in the back of the bottles of stencil correction fluid; man, that stuff will really screw up your head, that and White Out.
When I was in the joint in Oregon for a while (just for some minor B&E – nothing to worry about) I worked in the print shop and got used to smelling the printer’s ink, the solvents used to clean the machines, the gelatinous black grease that we’d smear around the gears every few hours to keep them cool so that thousands, no millions of pages flowed down the line without ever stopping, not even long enough to let me read what we were printing, some sort of newspaper, some type of manifesto, some piece of propaganda, some new distortion of reality, some bible for the feebs upstairs to dwell on as they think about what 25 to life really means,. Because because when you step inside a prison, your life really ends right then and there;, you’re just going through the motions, just keeping out of sight, out of trouble, and definitely out of circulation.
I spent four years in Soledad before they finally caught on and shipped me to Atascadero Mental Facility, nice; nice folks there, and the food’s better than normal stir, but you’re still not free to leave, just; just take your meds and talk to the doctor when you have an appointment and obey the psych techs at all costs. I lived next door to this guy who had been there since he was nineteen, and he must have been over forty when I was there; he looked a lot like my father or at least the pictures of my father, but one night he found a claw hammer somewhere, maybe the garden shed when he was outside doing yard work, and he stuffed it down the front of his pants, those white cotton ones with the drawstring in the front, and when the psych tech came around to check on him at lights out, he beat the guy to a pulp;, there was blood all over his cell, his bed, his arms; I could hear him working at it from next door but was too scared shitless to make a ruckus, so they didn’t find the guy until way after lights out and the tech was already getting stiff by then, and they just zipped him into a black plastic body bag and hauled him out.
But the fruitcake, the patient, I mean, the killer, the stone cold murderer;, they took off the ward, and we never saw him again, which I was really glad about because bloody stuff just freaks me out, you know, just takes me on an upward spiral toward the clouds, to the ultimate altitudes of my mania, to God’s very doorstep. I was there once, it’s; it’s an easy place to find. I had taken the coast road up near Big Sur, took me three days hitchhiking from San Diego, but I got there and right away found a cliff that drops straight into the churning blue Pacific. It was windy and cold, sort of like it is now at this bus stop, and I didn’t have my coat on, and my left shoe laceshoelace was untied, but I didn’t care, and I stepped to the edge and thought about all the things, places, people, ideas, feelings, disappointments, lows and highs, you know, things that life throws at you, and I felt where the rocky edge of the cliff ended, and the thin air began, and the fog was coming in, and the horn at Piedras Blancas was sounding loud and strong, and Jesus, I think this is my bus, I can’t be sure, maybe it is, maybe it’s not, but I’d better take it because the shelter slams its doors at 5:15 sharp and not even Saint Peter can get you or me or anybody in after that. So, I’ll see you later and thanks for talking to me, I mean; I mean, letting me talk to you, I mean, you know what I mean.
Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet wife (his in-house editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). He writes full time, producing short stories, essays, and novels. His stories have been accepted more than 550 times by journals, magazines, and anthologies including The American Writers Review,Bryant Literary Review, and Shenandoah. He was nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes and once for inclusion in Best of the Net anthology. Terry is a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist – who once played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing.
