Ode to the Accelerator

Downtown Long Beach on Elm Avenue, an early marmalade dawn in April. I am cruising at fifteen miles an hour in a 1990 lime-green Porsche 959 with black leather upholstery; Puccini's La boheme is playing in the cockpit at a comfortable volume. There is nothing particularly special about this place, in fact -- aside from the occasional ivy-kissed red brick buildings and colonnades -- it's pretty grimy, but once a year the city closes off this part of downtown for the Long Beach Grand Prix, which is scheduled for later this week.

Elm Avenue is the last American vestige of good traffic planning; the signals here are timed perfectly, each one turning green just as I approach its intersection, so I never lose my pace. Transfixed by the quietude, the sheer lack of people on the streets on a morning like this, I suddenly find myself on a stretch of Shoreline Drive; the withered, deferential palm trees flagging me by; and up ahead the famous hairpin turn that makes the Formula D series of the Grand Prix such a pleasure to watch.

The music has changed. It's Adrian Borland, Beneath the Big Wheel, a gentle song with a luxuriant acoustic guitar riff. Sublime relaxation; unprecedented chillness. Yet in spite of it, I find my foot pressing more firmly on the gas, my hands tightening their grip on the smallish leatherized steering wheel. The cafes and the pawn shops, the streetlights and the manhole covers, the painted lines on the road, all begin to accelerate past me. The engine's distinctive hum, far away at first, arrives at me steadily; confidently. In just a few moments I will enter the turn. I don't know for sure what the speedometer reads, but I don't plan to look at it. I guess you could say I just have a feeling, a certain pact with the road. I remember this road.

And then, at a velocity far greater than this sharp turn ever intended, I take it. I oversteer into the apex of the bend, and in an instant my tires are squealing. They lose their traction with the pavement, smoke bellows and swirls around me, and I am now drifting sideways, the trash-strewn curb of the road once off to my side now squarely in front of me. Suddenly, the car turning one way, the tires turning another, the moment all four wheels enter the drift, I yield the control of the driving factors to my intuition, and slip into an unexpected moment of reflection...

...I am thinking of her. At this early hour she is probably still sound asleep. I can see her now, shoulders decumbent, trailing, head on the pillow tilted slightly to one side, a hand beside her ear like maybe she's trying to hear something in her dream, hips rolled over a bit and the comforter pinched between her legs. To gaze at her like this, serenity. To be loved by her, the perpetual dream. She is my marmalade dawn; she is my ivy-kissed colonnade; she is why I can see the beauty in a place as forsaken as Elm Avenue. She is my confidence as I enter every hairpin turn; she is my hammering heart, the thrill and awe of every curve of this oil-slicked asphalt. And yet none of this could ever come close to that feeling of simply holding her in my arms...

Still slicing laterally through the turn; now the steering wheel spins through my hands, the front wheels return to center, and I wait -- wait for my car to point just right so I can hit the throttle and burst out of the corner. Before I realize it, my tires have grabbed the road and I'm already surging into the straightaway; the turn behind me, vanquished in a gulf of white smoke.

I look into the rearview mirror. The man looking back at me has a twinkle in his eye. He is laughing, heartfelt laughter; reflecting to me my demeanor of careless wonder, of simple joy, of fulfillment. With that, I decide to go back around toward Elm Avenue for another run.

A Man of Indeterminate Origin

He was known to walk the streets of San Francisco’s adamantine Tenderloin district, where he would peruse the vast library of human despondency that resided there. It was on those streets that you would see him idly conversing with the abandoned, the forlorn, the hated. It was here that you could find him transacting with those who had willingly exchanged life for a living death.

One time I spotted him reclining on a green bench near the civic center; I watched as he patiently and methodically recited the finer details of Pascal’s wager to a transvestite methamphetamine addict. In those hours of early morning, a thin film of orgasm and desperation seemed to slick everything. And when he walked, it was through the diffused glow of quick-loan neon, wrapped in an evanescent cloak of pre-morning mist.

I came to know him one night as we crossed paths in an all-night donut shop at the intersection of Turk and Hyde. He sat alone near the window. The 19-Polk roared past, and he watched it with an air of indifference. This was his world. He was comfortable.

I purchased a small cup of rehashed coffee and asked him why he chose to inhabit this place. Unlike those who made their crooked way in these nine square blocks of iron and concrete, his was a voluntary bondage. He responded that this was the only place that felt real to him, and whenever he crossed the arbitrary threshold, the world suddenly seemed to conceal – or perhaps discard – that which he liked to call “the soul of things.”

“Such is the way," he said. "The soul burns here. In these alleys and chain-linked lots.”

One night we crossed the boundary together. We walked to the top of the hill and gazed in silence over the valley, out to the sea. We were parallel with the stars. From our vantage the buildings extended below us in fantastically rich, all-consuming splendor – and from there we witnessed the burning in the endless valleys beyond. The tacit awe. The awe was the awe of life, the sweet ephemeral thing that ends soon. We knew there was no life tomorrow; only this life, the life that must be lived today. And for every valley, there was a man such as this. Not an evangelist or a shepherd. Just a guy who thrives on the least desirable portions.

Salty, Vol. 1

Enzio and Saadik take to the great restless sea by sailboat.

They grow long hair and beards, bleached a gorgeous hue of platinum blonde by prolonged exposure to sunlight. They assiduously apply Enzio's twenty-dollar-per-ounce botanical sunscreen; or at least they would if they still had it, but they ran out of it merely two days into their odyssey. For every shade lighter their hair, a shade darker their blistered, leathery skin; in short time they each look like clones of Giant Panther from Nintendo's Pro Wrestling. Enzio has a more erudite appeal than Giant Panther though, owing to the Cuban military cap he wears at all times to protect his head. By then they have also adopted Giant Panther's specialty moves, the Iron Claw and Head Butt, for strategic use against bull sharks.

Food is scarce, as is their constitution, for the stowaway prostitutes have mutinied, and the pubic lice they left them with preclude even a single decent night of sleep. But Enzio wisely brought the Lunesta, which he nicknames the New Hope, and Saadik has a big bottle of Xanax, which he stole from a beachside pharmacy in Laguna Madre. They help a little bit, but nothing like the stuff they're after now, the stuff they really covet: they are en route to Venezuela for a few more stalks of its famously chronic cilantro.

To pass the time, Enzio hits golf balls off the port side of the sloop with his three wood. It is a mystery to Saadik how Enzio manages to stuff the golf balls with broken-off match heads, but he happily relinquishes his disbelief as he watches each ball soar into the air and explode like a mortar. It's so entertaining that Saadik doesn't mind Enzio occasionally hitting the highly combustible fabric mainsail with one of those detonating golf balls, even though it's the only thing they have to catch the ever-slight breeze and propel them landward. Saadik even lets out a loud chuckle when one errant ball decapitates a nearby pelican, but when he looks to see Enzio dancing around, gleefully shouting "Hole in one! Hole in one!" he feels a curious tinge of remorse.

Meanwhile, Saadik has stored a week's worth of his ejaculate in a bottle, which he eventually corks and tosses carelessly into the deep blue. He will never know the great miracle that will happen from the throwing of that little bottle, that it will drift across the great Atlantic for months and months, to find itself one day washed upon the shores of Denmark near Copenhagen, and be intercepted by an artless young woman there, that this woman longs more than anything for a child to call her own, and remarkably will fertilize herself with Saadik's seafaring sperm straight from the bottle. Nor will he ever know what cosmic force kept his seed alive for that several thousand-mile journey, or that he might just perhaps have sex cells as impervious as that ancient heart of his.

The sea is full of mysteries.

Look, Saadik is no fool; he can tell Enzio is irritated by the endless, oppressive sunshine. But Enzio is Saadik's guest on this voyage, and he does what it takes to make Enzio comfortable. He offers him Belizean rum in great quantities. He feeds him enchanted cilantro. He gives him pulverized tobacco for relaxation. He plays Journey's Greatest Hits on his dad's old Sony Walkman, which connects to the portable CD player through a cassette adapter. "My friend," Saadik says, "you are the guest, and this voyage ends only when you are satisfied. I will accommodate you, even if you want to remain in my boat for the rest of your days."

But who the hell is he kidding? They don't have days, only several hours at best, before their rickety boat is swallowed by the unforgiving sea. After the battering they took from a pod of pilot whales, the boat is now leaking to the bilges. The rudder and anchor are both missing. Saadik is wasting his time in idle reflection whilst their tropical water ration dribbles rapidly over the end of the stern. "Well," Enzio replies, "your guest thinks maybe we should get to caulking the seams or something." He knows he's only indulging his conscience, because no amount of caulking will save the boat this time. And so he goes back to driving golf balls, aiming vainly at a bull shark that has been circling them since they left Xcalak...

Plasmasturbation

Okay, so this whole day I have definitely felt the absence of my life fluids. I am sitting there, you see, a piece of metal thrust in my arm, a liter bottle hanging beside me filling slowly with what looks like Stella Artois. Before moving to her next patient, the phlebotomist says to me, "Everything is good," and she's right, it really is. I feel effervescent, intensely and unreasonably sexual, only half-distracted by my consciousness being peeled away in thin strips from the left side of my brain to my right. Snowy re-runs of Dawson's Creek impress upon my mind, and that's the last I remember before falling into a deep void of cheering plasma recipients who have materialized from an orange haze; they are mostly gay minorities. The one in front, a young sensitive Mexican man with a slight mustache, proclaims, "The returning champion!" and he attempts a wet kiss, but before he gets to me I hose him down with my hemoglobin. I follow with a right hook to his kidney. I sense the force of my punch frustrated -- frustrated by what? It's like punching someone underwater. Ah, it finally comes to me in a flash of intuition: I am punching through the sheer slowness of time. I can perceive every detail of my environment, mostly the uncharacteristic silence, the Hawaiian-themed wallpaper, and my hooking fist clenching twenty-dollar bills. When my fist finally arrives at its destination, the Mexican man is now a sexy female bank teller. Tall, slender, curvaceous. She takes my cash and says, "I don't know whether to applaud your resourcefulness or to run, very, very far away; oh you little white thug." Nonplussed, I promptly reply, "Listen sweets, you'd better step aside unless you want to dwell in the holy conclave of my vomit." I'm just bluffing the girl, the nausea has already subsided. And suddenly I am back in my recliner made of hospital-grade vinyl, the centrifuge next to me eagerly separating out my blood plasma. When it returns my red blood cells back to me through the same needle, an unmarked bag of clear liquid is also emptying into my intravenous tube. Saline? Sugar water? Cyanide? There is only one question on my mind at this time: "When is my heart going to stop?"