from NONE OF THAT WILL DO. NOW WHAT?

By Miles Newbold Clark

YOU TRY TO escape. You drive up to Galahad, past rows of cloned suburban bungalows, two thousand feet up twisty access roads that still swell and burst with remote patches of winter-ice, and you look in your rear-view, find yourself floating on clouds of smog, the ridge rising from the clouds like Valhalla, and there are stars by the thousands. This isn't beautiful. There are places where this scene is beautiful. The PCH is one of them, and I've been there, a long time ago, before those psychological tests, when Dora still called me a hero. On the PCH it's called fog, and fog (unlike smog) is supposed to be beautiful, because it rolls in naturally from the Pacific, and once and a while it parts, naturally, and you look down for a thousand feet through rocks with hawks to the ocean, the waves cracking and breaking-up on the jagged coastline that opens and closes like a pair of woman's legs, foamy eddies curling into the crotch. The gradual, genuine imagination. And that's poetic, everyone agrees, because in the end it leaves you alone in the cold morning with the sky and your girlfriend and the clattering car radiator and your thoughts. The truth of an appropriate sensation: you should be grateful for it. In Galahad, when the smog parts - and it sometimes does, I don't know why - you see the high-rises and the interstate and the bars and bars of golden-grid streets, molten masses ablaze with what's collectively referred to as light pollution: that's not supposed to be poetic, but monstrous. It's not fair. Mountains are supposed to be left for you after the rest of this has dried up. Maybe Galahad has trained us to think of the city as a gaunt, alien monster, harder to escape, the higher you climb. Maybe it's just terrifying, to see the constellations above and below you at the same time, to know you're floating, and that whatever abstraction you conjure can be unexpectedly dragged down and thrown at someone else's feet. Maybe the mountains have eroded further than we thought. Maybe we're already underwater, and the tanker is staring up at us.

Forget the fact that if you take your wife to one of those expensive downtown restaurants at the top of a commercial skyscraper and gaze down at the electricity with a cocktail in your hand, it's considered beautiful. That if the two of you go home from dinner to a house on a hill and stand in your breezeway, looking at the electricity with cocktails in your hands, that that's also considered beautiful. Beautiful cities are always built next to hills. Las Vegas has several. Rome had seven. San Francisco has more than seven. Kyoto had more than San Francisco. Even Washington, D.C. has Capitol Hill. Manhattan? Well, it's got to have more hills than Newark, because that's where New York dumps all its raw sewage. The lights are beautiful in all those places, I'm sure, because I've driven through most of them, on the freeways, in my commercial truck, which is, perhaps, the only vantage point where lights aren't considered beautiful - i.e., on flat concrete - when they're throbbing all around you. Then they're supposed to overwhelm you, pollute you, muddle your violence and get you to dump your load obediently at an industrial loading-zone dock and drive you back to your cave with your little electric fireplace and waterbed. Still, all my teachers, back when I still had teachers, taught me that language and culture were fundamentally identical - shared systems of belief. That might be idealistic. All the same, I don't think they should call it light pollution. They should call it light-sharing.

Out there, someone has died tonight.

Dora doesn't like it when I go off on these tangents. Apparently I have a way of gripping the banister of our porch, like an ant gripping a blade of a leaf in the wind, waiting to be snapped up by a sparrow. There are lots of helicopters hmming up there these days, and allegedly they are protecting us with their eagle-eyes but who knows what they're really looking for. Now I'm a man with a mortgage and a necktie and I have to check my mailbox every day but really, I wouldn't jeopardize anything unless it was fun. It's fun lurching. We all have to have fun, don't we? I mean, lots of people buy boats or get drunk or break things. I don't cost much, I don't hurt anybody. There is of course all the psychological chitchat; masochism and schizophrenia and bipolar disorders, the ancient viruses of society, re-nouned; as soon as the globe-skipping uppity-ups with the machinery of civilization curled at their feet proclaim a new anti-body and collect plaudits, the noun mutates and they tell their Government to funnel more money into drug research, which is advantageous for them, justifies their jobs as lecturers and researchers, their invitation-only conferences. I had a professor in college who was deluged with summer conference invitations with names like "The 27th Annual Sociobiological Psychologist's Convention," and "Twilight of the Rorschachs: Philosophical Interpretations of Comparative Methodology." The names meant nothing. He evaluated them based on their degree of distinction. Every distinguished conference, as a rule, had to be set on a volcanic island in the pacific ocean within one hundred miles of the Tropic of Cancer. Now I'm not against having fun; I can see why an archeological conference takes place in Rome, or a political science conference takes place in Washington, DC, or why a class on Urban Theory might set up in Las Vegas. But really, the Tropic of Cancer? I can't believe that those are my tax dollars at work. These are professionals: bony, logical, trapped in their games. They're not supposed to live; they're supposed to keep the masses alive, afloat, balanced. The possibility of escape. Okay, tourism. But not that grass-skirt, coconut-bra, keg-party tourism. He always brought a student or two. His best, brightest students. The students who read scholastic journals in their free time, when everybody else is busy trying to find girls showering across campus with a telescope. Was that their chance to unwind? Could have been. Maybe there were gargantuan coeducational orgies, under the naked stars and the bongos and the fake torchlight. The concept may not seem pleasant to you. You think of your professors as a moment in your personal history, as aged, docile eunuchs with warm, knowing faces and bad choices in clothing, who scuttled roachlike across your sunlit quadrangle but whose frayed brown tweed blended seamlessly with the hunchbacked spines of the books on their office shelves, for whom you feel both mildly respectful of and sympathetic of and have gossiped about with the other gals as you sat dabbing paint onto your toenails before a sock-hop: he could be soooo hot and he doesn't even know it! I wonder who his wife must be! She's soooo lucky! but whom you never, in your mildest imagination or theirs, never seriously thought would ever change into something more comfortable. Well, perhaps they don't. Bear with me. Understand where I'm coming from. I wasn't considered one of the brightest students. The only conferences I've been invited to are truck driver's conferences. Can you imagine what happens at a truck driver's conference? You don't have to imagine; you can go to one. They're held at midnight, in bathrooms of diners next to truck stops by every freeway this country built. Some coked-out Yokel, nose running, standing on a toilet seat podium, stall door opened, waving his dick around and cursing his luck; other Yokels seated in the urinals, burping in unison. Islands of their own kind. What they'd do to a girl in a grass skirt I have no idea; what they can do to a waitress in an apron stained with chicken grease is no secret. You wonder what I did to get invited? Well, I'll tell you: I wasn't invited. Nobody is. It's free for the taking. You can frame your own ideas about me if you'd like. I'm leaving tomorrow for Denver. I don't get to drive much anymore, since Mr. Smithers gave me those psychological evaluations. I can tell you, I'm relieved. Dora would tell me she's happy I'm relieved and I'm relieved that Dora is happy about that but, well, Dora doesn't know everything. And she doesn't have to. So neither do you.

And now here's Dora, on the porch, tapping her heel, fingering the scar over her eyebrow.

"What is it," I ask her, wiping my forehead.

"You should come back inside," she says to me. "Dinner's ready."

"What is it," I ask her, again, wiping my forehead.

"Pork, and potatoes."

"You always cook that on Thursdays. Why do we always have pork on Thursdays."

"Because the supermarket's always got it on sale, honey."

Dora thinks like that. I guess that's a good way to think - I mean, it saves money and all that. People have told me I'm lucky to have kept her, after all that's happened. Keeps your feet on the ground. I want to tell those bastards what kind of ground that is. Discounted pork is meant for janitors.

"The sunset is nice," I say to her, and sweep my arm out towards the flaming sky, and she follows the gesture instinctually, up; but after a few seconds she realizes what she's looking at, and cultivates that familiar expression: the mother in the pet store looking at the purebred puppy she's not going to buy the 7 year-old child on account of expense.

"Of course it is, dear. Of course it is."

I can't help but think there's something limiting about her. We'd met four years ago, in the usual fashion - a bar, red lights, packs of friends, eyes exchanged. She was sitting with Lottie and Sarah, two world-class sluts from the cheerleading squad; my buddy Mort had been jabbing me for ten minutes with the butt of his department-store-bought mini-pistol. I didn't want to be so direct, but he knew about this girl, the same way he knew about all the girls in town: she looks like a grade-A dick-sucker, man. Look at that throat. Could probably squeeze both your balls in there, too. You should work it. With girls I am always very careful now. There have been some misunderstandings in the past but I'm not going to talk about those. Largely their part, I believe. I was educated in psychology; I know about girls. Electra complex, the Lenses of Gender, bulimia, the whole shebang. I like to finesse if I can. Anyway I finally get sick of the pistol-jabs and stand up and go up to her, Mort sauntering along as a wingman. Mort is a local politician, and an awful wingman; he'll do things like talk to your girl for a while, and make these loud, boisterous proclamations about auto-bodies, and then suddenly disappear. And he's got this necklace made out of alligator-teeth, like Crocodile Dundee, so everybody thinks he's very interesting, and you always notice when he leaves. And that's awkward, and he knows it, and I don't know why he does it. But Mort also carries that mini-pistol in his jeans; he isn't one of those people who you criticize. You work with him. And he had told me to work on Dora. So as we sauntered over I'd zeroed in on Dora - painted face, red lipstick, dressed in one of those halter things that showed a little midriff. Lottie and Sarah, the ex-cheerleaders, looked up at us with the artificial expectation of stuffed birds but Dora was thin as a wire, and to make it plain who I wanted I said well someone's certainly been doing their eight-minute abdominal workouts, to grab her attention, you know? But her face just dropped. I mean, who says something like that, right off the bat? She looked hurt for a second, and then gave me the pet-store look, and said: "well, the next six-pack you see won't be muscle."

That's true, I guess; driving a truck doesn't really lend itself to crunches. Too many cups of coffee and pornography magazines and long nights. Still, I was pretty irritated. I mean, who does this toothpicky little slut think she is? Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mort chuckling. My ears began to throb the color of the sky. Then suddenly there was Galahad, frowning at me, shaking his head: well, my boy. We can't have this sort of behavior. Can we? No, Galahad, we can't. And what would you say? Screw it? No, you wouldn't. But you're not here. So screw it. I hooked out one big paw and smacked her, right across the eyes.

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