TRAVEL AND SEX IN THREE PARTS
TRAVEL AND SEX IN THREE PARTS
ONE
On my back, on the roof I masturbate and think about bats (animals, not objects). It is a grocery store roof, big as two football fields pushed side by side, and with no one there but me. A wall surrounds the perimeter, and from above it is as if I have drowned at the bottom of a moat, six feet deep, later drained. Laid out on a blanket (too thin) and with a pillow (too lumpy) I am still tightly packed in my jacket and jeans. Down in the parking lot, Rob tucks himself into the car, (half-fetal position) protected by beach towels -which read University of Miami- rolled up in the window. In four hours he will wake due to the knock-knocking of the sweltering heat.
I’ve never been to Redding before but it is nice. Quaint. Stars just like the planetarium, bowed at the edges of the Earth.
“I wish that heavyset girl named- what was her name? Marissa? no Marisol- I wish Marisol would have offered us a place to sleep. Could have had gotten more of the town understood that way. Met folk, and exchanged tales. Like nomads. Gypsies.” But she still lived with her parents who would “freak out” and who kept dogs in the yard so we couldn’t sleep there either. “No way.”
Marisol, what a bad sport.
But I guess it was two hours past midnight and we had just pulled off the freeway and seen her walking home, from a friends house, across the park, alone, and we were two strange older men saying we were from Los Angeles- but really we could have been from Denton Texas, or Tampa Florida, or on a mission from the devil in our minds to torture and kill heavyset girls just off of exits from the 5 freeway North. So, probably she made the intelligent decision. Not the most fun, but the brightest. Otherwise she could have ended up “local girl found butchered” with a still photograph on the cable news- Marisol in her Roundtable Pizza apron and hat, parents quite sad.
“Mixing sand with the tarpaper makes it better at reflecting sunlight? Insulates the roof from heat? Protects against rain?” I am not sure. Certainly it makes sleeping less comfortable.
“All this space and none of it used.” I think. “Beds could be put here for the homeless, at least two hundred. Just like camping. They could sing songs, and not worry of getting set on fire while sleeping (They told me this happens in New York). I should contact city hall. This would make a superb proposition. Except of course for insurance, and for ‘man falls off building, sues Grocery Store, makes million dollars,’ And I guess they don’t have 200 homeless people in Redding anyhow. Do they have a city hall? Don’t know. But a bed would be nice. Keep my neck from hurting. Put me to sleep like 1, 2, 3.”
What a pathetic cowboy I would make.
The cowboys didn’t use beds on the range. And never did they complain of back problems or visit chiropractors. No beds for them, only hard living. Ropin’ and ridin’ and carousin’ and shootin’ at varmints. Layin’ down, with their boots still on, heads rested on prairie shale, watchin’ the sunset, and whistlin’. (Every Rose Has Its Thorn, or Bon Jovi Soundtrack songs, usually). But, now giving it more thought, I suspect mostly they were kept just drunk enough to fall asleep on dirt, and didn’t live very long either. Perhaps much of history’s substance abuse involves cultures adapting to falling asleep on the ground. Pathetic cowboy. Pathetic hun.
So the masturbation is administered, just the same as alcohol, or marijuana, or counting sheep for others. But “my god there are so many bats.”
Circling the lights they go in the front and rear parking lots. Twenty light towers, stuck up out of the ground like manipulated planets, each with its own orbiting flock. So many that they look like moths, only still swooping with the grace of bats, and wielding the fluttering wings of rubbery Halloween props.
“What would they do if this grocery store didn’t exist? Where would they go?” For the moment I picture these bats as teenaged boys with big trucks, parked in front of Taco Bell on Stratford Road, Winston-Salem North Carolina, wearing baseball caps backward, already having graduated high school. “Go away bats!” I call to them. “Go see the world!”
They do not respond. Probably don’t speak English. (Spanish? Latin?)
I think about all that I know of bats, which is little, as much as I know of say, computer repair, and most of this is third party (from elementary school and Discovery). I am not sure about the sonar hearing vs. eyesight vs. great sense of smell. I can’t recall the truth behind the thirst for blood, and attacking cattle and sheep. I try and list the diseases carried (rabies, hepatitis?) but even this, I can’t say for sure. In fact, all I remember exactly is about them not really being vampires (given), and about the guano in the caves that makes lethal fumes- but everyone knows these. Nothing impressive there. I have seen on television a lady with two hundred cats which she never took outside, (because of “my diabetes” she claims) creating the same thing; lethal gas, with men wore protective suits to clean it up. Now that was impressive. (Well, I didn’t actually see it, but I heard about it at least).
Yet none of this is helpful, because all I am wondering now about the bats is “do they know I am here because of my body heat, because they can see me, or hear me, or smell me? And which of these things will be most affected by the masturbation.” I lay very still while I think. “Will the bats come and get me? And if it happens will it happen just at the exact wrong moment? And if you are attacked by a bat, or by many bats during masturbation on a grocery store roof in Redding California, does it make for bad memories of Redding California, a greater fear of bats, an aversion to masturbation forever, or all of the above?
If I could think of anything but bats this would all be over by now.
In the car, Rob sleeps comfortably. Tomorrow we will be halfway to Portland.
TWO
In Portland Oregon they claim more strip clubs than anywhere else, per capita. I have not seen it written and notarized, but everyone says so. “More than anywhere!” Very proud of this they are.
In the late hours of the night, I am no longer impressed by the statistic and can say, unequivocally, strip clubs, like poems, should not be judged by quantity.
At the bar inside The Golden Spike (I think that was it) I leave best friends phone numbers written inside matchbooks like “car for sale call RJ 213 925 0494.” And then a drawing of the car. Beside me, on the second stage, a girl, big in thigh and small in breast has climbed the pole and now hangs, suspended by the grip of her monstrous legs some ten feet off the ground. “How does it look practicing for this? The same as twenty five in a row missed free throw shots?”
And if she falls, and is severely injured, will they stop playing Billy Idol?
A deaf man approaches the bar carrying a skateboard in his right and a tiny notepad in his left. He points to the pad, then places the skateboard at the side of the bar and argues feverously, in sign language, for more alcohol. The waitress argues back, also in sign language. (What are the odds?).
“Deaf or no deaf, he has had too much,” her body tells me, and maybe also “He comes in here every night trying to pull the same shit.” But both of these are just guesses.
Off-duty, a girl in her underwear (black lace) eats a cheese sandwich cut into triangles and pretends not to notice any of this.
For some reason it is sad to see a deaf person not get what they want, no matter how drunk.
THREE
At our first and only dinner I have Miso soup and Sarah tells me about a relationship she has had with her boss and with her boss’ best friend. I tell her this is no strange thing, and start to explain about me and Shannon before the baby was born, and about Shannon dating Mike, and Mike dating Alex and me dating Alex- but it is too much to tell all at once. So I don’t.
Later she shows me a place where people line up to eat fancy donuts, in expensive flavors like saffron, and talks about how she and her brother watched a one legged man have sex in a swimming pool when she was sixteen. I ask “Do you think it felt better for him there, like rehabilitation?”
“No,” She says. “Probably not.”
There was a punchline to her story, which I have forgotten. It involved “egg salad.”