A rotund waitress set paper place mats in front of us, with drawings of desert flora and fauna. Craig and Jimbo ordered a lot of food and they advised me to do the same. “Might be your last supper, man,” Craig said.
I nodded without quite knowing why. The waitress wrote the orders on a pad. When Craig said to her, with a lewd smile, “I bet your eggs are the best in town,” she tried to smile back. The food came, we ate, I presented my credit card, and when the waitress returned she had bad news. The card wasn’t responding. I gave her another and then another and they all turned out to be invalid.
“You’re maxed out, man,” Craig told me, not upset about it. In fact he went ahead and ordered a pie, to go.
I said something about washing dishes to pay the bill, and Craig said, “Maybe we won’t have to.” His smile was full of yellow teeth.
“We have to do something,” I said. “Wash dishes or…”
“Like in a movie, right?” Jimbo said.
And when the pie arrived, all boxed up and tied, Craig announced that he was getting money from the car, and he got up and left. And when the waitress went into the back part of the café, Jimbo got up. I reminded him that we hadn’t paid the bill but he kept walking, past the cash register, out the glass door. First Craig, then Jimbo, and I was like a prisoner. I felt like one, and so I surrendered. I unbuckled my watch strap, left my watch on the table, and then I walked out to the car.
They wanted me to enter their world, to join their club, the club of not doing good, and for no reason other than the reason of least resistance I resigned myself to membership in that club, and to whatever and wherever that resignation led. They supplied food and drink and travel, and although I didn’t like the idea of stealing everything, I didn’t see any alternative except getting out of the car, and since I was in the car I didn’t want to get out. And they didn’t want me out. They wanted me to be one of them.
“You’re staying with us, man. The three amigos.”
The beer Jimbo drank was barely cool, the ice they’d once had in their Styrofoam bucket had long ago melted, but they wanted me to drink. It was implied in their encouragement. They were almost demanding that I keep drinking beer. When I asked them to stop at the next bathroom they insisted I pee out the window. I didn’t want to pee out the window but I was too tired or too weak, or more likely, I couldn’t see what difference it would make. So I knelt on the seat, leaned out as far as I could, and of course I peed all over myself. And the funny thing was, I didn’t seem to care. I sat back down in the leather seat and they told me I needed to rest. “You need your energy, man, if you want to find your girlfriend.”
“Wife,” I told them.
“Whatever,” Jimbo said, and he told me to stretch out and relax. And because I was exhausted, I put my head on my backpack. But Craig and Jimbo didn’t stop talking, and they didn’t stop trying to get me to drink. They seemed to have an endless supply of both words and lukewarm beer, and try as I might to keep up with their drinking, at a certain point I got full of beer, didn’t want any beer, and I told them, “I don’t want any more.”
It wasn’t just the beer. It was my unwillingness to listen to them, the sense of being polluted by their words and their attitudes. And at this point the mood might have turned sour except that we were coming down out of the hills, the last range of rocky hills before the coast. And by the time we entered the area of greater metropolitan San Diego the two of them were happy again. They started talking about Anne, as if she wasn’t dead, coming up with schemes to find her. “Put an ad in the paper,” they said, or “Put up flyers on telephone poles.” They knew San Diego like the backs of their dicks, they said, and they told me to relax, to do nothing, and let them take care of everything.
The brown land was frosted with springtime green, but mainly it was covered with houses. Millions of people lived in the subdivisions cut into the hillsides. We drove through a town called El Cajon, which means “the box,” and through La Mesa, which means “the table,” and I didn’t know where we were going, or where I was gong with them, until, following the freeway to the end, we arrived at the Pacific Ocean. Craig parked the car near a pier in a place called Pacific Beach. A lot of people in bathing suits were walking on the streets and it was warm, even before summer.
Craig and Jimbo told me to watch the car while they got out, walked across a nearby intersection, and returned with bags full of hamburgers and french fries. They divvied up the waxy paper bags and as we were about to eat Craig realized we didn’t have any ketchup. “Can’t eat without ketchup,” he said, and I was the one volunteered to go back to the fast-food restaurant and get some.
Which I did. It felt good to stretch my legs and see people again. No one looked up when I walked to the condiment counter and grabbed a large handful of ketchup packages. I took this booty back to the waiting car, but the car wasn’t waiting. I looked in various parking lots, and it wasn’t there. It wasn’t parked on the street, and it wasn’t circling the street, and although I waited for them, pacing back and forth, hoping they went to get some gas, I knew that now, here I was, with nothing. I threw the ketchup packages into a plastic trash container.
I didn’t mind losing my pack or my clothes or even my notebook. But my photographs were in that pack. Anne, or what was left of Anne, was in that car. There was still a memory, the trace of memory, but everything else was gone. And I tried to see this as something new, a fresh start. I told myself that now, with nothing, I was a new man. I tried to see myself as reborn, but by this point I was getting a little tired of being constantly reborn.
4
I was thinking about Chief Joseph, the leader of the Nez Perce Indians, who in 1877 was put on a reservation. He had signed a treaty with the United States government, but because of a gold rush on his ancestral land was forced to flee that land and fight for that land, until, when the hopelessness of his struggle became obvious, he surrendered. “I am tired,” he said. “I will fight no more forever.” He was then taken to a reservation where he survived to see his people decimated by disease.
He didn’t have to survive, I thought. And I didn’t have to survive, but it was habit now, or genetic, and once I got my bearings, the first thing I did was make a phone call. I was going to call and get some money, but to make a call I needed money, and I didn’t have any, not even a thin quarter, so I stood by the entrance to a convenience store near the beach and asked people coming out for change.
Simple enough, I thought. I was an honest-looking person, and as people walked out of the Speedy Mart or the Quick Mart I tried to explain my situation. “What happened to me…” but before I could get started the people left me standing in the gum-stained entrance. So I changed my approach, got straight to the point. “Can I have a quarter?” I said, first to a woman, then to a girl, then a man, and you’d think, by the way these people refused to look at me, that a quarter was a lot of money.
For a while no one even acknowledged my existence, so instead of asking them to put a quarter in my open palm, I found a plastic bag and held that out, and maybe it was the bag or a new attitude, anyway, someone finally put a quarter in the bag and with it I called American Express.
I was thinking they would help but after finally getting through to the woman on the other end, she told me that my card had been terminated. I asked if it was possible to get a loan and I could tell by her tone of voice, even over the phone, even though she was calling me “sir,” that I didn’t really exist for her. She didn’t say anything disrespectful — the call might have been monitored — but I got the idea I was on my own.