Honking? Why am I hearing honking? I thought, my mind a haze. I struggled to pry open my eyes, but they felt like they were fused together by some otherworldly force. I raised my hand to clean out whatever was keeping them closed, but my hand felt heavy, like I was wearing lead boxing gloves.
My eyes were sticky and embedded with sand, along with whatever unknown bodily fluids the eyes generated during the night. Where am I? How did I get here? These were questions floating around the peripheral edges of my foggy brain. Maybe I was teleported to Earth from another planet? A planet where people honk at each other to communicate? I thought. How did I get sand in my eyes? Oh yeah, it’s coming back to me now. I was at a party at the lake last night. Well, I thought, that would solve the problem of where I came from but not how I got here. But where is that honking coming from? It was like someone leaned on their car horn for a few minutes. The sound went from barely audible to increasingly loud, then back to barely audible. God, I want to boldly go back to a restful sleep filled with wicked dreams of split infinitives.
I managed to get my eyes open to the geometric equivalent of slits. Allowing just enough light to penetrate and make my brain feel violated by the optic nerves. The pain from the overachieving Sun caused them to quickly close again. Once again, into the breech, I thought. I managed to open them to the smallest possible cracks, anatomically allowable. The slits generated a primal Dean Martin there’s-water-in-my-glass-wince. Looking at me from the safety of a 1963 Studebaker station wagon were five children with their noses pressed against the glass and Visigoth faces staring daggers at me. God, it’s the Farkle Family from Laugh-In, I thought.
I guessed from her resemblance to her little no-necked monsters that their mother sat in the front passenger seat with a frown plastered to her face, shaking her head from side to side. It looked like they were all dressed for church. The mom had on one of those little pink Jacque Kennedy pillbox hats. Thanks to my impeccable logic, I surmised that it might be Sunday.
What am I doing lying on the ground beside a car on a Sunday morning? I thought. Well, hell, I don’t rightly know but something deep inside of me is telling me it beats being in that Studebaker with a judgmental posse of do-gooders. Then, it dawned on me, They have me being judgmental now! The Jacque-Kennedy-looking woman rolled her window down and said, “Do you need help young man?”
I replied, “Only with Trigonometry, ma’am.”
“Well, I never,” she spluttered, “Boy, you need to find Jesus.” And rolled the window up before I could respond with one of the appropriate responses all smart-asses want to give when someone suggests you need to find Jesus. So, would it be a) he was here a minute ago but left like Pontius Pilate set his ass on fire when he saw y’all coming! b) I think that’s him in the car ahead of y’all ... ooh, ooh, made you look! or c) I had no idea the old boy was lost. Shucks, I thought, and I was going to go with b) since there were children in the car.
Most of the cars that pulled up beside where I was now sitting on the pedestrian refuge that separated the traffic refused to even look in my direction. Not that I could blame them. I must have looked like I was rode hard and put up wet. I was in my cut-offs and an ancient copy of a James-Dean-looking windbreaker. Every time the light changed, a new line of cars would drive past. Their faces said, “Oh, Lord, don’t let the light change and make me have to stop by this freak.” It is not at all unusual for me to have doubts about myself. But I was starting to doubt my own existence. Goddamnit People! It’s me, Charles. I exist! I wanted to yell. I ain’t no mirage. I am a real live human being standing here, for crying out loud, look at me! I am on this island, visible to the entire world, and you drive by like I am the invisible man. Now, I have to admit I was feeling somewhat disconsolate. I had only been back in the States for about ten days and had been partaking in an unbridled, audacious celebration of life for nine of those days. I was starting to consider that maybe I was in the middle of some wasted psychedelic dream when a car pulled up that I recognized. A familiar face leaned out the window and said,
“Hey, Marine, would you like some candy?
As my friend Dale and I were driving back toward my house, he handed me a lukewarm beer to wash my mouth out. “Damn, old son,” he said. “You smell like the last rose of summer!”
“You’re not exactly a bottle of Chanel, Kemo. What the hell happened last night? How did I end up on that traffic median, or better yet, why did I end up there?”
“Well,” Dale started, “we were all sitting around the campfire getting smashed in a proper Texas fashion when someone mentioned how big and gorgeous the moon was. And you said, “Hell yeah, a great night for skinny-dipping.” Then you stripped down and ran out into the lake with a ski belt and a can of Fosters.” The girls all giggled and said they weren’t stripping down. Well, except for Boogie. She was down to bra and panties and in the lake in a New York minute.” Boogie Wilder was a red-headed, green-eyed, adventurous soul who attracted men like dreams to slumbering minds. “So, the rest of the guys looked at each other and decided to join you and Boogie in the lake. As we were floating around and drinking, you said, I wonder what kind of nonsense the man in the moon is up to tonight. Then you started singing Moon River in Latin. That’s when I knew you were headed to oblivion.”
“When I was in Ms Head’s Latin class,” I said, “I would spend my spare time trying to translate songs into Latin. It helped me pick up Latin a lot quicker, and it was very productive. Now, I am trying to translate songs into Latin to determine the degree of inebriation I have experienced. That old feller in the moon doesn’t always have my best interests at heart. You know, my mom was an emergency room nurse for years. She used to say, You could tell there was a full
moon last night. The emergency room was full. I never thought much about it, but it did plant one of those superstitious seeds in my brain.” It would be another thirty years before I would be able to look on a full moon as a beautiful phenomenon full of promise. The roots that grew from those earlier superstitious seeds would be jerked out by the roots.
Dale said, “Well, you swam to shore to get another beer. When you didn’t come back for a while, we got worried about you and decided to swim back to the beach to look for you. You had passed out by the fire as naked as the day you were born. All our dates had split, so we figured you had offended their sensitive natures, except for Boogie, who thought the whole scene was a hoot. We spent about thirty minutes trying to get you back into your cut-offs, but you were out of it, old son. Then you would wake up and start mumbling something about No man is an island, blah blah blah, don’t ask who the bells toll for, it tolls for thee blah blah. On the way back to town, the guys thought it would be a great prank to leave you on your own special island. Which we did. We dropped you off around one in the morning. I was going to come back and pick you up in about an hour. I went home and cleaned up, then fell asleep. When I woke up I almost panicked. And drove back to where we dropped you off as fast as I could. I think next time we drop you off, I am going to pin a sign on you that says, I will recite No Man is an Island for a ride.”
“Well, Pard, there ain’t gonna be a next time.”
“You mean I iced down this six-pack of chilly ones for nuthin’?”
“Well, I am kinda thirsty.”
We laughed and started singing, “Call it a night ... the party’s over ... and tomorrow starts the same old thing again."
