free of urine, scraping together a pillow of bark chips that made his forearms itch. He smelled something oily. He felt the heartburnt wooziness of having taken the wrong carnival ride.
At midnight the McDonald's lights went off. John watched two staffers come out back, fill the dumpster with plump white bags, and lock up the caged area. Like a coyote, he caught himself looking for any stray bits of food they might have dropped. Before he fell asleep, he figured the night staff would still be sleeping when the morning employees arrived to open up, and so wouldn't recognize the mumbling transient with a Fred Flintstone five o'clock shadow.
John was a noble fool. His plan to careen without plans or schedules across the country was damned from the start. He was romantic and naпve and had made pathetically few plans. He thought some corny idea to shed the trappings of his life would deepen him, regenerate him — make him king of fast-food America and its endless paved web.
Each day John felt dirtier and more repulsive. He stank. He'd tried to wash his underwear in a gas-station sink using granulated pink industrial soap, and he'd put it out across the top of a fence to dry, but it had blown onto a mound of sawdust on the other side.
He learned how to avoid the police. He slept in hedges. He continued wandering east, neighborhood by neighborhood, out into the fringes of Los Angeles County. He came to hate dogs because they recognized him as a roamer and announced it with their barks.
He scraped together aluminum-can money to buy — and he laughed as he did so — bourbon — cheap booze! Nice and sweet, and just as delicious and unsophisticated as the first time he'd tried it in his teens.
In Fontana, a dead steel town sixty miles inland, he fulfilled Ivan's prophecy and stole laundry from a clothesline, a UPS delivery man's uniform which fit him surprisingly well. He scanned the house, and nobody was in. He jimmied the lock on a flimsy aftermarket side door. Inside, he showered, washed his hair, shaved and donned his new uniform. He bundled up his old clothing and wedged it between two plastic stacking chairs on the rear patio as he left.
The UPS uniform was his ticket to respectability. With it, he was able to go almost anywhere in public, regardless of hygiene, with almost no scrutiny. It made him appear casual, industrious, sober, a charmed messenger.
He made no friends, but to his surprise scored with a few women turned on by his UPS togs. He hated himself for having the experiences, not so much for their tawdriness, but because such flings felt as if they were against the rules — which made him suddenly realized he
His first tryst was with a woman — twenty-nine? thirty-two? — tense as an overstretched guitar string. She was reading a copy of
John said, «I'd say the magazine started to go downhill when they shifted their focus from pure architecture to that of Homes of the Stars.»
And off they went to her place nearby. She was terrifying in her need, and bayed like a stampeding elk when she saw that John wasn't wearing underwear. That night was his first sleep on a mattress in weeks, but he was promptly booted out in the morning when she left for her job processing spreadsheets at a Dean Witter office.
The following night he scored again, this time with a frowzy-haired plump young mother strollering her eight-month-old past a Pottery Barn. She also lived close by, and offered John a meal afterward — lettuce and a packaged stroganoff casserole, which he ate without talking. The woman and her screaming child struck John as being so alone in the world. It hit him that his own form of loneliness was a luxury, one as chosen and as paid for as three weeks in Kenya's velds or a cherry red Ferrari. Real loneliness wasn't something an assistant scoped out and got a good price on. Real loneliness was smothering and it stank of hopelessness. John began to consider his own situation a frill. The only way he could ennoble it was to plunge further, more deeply and blindly, into his commitment to the life of the road, and garner some kind of empathy for a broader human band of emotions.
The woman asked John to stay the night, but he declined, lest she become slightly attached to him and even lonelier when he left.
In Riverside County he hopped a railway flatcar that carried him to Arizona under a milky night sky. The rhythm was calming and he slept, waking up to pink canyons and coral clouds. There was a fellow Nobody at the other end of the car, hovering over the car's edge to speak in sign language to an invisible friend. John made no effort to talk. It was an unwritten code among Nobodies that they not bother each other, and there were so many of them out there! Once John knew what to look for, he saw them everywhere. In the same way his brain erased telephone poles when viewing scenery, his brain had also blocked out Nobodies.
Nobodies had surrendered their families, their childhoods, their jobs, their lovers, their skills, their possessions, their affections and their hopes. They were still human, but they'd become part animal, too. Two months into his trip, John was pretty much a Nobody, too.
He remembered cruising with Ivan, in the old orange 260-Z, back in the UCLA days of pointless classes, sunshine, large houses filled with rock stars and no furniture, buckets of fried chicken and music that engraved itself onto his brain like script on sterling silver. They were returning from a failed party in the Valley, cresting the Hollywood Hills — Los Angeles lay before them. John had pulled the car to the side of the road and Ivan asked him what was the matter. John was silent. He had suddenly seen a glimpse of something larger than just a landscape.
«John-O, c'mon, what's the deal? You're zoning on me, buddy.»
«Ivan, cool down a second. Look at the city.»
«Yeah. So?»
«
«Well,
John tried to explain to Ivan that until then, he'd always unthinkingly assumed that the built world was something that was simply
Ivan
But now, on the train at night, John felt as if he'd been leveled, humbled, like somebody gone back to visit the house they'd lived in as a child to find it turned shabby and unremarkable.
Somewhere in Arizona the train stopped and John got off.
Chapter Fourteen
Making hit movies was one of the smaller problems in John's life. Ivan handled the workaday stuff like budgets and wind machines and union haggling. John's role was to walk into a room where nothing really existed except for a few money guys who wanted a bit of glamour, a good dollar return and a few cracks at some industry sweeties. John would conjure up a spell for these Don Duncans, Norm Numbnuts and Darrens-from-Citicorp. He had to cram his aura deep, deep, deep inside their guts, spin it around like a juicer's blade, then withdraw and watch the suits ejaculate dollars. «People, this isn't about cash, this is about the American
