Want

CHAPTER ONE

It’s time to go.  Just that this first step in the darkness is a hard one to take.  Should I go?  Of course I should.  I should go.  I’m gonna do it.  I will.  Ready.

I’ve got a backpack on—one of those camping pack jobbies I got at REI on San Pablo in Berkeley.  It’s called The Resistor.  It looks badass as hell, like I’m en route to meet my Sherpa.  In it, I got all the necessities of my upcoming odyssey.

1.       Layered clothing like crazy.

2.       Cell phone.

3.      Video iPod with some old movie called Valley of the Dolls; the uncensored music video of Madonna’s “Justify My Love”; a digitally remastered version of the Paris Hilton sex tape set to a remixed, electronic version of Clam Bake by Elvis Presley; and 5000 songs specifically selected and downloaded for this trip in an attempt to give my present life a soundtrack, something I’ve always desperately wanted.

4.      Five pounds of protein powder because I’m trying to get waaaay ripped.

5.      A very small digital camera that belongs to my father for taking photograbs—my word for pictures. 

6.      A small collection of tacky, plastic-beaded bracelets made to look like valuable gemstones to give to people I might come across so they will remember me.

7.      A rainbow pack of condoms, which is already open and three-short of being full.  Three short because of practice applications in the bathroom (one botched and two successful).  The inclusion of these condoms is positive thinking at work.

I take the first step.  Silent, even though the steps are made of distressed wood they pulled out of some marsh in Georgia and fastened with antique nails of low quality but high aesthetic appeal.  Most of these babies sound like spoiled, pissed off kids in the supermarket when you step on them.  Not that long ago I mapped out a silent path down the stairs with masking tape—creating a square on each step so I could sneak out in the middle of the night and go to the Haight with Jonesy to watch the Goths and Sheilas prance around like superstars.  I thought, at the time, my mother wouldn’t understand what the masking tape squares were for.  “Zachary, what are these,” she asked.  “Don’t touch those!  Jeez!”  “What are they?”  “It’s an art project.”  “An art project?”  “It has to do with ascension.”  “Oh, yes.  And is this a permanent installation?”  “What the heck do you mean?  No.”

It’s five o’clock in the morning.  My parents are light sleepers.  If they hear me, they’ll surely storm out of the bedroom and ask a no-win question like, “Zachary, what do you think you’re doing?”

Well, I’m stalling.  That’s what.  I’m thinking about how I want mostly premarital sex with experienced people wearing very thin robes with nothing underneath, how I want to smoke just a little blaze out in the country and lie in a field of grass for the afternoon with someone too blissed out to even really know I’m there, how I want a girlfriend who is like ten inches taller than me, how I want better… just… times, how I want to free the animals from the zoo in a huge prison break I record with a DV cam, and how I want to learn how to be crazy.  Not like schizo or anything, just like hella wack.  A wild guy who everyone tells stories about years after he’s dead.  Etcetera.

 But really, I shouldn’t be wasting time here, because, according to my calculations, every second I stall the risk of discovery and capture increases by about three-point-four percent.

My mother’s snoring.  She sounds like an exotic bird when she sleeps—a music you might hear coming out of one of those bad jazz clubs in North Beach.  She refuses to believe she snores.  When Chuckster Rags—that’s what I call my father, a nickname I invented several years ago after a bad dream about rabid, carnivorous chickens—tells her, “You really sawed logs last night,” she says, “I did not!  My God, Chuck!”

My father, on the other hand, sleeps so silently and so still that when you watch him it almost scares you.  It’s like he’s a sculpture in a museum, something venerated and powerful to behold—Don’t touch!—but something that will never reach out and touch you.  In a good way.  That’s Chuckster Rags, the silent sleeper, the all-powerful gentle man.  I called him Jalala-Dad for a while, and then Jalalabadass-Dad, but Mom told me it was inappropriate.  Dad loved it.  He loves all the nicknames I’ve called him over the years.

I also want to run in a brown field of wheat so tall I can suddenly collapse and vanish from view.  Just gone.  And I want the wind to pick up after I collapse and do that mysterious wave thing wind sometimes does to the wheat in fields out there.

One of the stairs screams now because of antique nailage and I back off it.  It’s like a bad movie. Except in the movie, I’d be a girl wearing hotpants.  So, instead of taking the step, I leap for the step below the screamer.  There’s a loud croaking sound, probably because of my increased weight with The Resistor—a factor I didn’t take fully into account.  My mother’s snoring stops.  Danger shit.

Dead silence.

What would she do if she woke up and caught me?  I’d say, it’d be over.  Whether or not she’d buy my false story is unknown.  Improbable.  I’d say she’d make me unpack my backpack piece-by-piece on the kitchen table in front of her and explain each object individually.  There, the objects of my odyssey would be laid out in front of her.  This would be humiliating.  The three-short condom pack would be the real clincher. She’d count.  What do I say?  This is the kind of clever thing my mother does.  It would be both her divining the truth about what I was doing and the punishment for it.  Well, unless she found out the whole truth about the odyssey—about the entanglement of my fuck-ups and lies.  This would give her a conniption fit of historical proportions that would make us all famous in the end.  The headline in tomorrow’s newspaper would read:

DEDICATED RADIOLOGIST RIPS HER SON TO PIECES AND EATS HIS TRACHEA

                As I reach the bottom of the stairs I wonder: What the shit am I doing?  Well, I’m just running away from… I-don’t-know-what.  Or I guess I do.  Things get pretty sketch when I really think about it.  Like how I’ve pretty much rationalized this whole thing by telling myself I’m going to look for my crazy uncle, when really I’m probably just running away from… I-don’t-know-what.  Or I guess I do.  Like I said, pretty sketch.

The last thing I have to do before departure is get Grandpa.  For a while I was going to leave Grandpa behind, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, primarily because Chuckster Rags and Mom haaaaaateGrandpa, and would probably let him starve to death.  Really, it’s not like I don’t know that running away on an odyssey like this gets increasingly difficult when hauling Grandpa around, but I’m not kidding about leaving him behind—dead in days is my predication.  Maybe hours.  Okay days, but still.

                One time Grandpa went missing and my mother was so disgusted and angry at me for letting him escape that she stayed in a hotel until he showed up.  Five days gone.  We have no idea where he went.  She told me she had nightmares about Grandpa sneaking up on her at night in the hotel and biting her face off and would wake up screaming so loud people pounded on the walls and ceilings.  “One went that Grandpa had crawled into my bed and started eating my fingers.  Hungry because of all those days away.  Eating my fingers, Zachary.  My fingers!  This is no way to live!”

                Because I can’t turn on the lights, I have to do everything in the dark, which is slow because I’m being careful.  It’s sort of like walking in water.  It’s amazing how few things you remember when you can’t see them.  Obviously I didn’t remember this long painted oak table I just kicked behind the sofa—the sofa I can’t sit on because the material was made by like silk-witches in Istanbul.  In fact, when I try to visualize the room, all I can really see is this abstract jumble of my mother’s collected items: framed paintings of watercolor landscapes, antique medical items like a stethoscope and some kind of wooden pliers for removing malignant hairballs or something, her gaudy brass statue of Minerva, and her attempts at wood sculpture when she was in college, little tableaus, she calls them, of women’s torsos bent into erotic arcs (though she’d never admit they’re erotic).

                Grandpa’s a little cranky when you first wake him up.  He kind of turns heavy and loose, almost like he’s dead.  But once he knows you’re serious about rousting him, he tries to squeeze the hell out of your arm just because he’s pissed.  I have to carry him to the kitchen so I can retrieve his food from the freezer. Grandpa’s favorite food?  Beetles.  This I found out one day in Golden Gate Park when he went crazy eating beetles off the ground.  After that I went on a big internet search trying to find some supplier who sold beetles in bulk.  Now, we get them delivered from Maine in 10 mil., vacuum-packed plastic mail bags. When you open them, they smell like fish food—a smell that can roust Grandpa, no problem, out of deathly-dead sleep.

I open the huge freezer door and light spills into the kitchen.  It’s just when I have my whole head in the freezer, sifting through boxes of Mom’s Leeann Chin diet food—also in vacuum-packed bags—that I start to hear noises.  It’s a creak first, then a squeal.  The stairs?

                I stop moving, pull my head slowly out of the freezer so I can hear better—freezers make that weird ocean sound all the time—but before I can even turn around, it’s like police spotlights in the kitchen.  Every light—the overhead fixture, the wall uplights, the recessed halogen under the stainless steel cabinets and above the granite counter—illuminate.  Busted.  Not even out of the house and I’m already screwed.  I can see myself taking individual items out of the backpack and laying them down on the kitchen table as my mother sips coffee and sneers.  My first impulse is to grab a knife, but now I’m like, Whaaaaat?

                I turn around.

                “What do you think you’re doing, Zachary,” my father asks, glancing at Grandpa, glancing at the freezer, glancing at The Resistor leaning up against the lower cupboards.  My father is standing there in a pair of yellowed and saggy tighty whities, itching his eyelid with his thumbnail.  He’s tall, skinny, but has a little bit of a belly, which my mother teases him about.

When my mother teases it comes from hidden irritation.  Though you would never describe my mother as vain after first meeting her, she is.

                “Heading out.  Got the paintball championship of the world with Jeremy today out in Lafayette. Didn’t Mom tell you?  I told Mom.  I’m sure I told Mom.”

                “Paintball?  This early?”

                “Yeah,” I say.  “All-dayer.  Commando style.”

                “How are you getting there?”

                “Taking BART.”

                At this Chuckster Rags stops and thinks.  It’s 5:05 a.m.  He is tired.  He is disoriented.  He knows all this doesn’t quite add up, but is he really willing to begin the laborious task of deconstructing the narrative I’ve now constructed for him?  Is he prepared to wake up my mother, the boss, and bother her with this when she’s snoring like a saxophone?

                “You’re taking Grandpa with you to Lafayette,” he asks. 

Now, with Chuckster Rags, this could either be a parting shot, a sluggish dispute before giving up for good, or it could be the beginning of an interrogation that will lead to the odyssey’s uncovering.  An answer to a question like this is crucial, because if the answer doesn’t satisfy him, his confusion will give him the energy to ask another.  Etcetera.  On the other hand, if you cow him with the response, he is bound to give up.

“Of course!  Do you really think my friends would let me show up without Grandpa?  He’s like the paintball mascot, Chuckster baby.”

My father looks at Grandpa and rolls his eyes, swallowing and shaking his head.  “Got your cell phone?  Be careful.  Don’t take any chances.” 

This is a Chuckster Rags mantra: Don’t take any chances.  He lives by this rule and he expects me to too.  Sometimes I wish he’d loosen up.  And yet, it’s this exact trait that makes him dependable and a good dad.

I can tell that Chuckster Rags is going to stand there to see me out, which means pulling the large box of food to last Grandpa approximately fifty-three days out of the freezer and stashing it in my backpack is not an option.  But because Grandpa only eats mice and beetles, it’s not easy to attain his specialized diet on an extraordinary, fate-undetermined, cross-country odyssey like I have [un]planned.  So, I take one bag of beetles from the door of the freezer, stash it, hoist The Resistor on my shoulder, and open the cuff of my sweater so Grandpa can slither in underneath my clothes, where the cold-blooded sucker likes to wrap himself around my arm and sleep.

“When will we see you,” my father asks, and for some unexpected reason I get this cold feeling of uneasy sadness in my stomach.  Though I make fun of him a lot, and though he’s kind of a tragic character, my father is a hard man to lie to.

“Ahh, later.  Tonight, I guess.  Late.  Might stay at Jeremy’s.”     

                I open the door and walk down the stairs to the first landing, just a little soft in the sixer with apprehension and guilt. 

                “Zack,” my father calls out, and I start to panic a little.  “Will you come back up here for a minute?”

                I look ahead.  I could make a run for it.  I’m this close to escape.  This close!  I should run.  What’s he going to do, run through the streets after me in his skimps?

                “Zack?”  An edge of suspicion.  He’s got the scent, I think.

                But I can’t make a run for it.  The thing is, after all, I don’t want to leave the Chuckster on such a sour note, especially when considering the reason for my departure and my destination.

                When I get back into the kitchen, Chuckster Rags is holding a small box wrapped in newspaper in his hand.  On the table, I left both my parents gifts.  I thought that it would be a good token, and something that might buy me a little time—they wake up and find a gift for them and feel good about it.  Then, later, when they realize that I’ve lied to them, they know that it wasn’t because I didn’t like them or anything.

                “What’s this?”  His eyes are like a bloodhound’s nose.

                “A present,” I say, mind racing.

                “What’s going on?”  It would be now that most people would suspect I’ve lied, but because Chuckster Rags is not a liar, he has no idea when others are lying to him.

                I decide to tell him what Heather Williamson, my history teacher, calls a “political truth,” which is something that can be fact checked, but doesn’t necessarily pass a lie detector test.  “I decided that I wanted to be one of those guys who gives gifts when there’s no particular occasion.”

                “So, I should open it?”

                “No, it’s-” Too late.  I hate when people open my gifts in front of me.  It makes me feel like they’re actually ripping off my clothes and I’m standing there naked in front of them.  “I used the Guardian,” I say as he inspects the wrapping paper filled with pictures of boygirls and the numbers that will get their hands on your body.

                Inside is a small wooden box with a glass front that I made in Cherish’s grandfather’s garage workshop in Daly City.  It took several attempts, and mostly Cherish’s mean-bastard grandfather, Horace, who is practically blind and calls Cherish a “little fucker”—“Where’s my damn number ten, you little fucker?”—did most of the precision work.  Inside the box is a piece of petrified cypress root I got in a basement curiosity shop in Chinatown.

As the Chuckster peers into the box, I get this feeling that it’s actually like me he’s peering into, seeing all the crap in there I didn’t want him to see.

                “Did you make this,” he asks me.

                “The box,” I say, “out of teak and heat tempered glass.  I mean, with some help.  It’s petrified cypress root in there.”  Of course, he doesn’t get it, but I can’t bring myself to explain to him the reason I chose it, with all its representations and deep meanings or whatever.  He’s probably thinking it’s a stupid gift and he should try to be nice and say he loves it.  I should have just left.  Instead, I have to stand here in this awkward silence as he holds the thing, looking at it and looking at me, hair all pilly foo, wearing only his skimps.

                He places the box carefully on the table just like someone does when they’re about to leave something meaningful behind.  It’s a concerned and almost worried gesture, and all the sudden this quick rush of generic memories arrives in my head—accidentally starting Chuckster Rags’ hair on fire with a blackcat firecracker, bathing with my mother when I was a little too old and asking her why I didn’t havethose, coming home every day after school to an empty house and having to learn how to cook, listening to the phone ring in the middle of the night and wondering which one of them would have to go in to the hospital…

                I can feel my eyes start to water and my throat swell.  “I gotta go,” I tell him, but it’s like forcing a butter knife through a block of cheese.  The words barely emerge on the other side.  I can’t believe it.  Am I going to just cry now?  I turn and walk back out the door, down the stairs to that first landing.  I’m trying to seem nonchalant, but I get this weird thought about the significance of this moment—how the next time Chuckster Rags sees me I’ll be eighteen years old, a legal adult.  This is the last moment of my childhood, I decide, so why not give it some real significance here for posterity?

                He walks out of the apartment and looks down the stairs at me.

                “See you later,” I say to him, and even the choice of words sounds suspect.  I give Chuckster Rags a pump of my fist—a kind of Rocky gesture that always makes him smile because it’s like we’re sharing some victory together, him and me.  But it’s not even just for him.  It’s for me too, this little gesture to remember what I now deem The Last Moment of My Youth.

Chuckster Rags smiles, chuffs, and shakes his head at me.  Then he pumps his fist back, and I almost tell him I love him, but know it would be cause for suspicion, so I just disappear down the steps.

2

                When I hit the sidewalk on Post Street it smells, well, urban.  Heather Williamson, that history teacher of mine, told me I need to focus more on details and less on categories and generalizations.  If she were here she’d ask me what “urban” smells like, and make me make up the ingredients—car exhaust, dog piss, coffee, cooking grease—that create an urban funk.  And have you ever felt like someone sort of hits on something about your personality at the same time that they totally miss something too?  Like how she was kind of generalizing about the way she assumed I generalize everything, when really I don’t at all.  I only generalize things worth generalizing, like history (a sham) and psychology (a sham) and art (no explanation necessary).  Because Heather Williamson is kind of young, and really attractive in this bookwormish way and if she knew that I knew her middle name and the day she was born, if she knew that when she took off her glasses to rub them with her blouse the indentations the glasses made on the bridge of her nose made me imagine the dimples she might have in unmentionable places (her ass when wearing a thong), she’d change her mind.

                Another thing I want is to be able to magically control time with a remote control.  There are three functions I’d especially enjoy.  First is variable speed slow motion.  Second is pause.  And third is skip chapter.  The only thing is that I might get a little carried away with skip chapter and would have to live my old age out in perpetual slow motion.  Except I guess I’d have rewind, but I don’t believe in rewind.  I’d have rewind taped off.

Here’s the thing.  I’m seventeen.  I’ll be eighteen in mere days.  What better time to run away from home?  Okay, so maybe a little last minute, but at least I’m finally doing it.  I’m leaving my parents—not for good or anything, not like never seeing them again—I’m leaving all my friends, I’m leaving my pseudo-girlfriend (okay, she’s not my girlfriend.  In fact, she thinks I’m a psycho, but I did kiss her once.  She was drunk at Cherish’s graduation party), and I’m leaving my city (San Francisco) and state (which I’ve never been out of, except once to Nevada to light off pipe bombs and fireworks in the desert).  Plus I’m sick of everyone from high school, and I’m sick of going to their graduation parties and getting busted for drinking root beer schnapps (and all the girls I know do this hella wack thing now Kaitlyn started in order to avoid getting busted where they dip tampons in vodka and pop ‘em right in.  They have some nast term for it, like dunking donuts.  Jonesy tried to put one in his ass at Rachel’s house, but it stung so bad he almost cried because it was Absolut Citron).  I mean, I’m just sick of all that, and I’m sick of my parents too, and sick of going to church all the time and all their Catholic weirdness that doesn’t even seem right with my mother (and yet she’s Catholic as hell).  I’m sick of sitting in the pew and thinking things that make me feel guilty—like if God were reading my mind he might just puke on me right there all Nickelodeon-style as I imagine some miniature, naked, female Commando leaping around on the hanging light fixtures above us and piercing people’s nipples with shots from her little machine gun, Kapow!

I want something better.  I want to see some America for once.  I want to struggle so things feel better when I achieve them.  I want to love so hard I get desperately suicidal or something because I can barely even handle it!  I want to meet Tinkerbelle for Christ’s sake.  I want to collect weird shit like taxidermied starfish in Plexiglas cubes. 

Oh, and I want to find my uncle, this waaaay maniac guy I’ve been hearing about since I was a kid. This guy who, as the story goes, loved my aunt so much they shattered their front teeth coming together after years apart.  Probably not true, but what the hell.

I want to get outta here.

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nleither@scu.edu