Planet Fever (13 page)

A half-hour on the pass, a fog had set in, which made driving the switchback ridden and guardrail-less road all the more treacherous. I stayed relaxed, taking it easy, though I had to keep wiping sweat off my palms. Visibility was minimal, and the edge of an abyss loomed just yards away from the side of the road—one simple yank of the wheel to the left and I would’ve tumbled down the side of the mountain….

A PERSISTENT
drizzle decided to accompany the fog as the paved two-lane road became a one-lane dirt road, which eventually evolved into a mud trail. My sweat-ridden palms were slick on the wheel and I kept the vehicle in first gear.

Maybe the short cut wasn’t such a bright idea.

The rear wheels of the truck fishtailed every so often as the grade became steeper, the switchbacks sharper, the fog heavier and the precipitation more copious. I had to keep going, for if the truck stopped there was a good chance of getting stuck. A blind U-turn on this narrow mountainside Jeep-trail was out of the question. I tried by instinct and feel to hug the inside of the road—the mountainside—and prayed that I didn’t hit a random, giant fallen boulder, and that a random, giant falling boulder would not hit me.

As soon as the rain seemed as though it would subside, it beat down with greater vengeance and fury. At this point the windshield wipers were a mere formality—the water cascaded down like a gushing waterfall. I poked my head out the window, but gusts of wind and rain pelted my face, slamming into my eyes and causing me to jerk the truck toward the edge. My best chance for survival had boiled down to me winging it. The truck bogged down in the mud, fishtailed more and seemed on the verge of going over the edge as each sodden second progressed.

I thought I was at the top of the pass but couldn’t tell whether the sign read “scenic overlook” or “beware steep grade and curves ahead.” Now the pick-up lurched and slid downward and the engine worked on keeping the thing slowed down. I punched the breaks to the floor. My heavy breathing filled the cabin. I could see nothing, and lost all control of the truck. I was at the mercy of this mountain, and I guessed this mountain had never contemplated a concept such as “mercy” in its long existence….

THE TRUCK
slid into what would be its (and my) doom. A slideshow display of my life manifested before me in no particular chronological order: Age five: waking up on the playground after having fallen off swing, other kids surrounding me…. Age 14: kissing first girlfriend…. Age 17: falling off side of building trying to climb drunk…. Age 7: asking my dad if we could visit the remote place depicted on the
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
film poster…. Age 10: scoring the championship goal…. Age 15: learning to fly a plane…. Age 16: talking to a NASA guy about how to go about becoming an astronaut…. Age 25: being recruited by someone I can’t remember the name or face of for something covert and having permanent amnesia thereafter…. Age 3: inside a bubble because of an acute asthma attack.

The images flashed in rapid-fire and random succession, millisecond bits of consolidated memory datum bursting forth, yet a dreamlike quality stretched each scenario to seemingly last seconds,minutes or even hours. I clenched my eyes shut and bellowed forth a primal yell, fearing these were my final moments on terra firma before smashing into the terminal unknown….

The crash never occurred. What seemed to happen was more a wipeout—like spinning 720 degrees on sheer ice and coming to a sudden halt. It would’ve been a casual way to go: spinning-out horizontally into death.

But I realized I was, in fact, not dead, for I heard that relentless rain plinking on the truck. Opening my eyes, my hands were intact and shaking, still wet with sweat. I turned the rearview down to check my face in the mirror; blood poured from a gash on my forehead.

The engine was tacked out—my foot had passed from the brake to the accelerator. In a state of concussed delirium and shock, I was aroused into a semi-state of awareness by a tapping on the window. I rolled it down, and a tight-jawed man wearing a green plastic “Las Vegas” visor, scuba goggles, and an army-green plastic poncho leered in upon me. Between his teeth he clenched a cigarette holder with a soggy cigarette.

“Goddammit man—get your foot off the pedal and shut your rig off—you’re gonna blow the goddamn engine to Richard Nixon’s grave!”

I let off the gas and killed the ignition.

“Man, you’re either a jackass or an adrenaline junky, or both.” He eyed me then the truck. In a sudden spasm, he lurched his head into the cab, his goggles no more than 3 inches from my face, his damp cigarette pressing against my cheek. “Yeah, you’ve seen the edge, there’s no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over,” he mumbled.

“I don’t think I went over,” I said.

He eyed my forehead then commanded, “That’s it! Out of the truck! You need immediate medical attention! And you are in luck, man—because I am a certified EM fucking T.”

Somehow this terse, eccentric fellow didn’t strike me as an EMT. Screw it, I thought. At least I’m not mangled at the bottom of a ravine. I opened the door and stumbled out.

“For god sakes man—roll up the window or your seats will get sopped!”

“Eh, yeah.” I rolled up the window and looked around to see where I had landed.

The truck had slid down a muddy side road that happened to be the driveway to what was this man’s residence. On either side of the entrance stood two tall totem poles, with a falcon carved on top of each one. The drive spilled into a flat area where a Jeep was parked, and various items (such as television sets, toaster-ovens, mannequins, LP album covers of disco bands from the 70s, a typewriter and a rubber mask of George Herbert Walker Bush) were strewn about; most of them bullet-ridden through and through. A wire fence encircled the perimeter of his cabin.

He stopped at the gate and leered with one eye and bit on the plastic cigarette holder. “Are you armed?”

“Uhh—no, no I’m not.”

He reflected then stated, “Well, we’ll take care of that later. A man’s gotta be armed in this area—this is bear, wild boar, and bat country!”

There was a sign nailed to the gate:

The inside of his cabin was cozy in a Dadaistic, disheveled way. Scattered about the dining room table were piles of paper that camouflaged a desktop computer and printer. A cursory examination of the living room yielded thus: three mannequins wearing Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton masks, seated in various states of repose around a coffee table; Old Glory flags draped as curtains, miscellaneous bric-a-brac piled on shelves worthy of a tourist shop off Hollywood Blvd. There were also a bunch of old photographs of World War II taped up everywhere, a “Federal Map of the United States” pinned to the wall, an 18th Century musket hanging above the fireplace, and tying the room together on the far wall was framed Monet’s “Sunset in Venice.”

He mumbled off to the kitchen, where the clatter of kitchenware clanging and falling, cupboard doors slamming and the occasional muttered cussing emanated. Through the saloon-styled doors to the kitchen, he spilled forth, brandishing a liter of Wild Turkey whiskey, some gauze bandages and an infantry knife. The cigarette holder clenched in his teeth held a fresh cig. Gone was the poncho. He sported a floral Hawaiian shirt underneath a sleeveless mountain vest. He still had on the visor and goggles. Like his front yard and living room, it was an eclectic look.

He took the knife, stabbed it into the table. “Sit down,” he grunted.

He grabbed two empty glasses that had been on the table and poured each to the rim, and set his cigarette into an ashtray. “First the Captain—to steady his nerves.” In one gulp he put back the entire glass of whiskey. He grabbed the knife, cut out a giant wad of gauze and saturated it with the booze.

“Ready, set—” In a flash the gauze stung my forehead. He pulled it away and scrutinized his work, then jammed the glass into my hand and stated, “As your Captain I command you to take four of these per hour. Starting now!”

I vaguely remembered promising Mona I’d lay off the booze, but the memory was hazy enough to ignore. I took his advice and put it back. He cut off another strip of the gauze and wrapped it around the top of my head. Pondering the wrapping, he blurted, “Shit—we need the healing stuff of Chief Rain-In-the-Face.” He poured another glass for us both, and roved across the room to a closet, where he rummaged through a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. “Alas!” he sauntered back and held up a feather. He tucked it into the wrapping on my head, put back his drink and declared, “Captain Stockton T. Jager does it again!”

Five shots later I was “feeling no pain.”

In fact, I wasn’t feeling much of anything.

My host had been scribbling on random sheets of paper and feeding them into his fax machine, rambling things like “take that you pinko bastard!”

He glanced over at me, examined the almost emptied bottle and declared, “Man—you gotta be black-ops. Anyone that dares fuck with you had better fly one way, because they are not coming back!”

He brandished a revolver pistol from his desk drawer, opened the chamber, spun it and clicked it shut. His fax machine began spitting out a message, prompting my host—the good Captain Jager—to yell out “evasive maneuver!” whereupon he tumbled over, took aim and unloaded three rounds into the machine, annihilating it. He grabbed the sheet of paper, scrutinized it and set it ablaze using a Zippo lighter, then lit his cigarette via the flaming document prior to stomping it out. He surveyed the damage like a military field commander after a battle.

“Damned collateral damage,” he grunted, sitting down across from me and pouring another round. “What’s the score—what’s your story?”

“Uhhh, I was headed toward an old friend’s and I thought I’d take a short cut—and now here I am.”

“Here indeed.” He stubbed the burned down cigarette into the already full ashtray and poked a fresh cigarette into his holder, lighting it. “That’s the ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where.’ I need the ‘why’ and particularly the ‘who’ dammit!”

What the hell was this maniac getting at? This was a question I wasn’t sure I could fully answer.