-Chapter 12-
Max suggested we go out into town, as he had to arrange some things with a 'business associate.’ He was passing through via St. Petersburg apparently, and he thought I should meet him. Visions of some surly Russian mob boss cracking both our heads over the back of a Mercedes coupe after failing to receive his promised gold bars flashed through my mind, but I decided to play along and not ask too many questions. We walked down Nygata to the little park set amongst stately slate and brick townhomes on one side and a cluster of ugly, functional low-income housing blocks on the other. A study in the contrasts of the social welfare state, but I reminded myself that at least the Scandinavian countries managed to take care of their poor, their downtrodden. In America, it seemed these days that they were cast out of the street for failing to meet the mark of a ruthless capitalist system they were unwillingly born into. I did not then see the irony in the upcoming exchange, where Max would trade chunks of bright, corrosion-resistant metal for cash, money he didn't even need, considering his lineage. He just wanted to get another taste of that ephemeral high, the head rush of selling and buying that entranced humans so much.
He gave the money almost entirely to charities, he informed me as we walked arm-in-arm the way the Italians do, and I believed him because I loved this new closeness. Max had a few endearingly loose screws; that was certain, but I liked him that much more for it. He’d decided after applying to dozens of jobs in LA and across the U.S after UCLA and hearing back from a minuscule fraction of them, that rather than fall into the easy of trap of accepting a well-paying 'engineer' position at his father's company, he would try something a little less conventional. That this would evolve into a transnational cold War Robin Hood scenario was unbeknown to him at the time, he claimed. He merely knew that the internships he'd done while in school were incomparably more valuable and applicable to life than school itself, so why not extend this philosophy into some 'self-employment?' He loved that term, 'self-employment', because as he explained to me as we walked up to several empty benches in a leafy corner of the park, that somehow translated to choosing whose will you were enslaved to for money, rather than having it dictated in a little rectangular box of glass and steel, oh, say a 30 minute drive from your house, the way most people did. 'God, this kid is a trip...’ I thought, recalling that crazy chick from Stockholm, the one who had told me I’d 'come from a dream'. Then again, who was I to pass judgment on anyone's sanity these days? I'd given up that right when the first tab of acid reached my addled brain that delicious, warm May evening some 6 months earlier. Each step I took from my then-abandoned car to the Newport docks was another irreversible lifestyle shift, another move towards neon irreverence.
We took a seat on one of the benches, and Max instructed me to act cool- he'd already told Peder, his accomplice, all about me. He was looking forward to meeting him, he informed me in matter-of-fact offhandedness. After about 5 minutes of watching passerby's and exchanging adolescent comments between each other as to the person's attractiveness and/or employment, a tired looking, heavyset man in a large brown peacoat and equally tired looking leather shoes walked up to us. He greeted Max with a reserved smile and nodding approvingly towards me. After they had exchanged several words, he turned to me and extended a hand. 'Peder Zherov', he said in a surprisingly high voice, almost theatrical. 'I'm sure you expect some polished, important [which came out sounding like eeeemporrrtant- a helium balloon slowly being relieved] looking KGB ambassador, from Kremlin direct, eh?', he asked me with a slight smirk in Max's direction, as if this was some kind of inside joke. I stumbled over some indistinct apology, before Peder chuckled and continued. 'I am just representative, you see... What you hear in American news, Soviet Union has unlimited supply of natural resources, blah blah... not true. In specific, we lack precious metal, even vith new deposit in Kazakhstan and Norilsk, eez always more, more, more! zhey vant...' he trailed off, clearly disgusted with the American-style resource imperialism the Russian's were carrying out in an attempt to reach parity with the Yankees.
Max brought a small briefcase up from near his feet, slim and smart. He carried it with such precise indifference I hadn't noticed it until now. He handed it to Peder, who hefted it with one arm, expertly gauging the weight, letting it dilate the blue veins of his flabby, tired arms in delicious exertion. 'Yezz, zis is precizzzely what we have been looking for', he said absentmindedly to Max, still distracted with the exact heft of the little briefcase. 'Too much platinum supply now that Norilsk mines operating fully', he instructed me. 'Biggest deposit in vorld for platinum-group-element, no qvestion... but, we can no sell to American or even those European fuckers in NATO', he continued in disgust. 'Government, zhey even try and sell below spot price', he added dejectedly, 'but Americans no want, say zhis no good, zhis beautiful Siberian vhite gold.’ ‘So they want to buy gold, and silver in lesser quantities, but that's generally too bulky and hard to move', Max added, sensing I was now thoroughly lost. Peder nodded, and fished what looked like a typed receipt, neat rows of numbers and Cyrillic characters on narrow paper, and handed it to Max, who surveyed it quickly, nodded approvingly, and shook Peder's hand. 'Clark', he said, 'eet vas very nice to meet you. I vish vee talk more, especially about Mediterranean girls and zee vonderful French wine, but I must be going now... authorities pozzibly vire-tap my phone call other day, and fake passport zhey give me not so convincing, you know?', he winked, and added more soberly, 'You know, I vonder sometimes vhen ziss is all over, vhen vee one community and not egotizztical Nation-States ruled by handful of crazies, vhere will vee all be? Hopefully still alive!' he added on a lighter note, and slapped his knee, walking west towards the train station and ferry docks and waving goodbye over his shoulder.
‘He’s something huh?’, said Max, is if to diffuse the weight of Peder’s words, but something in me still reeled from the encounter. Not just Max’s ‘unusual’ business dealings, but the way in which we all inevitably whored ourselves into the consumerist culture, the way one’s ‘profession’ was so rarely also their passion. Sensing my disorientation, Max continued ‘So, we are bother in rather odd situations, eh?’ I nodded distractedly. Where did I know this Zherov from? ‘We have become prisoners of scheme’s we barely understood to begin with, our destiny manifesting itself in all the wrong ways’, Max lectured soberly. ‘Who talked like this?’, I thought in slight awe. Max always spoke to the sky and the cold, gray reflections of nearby buildings when he felt like extrapolating on life like this, as if afraid to face his own words or his subjects directly. ‘So, what I am suggesting is a solution for us both to get out of this…’, his words trailing off unconvincingly before continuing. ‘I have some friends, or rather acquaintances, they are out of work sailors; very, very good, they used to be affiliated with the Norwegian world cup team, if I recall.’ I was somewhat confused, but Max continued- ‘You no longer really need the boat, am I right?’ I wanted to protest, but the truth in his words ran through all the illusions I’d built lately, and I could only nod meekly, subserviently, ‘godammnit, this kid always get’s his way’, I thought, but I let him continue.
‘So, hear me out before you dismiss this as crazy, because I think it might actually work’, Max continued, now walking languidly down Nygata towards the water, seemingly fluid in his transition from thoughtful bench sitting to pedestrian progress. ‘We can hire these guys to sail the Stranger back to Newport for you, and then you are at least partially absolved of that sin, no?’ I flinched at the ‘We’… somehow I had carried the ludicrous idea that Max alone was supporting our new endeavors financially- that being the illustrious trans-national criminal, he would foot the bill on whatever we decided to do. I chastised myself for trusting a near-stranger so implicitly. He didn’t feel like a stranger though- there was some kind of equally strange, almost subversive trust going on, and the ‘lost brother’ dream flashed back to me, bothersome and surreal. ‘I know what you’re thinking, that of course they won’t want to accept that kind of risk, sailing a stolen yacht across the Atlantic, but let me tell you, the economy here is not so great right now, despite what your might read in the American news, and can you imagine what it must be like for a man’s pride to be reduced to welding steel at some boatyard or working as a deckhand on a ferry after crewing on one of the world’s premier racing teams?’ ‘Devastating…’, he trailed off, as if I was missing the obvious, ‘perhaps he has some personal connection here’, I guessed, but I decided not to stop the momentum of his proposition.
‘We will pay them handsomely for their efforts and risk, obviously, and I think it is wise to go with a crew of 4’ ‘Four!?’, I protested. ‘I know, I know.’ Max conceded, ‘But remember that they will be taking a relatively direct path across the most treacherous part of the North Sea, where town-sized oil rigs lie like skeletons a thousand meters under the sea.’ The thought made me shiver slightly, and I understood suddenly how incredibly lucky I had been on my trip thus far- skill was of course a large factor, I was not discrediting myself there, but luck of an extraordinary variety factored in much larger. It seemed to propel me further into strange newness. ‘We will obviously pay for their flights back to Oslo from New York, secure ground transport from Newport to JFK, and provide an initial payment up front of, say, 50,000 Kronor. ’50,000!?’ I gasped, but my wealth betrayed me, and some mental back-of-the-hand calculations reminded me that this was well within my means at the time, though a withdrawal of that magnitude might raise some suspicion with the banks. ‘I assume you have Swiss funds?’, Max continued, as if aware of my lingering doubt. I assured him I did, but even the Swiss banks, notorious for asking very few questions, might raise a brow at such a sudden withdrawal. They might be accustomed now to random European ATM and teller transactions totally a few hundred USD or less, under the name of a one ‘Nils Clarkson’, 24, Goteborg college student.
‘So what do they do when they make it, if they make it safely back to Newport…’, I queried Max cynically, ‘Pull The Stranger into her old slip at 4 in the morning, leave a little paper note saying ‘sorry I stole your boat for 8 months’, and head back to Norway?’ ‘Précis’, Max exhaled, smiling in that way that made his vaguely elfish features look more mischievous and youthful that usual. God, he was too much; too much everything, too much of what I was afraid I needed. ‘Ok, ok- partly sold’, I admitted, ‘But more by your used-car-salesman shtick than the actual idea’, I quipped, smirking. ‘Besides, what are you getting out of this? I had been dreading this part, because I knew that the boldness of his proposition must be countered by some barely-achievable countenance on my part, something to make me rescind the whole damn idea.
‘Drive me to the police station.’ Max stated flatly, and I almost tripped over the uneven gray cobblestones, the humility of his statement so at odds with the image I had built of him thus far. For someone so seemingly afraid of commitment, this seemed like a pretty bold ultimatum, but I allowed him to continue, fascinated by his directness. ‘You now think I’m crazy’, he said, and I couldn’t argue. ‘Its not just that I want to face the consequences of indirectly ripping off some old ladies of their family heirlooms. It’s… deeper than that. I want to see what will happen… you see, I have really spoken to my father in 6 years now, not since I started college at UCLA, and I wonder, will he ‘bail me out’, so to speak? You have to understand, he is a very powerful man in this part of Norway… not only is his company, Lundgren Aluminum, one of the biggest employers in this region, but he has ties to Statoil and HydroNord, the 2 biggest companies in Norway right now, as well as some, shall we say ‘dubious’ connections to Parliament. See, you Americans are not the only ones with corporations running government? We just do it a little better’, he laughed bitterly; as if aware of the magnitude of what he was facing for the first time.
‘Naturally, he won’t want his only son, however estranged we might be right now, to become a national media spectacle, or worse, go to jail. They have a small army of lawyers at the Aluminum Company… the environmentalists and labor people are getting worse every year, he says… Though frankly, as much as we disagree, I will say that the labor people have no legs to stand on right now, as his pension and benefit package is amongst the best in country, not to mention the tax credits he’s managed to procure for his employees through connections with the conservatives.’ He said this with a mix of respect and disgruntlement- it was clear the old man still had a profound effect on him. ‘He’ll try whatever he can, say I was insane or under the influence of drugs, coerced by the Russians, whatever… but, I want to serve some sort fair justice for what I did’, he said forcefully. I complimented him on his bravery, his refusal to compromise, but secretly wondered how much of this grand scheme he would actually follow through on. He told me that before we started this new plan, if I agreed, that we should take a week or so and explore the countryside, maybe even take the train up to Tromso or the Lingen Alps, so I could experience a type of austere arctic beauty I’d ‘probably never seen before.’ ‘It’s much prettier than Kiruna’, he chided me, after hearing my story of how fascinated I was by the surreal Swedish iron mining town north of the Arctic circle; having visiting my uncle there as a small child, where he’d had been stationed as an engineer by the state mining behemoth LKAB. I agreed, excited by the prospect of postponing the inevitable, and said this would give us time to ‘reconsider how fucking crazy the whole idea was.’ Max smiled and put his arm around mine, the way southern European men manage to do, so convincingly platonic, yet still warm and affectionate. I didn’t care, I just wanted more of whatever this had become. We walked back up the hill to his flat, and spent the afternoon pouring over old gas station maps, the obscenely complex and impractical Norwegian highways system diverging to the north like the veins on my uncle’s legs in that scarce Arctic summer, I recalled- a roadmap of hard work.
I mostly wanted more stories, though- Max’s stories were always so complex and distracting, at least the few I’d heard. After a hasty fika of black coffee and slightly stale cookies, I asked him where he’d been before UCLA and after high school, since I’d realized an incongruous 6-month or so gap in the recollection of his experiences last night. Max smiled in that vague, affected way that made you want to punch or possibly hug him. He told me I wouldn’t believe him, that we ought to focus on the present instead, and plan the improbable week in the north. I pestered him anyways; I wanted a break from the present, its immediacy always so damn exhausting, so finally he gave in and told me about Arizona. Arizona ‘wasn’t supposed to have actually happened’, he warned. Since it did, he ought to tell him about it anyways, since mother was ‘not pleased at her only son deferring a scholarship to one of the best public schools in the west to go ‘buy some rocks.’ ‘Perhaps you’ll understand my present situation a little better after this’, he offered cryptically, and then began.
June 18th 1976. 8 Miles south of Tombstone, Arizona. 4:00 PM, 94 degrees Fahrenheit, clear, sunny.
‘They call it caliche, a type of calcite, or Aragonite rather- but not like the alabaster-white Roman columns and monolithic blocks of Aragon, Spain. This is a stoic, black varnish, which coats the rough, hard edges of the desert and focuses the sun's angry rays down another lonely highway. In this case, the highway led to Bisbee, a former copper Mecca at the very southern tip of America's sprawling manifest destiny, 8 miles from Mexico and a world away from the crowded, suburban productivity of the Los Angeles basin. Here, time moved slowly with the overhead passing of the sun, a brilliant white fireball that withered anything not shaded from its wrath. The green El Camino shot down the highway as if launched from the gates of hell, blazing along shimmering black asphalt riddled with potholes and crooked fissures where the desert had worked its way into man's geometry. Inside, bathed in cool air conditioning and sharp, staccato rhythms from the vintage speakers, sat Max, his expression fixed and rigid, forward, anticipatory; as if always cresting a hill. He’d always been a ‘collector’, as his mother called it, as if the singular, obsessive desire to acquire could be summed so simply. When he had left LA a few days earlier, she had smiled sadly, kissed him goodbye, and told him to be as safe as he could be… she knew he was no longer hers in entirety, his safety would now be a compromise between them, her nest not some much empty as temporarily vacant.
They say drivers approaching Mach one out on the playa in Utah's Bonneville flats always note the sensation of being about to crest a rise, as the flatness is so uniform that eventually the curvature of the earth takes over, fading onward into the mountains. The young man in the driver's seat breathed evenly in deep, confident inhalations, and the edges of his mouth curled upward ever so slightly in smug satisfaction. He reached for a cigarette and thought better of it, shoving them under a worn pack, festooned in bright Navajo colors, a gift from the Rez people after his work-study stay with them last spring. It wasn't right to call him a drifter, because he had time and money, luxuries not afforded to those confined to the paranoid realm of vagrancy. He had an education too, or the beginnings of one, a great scholarship to UCLA, on the heels of glowing recommendations that spoke above his less-than-spectacular high school GPA. 'I'm taking a field sabbatical", he told his mother in straight-faced sincerity, though she knew this was bullshit; such things were for tenured professors and reserved academics, not idealistic young men whose future was indefinitely possible. He had a name, but preferred not to use it when possible; names were too preconceived, too confining. If there was one thing he disliked, it was confinement. The lush green urban backyard forests and gaudy modern homescapes of LA had slowly driven him insane until he did what all dreamers and half-believers out here did: went to the desert.
This latest trip was both for business and pleasure. He was to procure and purchase minerals, no, not rocks or dusty, classroom-bound mineralogy samples, but radiant crystal groups of the highest quality and pedigree, the art of the natural world, he liked to say. Mineral collecting had always been an interest, a passion really, and the material desire to hold and possess clouded out monetary or practical concern. He really didn’t know why he said he was going to study English and art history… he believed secretly that these fields were largely self-taught anyways, you either had it or you didn’t, kind of like mineral collecting, but it seemed to please his old-school Bohemian mom, and his friends approved too. Still though, the desire to own and acquire was so strong in him that refused to consider to consider greed as a motive, anything involved with science, even so circuitously, should be held noble and indisputable, he thought,
In his eyes, the world was filled with so much filth, the cheap, mass-produced miasma of 21st century life dulling people's aesthetics until everything was synthetic, artificially enhanced to replace experience. The experience had to be immediate, yet still long and strange, circuitous, and surreal. The collector was both an accumulator and an adventurer, scouring the ragged edges of the earth in search of the most beautiful and profane objects; that which we are meant to admire from a distance, wretched out of the earth and framed behind glass. The El Camino was his friend Joe’s, one of those classic American ‘cool kids’ of the late 70’s, with minimal regard for his own life or that of others it seemed, so high on his own potential, he forgot to take out the mental insurance policy on mistakes. When Max had casually asked him if he could borrow his car for a week, Joe tossed him the keys and said he wasn’t going to need it anyways, as he had an upcoming 2-weel stint of community service cleaning park restrooms in East LA, penance for trashing the beach in Las Tunas a few weeks before in one of those underage parties that makes you want to forsake your mortgage and car loans and be eighteen again. The highway had turned winding and steep, and Max tried to put all these distracting circumstances out of his head and focus on the road ahead.
The mileposts now read in the single digits, and on the right, a broad, high cliff of grayish-white Escabarosa Limestone followed the highway, remains of a warm, ancient sea now juxtaposed in the desert. Between these humble layers of petrified ocean lay some of the richest copper veins in the world, huge, dense bunches of cuprite and azurite, chalcopyrite and malachite, their colors bold and obvious. To the weary, hungry men who first crossed this lonely bit of land a hundred years earlier, their salvation must have been these bold outcrops of wealth, a hill of Malachite-laced limestone and porphyry a hundred meters long waiting to be converted to drain pipes and electrical wire, the dull functionality of modern society triumphed over nature's mystery. Max also came down here, to the far corner of the Southwest, to escape people, the discontent and morbid pop culture bred by the city. People were too unpredictable, flimsy and temperamental, and he vowed only to sell them what they wanted, and in the process perhaps see into the heart of a gem, for as Keats, a foolish romantic but also a sage, had said, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever, Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness."
To pass into nothingness was his greatest fear, and he poured a shot of whisky into his lemonade as the El Camino crested the last undulating, scrub oak clad hill before Bisbee. Lemonade tasted sweet and satisfying, like childhood, only giving and never taking. Bisbee sat at the upper end of a narrow canyon. Like most mining towns of the West, crammed improbable urban density into a former gully or wash, now serpentined by narrow, steep streets and bright pastel manor houses, the former trophies of the mine captains and the Copper Kings. His first stop was a contact made though an old geology professor he knew through volunteering at the LA County Natural History Museum, and from what he could gather, was an ancient Mexican miner and his wife, former denizens of Bisbee's underground empire. They had some good minerals, Prof. Fawkes had mentioned, and were worth visiting if he was in the area.
He had telephoned them last week from his parent's house in the low, scrubby hills above Brentwood, and had made his intentions and associations clear. "Mr. Hernandez, it is a pleasure to speak with you today. Let me first say I am much enamored with you're lovely little town of Bisbee. No, I'm not in real estate or politics. I am a mineral dealer. Ah, you have heard of such characters? Let me say they are not all flakes and con-artists. I am a recent college graduate’ [he had to lie a little bit, didn’t he? Not that Mr. Hernandez cared though, really], ‘with an intense interest in the beautiful minerals of your town’, he continued boldly ‘And wish to purchase some of the specimens you have in your collection, at your discretion and convenience. Next Tuesday? Yes, that would work fine. Why don't we say noon then. Righty-o. You take care as well." He really did speak with such pompous, confident syntax and verbose forwardness, but it was a function of his eccentricity rather than his ego, and besides, the arrogance was lost on someone like Mr. Hernandez, who just took him to be a peculiar gringo.
He hastily searched for some house numbers from which to orient himself to the address; 325 Brewery Avenue, in the heart of the old business district. The car lurched up the steep, well-kept street, and he hastily threw the clutch into park on a narrow bit of dirt outside the little lime-green abode cottage. He knocked on the door, and an elderly, kind-faced man opened it, his smile a map of dark brown creases and eyes which has seen more than their fair share death and hardship, good times and the dregs of an aging industry. Mr. Hernandez shook his hand cautiously, and then introduced his wife, a short, round woman wearing a festive Sinaloan dress and holding a tray of freshly cooked empanadas, which the Max devoured gratefully. Mr. Hernandez ushered him to a narrow, rickety staircase in the back of the single, open living room, and soon he stood in a dusty, poorly lit concrete room, surrounded by box after box of rocks. At first, his expectations dived, as he presumed Hernandez's "mineral collection" was nothing more than a typical jumble of crude ore samples, the usual miner's assortment of oddities picked up over the years, valuable chiefly for the metals they contained. A closer inspection of a nearby box revealed some small blue crystals poking out from under thick dust and cobwebs. He picked up a large mass of brilliant green malachite, and, blowing off some cobwebs and dust, noticed a small pocket on the backside covered in lustrous, dark blue 2-inch Azurite crystals. 'Jesus!, he thought with elated surprise as he studied the specimen... it needed some serious cleaning and trimming, but once back home, this piece alone would easily sell for perhaps a thousand dollars or more to a wealthy east coast collector. His thoughts turned more practical as he speculated on what Mr. Hernandez knew about minerals... others had probably been here before; perhaps he wanted an absurd price for these minerals, or maybe he wasn't even willing to sell... Max wanted to be fair, but he also realized that an honest price for Mr. Hernandez could still be a windfall for him, if he handled it right.
In the rusting teal truck of the El Camino, he had $1,500 in cash in a little gray leather suitcase. This was supposed to be for the whole trip; no, the whole summer, really: purchases, emergencies, food and booze, the works. He knew this was the best stuff he was going to see all day; fuck it, the whole trip. In what he knew of the modern mineral market, this was a windfall, and he was absolutely ready to pool all his eggs in one basket to have a go at this. He made a cursory overview of the rest of the collection, which, as he expected, contained a relative variability in quality, but enough keepers to make the deal a no-brainer. He admired a large, heavy lump of ore than turned out to be a supremely dusty mass of sharp, twinned copper crystals, their edges coated in brilliant red cuprite, like some post-modern statue dipped in red paint. Smaller pieces of electric-green malachite and effervescent-white calcite sat sparking under years of dust in decaying peach baskets. The time has come and he approached Mr. Hernandez as calmly and indifferently as he could. "You have some superb minerals in your collection sir. This is obviously the work of someone with an eye for aesthetics. I will not hide the fact though that as I am sure you know, nothing is labeled or sorted, cleaning will be laborious, and there are a fair amount of lower-grade pieces. I am prepared to offer you 1500 dollars in cash for everything." Mr. Hernandez's eyes, which up until now had been wide and kind, narrowed with concentration, and he steeled himself for the inevitable no, looking absent-mindedly out the little stained glass window in the basement corner. Suddenly, he felt a hand meet his and start to shake, and they both smiled silently as he went out to the car to get the cash.
"Great, I just spent fifteen hundred dollars on a bunch of rocks, which, in addition to being marketable to a very small, questionably-sane segment of the population, are going to barely fit in my little car.", Max thought to himself. The rest of the afternoon was filled with huffing and puffing up and down stairs, moving, sorting, and cleaning with hoses and brushes in the little yard, and organization into neat new boxes of his own, stacked in little rows in the trunk. The couple mostly sat on the faded old floral-patterned couch in the living room, conversing quietly but excitedly in brisk northern Mexican Spanish, hands running over the little pile of crisp, neat hundred dollar bills. He finished the packing and, after downing a few more empanadas, heartily shook hands with Mr. Hernandez, and gave his wife a kiss on the cheek before starting the engine and coasting on an empty gas tank down the steep incline of Brewery Gulch to downtown. He smiled and shouted a few nonsensical hoots and hollers, like a kid who had won the little league game single-handedly AND gotten ice cream after. The deal was fair, honest and straightforward, he reminded himself, but damnit if he hadn't made out well. He was also now dead broke, and he hurried up the street to the little antiques and novelties shop that sold one-dollar rocks to the hordes of winter tourists. The aging woman behind the counter was getting ready to close up shop, and didn't seem overly pleased as he swaggered in the door, young bravado and style. He carried a rectangular white box, and inside were a couple dozen little blue Azurite roses, pretty but not especially rare. Still, they were hard to come by these days, and he knew she'd give him cash. 'Hundred bucks" he said flatly as he opened the box on the counter, and she smiled as she withdrew 2 new fifties from the antique register.
He skipped unevenly, in pace with the crooked street, red cowboy boots click-click-clack on the pavement, until the most popular saloon appeared to the left. Tall glass windows lit with boisterous laughter and the din of conversation. He sat down at the old wooden bar and asked for a double shot of Jack, which, he thought, must have been a ticket of some sort with the locals. Soon his story flowed like the dried up edges of the Colorado in springtime, new friends and strangers crowding around as he made some sort of future for himself, here on the desert varnish. The trip back to LA was giddy, almost dream-like. The bleak miles on Interstates 5 and 10 passed in fleeting sunlit moments, and he was able to make enough money off the collection when he got home so that he scarcely had to work for almost 2 years of school. His friend’s were inevitably jealous and confused as to how he managed to ‘make money off selling rocks’ when to a non-collector the idea seemed so absurd. He relinquished the idea of ‘ownership’ and ‘sale’- rather, he felt that all objects were inherently transient and moving, to hold them with the idea of permanence was foolish. Thus, when the summer drew to a close, not by climate, of course, as LA in recent years never seemed to quite morph from the blazing heat of real summer to a more tolerable Mediterranean fall, he had sold everything. Well, almost everything- a few pieces held special appeal in their odd or particular aesthetics, usually no ‘value’, so to speak, just the way they stirred a slight sentimental affection in him. When he started school that fall, the feelings of transcendence compared to his peers grew and manifested themselves in his strange arrogance, the wall he built between others his age. He’d been raised on interaction with people from social climes perhaps to diverse for his own good.
Max again emphasized to me that he didn’t want to tell me about Arizona, but had reconsidered it. I didn’t care, I was afloat lost in someone else’s story; lost in how great he was. He thought it might help me understand our present situation in a more rounded light. I nodded thoughtfully, reclining on the little gray futon as we were now at Max’s flat again. I was thinking about dinner, or maybe lack thereof- the conversation seemed to fill some sort of hunger niche, it was too difficult to allow nourishment to interfere. I said I wasn’t hungry but Max made food anyways, ignoring me, always so industrious. The sun had long since drowned itself, and the late fall Nordic afternoons were short and bittersweet. Always we seemed to be recalling childhood, when, unburdened by expectations, the only thing that shortened possibility was the end of the day, the yearning of tomorrow. Max made pancakes, the thin Swedish variety I recalled with delicious mental texture from his early childhood. My mother would prepare them in the big yellow kitchen that seemed to him like a palace, the rest of the house the outlying kingdom. I’d never doubted my parent’s motives for moving to the States- I was too young to protest with any authority anyways. I knew even at the time that it was something bigger than me, something that would unfold into the right shape later in life, the corners neat and tucked into the most delicious memories.
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