Planet Fever (24 page)

I thought about fleeing but instead offered my ticket. They threw it into the robot receptacle and escorted me toward the ominous iron door.

“You’re going to exterminate me!” I attempted to yell, but all that came out was “Gonna ride the ship to space!”

The door clanged and the air got really cold….

“HEY MISTER
, you might want to get up and indoors. At night it’s cold here.” A stringy, brown-haired girl loomed overhead.

The park had grown quiet and dark. From the shadowy parking lot, a young man emerged. “Eliza! What’d you find over there?”

“Some guy sleepin’ in the park. He doesn’t look like he’s from here,” she said over her shoulder, then looked back at me. “Am I right?”

“Yeah,” I said, pulling myself up.

The guy approached and stood next to the girl. He had a James Dean look but with late-teen acne, and she was pretty in a plain-Jane, naive way with giant, Boston Terrier puppy eyes. She wore a flannel shirt and a prairie skirt over jeans and military-style boots, topped off with a leather jacket.

“Hey man. How’s it going?” the guy asked.

“I was taking a break here, and I must’ve passed out,” I said.

“You drunk?” he asked.

I thought about the bottle I had bought back in St. George. I hadn’t cracked it open yet. “No, just tired. I walked here from St. George.”

“That’s a decent hike. ‘Specially in those things.” He pointed to my homemade moccasins. “‘Bout seven hours, huh? Where you going?” he asked.

The girl just stared at me as though I were a rock star or a creature that had just fallen from the sky.

“Zion.”

They looked at one another. “He can’t walk to Zion tonight. It’s freezing and he’s got no gear,” she said.

“Yeah.” He sniffed the air, closed his eyes, nodded, and opened his eyes. “Okay then. You want, you can stay with Eliza and me at my mom’s house. She’s out of town on business, but she wouldn’t mind anyway.”

The girl—Eliza—whispered something to him. He nodded. “Yeah, okay then. And we’ll give you a ride if you want to Zion. Tomorrow.” Eliza’s brown eyes lit up and she clapped and jumped up and down like an excited puppy. “We haven’t been there in a while and it might be nice to do a picnic.”

I couldn’t get over the fact that they were offering a complete stranger a place to crash. Were these people so naive as to allow a vagabond sleeping in the local park into their house? Looked that way. Or maybe I was a fool for going off with them? What if they were some weird couple into freaky stuff like finding random, out-of-town strangers and snuffing them for kicks? I figured I was a decent judge of character, and these two did not strike me as menacing. If anything, they were kind of simple.

Of course, most of Ted Bundy’s victims might’ve assumed the same thing prior to accepting his advances….

Still, the idea appealed to me, because the temperature had dropped considerably. “Sure. That sounds good. Thanks,” I said, and the guy helped me up.

He looked at me, raising his dark eyebrows. “One stipulation, though. No booze and no drugs. Can’t have it in my vehicle or house. Period.”

Oh shit.

That was the catch. I hadn’t had anything to drink since … when? The mountains of Colorado? Or was it before my visit to Fillono? When was that, anyway?

“Oh. Then maybe I should get rid of the bottle I have in my pack.”

“You do what you think is right,” he said.

Maybe I should pass on this offer….

I was at a crossroads, answering to the devil on one shoulder and angel on the other. A metaphysical “Let’s Make a Deal”—the moment of truth.

Could I do it?

Sure.

Did I want to do it? Spend one sober night with this strange pair?

Fuck it.

I uncapped the bottle, poured it out onto the dry turf and tossed it into a trashcan. I felt a mild pressure—ever so subtle—release from my brain, like a stuffed-up nose finally becoming clear.

Eliza beamed.

The guy nodded, then gestured for me to follow him.

We walked to an old 1970s International Scout, a pre-SUV beast of a vehicle meant to drive through hell and high water, so long as you could keep the 7-mpg thing fed with fuel. Eliza and the guy climbed in and I got in the backseat. The giant metal doors slammed shut and I realized those were the doors that had made their way into the dream—the sound of the iron doors slamming behind me and the poor Down’s Syndrome guy with the juice box. I wondered about the meaning of that dream, just as the behemoth engine rocketed to life, cutting off any meditation I was entertaining.

“Your driver here is the love of my life: JD Martin,” the girl shouted over the engine, looking back at me over the giant couch of a front seat.

“And this here is Dawn Eliza Jonathan, the love of my life,” he shouted, and she bent over and kissed him on the cheek.

“That’s right. See, he got me a ring from the Safeway bubble-gum machine.” She showed off her green, plastic smiley-faced ring.

I nodded, still unable to lock in an accurate read on them.

“I’m gonna get her a nice diamond once I get my limousine business up-n-running,” JD said.

I wondered if there was a great demand for limousines in the town of Hurricane, Utah.

“Well, you’ll probably have the market cornered in this town,” I stated.

It took a moment before they both laughed. The vehicle veered off into the dirt and the ride got rough for a few seconds until JD steered back onto the road.

“That’s a good one, mister. A limousine service in Herahkun. Whoa boy—I never even thought about that. You got an imagination!” He wiped a tear from his eye.

“He’s gonna start a service in Los Angeles that takes people from their homes or hotels to big events. When I turn eighteen in August we’re cuttin’ loose from Herahkun,” she said.

I liked the way both of them pronounced Hurricane: Her-ah-kun. Gave me a down-home feeling that I was going to be okay under their care. Sober, or otherwise.

“And Eliza here is gonna be a makeup artist. Get them actors and actresses to look nice for the big screen.” He put his arm around her and drew her close.

Such optimism and naiveté. I recalled my own youthful sense of buoyancy, and wondered when it had metastasized into a shell of perpetual indifference and chronic cynicism. Probably at seventeen when I broke my leg and received a concussion falling after climbing up the side of a building as a drunk stunt and dashed any and all hope for induction into the Air Force Academy and spaceflight, which I had been gunning for.

So I took to booze and writing.

Exit: good cheer. Enter: sardonicism.

“Where you from?” Eliza asked.

“I’m from where you two are going.”

“No shit?! L.A.? How ‘bout that. What in the hell are you doing all the way out here in our fine neck of the woods, anyway?” JD asked.

Long story…

JD MARTIN’S
mom’s house was a one-story brick deal with an add-on garage and chain-link fence surrounding the modest, grass-thatched yard. He drove the truck up the gravel driveway to the back of the place. A couple of Australian shepherds raced toward us, wagging, barking and smiling. One of them jumped up on me, its tongue slapped my face with slobber.

“Trumpet, get off him,” JD commanded. Trumpet paid no attention to his command. Another swish of the tongue. “She really likes you. She never does that to anybody … especially strangers. TRUMPET, I SAID GET DOWN!” This time Trumpet obeyed, but stayed by my side.

“See? We ain’t crazy. We got a good gauge of people and these dogs sense it. I know you were thinking we were out of our minds ‘cuz who would let a stranger into their home? You passed the test,” Eliza said. Trumpet licked my hand.

We entered through the back door into a tiny laundry room that led into a tidy basic kitchen that joined a little dining room with a small, well-kept table. The living room was situated on the other side of a threshold of hanging beads.

In that living room, a giant, black-velvet painting of what looked to be the Pinta, Niña and Santa Maria in a harbor adorned an entire wall. On another wall hung a picture of wild stallions galloping in an old-west landscape; next to it a case of books on miscellaneous topics like self-help, new-age, pulp novels, and a set of Funk and Wagnal’s encyclopedia that stopped at SA—SP. The rug was made from a fake furry animal of some kind (sloth, perhaps?).

A brief cursory scan of the place revealed random plants, a chrome-framed glass coffee table with
Popular Mechanics
,
Cosmopolitan
and
National Geographic
magazines dispersed about, and there was a disco ball suspended from the ceiling. A couch on one end of the room faced a giant hutch with a hi-fi stereo set that looked like a spaceship console from the 70s. Over in a corner by the front door rested a pair of ski boots, skis and one pole. On the shelf next to the spaceship console there were stacks of old records: Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull, Best of Mel Torme, The Who, and Johnny Cash…. The most interesting ornament was the crash-test dummy seated and leaning against the bookshelf. The place posited itself as an amalgamation of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s with a style and consistency to kitsch.

This was a thrift store transplanted to a living room, but with better, softer lighting and no musty smell.

“Peek-a-boo! Howareyou?” A high-pitched voice squawked from the corner opposite the disco ball. Perched atop a coat rack stood a bright-green parrot. “I see you. Don’t get fooled again,” the bird whistled.

“That’s Parakleet. You can call him Pal for short. He’s an Indian Ringnecked Parrot,” Eliza said.

“Peek-a-booo! Nice to meet you!” Parakleet, or Pal pitched.

“You bet. Nice to meet you too, Pal,” I said.

“I bet! I’m your pal! Peek-a-booo!” Pal trilled.

Reacting to my double take, JD said, “Yeah, Parakleet is real special. That’s one smart bird. He’s got a vocabulary over a thousand words—which is twice more than most—and he
understands.
”

“That name….” I wondered.

Eliza smiled. “Obviously rhymes with ‘parakeet’, but it’s also a Greek word for advocate, and he advocates, all right.”

“Get comfortable. We’ll get you out of your bind. You can count on it. I’m your pal. Peek-a-booo!” tootled the astonishing bird.

“Yeah, his prior owner was a litigation attorney, so he sometimes sounds like one of those commercials,” JD said, then pointed to a beanbag on the floor. “Definitely get relaxed.”

I checked the big, yellow beanbag chair and sank down onto it.

JD walked over to the stereo and put on a record, some kind of spacey, rhythmic synthesizer music mixed with syncopated whale calls.

“Would you like something to drink? We got some great herbal tea JD’s mom brought back from Korea last time she was there,” Eliza offered.

“Sure.”

She walked through the beaded curtain and the clacking sound triggered a momentary flashback to my childhood: our basement had been a quasi-disco hippie lounge with dance floor, hi-fi, and … disco ball. An eclectic mishmash of strange cultural combinations.

“Peek-a-booo!” Pal blasted.

JD leaned over the side of the couch and snapped on a device that shot up multi-colored lights at the disco ball and made it twirl—we had the exact same thing in our basement. He dialed the twirl speed to “low.”

“I appreciate your hospitality. This is a … funky place.”

“I got a funky mom. She’s a product of the 60s, 70s and 80s. She stepped off the bus in 1988, and I don’t think she owns one thing from after that year.”

“But this place is sooo cool,” Eliza said, walking back through the beads. “It’s original.”

“Yeah, original,” I muttered, scoping around the room for more treasures.

She handed me a mug with a picture of a gorilla on the side and set the other two mugs onto the glass coffee table.

“That was fast.” I watched the steam rising up from the mug.

JD and Eliza exchanged glances.

“We already had water simmering before we left. That’s how you gotta make this tea,” JD assured me.

“It’s a slow simmer,” Eliza offered.