BENEATH THE COYOTE HILLS
William Luvaas
1
They say you never get more than you can handle. So how do we explain suicide, then, or divorce, or crimes of passion, or parents who murder their children, or fall to pieces after having them? How do we explain people like me?
I am akin to Dostoevsky’s underground man, living in my own underground in an olive grove outside the town of Hamlet in SoCal. Hamlet longs to be a quaint English village rather than a scrappy burg in the high desert. Once a prosperous farming community, it is now down-at-the-heels, peopled by social security retirees living in run-down trailers inherited from former retirees who died in them, ex-cons and sexual predators, evangelical shouters (a church on every corner), recyclable collectors, and nutcase old farts tooting around in golf carts decked out with American flags. Diabetic tubbies trip out of Walmart pushing shopping carts full of cheap carbs and gizmos from China. How can they afford all that shit? Gun nuts blast holes in mudstone cliffs in the wash below my place or take aim at the cross atop “The First Church of the One True Christ,” modeled on the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. They dodge through the sagebrush in cammo gear, assault weapons at the ready, hunting “Feds.” Scares hell out of me when they invade my grove. I’ve fashioned a suit of palmetto fronds, a raffia affair, which I clamber into when they come, blending so seamlessly with the landscape that the bastards brush right past me, unaware I am there.
Doubtless there are wage earners among our Hamletites (how else could the stores stay open?). Although I hear the cash economy is obsolete anymore. These days, banks fund credit vehicles which consumers use to buy products, the banks take their cut, then securitize their risk and sell it to investors via hedge funds, which cleverly bet against prosperity via credit default swaps or some such, and make a killing in the next big crash, so they can start the cycle all over again. No one really understands how it works. It’s Rube Goldberg economics, a self-perpetuating prosperity machine. Those of us on the economic outskirts get by on its leavings. One thing you can say about capitalism: it produces one helluva lot of trash.
I have furnished my hut with its castoffs: pots, pans and utensils from the county dump, used carpeting on the dirt floor, a mattress and La-Z-Boy I picked up on the street, prints I took off walls of an abandoned motel—then the walls themselves to construct my hovel. I had a palm frond roof at first, watertight and sun-reflecting (nature has its leavings, too). The Cahuilla and Soboba Indians roofed their shelters with fronds. After the housing crisis, I salvaged Spanish tiles from foreclosed homes in a nearby development, brought them home in a shopping cart, and tiled my roof. Damnedest thing you ever saw: a beautiful Spanish tile roof on a shack! I brought windows home from the development, too, a laundry tub which I use for all my washing needs, and Romex electrical cable, which I’ve run to a nearby power pole and tapped into the power grid, so I have free electric lights and heating. How else could I do my scribbling half the night on a laptop I found in mint condition beside the caretaker’s shack at the county dump? I had as much right to it as the caretaker did, since he salvaged but didn’t secure it. So I salvaged it from him. Finders keepers is first principle in the long-standing conventions of salvage. First principle of us freegans. Besides, I had more need of it than he did. He would sell it, while I use it to keep myself sane, pecking away at the keys:
Call him V.C.: Voltaire Cambridge Hoffstatter. His parents loved the great French satirist, inventor, provocateur and entrepreneur and hoped their son would emulate his namesake, especially Voltaire’s business prowess. V.C.’s father, J.D. Hoffstatter, was founder and CEO of the First National Bank of Enterprise (the noun not the town). Voltaire’s boyhood friends did not call him V.C., as he would call himself once he launched his career, but simply “Volt.” The nickname fit him perfectly. Not just his personality and life trajectory, quick wit and high-voltage charm, and his luck with the ladies, but also even his physique. His body zigzagged on an upward trajectory: runner’s thick legs zagged to a trim waist, then bulged outward in a broad upper torso, muscled abs, shoulders and biceps, and zagged again into a thick neck and elongated cranium. All that native energy seeming to explode out the top of his head. At track meets, onlookers could swear Volt was wielding the Olympic torch: running perfectly upright, a Pentecostal flame licking off his skullcap.
His father, J.D., once told a golf companion that his son would one day grace the cover of Time magazine as “Man of the Year.” The companion chortled. “Right, J.D., and my boy will be president.” J.D. skunked him on the next hole. He did not much care for snideness or negative thinking. A man who kept his chin up would see what was coming on the horizon; a man who did not would miss his chances. Hadn’t Shakespeare said something of that sort? When Volt was a toddler, his mother couldn’t keep the boy’s head down on the pillow; he was already looking to the horizon, already insisting that he would make a success of himself. It tickled J.D.to no end.
By age nine, Volt had a thriving banking business going at his grade school. He loaned lunch money to his classmates at usurious interest rates, even worked lunch vouchers into the mix, using them as primitive credit default swaps. One might think such usury would earn V.C. enemies. Actually, it earned him admirers. Everyone knew from early on that he was going places—and hoped to go with him.
I had a normal childhood until Pop lost his job and took up the bottle. Mom became depressed soon after. My brother Zack and I would arrive home from school to find her lying glumly on the couch watching TV in her nightgown, too blue to greet us. Still, I got good grades, made the junior high varsity baseball team, was popular enough. Though nothing compared to my brother Zachariah: two years older, first in the state in the 440 yard dash, class president, ladies’ man. Zack was still big brotherly in those days; he showed me the correct way to slide into base, advised me on my swing, helped me with algebra. He seemed to know everything, born like a computer with many gigabytes of information pre-stored in his brain.
Pop’s fall and Mom’s depression were my first lesson in life’s vagaries. I’d been indoctrinated, like every American kid, to believe that life is a rock climb: you secure hold after hold until you reach the top. But I soon learned that our fate often arrives like a pizza we haven’t ordered. Suddenly it’s just there, and we must pay for it. Perhaps you have heard it said that when bad luck comes good luck is sure to follow. I believed this once myself, and still struggle to believe it. However, I have learned that the only certain thing about life is its uncertainty.
#
“It can happen to anyone,” Dr. Napier told me after my first episode at age twelve. “It afflicted Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Handel, van Gogh and Flaubert. So you’re in good company, Tommy. These names may mean little to you now, but they will bring you comfort as you grow older.” So I had it in my mind from early on that I would be famous.
I still wasn’t fully conscious after experiencing my first spell the night before, still in a twilight zone between sleep and waking. Dr. Napier’s words echoed in my head as if in a cathedral; they clung to white walls of the examining room and slid down in thick yellow streaks like egg yolk. Yolky talk! But they made an impression on me. After all, I had just awakened from death as some do on the operating table, and was—on a certain level—keenly alert. Everything seemed new and clean. I had never before noticed how people’s lips shape the words that emerge from their mouths. Dr. Napier was saying mine wasn’t a “disease” at all but rather a “neurological condition.”
Mom, Pop, and Zack were totally freaked out by my spell at the dinner table the night before, against which I cracked my head as I fell to the floor. They slid me uneasy looks for days after and reached out their hands to help me walk, when I could walk fine on my own. Mom spoke to me in a hushed voice as if in church. She took me aside in the kitchen after school and whispered in my face that it was all her fault. When I moved away, she stepped closer, talking rapidly, head turned sharply to the side as if she couldn’t bear to look at me; her breath stank of coffee. She insisted her “weak genes” had triggered it. “Your great-grandfather Seymour was schizoid, you realize, and Uncle Sam had fits, his wife Millie was slow. And your Dad’s father, Grandpa Aristophanos, is peculiar. Mental illness runs in the family, don’t you see? On both sides! I’ve expected it to show up in you boys one day.” She looked at me then, eyes brimming with tears and something like dread, whispering how awfully sorry she was in a hushed, imploring voice that scared me more than the spell had.
“I’m not mentally ill,” I whispered back, “only ‘neurologically impaired.’ That’s what Dr. Napier says.” I didn’t know what he meant, but I liked the sound of it.
I didn’t actually experience that first one. I never do; I am unconscious throughout. “It is a loss of muscular control and consciousness,” Dr. Napier told me. “Thank God for that.” I do recall far-off music, like a pipe organ playing inside my head just before it hit the table. Bees swarmed in my belly and came buzzing up my esophagus into my brain. Now, whenever I hear bees buzzing around flowering olives, I hunker down, expecting a spell.
I couldn’t recall what we’d had for dinner that night or what we had studied in school that day. Didn’t remember that I’d hit two home runs in our game against Whitethorne. How excited my family was. “So you gone brain dead or what?” Zack asked me next morning. “Real pisser, huh? So like what day is it, Dick For Brains?” I wasn’t sure. A slice had been cut out of my life, leaving an empty space. “Tuesday maybe,” I ventured. Zack pounded fists against his stomach. “It’s freaky Friday, dipshit. The day after fairy day. Remember? Hey, I got a dipshit space case for a brother. Just beautiful.”
He regularly called me Dick For Brains, but he’d never called me “dipshit” before; it hurt.
“You think my brain got scrambled, Zack?”
Zack shook his head as he left the room. “I think it was already scrambled, like Mom’s. Just didn’t show up until now.” My big brother wrote me off as a loser that day (maybe I did, too). That hurt more than anything else I can remember from my childhood.
Volt Cambridge Hoffstatter (V.C.) was known as a lady’s man in high school, as well as a wrestler, debater, and football star. He fucked half the rally squad and the football coach’s daughter, then his wife. He balled the wife of the Episcopal priest at the church the Hoffstatters occasionally attended. She had eyed him from down the pew, and after services they screwed in the backseat of Volt’s Mustang in the church parking lot. He took her panties as a memento and tucked them away in his “nooky drawer.”
He knew that women are attracted to two kinds of men: Alpha-male winners and men-boys who make them laugh. He was clearly the first type. Years later in New York, he confessed to a fellow executive that he had screwed over 3,000 women in his life. “I lost track years ago. I don’t have time to do as much of that anymore.”
Once, in the semi-final round of the state’s high school debate championships, he tussled with his opponents over the definition of morality. “Take war, for example,” he said. “I would submit that war is moral if we define morality as ‘the greatest good for the greatest number of people.’ War is not only good for the victor’s economy—it ended the Great Depression, after all—but it also eliminates large numbers of one’s enemy and culls the weak from among the victor’s population, since it is a law of nature that the weak shall fall and the strong prevail. So it’s ironic that Hitler made Social Darwinism the pillar of his Teutonic church, only to fall on his own sword. Pitiful loser!”
V.C. didn’t notice the judges leaning forward over their score cards, trying to decide if he was being facetious.
“War strengthens character,” he continued. “It shows us what we are made of. It has advanced science more than any other discipline. Without wars, we would still be in the stone age. Men would not know how to be men without testing their manhood in battle, and women would not know how to love them.”
The captain of the opposing team, a tall boy with red hair and a protuberant Adam’s apple, whom V.C. immediately pegged as a Bible thumper, was outraged. “What of our age-old moral texts, the Holy Bible, the Pentateuch, the Koran, the Upanishads?” he demanded. “All prohibit killing as a cardinal sin. So you just dismiss them with your bogus definition of morality? That is a total red herring.”
“Herrings stink and so does your logic.” Volt said dismissively. “Those ‘moral texts,’ as you call them, are the superstitious speculations of ancient cultures that were ignorant of science and psychology.”
Though Volt clearly won the debate, the judges awarded the contest to the other team. It was one of the few defeats in his young life, and V.C. was enraged at the injustice of it. So much so that he would mention it to his friend Stephenson Jeffers thirty years later. “Bad luck!” Jeffers said dismissively. Volt upbraided him. “You know, Jeffers, ‘luck’ is secular superstition, along with ‘fate,’ ‘destiny,’ ‘fortune,’ and all the other deceits of the gullible. I don’t believe in it anymore than I believe in God.”
#
So why not take up residence in an abandoned house? There are hundreds of them now in the valley, which might be dubbed “The Valley of Failure.” Houses are subject to intrusion by thieves, itinerants, and deputy sheriffs with eviction notices. Tucked away here in a derelict olive grove, I feel secure. I harvest fat black olives and cure them, sit out under the stars and contemplate my life...or lack of one.
Felony Fred and I used to salvage copper wire from abandoned houses and sell it for scrap; made enough one year to keep me eating. Never did know what crime Fred committed to land him in prison; he didn’t talk about it. Hardly talked at all. We would bust Sheetrock walls open with a sledge hammer and snake the wiring out from inside. Totally fucked places up.
I knew it was wrong to trash houses that belonged to someone else—even megabanks. I’m not a moral imbecile. But I had my reasons. I needed to eat. Look at it this way: you own a subdivision which you’ve turned people out of, foreclosed on them because they are underwater on subprime mortgages that were dicey to begin with, and for the-devil-knows-what reason you refuse to adjust owners’ payments so they can stay in their homes, won’t even consider renting to them—or anyone else—but let the houses sit empty; you don’t maintain or resell or even guard them, just let them decompose in the desert sun like monuments to lizardish despair (or Ozymandias)...maybe, just maybe, you deserve to have them trashed.
“This one’s gonna be a sonuvabitch, Freddy. We got to bust through Sheetrock and snake wiring out of the studs they ran it through. One of us will to have to climb up into the attic.”
Freddy just looked at me.
“There’s bound to be scorpions and black widows up there.”
Freddy looked pointedly down at his bowling ball belly as if to say, “You fucking kidding me!”
“Okay, I’ll do her. But you handle the sledge.”
No need to coax Freddy there. He went at those walls like he held a personal grudge against them, like whatever it was had fucked up his life lived in those walls. It was the pounding and Freddy’s roars that got us busted—cops pouring in from every direction, sirens blaring, a helicopter circling overhead like we were empty-house terrorists. I told the cops we were within our legal rights to salvage material from abandoned houses. They laughed and charged us with malicious mischief, grand larceny, trespass, and resisting arrest. I spent a year at Vacaville, but that’s a story I don’t care to tell. What can you say about prison? A long nightmare in lockdown loneliness and fear, bullying and boredom. Spells every other day since they refused me my meds. Actually, the spells helped me get through it, since they filled me with compassion for my fellow prisoners, even the nastiest Aryan Brotherhood skinheads and Mexican mafiosos. Besides, my spells terrified them, so even the psychos avoided me like I was a leper. Still, I gave them my grub in the mess hall, said I wasn’t hungry, sat down with them and told stories. At first they chased me off. “Don’t eat his food, homey. I seen him spit in it.” Eventually, they accepted me, would call to me across the mess hall, “Come tell us a story, Scavenger.” We are all suckers for a good story. Mine were mostly borrowed from the great novels.