There's a whole crowd out on the road, storm or no storm: commuters, evening shoppers, repair crews, teenagers jazzed on a world turned to shit, and I have to be careful with the wind rocking the car and the jolts and bumps and washed-out places. This used to be open country twenty-five years ago — a place where you'd see bobcat, mule deer, rabbit, quail, fox, before everything was poached and encroached out of existence, I remember stud farms here, fields running on forever, big estates like Mac's set back in the hills, even an emu ranch or two (Leaner than beef and half the calories, try an Emu Burger today!). Now it's condos. Gray wet canyons of them. And who's in those condos? Criminals. Meat-eaters. Skin-cancer patients. People who know no more about animals — or nature, or the world that used to be — than their computer screens want them to know.
All right. I'll make this brief. The year is 2025, I'm seventy-five years old, my name is Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, and I'm half an Irish Catholic and half a Jew. 1 Was born in the richest county in the suburbs of the biggest city in the world, in a time when there were no shortages, at least not in this country, no storms (except the usual), no acid rain, no lack of wild and jungle places to breathe deep in. Right now, I'm on my way to share some pond-raised catfish sushi with my ex-wife Andrea, hoist a few, maybe even get laid for auld Wig syne. Or love. Isn't that what she said? For love? The windshield wipers are beating in time to my arrhythmic heart, the winds are cracking their cheeks, the big 4x4 Olfputt rocking like a boat at sea — and in my head, stuck there like a piece of gum to the sole of my shoe, the fragment of a song from so long ago I can't remember what it is or how it got there. Down the alley the ice wagon flew… Arlene took me by the hand and said, can't you be my man?
This is going to be interesting.
The parking lot is flooded, two feet of gently swirling shit-colored water, and there go my cowboy boots — which I had to wear for vanity's sake, when the gum boots would have done just as well. I sit there a minute cursing myself for my stupidity, the murky penny-pincher lights of Swenson's beckoning through the scrim of the rain-scrawled windshield, the Mex-Chinese take-out place next door to it permanently sandbagged and dark as a cave, while the computer-repair store and 7-Eleven ride high, dry and smug on eight-foot pilings salvaged from the pier at Gaviota. The rain is coming down harder now — what else? — Playing timbales on the roof of the 4x4, and the wind rattles the cab in counterpoint, picking up anything that isn't nailed down and carrying it off to some private destination, the graveyard of blown things. All the roofs here, where the storms tend to set down after caroming up off the ocean, have been secured with steel cables, and that's a company to invest in — Bolt-A-Roof, Triple AAA Guaranteed. Of course, everything I ever had to invest, every spare nickel I managed to earn and everything my father left me, went to Andrea and Teo and my wild-eyed cohorts at Earth Forever! (Never heard of it? Think radical enviro group, eighties and nineties. Tree-spiking? Ecotage? Earth Forever! Ring a bell?) It takes me that long minute, mulling things over and delaying the inevitable in the way of the old (but not that old, not with all the medical advances they've thrust on us, what with our personal DNA codes and telomerase treatments and epidermal rejuvenators, all of which I've made liberal use of, thanks to Maclovio Pulchris' generosity), and then I figure what price dignity, jerk off the boots, stuff my socks deep in the pointed toes of them and roll my pants up my skinny legs. The water creeps up my shins, warm as a bath, and I tuck the boots under my slicker, tug the beret down against the wind and start off across the lot. It's almost fun, the feel of it, the splashing, all that water out of its normal bounds, and the experience takes me back sixty-five years to Hurricane Donna and a day off from school in Peterskill, New York, splash and splash again. (And people thought the collapse of the biosphere would be the end of everything, but that's not it at all. It's just the opposite — more of everything, more sun, water, wind, dust, mud.) I'm standing under the jury-rigged awning (steel plates welded to steel posts set in concrete), trying to balance on one bare foot and administer a sock and boot to the other, when the door flings open and two drunks, as red in face and bare blistered arm as if they've been baked in a tandoori, trundle out to gape at the rain. "Shit," the one to my right says, and I'm squinting past him to the bar, to see if Andrea's there, "may as well have another drink." His companion blinks at the deluge as if he's never seen weather before — and maybe he hasn't, maybe he's from Brazil or New Zealand or one of the other desert countries — and then he says, "Can't. Got to get home to" (you fill in the name) "and the kids and the dog and the rats in the attic… But fuck this weather, fuck it all to hell."
I take a deep breath, dodge around them, and step into the restaurant. I should point out that Swenson's isn't the most elegant place elegance is strictly for the rich: computer repairmen, movie people, pop stars like Mac — but it has its charms. The entryway isn't one of them. There's an empty fish tank built into the cement block wall on your immediate right, a coat rack and umbrella stand on the left. Music hits you — oldies, the venerable hoary inescapable hits of the sixties, played at killing volume for benefit of the deaf and toothless like me — and a funk of body heat and the kind of humidity you'd expect from the Black Hole of Calcutta. No air-conditioning, of course, what with electrical restrictions and the sheer killing price per kilowatt hour. Go straight on and you're in the bar, turn left and you've got the dining room, paneled in mismatching pine slats recycled from the classic California ranch houses that succumbed to the historical imperative of mini-malls and condos. I go straight on, the bar teeming, Shiggy glancing up from the blender with a nod of acknowledgment, some antiquated crap about riding your pony blistering the overworked speakers.
No Andrea. Ride your pony, ride your pony. My elbows find the bar, cheap sake (tastes of machine oil, brewed locally) finds me, and I scan the faces to be sure. I even slide off my glasses and wipe them on my sleeve, a gesture as habitual as breathing. Replace them. Study the faces now, in depth, erasing lines and blotches and liver spots, pulling lips and eyes up out of their fissures, smoothing brows and firming up chins, and still no Andrea. (Swenson's, in case you're wondering, caters strictly to the young — old, the fastest — growing segment of the U. S. Population, of which I am a reluctant yet grateful part, considering the alternative.) A woman in red at the end of the bar catches my eye — that is, I catch hers — and my blood surges like a teenager's until I realize she can't be more than fifty. I look again as she turns away and lets out a laugh in response to something the retired dentist at her elbow is saying, and I see she's all wrong: Andrea, and I don't care what age she might be — sixty, eighty-five, a hundred and ten — has twice her presence. Ten times. Yes. Sure. She's not Andrea. Not even close. But does that make it any less depressing to admit that I'm really standing here on aching knees in a dress-up shirt and with a sopping-wet beret that looks like a chili-cheese omelet laid over my naked scalp, waiting for a phantom? A blood-sucking phantom at that?
Ride your pony, ride your pony. What is it Yeats said about old age? It wasn't ride your pony. An aged man is but a paltry thing, that's what he said. A tattered coat upon a stick. In spades.