CORRIDORS OF TIME
A chapter from THE BIG ELECTRIC NIGHTTIME
Tom knocks on the unlocked screen door of Lauren’s house. She lives two blocks beyond the railroad tracks, with her uncle. It’s late March, and we’re wearing sweatshirts and jackets for the chilly late afternoon air. “Knock, knock!” Tom shouts as we step into the screened-in front porch. Filled with stacks of newspapers, and tropical houseplants in various stages of growth and decay. Like Tom, Lauren is new to Pinellas Park Junior High. Also, like Tom, she’s gay, and she’s recently moved to Florida from Atlanta. Tom was immediately taken by her deep southern accent. Tom has never met anyone from Georgia before, and she’s never had anyone give her as many albums as Tom does.
We were heading downtown to see a free concert at Williams Park. While Tom and I have each been stoned, together and apart – we’ve learned there’s a variety of types of pot, and it always matters where you are and who you’re with. Lauren let us know her Uncle John practiced herbal generosity, and was a firm believer in how marijuana and music go hand in hand.
I was beginning to believe baggies of pot just fell from the trees, since everyone seems to have it with them or can get it in a heartbeat.
Finding the gray paint-flaking-off front door locked, Tom knocks and shouts out, “Lauren, it’s us!”
“Who’s there?” she asks, in a slow drawl.
Tom starts to knock a second time when Lauren opens the door.
With a towel wrapped around her long reddish-blonde hair, and a joint in her mouth Lauren lives a life we can’t. Smoking pot in front of her uncle/guardian is something she can do whenever, she told us at school when we first met. Her skinny body is covered up with a pair of blue jeans and a purple T-shirt. Sometimes she looks like a model in magazines, like in this moment. Her age 15 seems a lot older than our age 15. Lauren takes one more puff of the joint and passes it to me with two long fingers. I take a big hit into my lungs and cough half back out. I pass the joint to Tom.
Tom pulls the copy of Surrealistic Pillow he brought (not bought) from behind his back and hands it to her. She smiles and kisses Tom on the cheek.
Lauren says, “Too bad we’re both gay, Tom Wheatly.”
“For you, tonight, consider me bisexual.”
She punches him in the arm and Tom says, “Ow, you’re so mean.”
I notice there’s music coming from another room in the house.
Lauren glances down the hallway, and says, “Come on. I’ll introduce you to my uncle.”
Beginning to get stoned, and full of going-to-see-a-concert energy, we follow Lauren down the dark hallway. She enters the room ahead of us, motioning us in. A table lamp on a wooden crate illuminates an unmade bed, a stereo, speakers, and albums leaning against the wall and stacked on the bed. Next to the stereo is a guy, maybe five years older than us who has shoulder-length hair and a beard, sitting in a wheelchair.
Green River by Credence Clearwater Revival is playing. Lauren leans down and talks softly to her uncle, hands him the Jefferson Airplane album, and he passes her a mostly-smoked joint.
Uncle John brushes his hair out of his eyes with his fingers and blinks up at Tom.
John’s voice has more of the red clay Georgia south in it than Lauren’s. If her voice has a touch of honey, his contains a dollop of molasses.
“Shit,” Uncle John says. “Didn’t figure you to be as tall a fucker as you are. Although, hey, everyone’s taller than me these days. Anyways, mighty fine record selection you brought tonight.”
“Glad you like it,” Tom says.
“Don’t just stand around. Sit your asses down on the bed, floor, anywhere,” John says. “Anyone want a beer?’
Lauren steps up and waves us back down as she left the room.
John picks up a joint and lights. He smokes it halfway down before passing it to Tom.
“Yeah,” John says with a wink to Tom. Sure do appreciate some of these albums you’ve been getting for Lauren. You must work in a record store, or something…”
“Or something,” Tom says, while holding his breath and passing the joint to me.
Lauren comes back in with four beers and hands them to us.
“I’ve always thought music should be free,” John says.
Tom sighs. “Yeah, I just wish there was a way to get concert tickets for free. Almost up to five bucks now.”
Uncle John takes a long swig from his beer, turns to the side and sees me sitting on the bed. Looking at me as if I’d just appeared from another dimension. “What’s your friend’s name, Tom?”
“This is Alex,” Tom says.
“Welcome to my room, Alex,” he says as he unwraps the plastic from Surrealistic Pillow.
“Good to be here,” I say.
“What are you all up to this evening?” John asks Lauren.
“Going downtown to a free concert at Williams Park,” she says.
Tom sees one of the albums on John’s bed is Tommy, by The Who.
One of Tom’s go-to albums to listen to. Half the time it seems to be playing in his brain, as the lyrics escape from his mouth with a life all their own.
“Do you like The Who, John?”
“Ah, hell yes,” John says. “When Townsend gets his arm going like a windmill, it’s hard to tell if he’s winding up to pitch a fastball or wail on his guitar. No one else plays like him. Something for all of you to start thinking about. Do one thing well, you just might make it through this crazy life. Even if you’re going to be a fuck-up, be the best damned fuck-up anyone’s ever seen.”
The four of us take sips from our beers, and an uneasy silence approaches us from one of the four corners of the room. To me, it feels like a dark wave of anti-matter sneaking out of Televisionland. But Tom is always willing to fill a void of creepy silence with the first words ready to dive off his tongue and into the pool of possible questions, statements, or random noises. He says what we’re both thinking.
“How come you’re in a wheelchair, John?” Tom asks.
Lauren shoots Tom a look like why’d you have to go and say that.
John laughs, and says, “Not only are you a tall drink of water, but you say what’s on your mind. I’ll tell you what, it’s a hell of a lot better than having someone make “too bad for you” eyes at me because I’m where I am. Why needs that noise? How’d I get here? Walking through a jungle in a single file line, with a bunch of my buddies. There go my legs out from under me by stepping on a mine. Guy just behind me got cut in half. Chopped him in two pieces like his spine was a rubber band…”
He shakes his head back and forth, saying no to what had already happened. A dark shiver ran through me, from toe bones to skull top.
Tom looks at me, and I say, “Aw, man.”
The menacing silence gets closer to all of us, hovering only a foot or so above our heads.
The Night Time is the Right Time crawls out of the speakers in slow motion.
The joint circles its way back to John. He pulls the smoke deeper into his lungs than any of us, as if they possess trap doors and hidden subterranean pages built into them. He washes the smoke down with a swig of beer, and says, “Hell, when did it happen, four or five years ago.”
John dismisses the span of time with a shrug and a grin that’s closer to a grimace. But when I count backwards, the way calendars flip away months and years in black and white movies, the same span of time for myself would be nearly half a lifetime. Here’s a disabled vet, as they say on the nightly newscast sections of Televisionland, sitting in front me. John is in his mid-twenties at most, looking a decade older than that. Sneaky meddlesome ghosts are hiding in the pouches under his eyes. Rice paddies poisoned by Napalm have been planted in the stubble on his cheeks. Time doesn’t ripple over the water in these rice-growing wet fields. Time doesn’t sway in endless moments in sweet summertime. Time isn’t in charge of mewling kittens and pink-eyed bunnies. Time is a large, sinister, and imposing force. The inner mechanism of the clock has been pried open. Gruesome creatures feeding on death are crawling around inside the celestial world clock. Everything ages at a speeded-up rate of time. Plants bud and decompose in an eyeblink. Outside this smoke-filled room, just past the screen door, next to the ordinary gray sidewalk, convoluted events take place in ways the human eye can’t detect. Vegetation decays in moments. Spiders spin webs in an eyeblink, preparing to assassinate other members of the insect kingdom. Tall forest trees are evaporated by lightning strikes. Mountain ranges erode within weeks. Planets spin out of their orbits in the course of an afternoon. People are healthy one day, and the next day they appear in obits. TV is lying every night, to millions of people at once. Making a war a mass delusion. With corn flakes and car commercials sandwiched in between the battles.
“What was it like over there?” Tom asks. “Before all this happened to you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “We’ve been watching the war on TV since we were little kids. Feels like it’s a nightly show now, with Cronkite reading the daily body count. Talking over shots of soldiers walking through fields, or an explosion going off in the distance. Everyone looking like they’re acting their part in a movie.”
“That’s a good one,” John says, in a that’s not a good one tone of voice. He taps the ash of his joint on one of his wheels. “Sure, I’m a movie star. Fucking Dustin Pacino or some fucking-body. Got to remember that one. Guys down at the VA hospital will love it.”
John passes the joint to Tom.
“Want to know what it was like, huh?” John asks. “To know all about the behind the scenes shit in the movie?”
Lauren crosses and uncrosses her arms, then scowls at me and Tom. “You know you don’t have to talk about this war crap, Uncle John.”
“It’s alright, Lauren.” He shakes his head at her. “We’re just sitting around and getting high, talking shit. If your friends are asking questions, it’s because they really want to know. How about you get your uncle a cold beer, and bring in some for your friends too.”
Lauren shoots a look at Tom, and goes into the kitchen for another round of beers.
The gloomy silence stays at least six feet away from all our heads, since we’re getting to know each other a bit better.
“So, Tom and Alex, what was it like, huh?” John says, while gazing at the wall across from him, as if he can view the movies in his mind on the blank wall.
“It was knowing for certain you were going to die in the next second, even if it never happened. Knowing you could be next in line. Sometimes I wish for it. Dreamed I was killed at least once a night. Which is to say sleeping wasn’t much better than being awake. Being on patrol, taking my helmet off for a minute, and tripping on a tree stump and bumping my head against the base of a palm tree. And being glad I did it. Because the knot on my overhead made me feel more alive than I’d felt in months. Being over there was breathing in sulfur and weird-ass chemicals with no names, just numbers. It was the smell of stale piss, and muddy water full of rotting animal carcasses. Everyone around me had the same thought as me. How do I get out of here? Preferably alive. It was either a wall of rain in front of your face, or sheets of sweat dripping down your cheeks. For me and all my buddies, it was sidestepping buried mines, until your luck ran out. Like mine did.”
“She, man,” Tom says.
“They don’t show any of that on the news,” I say.
John leans his head as far back as he can, and pours the rest of the beer down his parched throat.
“What was it like?” he asks again. More like he was asking himself than us. “Was never knowing whether I was going to get hit from friendly fire, or enemy fire first. Half the time didn’t seem to matter. When night shift duty came around we’d get a pill jar full of speed, pop a couple when we went on duty at midnight. Get jittered nerves, at the monkeys jumping in nearby trees. Couple hours speeding, then you might get a break when someone would pass you a Thai stick, and if they were alright, they’d let you know if the high was a medium buzz where you could take three tokes, or a half-toker, and if you misjudged how much you inhaled, your mind was going to go places you didn’t want it to go. By the time first light of day rolled around, I didn’t know whether to jump off a cliff or wind my watch.”
Damn,” Tom says. “None of this sounds like the bullshit they show us on TV, or tell us at school. Sound as if it only made sense because you got high.”
John laughed. A deep in his throat kind of laughter. “Nothing made sense over there. First second I was in-country to the last moment, when as I was about to fly home. Some things I remember, like the people who were coming at the war from a whole different level. Most real guy I ever met was a spook, gave off the vibe of being in some deep-level CIA shit. Met him in the backroom of a bar in Saigon. He was out-drinking everyone else at his table. Empty bottles of San Miguel littered the landscape of the table. Three passed out servicemen flattened onto the table. He sees me, and waves at the waitress as I sit next to him. He pointed at her, said something in Vietnamese and held up four fingers. The man was maybe in his mid-thirties, wary and wired, wearing a beat-up suit and mirrored shades. “Where you from?” he asks. I tell him Georgia. He says, “Red clay backroads. Shit-kicking bars. Good times.” I laughed, and said, “Sums it up well. What are you doing in Saigon?” He let out a grunt, turned to me with those mirrored shades, pulled a bent cigarette out of his shirt pocket. Lit it, inhaled, and blew out a long stream of smoke. He said two words. “Dirty tricks.” I never heard the War in Vietnam better summed up, with as few words.”
Lauren appeared in the doorway with four cold bottles of beer in her hands.
“You OK, John?” she asks, as she hands him one of the beers.
He offers the merest of smiles. “Go on, have fun with your friends. See some live music.”
“Alright,” she says to her uncle, then turns to us. “Let’s go out to the kitchen, guys. We’ve got to get going to the concert soon.”
John reaches up and shakes my hand, says, “Glad you stopped by.”
He lights a fresh joint, and a swirl of gray-green smoke makes the rough shape of a halo around his head. Lauren tilts her head and rolls her eyes toward the kitchen.
“I’m alright,” John says. “Get yourselves downtown. Music does the trick.”
His words come out of his mouth slower, and he pauses in the middle of some of them.
“Lauren, can you flip the record over for me?”
She puts on side two of Creedence, and says, “”C’mon out in the kitchen if you’re feeling like it. We’ll be gone in about 20 minutes.”
John waves us out of his room.
The bright yellow light in the kitchen is another world compared to the cave John lives inside. We finish our beers and wait for Lauren’s friend, Annabelle, who has a car.
Lauren laughs and says, “I always seem to meet a girl with a driver’s license, real or fake, and she’s usually my opposite in so many ways.”
I notice Lauren’s eyes have teared up from all the smoke in John’s room.
“I didn’t try to get him to talk so much about the war,” Tom says. “It just happened.
“You didn’t mean anything by it, Tom,” she says. “You’re just curious about everything.”
“He’s been through so much,” Tom shakes his head. “He’s a cool guy.”
“He’s good to me, and that’s what matters,” Lauren said.
“Think he might come out, before we go?” I ask.
“Sometimes he wants to be around other people, but most of the time he doesn’t,” she says.
I get a glass of water, and while I’m standing at the sink I can see all the way down the hall. John’s door opens, and he rolls his wheelchair directly toward me, down the dark hallway. He’s moving toward the light of the kitchen from someplace much farther and far stranger than his room. He’s even coming from a land weirder and wilder than the one just on the other side of Televisionland. He’s become a messenger moving through time and space, shifting events, and puncturing everyday reality. He carries handfuls of incidents and tragedies in the seemingly innocent pockets of his flannel shirt. I blink and he’s wearing a heavy coat with big pockets all over it. In one pocket, he’s got a scale for weighing the past. In another pocket, he’s holding ribbons, snakes, bones, spiders, mountain trails, skulls, worms, pills, torn maps leading to nowhere, and rivers of blood mixed with mud. There are long corridors of time leading to dark red and deep green chambers and passageways inside of him, secret places he keeps hidden from view. A joint is planted between his grinning lips, with the smoke trailing all the way past villages on fire, electrified fences, helicopters spewing flames, endless starless nights, and disconnected telephone wires – leading all the way back to the jungle.