"The truth is a pathless land."- Krishnamurti
"Traveling alone?"
I start to answer but stop. The well-groomed car rental agent doesn’t even notice. He just clicks and clatters on his keyboard in near frantic dedication. With neatly gelled hair and European eyewear, he asserts his dignity behind a desk of the-customer-is-always-right, America.
He looks up.
“Big Sur is beautiful this time of year.”
He’s noticed my return location, but he’s exhausted his small talk capability with that once sentence.
"Let me show you what we have available."
Outside, white cars line the parking lot like a monochrome army.
I’ve come here for the ocean, but must wade through a sea of cars first.
"What's with all the white cars?"
"The automakers mass produce them and can't sell them all. We get them at a discount."
I’ve come here for the ocean—and for my daughter. As I choose my white rental car, I make a mental note: Even the most mundane facts have reasons, details that reign in the chaos.
Pebble Beach; July 5, 2008; 3:00 pm
Angela pulls out of Spanish Bay with a right turn that's a little too sharp and a little too fast. She slows for a pair of deer that lunch on overly-fertilized golf course grass and saunter too close to 17-Mile Drive. Outside my window, the bright green of the foliage and the deep blue of the sea press against one another like opposite ends of magnets. The ocean rages against the dark upraised hand of the shore, bursting into white foam flames, trying to escape. The rolling hills take us up and down, our car bobbing like a ship on the wrong side of the divide.
I watch the waves bash against the shore and listen to the sound that has awakened me on so many nights in land-locked Ohio. Before today, I’d never seen the ocean, but it has roared in my ears night after night. I’ve longed for the ocean, yet shot up out of sleep petrified of being swallowed beneath it.
Yet, here I am.
Angela looks over at me.
“Are you taking in the landscape?”
I shrug.
“Look at that house over there. It looks like a palace, doesn't it?"
Another shrug.
"It's disgusting," Angela announces. "They don't even try to intermingle with the surroundings."
"Arrogance," I say softly. "Arrogance."
As we coast by elderly couples with pastel-colored polos and golf clubs in hand, Spanish mission-style mansions alternate with Dutch gingerbread palaces in neat succession. Angela clears her throat to indicate that she is about to ask a question. She weighs her options, sizing me up before continuing. In the rearview mirror, I see the lively flash of blue that animates her eyes and grip my seat, bracing for impact.
"Dad, whatever happened to Uncle Mike?”
I hesitate. She continues.
"You know, I only met him the once and I always wonder why."
Once was a short visit in our Ohio suburb. Mike appeared unannounced and paraded into my daughter's room shortly after I opened the door. It was the early 90s but Mike seemed to think it was still the early 80s, his shaggy blond hair meeting his cheeks lined with light sideburns. His large plastic glasses had the frame of a 70s disco star, but he seemed oblivious to the contradiction of being an Evangelical minister and looking like a cocaine-snorting dancing king.
Angela barely looked up from her book when we entered the room. She was a teenager then, and in typical teenage fashion, she was above caring who was paying a visit. Through his sunglasses, he scanned Angela's walls taking in the Nirvana and Pearl Jam posters, nodding as though he'd uncovered some great secret. Having spent more than a decade trying to keep the words sin and damnation out of my daughter's vocabulary, I watched in horrified wonder as he launched into a mini-sermon.
"Do you know what these posters are?"
"Rock stars?" Angela looked up from her textbook with a sarcastic "Duh" ready on her lips.
"Idol worship," Mike announced quickly. "The Bible tells us that there is only one God and thou shalt not worship false idols."
Angela appeared to ignore the sermon while she idly flipped through her book.
Outraged, Mike demanded, "Well, what do you think about that?"
"Not much."
After Mike had left, Angela came out of her room and asked a question that has stayed with me for years.
"Who was that?"
Only then did I realize that I had never mentioned my brother to Angela. At that very moment, I decided to keep it that way.
I. Summer 1972
My big brother introduced me to Led Zeppelin and the Doors, gathered books of Jim Morrison's poems, and taught me that inner darkness was the cornerstone of cool. Around the house, he was lazy, spending hours in bed with Riders on the Storm on continual replay. In the evenings, he disappeared until the early hours of morning, his return always announced by stumbling bangs on the wall, and a cluttering of confused keys searching for entry. I'd hear my mother's muffled voice hiss accusations: "Where have you been? Are you on drugs?"
In the mornings, her voice took on a hurt, maternal tone as she spoke to her sister on the phone. She always asked the same questions:
"Do you think he's like that because he's grown up without a father?"
"I do the best I can, but I have to work and support the boys."
"Do you think John is going to end up like Mike?"
I was incapable of following in my big brother's footsteps, but not for lack of trying. Throughout school, I listened to teacher after teacher recommend that I ask my older brother how to divide fractions or write a report about Dickens. Mike effortlessly sailed through school during the day and managed to party all hours of the night. Meanwhile, hours at the library and paid tutors couldn't get me on the honor roll. Having Mike as a brother had only one advantage: When I got old enough to take an interest in drugs, I could go to him.
"You want some weed, huh? How old are you now? 12?"
"14," I muttered.
"Alright--I can help you out. Let me go over to Al's and get some."
When Mike came back in his plum Ford Pinto, I went out to the driveway to meet him. He handed me a wadded up sandwich bag with a melodramatic wave of his arm.
"Careful with this stuff," he said. "It can make a young fellow like yourself go crazy."
"Yeah right," I said, handing him a $10 bill.
I walked through the neighborhood and picked up a couple friends, the three of us making our way to 'the barn,' a dilapidated structure in the middle of a cornfield near our houses.
Charlie Bowman rubbed the buzz cut his father had recently forced on him, his expression complaining of injustice.
"We need to bring some girls out here, man."
Adam Rickett was shoving me into the barn and trying to start a mock boxing match. He stopped at the suggestion.
"Yeah, seriously," he said. "Why don't you go home and get your sister?"
A cloud of aggression passed over Bowman’s dark features: “Shut the fuck up, Rickett."
"He was just kidding, man. Come on, let's smoke some pot."
Adam couldn't let it pass. "What? Mitchell's got some weed?" Adam taunted me with the surprise in his voice. He was the proven rebel of our group, stealing his Dad's Budweisers and his mom's cigarettes for our personal consumption.
"Give it here and I'll roll it up," he said.
As Adam opened the baggy and peered inside, Bowman stepped back, looking on in wide-eyed amazement. It was clear that he'd never smoked before either. Adam looked into the bag, looked up at me, and then looked down again. He sucked in a deep breath through his nostrils before announcing, "This isn't weed, man. Who the hell sold you this?"
"The hell it isn't," I countered.
"This is oregano, the shit my mom uses in spaghetti."
He held up the palm of his hand filled with dried green flakes and blew them onto the dirt floor of the barn.
Standing there in my Led Zeppelin t-shirt and worn-out blue jeans, my bushy hair growing out in emulation of my brother, I was a fool. Warm blood rushed to my cheeks as embarrassment turned slowly into anger.
I ran out of the barn, leaving behind my friends' laughter. By the time I reached our brick house three blocks away, I was sweating, pushing and pulling air with my heaving lungs. My brother was sitting on the La-Z-boy chair in our living room. He looked up when I came in, still smiling as he was earlier.
I calmly walked to the side of his chair, and with everything I had in my 100-pound body, I punched him square in the nose. Blood seemed to pour out in rivers as he stood up and promptly pummeled me to the ground. We rolled around on the living room floor for what seemed an eternity before he finally got the upper hand, pinning me down, his knees on my chest.
Blood dripped from his chin onto my chest and neck while he fought for breath.
"What was that for?" he asked.
"For selling me fucking oregano!" I struggled to wiggle him off me.
"I didn't sell you oregano, you little shit."
"Yes, you did!" I screamed, tears blistering my face.
Then, in a lucid, almost hypnotizing voice, Mike looked me in the eyes and said, "I'm your brother. I would never lie to you."
Spanish Bay; July 5, 2008; 3:30 pm
Our white car pulls into a parking lot facing a white sand beach littered with the tentacles of underwater sea kelp. Three children pile out of the car next to us, the mother calling after them, a bottle of sunblock raised futilely in the air. The youngest child, a toddler with down duckling hair, tumbles after his older siblings who race toward the sea. Feeling the cold water's unexpected reach above their thighs, they stop abruptly and run away screaming. They soon turn their attention to the seagulls that wait for the children to get within inches before flying a little further away. The toddler cries in delight as the ritual begins anew over and over.
I watch the family and avoid eye contact with Angela. If I ignore her question long enough, perhaps she will forget it-or at least not repeat it.
The father gets out of the car and slowly meanders after his family. He has whispers of gray in his cropped brown hair, but keeps his face clean-shaven to disguise the inevitable onset of middle age. White shoes and tube socks keep his feet separate from the sand. His blonde wife trails behind him, a sun visor keeping her from squinting, preventing the deepening of wrinkles, the onset of crow's feet. She wears shorts that show off her still-fit legs fought for every morning on a treadmill. She holds a camera between her and the ocean, clicking the scenery into a memory chip. Satisfied that the beach now belongs to her, she is ready to move on to the next sight, and begins to call to her children in Russian or French or German. They have to hurry to get through the seventeen miles and eat dinner.
Fine dining has become a McMenu for those possessing the mighty Euro, and Big Sur is on fire, but no one notices either phenomenon. The dollar is still green and the air quality is good today. Only a dark tunnel of smoke stretching across the horizon provides any hint of disaster. The smoke leaves Big Sur on the left hand of the horizon and extends across the sky to Santa Cruz on the right. Back in Berlin or London, someone might ask, "What's that?" while pointing to the row of apocalyptic smoke in the family photos.
"I think it is fog," the blonde woman will answer with an air of certainty. "It was always so foggy there." And that will be the story, the memory, the fiction.
***
My daughter is not like them. She walks onto the sand and removes her shoes. She strolls to the middle of the beach, looks around, seems to contemplate her next move. She waves me away, still annoyed.
"Walk around and enjoy!"
She forces a smile.
As I move away, she plops down into the sand, no blanket, no chair. Just lies right down. Sand clings to the back of her dark jeans, makes a sponge-like imprint on her pink V-neck. Her dark curls immediately attract the contrast of white specks of earth.
The tourists watch her with the same bemused awareness they give to seals sunning themselves on rocks. They watch her because she thinks she belongs here, that she is a part of this place and it of her. This comfort with the world is what terrifies me about her.
I take a deep breath and make my way back to my daughter who suddenly seems too close to the crashing waves. Sensing me, she stands up and moves in my direction. The ocean breeze blows sand from her perimeter, making it look as though smoke were billowing from her.
"What do you think?" she asks as I get closer.
It is unclear whether she means Mike or the scenery. I take advantage of the ambiguity.
"It's a beautiful place."
She hasn't even noticed the sand sticking to her backside, so I swipe at it and she laughs, suddenly self-conscious.
"Dad," she says elongating the syllable. "I can get it."
She brushes sand off her neckline as we walk back to the white rental car.
"Are you ready for the Lone Cypress?" she asks.
"Yeah, let's do it."
"Oh ... we will," she says running ahead. "Us with a dozen or so of our un-closest friends."
With satisfaction, I note that she, too, was thinking about the tourists.
II. Fall 1975
By senior year, there was no Mike, just rumors of him. Girls at school gossiped about parties at his house in Columbus, and then grew quiet when they saw me, whispering and covering their mouths as though I were some kind of lip reader.
Things were quiet at home until one night, the familiar, heavy sound of Mike's footsteps echoed through the house. The sound was always like that, a loud and dull thud resulting from the weight of Mike's hefty frame. But, on this particular night, the thuds were deft, quickly approaching. Keys sang their bewildered song as one or two ill-fitting ones struggled to turn the lock. Finally, he found the right key and the lock gave.
My mom's bedroom door quietly cracked open and her footsteps made quiet impressions as they moved across the carpet. From my room, I heard the plastic rumbling of a trash bag and my mother sobbing.
"What happened? Oh God, What happened?"
I pulled myself out of bed and peered around the corner into the living room where I saw Mike peeling off blood-stained clothes and tossing them into the bag. When he finally saw me, he seemed surprised.
"Just go back to bed, Johnny."
His pupils occupied the entire circumference of his eyeballs; only narrow intertubes of blue remained. I moved closer to him and saw scratches up and down his arms and back, a bite mark on his shoulder blade.
"Did you get into a fight?" Mom asked.
She was trying to create a rational plotline to the apparition in her living room, but there was none: "Oh God ... Oh God ..."
Mike avoided looking at Mom and instead locked eyes with me. He quickly began issuing commands.
"Get me one of my old shirts and a pair of jeans while I'm in the shower."
I didn't tell him that I'd thrown out all his clothes, the mess he'd left behind. I went to my room and found a ratty t-shirt and an oversized pair of sweatpants, left them outside the bathroom door.
Laying in my bed, peering into the darkness, I listened as Mike got dressed and ignored my mother who continued to beg him for an explanation. Finally, the door shut and a car engine roared away.
The next day, the police came while I was at school. When I got home, my mother was rocking on a chair on our front porch. Her pale blue eyes seemed to be looking at something far away, but the houses lining our block were the only things there. A slight breeze blew her fine dark hair into her face, but she did not blink. I leaned down and pushed her hair behind her ears so that she would see me.
"I think Mike killed a man," she whispered.
"What?" I bent down on one knee and turned my ear to her lips.
"The police are looking for Mike. Say they found a naked boy dead in the alley over off Tilden. Drugs or something they say."
"It'll be alright, ma," I said. "We will be able to go visit him while he's in jail."
She looked at me as though I'd said the most crazy thing she'd ever heard.
"Johnny, I didn't tell them nothing. And don't you neither. We haven't seen him since Christmas and that's a fact."
"But, mom, don't you think we should tell the police what happened last night?"
"He's my son," she said. "I will not turn in my own son to the police."
III. Winter 1985
It was a bar that could be any bar in Middle America: Nascar posters adorning the wall, checkered flags hanging like Christmas tree tinsel, cigarette smoke hovering thick as small talk and unspoken sorrows. Johnny Cash was strumming steadily ahead as I contemplated how to get the smoke out of my clothes and alcohol off my breath before going home to my wife and kids.
Suddenly, a man pulled up a barstool beside me, the outline of his figure blurry in my peripheral vision.
"Hey there," he said, shifting his weight towards me. "I'm Steve."
"Hi," I said, non-committal.
"You look a little familiar--What's your name?"
I turned to face him, placed my beer on the bar. He didn't seem to be looking for trouble: just an older guy, red-faced and balding, looking for some conversation.
"John," I said, finally. "Pleased to meet you."
I held out my hand and Steve took it, steadily looking me in the face, studying.
"John what? What's your family name, boy?"
"John Mitchell."
"Any relation to Mike?"
I reached for my beer and swallowed slowly, trying not to meet eyes with Steve.
"Yeah, he's my brother."
"Son of a bitch," he exclaimed, slapping the bar with his palm. "I knew it. You're a dead wringer for him. Where is he these days?"
"No idea. Haven't heard from him in ten years. Last I heard, he was a minister in Kansas."
"A minister? That piece of work knocked up my sister 12 years back and she's never seen a dime of child support. Minister my ass."
My insides roared like the tides that bash against the confines of my skull. Sweat beaded on my face as I stood up from my stool, shaking, looking for an exit.
"You alright?"
Steve’s face blurred into all the other faces as I moved backwards from the bar.
"Let me go call him."
I went outside to the phone booth, the cold winter smacking my face, pushing me toward sobriety. I opened my wallet and searched its contents, opening every crumpled, folded paper I found. Finally, I opened one so old, it seemed ready to disintegrate into pocket lint.
The sound of the phone ringing had the lonely digital echo of no-man's-land. It could be buzzing in Topeka or Timbuktu, the sound humming for no one in particular.
"Hello?"
I hiccupped a shallow, "Hello?"
"Hello? Who is this?"
"Mike, it's your brother."
A long pause extended between the two phones as though slowed by distance, time sticking to our feet like road tar on a summer day.
"Yeah? What do you want? Is mom okay?"
"Well Mike," I began, "I know we've had some differences over the years and I'm all for live and let live, but there's something we got to talk about."
"Uh-huh, that's right John. Gospel says there is a season ..."
I let him roll out the gospel for a few minutes, strangely comforted by the familiarity of his voice, the bizarre intimacy that exists only between siblings. An icy breeze cut through the phone booth and the words unexpectedly pounced from my lips.
"Look Mike, I met a guy who says his sister's got your kid."
His monologue came to a screeching halt like a turning car that's just spotted oncoming traffic.
"You know about that?" he finally asked.
"Yes, I know about it. And you know it ain't right," I said.
"Well, I prayed on it real hard and finally the good Lord opened my heart. Now, I got two kids of my own, adopted from China."
"That don't matter, Mike. You have a boy Angela's age out here and you've never even seen him."
"Does mom know?"
"I don't know, but I'm going to tell her."
"Who else knows?"
"Mike, that's not the point. How would I know? You can't just pretend to be a minister, adopt a few kids, and absolve yourself from everything you've done wrong in life. You've got to confront what you've done."
I heard the dial tone, the conversation immediately becoming the past, my heart humming in my head, the blood surging through my veins waiting to tear everything apart with its raw anger.
The Lone Cypress; July 5, 2008; 4 pm
To our left, seals bask on rocks like giant sausages. They show off for the people taking pictures and chattering in a dozen languages. Occasionally, I hear 'sea lion' dropped into the tourists' sentences with a question mark in their intonation. They manipulate their cameras to fit into the openings of the chain link fence, complaining of the inconvenience as silver lines shadow their lenses. Giving up, they point their cameras at the lone cypress, a bonsai-esque silhouette protected from the elements by a seemingly ancient wall. As the cameras click, the stories take shape above crashing waves.
The dark hovering cloud in the background?
"It's a shadow from the sunset," a Norwegian student tells his friends when he visits for the holidays.
Angela comes up next to me, wraps her fingers into the fence, and yawns while looking at the seals. Evening is coming and the fog is moving closer. She zips up her black jacket and shudders.
"Isn't it sad that they have to build a fence to keep us away from them?"
"Some things are meant to be seen and not touched," I say, placing my hand between her shoulders.
"Like Uncle Mike?"
She shrugs off my hand and turns away, facing the Lone Cypress, the open breathless expanse of sky and water gaping between us.
"Do you really want to know about him?"
Angela nods and turns back to me.
The stories bash against the confines of my ribs and rush up my throat to my lips where they sense their escape. I put my arm around my daughter, already feeling lighter. As we walk back to the white rental car parked next to a series of other white rental cars, I hear myself begin.
"I'll tell you three stories and then you will know everything I know."
BB
