Vision Quest (3 page)

Even in the best of health Mom is built like a falling leaf. But even when she was the sickest her body couldn't keep her spirit down all the time. She always wanted to know what was going on at school and how many cars Dad sold. She was into painting by numbers and making ceramic ashtrays and mosaics—stuff she could do lying down. And when she felt good enough to get around she cleaned the house and washed clothes and baked stuff and even trimmed the grass. We lived in a time of strange eclipse
then—all darkness and quiet for part of the month, then blasts of steady light and activity. I know I'm still shaped by those times, but I don't know quite how.

I guess Mom had a terrible time giving birth to me. I heard she almost died. I know something happened to screw up her menstrual cycle and cause her really unnatural pain and heavy bleeding about ten days each month. I have no idea what this problem could have been. I've never come across symptoms like those in my reading. I'd like to ask a doctor.

Anyway, Mom was sick like that for fifteen fucking years. She didn't have a hysterectomy because her doctor, a naturopath, told her she wouldn't be a woman anymore if she did. He also told her that God was the greatest healer.

He treated her with vibrating machines, hot and cold towels, and a lot of capsulated herbs named just with letters of the alphabet. I don't know what God treated her with.

After school I'd take a bus to the clinic to see her. She'd be strapped in this thing that looked like a chastity belt. It was hooked up to an electronic device that resembled an automatic washer on wheels. Violet tendrils of light popped and danced in the little round window. Mom would spend some time hooked up to that machine, then she'd get a series of hot and cold towels, then she'd swallow two Cs and an A and a B, and I'd push her out in her wheelchair. She hurt so bad she couldn't even stand up. We'd take a cab home.

Mom was a country girl and had gone to that guy all her life. She wasn't and isn't terribly religious, so more than that it was probably habit and faith in an old acquaintance that kept her with him. It just happened that after she married Dad and moved to Spokane this doctor decided to open a big clinic here.

Finally, when I was fifteen, the naturopath died. Mom didn't know any other doctors, so she went to Dad's. Although he never bought the line himself, Dad kept quiet about Mom's naturopathy for all those years. He just paid the bills.

Dad's doctor referred Mom to a gynecologist, who told her she was crazy for not getting a hysterectomy fourteen years before. So she got one. And after she rested awhile she felt great. I don't know if she felt less a woman.

I remember one thing from the days of her sickness—I'll never forget it. I was playing Pop Warner football then. I was in the seventh or eighth grade. Our season was over and I got voted most valuable player. I was a really big bastard for a seventh or eighth grader, so it wasn't surprising. But it was still a pretty big deal for me. I ran home about a thousand miles an hour to tell Mom and show her my trophy. I blasted in the door and saw all the lights were off. I figured she might be sleeping, so I walked quietly into her bedroom. Outside it was a beautiful fall afternoon, and inside there was my mother with her curtains all drawn up tight, curled up like a little animal in her bed, holding her pelvis and crying.

I burst into tears. I must have scared her. I ran up and jumped on her bed and probably half crushed her. I just hugged her and cried like a little kid. All I said was, “I'm sorry you don't feel good, Mom.” I just kept saying that. She probably couldn't hear me anyway through all my blubbering.

After a while I showed her my trophy. Mom said she was feeling better and that she thought the trophy was great. Then I went downstairs and cried by the furnace, where Dad used to beat on me when I was little. I fell on the floor like I was having a fit. I remember the concrete was cold at first but got really warm. If that doctor were alive today I'd kill the cocksucker with my bare hands.

After Mom got feeling good she took a job in the china and glassware department of the Bon Marché. In about six months she became a buyer.

I think maybe what happened is that she had been sick for such a long time that finally feeling good was like becoming a new person. She started making friends at work and really got into her job. That's when she started falling away from us.

None of us was home much. Dad worked a fourteen-hour day, I was either in school or working out or running room service at the hotel, and Mom was traveling a lot. When we were all home at the same time, Mom was busy with her catalogs. The talking she did do was more to Poodle than to Dad or me. But when I'd stop to see her at
the Bon, she'd be blustering around in full bloom, gabbing with the salespeople and the customers.

She went for a ride on my motorcycle once. It was dusk. I took her up to Manito Park to see the rose garden. She really enjoyed it. But then I took High Drive home and scared the hell out of her. That was a bad move, because she wouldn't go again. I think she got a kick out of riding slow. She wore this long wild scarf thing from Italy. It flapped about three feet behind us. Mom looked pretty racy. From a distance she probably looked like my little sister.

I think more than anything else it was the change in their lifestyles that broke Mom and Dad up. Before last spring Dad was into one thing only—selling lots of cars and making heavy bread. He went at it like a war. Each car sold was an enemy casualty. If he made his bonus each month it was a battle won. He was the general and the salesmen were his troops. He took care of them like a father, selling cars himself and crediting the deals to the lowest men on the board. He wore his uniform proudly—double-knit sport coat, cranberry slacks, white belt, white shoes.

Mom liked driving her Buick convertible and buying different-colored carpet for each room in both the house and the cabin and buying new credenzas for all her dishes and going out to dinner a lot. The thing about Mom is that she got real pleasure out of this sort of shit. I saw it in her face when she dusted the furniture or when she set the table for company. That's why I don't think I can ever stay
pissed off about it for long. Her family was poor. I guess she learned to need stuff like that by not having it, the same way rich people learn to need it by having it. I don't really understand about learned behavior patterns yet. We're well enough off. At least we were. I couldn't care less about a bunch of fucking cups and saucers or a whole store full of big-assed cars.

Anyway, it happened that Mom's new lifestyle and Dad's old lifestyle coincided, or at least didn't conflict.

But about last spring Dad began to change. He began to tell me how shitty the new cars were, about how there were so many piddly little things always going wrong with them, and about how they would come from the factory with the armrests half off and the plastic “wood” on the dash coming unglued. He complained to the factory representative that nothing manual could be ordered anymore—no standard transmissions, brakes, or steering, not even a station wagon back window that could be rolled by hand. The factory man, this young college-educated guy of whom Dad had been in awe, told Dad that people didn't want to do things by hand anymore. Dad, who was getting less and less awed all the time, said, “In a pig's ass they don't!”

Then I began seeing books on the nightstand with Dad's
Time
:
Future Shock
,
The Assassin Automobile
,
The Human Use of Human Beings
,
Power and Innocence
. He began to wear his older, plainer clothes. He's got two closets full of clothes. He must have a hundred shoes. He quit smoking, and
to fight his nervousness he built a working model of the Wankel engine. He tried to talk Mom into quitting smoking. He tried to talk her into selling the Buick and buying a little Honda car. He wanted to try walking to work a couple days a week. Mom was having none of it.

One evening after I got home from working overtime I heard Mom and Dad talking. Dad was nearly pleading with her to stop smoking. She smokes about three packs a day. I was surprised at Dad's tone. I'd have to call it “tender.” I wouldn't call him mean, but I don't usually call him tender, either. It made me happy in a sad way. Not that it turned out well. Mom said she loved smoking and could never quit. The tone in which she said it made me feel strange and good. I would have to call it tender, too. She also said it would break her heart to sell the convertible. She said she'd never drive “one of those little toilet bowls.”

Dad hasn't smoked a cigarette since. But he did return to cigars, of which he smokes probably fifteen a day.

Either Mom and Dad ended their twenty-year marriage quietly or they did all their yelling when I wasn't around. The first I knew about it was one day in the middle of August when Mom asked me to meet her for lunch. We sat in a booth in the Bon Marché cafeteria and Mom told me she was moving to Seattle.

I focused on the way she held her cigarette. So casual—elbow out, wrist cocked, a little kiss of lipstick on the filter. I thought back to the picture I'd seen of Mom in her
teens, when her hair was long in what they called a “page boy.” And in my mind I could see her practice holding her cigarette. Stuff like that was important then. I loved my Mom that day as much as I ever did or probably ever will. I think I loved her because she suffered so long and still came out of it with a good heart. Maybe I feel guilty for being part of the cause of her suffering and love her to make up for it. Whyever I love her, I don't think it's just because she's my mother.

“Punkin,” Mom said. “I want you to know they broke the mold when they made your father.”

So Mom lives in Seattle with her new husband now. She transferred to the Seattle Bon Marché. We talk more now, even though it's only over the phone. I'll spend a week with her after the season's over. The University of Washington invited me to visit their campus, so I'll do that then, too. Carla doesn't think she'll go along.

It's dinnertime at the hotel
and Elmo, the cook, asks me what it will be. I tell him a wheat-germ burger. Lean beef mixed with wheat germ. He keeps a couple in the fridge for me.

Elmo is a big fan of the semipro football team I played a little for this fall. He thinks I'm crazy to lose all this weight just to get my body thrashed. He wants to see me play college ball, then go to the pros. There's no way. I even got beat up playing my one season of high school ball. I tell him
he's
the crazy one. “Those guys are creatures,” I say. “They'll peel me and eat me!”

The Spokes picked me up as a flanker. I'm pretty fast and I catch the ball. I'm not crazy about getting hit, though. They paid me twenty bucks a game. I was making pretty good money working five nights a week at the hotel and playing ball on Sundays. Otto played, too, but much more seriously than I did. Otto is a real football player. Football's what will get him through college, and unless he gets hurt or something, he'll go with the pros for sure.

Tanneran played guard and Leeland Wain, the David Thompson varsity football coach, played quarterback. I'm
pretty good friends with both Gene and Leeland, considering our age differences.

I had to go out to Rollie's Ribs after the game to pick up the extra tens this gambler friend of Elmo's gave me for each score. Now that it's legal to drink on Sundays, Rollie's really blasts after the games. One night some other friend of Elmo's was drinking or doping or both and decided I was white-assed and chickenshit and that he was going to cut me up and feed me to Rollie's Afghan hound. I thought he described me pretty well and wasn't about to argue. When he started after me with the world's biggest pocketknife, all I could do was stand open-mouthed and greasy-handed. Stuff like that scares me even in the movies and it was twice as scary in real life, especially coming so fast out of a situation where everything had been peaceful and fun. Leeland got up to stop the guy and the guy took a swipe at him. Then Elmo got up and the guy took a swipe at him. Then Tanneran picked up one of those round-bottomed wine bottles they use for candle holders and coldcocked the guy. It wasn't funny. The bottle broke and the guy went down like he was dead. Gene went back to his ribs and Elmo dragged the guy outside. I was grateful to Gene, but since then I've been a little afraid of him. He got so mean so fast, and then he was so normal again. I still like the guy a lot and I admire him, but I'm not too anxious to talk to him about Carla.

Elmo says, “You are my mainest man.”

The dinner orders have started to come in. Sally, the
cashier, hands me the slips. Number 611 is on top. Crab Newburg, tea, lemon pie. He's still here. I give the slips to Elmo and he hands me my solitary burger.

I have no control—it's gone in two bites. Christ, I'm hungry! I fight it with a book of fiction.

I read quite a bit. This may be why I've done pretty well in school so far. There may be a correlation between reading a lot and appearing to know things. Downstairs in the employees' bathroom, along with my secondhand copy of Gray's
Anatomy
, I've stashed
The Confessions of Nat Turner
. At home in the downstairs bathroom I keep
Pathology
, a gigantic book by a physician named Robbins. When I'm tired of reading it I balance it on my head to strengthen my neck. Upstairs at home I keep Upjohn's
Manual on Nutrition
. I don't use the upstairs bathroom that much, and I'll go with Adelle Davis on the subject of nutrition, at least until I'm something other than a layman in the field.

Next to messing around in the woods up along the Columbia where Dad grew up, I'd have to say that learning about the human body is the thing that interests me most. Next comes the human mind, I guess, or the human heart—whatever it is that makes us act the way we do. I love reading and watching movies and talking with my friends, even standing with a tray of dirty dishes and eavesdropping on the guests at the hotel, gossiping over their dessert. Wrestling combines these things for me.