Free Spirit Read online

  I could not communicate telepathically, I concluded. And I didn’t have a third eye that could see through ESP cards either. I was faking it. But I forgave myself. My mind just worked differently from hers. I preferred to look around with my two regular eyes and catch the little details that Claudia didn’t. I noticed the tremors in the puddle that heralded rain, for example, and the distinctive facelike contours of the burnt tree that marked the turnoff toward home. It wasn’t clairvoyance, but at least it was something.

  One day in November we ventured down into town for food and library books and found ourselves in a race against darkness to get home. My myopic mother had a hard time navigating the steep, winding roads at night. And then, halfway up the mountain, winter arrived. Snow poured from the blackened skies like milk. Fields and forests were quickly folded into a smooth new landscape of sparkling white. Our well-used egg-shaped Buick coupe (that I’d dubbed Victoria the Great White Whale) began to fishtail in the ice and snow. We slowed to a crawl. Claudia leaned forward over the white plastic steering wheel, peering into the whiteness that punctuated the blackness.

  “Hang on, Josh. I can’t see the road anymore.”

  I leaned forward too, looking for landmarks. “Look, Claudia, you can see the fence posts at the edge of the fields still. Try to stay in the middle between them.”

  We crawled forward for another half mile or so, churning up the snow in front of us. The Whale started to cough and buck. Then we very slowly slid into a shallow ditch, and the Whale breathed its last breath.

  “OK, Joshey, let’s take a couple of deep breaths and send our energy to start the car again.” I closed my eyes out of respect for my mother but didn’t even try to telepathically jump-start the car. I already knew the Whale was gone. We sat in complete silence for a few moments, the heat ebbing out of the expired Whale, the snow piling up around us. “We could stay in here, I guess, and wait for help,” Claudia said uncertainly. She didn’t know what to do.

  “No, let’s walk,” I told her.

  Claudia turned to me, her glasses fogging up: “Is that what your heart tells you?” I detected a hint of fear in her voice.

  “Yes,” I told her with certainty. But it wasn’t my heart telling me anything. It was just facts. I remembered that the previous winter, when we were with Bob, they hadn’t cleared the roads for weeks. And we’d be hard to spot in a white car covered in white snow. Plus, I was pretty sure from the length of the parallel fence lines that this was the last straightaway before the second to last fork on the road home.

  We emerged Jonah-like from the Whale and scrambled onto the snowy beachhead of the roadway. The white powder was almost up to my knees.

  “This way, Claudia,” I called to my mother. My voice sounded tiny, the snowy air muffling my words.

  We waded down the road together, holding hands. Claudia had to stop several times to clean her glasses, until finally she said: “Joshey, I can’t see. Every time I clean my glasses they fog up again. I’m blind.” She sounded panicked.

  “It’s OK, Claudia.” I squeezed her hand. “I think I can find the way.” I stepped forward, leading her by the hand.

  “I believe you can do it, Joshey. Concentrate. Let your third eye lead the way.”

  I knew we went left at the fork in the road. “This way.”

  “Good, Joshey. Follow the blue energy.”

  We were in the forest now, and the flat roadway was easier to follow. At the second fork, I knew we needed to turn right. “This way, Claudia.”

  “You are so psychic tonight, Joshey. You always have been.”

  She was referring to my fetal telepathy again. The week before, my mother had finally told me the secret of what I had communicated to her in utero. She cried, and I held her hand, struggling to understand her words. She told me that back when she was first pregnant with me she had been living by herself in the Noe Valley of San Francisco. One night a man broke into the apartment and attacked her. A black man in dark clothes. He raped her and then went out through the fire escape. My mother lay there, sinking into the floor, into the depths of the earth, blood between her legs. It made no sense to her. None of it. How could she bring a child into this? What was the point of keeping me? Then, from the blackest depths, there was a sudden emphatic, brilliant twinkle. Like a new star at the edge of a dead cosmos.

  “I know who you are,” she had whispered to me. “You’re my baby. Are you trying to tell me something?”

  I had twinkled back exuberantly.

  “Are you trying to tell me you want to live?”

  “Yes!” I had signaled back.

  Now I was almost six and I was leading us through the snowy landscape. Out of the frozen mist materialized the familiar burnt tree with its human face, bearded now with whiskers of snow. The flatness beneath it must have been our little dirt road. “Come on, Claudia, we turn up here.”

  “Oh, Joshey, are you sure? It all looks the same.”

  “I can tell by the tree.”

  “Are you using your third eye?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  The second break in the trees had to be our driveway, curving up and to the right.

  She thought I was communicating with her telepathically when I was in utero. But now, as I led her through the frozen darkness to home, I realized she had gotten it wrong. What she sensed must have been my little fists pounding at the walls of her womb in rage, wanting to come out and protect her. Now I was almost six, and I was getting stronger every day. I didn’t need psychic powers or a third eye or anything else. I just needed to be strong and brave, like a sharp-eyed shepherd guiding a lost sheep through the storm.

  SIX

  The Extraterrestrials

  In the year 1165, the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela left Spain to explore foreign and exotic lands. He met the wise men of Samarkand, the pearl divers of Bahrain, and the rabbis of Mizraim in Egypt. To his surprise, he found that people did things much the same as they did back home. I had the opposite experience. In the year 1981, when I was five, I journeyed no farther than it took to meet the neighbors, hitchhike into town, and attend school. The people I encountered were more foreign to me than the dervishes of Barbary or the fire eaters of Cathay.

  Foremost among these strangers were our elderly neighbors on Mount Lassen, the Stiglers, whom my mother considered land barons of Hearstian proportions. “They’re millionaires! They own half the real estate in Redding and Red Bluff,” Claudia complained to me. “They don’t have to lift a finger, and the money just rolls in.” I’d never met rich people before and was duly impressed by the Stiglers’ fancy doublewide trailer, what with the redwood porch they’d added on, and I stared in wide-eyed awe at the big color TV that dominated their living room.

  But my mother’s resentment of the Stiglers wasn’t just class animosity. They’d refused to acknowledge that their St. Bernard, Champ, had killed our goat, Nancy. “Champ’s a rescue dog,” insisted Mrs. Stigler. “He’d never do something like that. Must have been wolves.” But we knew better. Later, after we’d run out of firewood, old Mr. Stigler came down the hill and yelled at Claudia and me for chopping down an old dead tree with our chain saw. “That tree was on my property and you were trespassing! Next time you trespass on me, I’m gonna call the sheriff on you.”

  Claudia fumed: “He doesn’t own the fucking land! Nobody owns the Earth. We were doing him a favor, clearing out a fire hazard for him. Cheap old bastard! He could buy us a whole herd of new goats if he wanted to.”

  But, as time went on, the Stiglers slowly began to redeem themselves. A couple of weeks after the yelling incident, a full cord of chucked wood mysteriously appeared in our woodshed. Later, after our car had broken down and we were running dangerously low on food, Mrs. Stigler dropped off a bag of groceries on our doorstep. Most of the food was full of white flour and sugar, rendering it inedible for organic pioneers like us, but it was the thought that counted.

  The Stiglers’ upslope property deigned to meet our
funky little lot along the fence line of the gardens. There, the worlds of the bourgeoisie and proletariat came together to celebrate the spring. On the upslope Mrs. Stigler daintily tended to her orderly flower beds in the shade of her yellow sun hat. On the down slope Claudia dug up to her elbows in chicken shit and dirt, raising beds of chard, kale, bok choy, and broccoli, her hair tied back with an old shoelace. But as they toiled under the same sun, the women began to make small talk across the low picket fence, and it seemed that some sort of friendship was possible. Until I accidentally ruined it.

  Gardening—like meditating, dream journaling, and painting—brought my mother great pleasure. I considered it a form of torture. “I’m bored. I’m booored, Claudia. You said an hour. It’s been like ten hours already and I’m sooo bored. And it smells bad.”

  “Joshey, you have to look at working in the garden as a form of meditation. Try it. Come down here and get your hands dirty. Let all your negative energy flow out into the Earth.”

  If redeeming your soul in the soil meant kneeling in chicken shit for three hours at a stretch, I didn’t want any part of it. In desperation, I wandered off to pick through the last of the junk Bob DiNardo had stockpiled from the dump. Underneath the fire-blackened box spring, I unearthed a sad little tricycle, stripped of paint and afflicted with rust. The rubber grips on the handlebars were long gone, and metal stumps were all that remained of the pedals. I righted the thing and found that it was only moderately mangled. All three wheels still spun, and I could move the pedals almost one full rotation before they jammed into the front fork. Then I had to jump off and crank the pedals back again. It was just like our car. You lurched forward, stopped to fix it, and then lurched forward again.

  It took me a full minute to cover ten feet. “At this rate, it’ll take me all day to get back to the garden,” I thought. But I couldn’t think of anything more fun to do, so I seesawed my way forward. Half an hour later, I rounded the pine tree at the corner of the garden. “Look, Claudia, I’m driving my car!” I threw my head back as though enjoying the breeze flowing through my hair, and then jerked to a stop. I put an expression of shock on my face. “Ah, fuck! It’s all fucked up! Look, Claudia, I’m meditating to fix it! Now I’m fixing it for real.” Claudia looked up and nodded and then tried to continue her conversation with Mrs. Stigler. I lurched forward and then jerked to a stop. “Ah, fuck! It’s all fucked up! It’s fixed! Ah, fuck! It’s all fucked up! It’s fixed!”

  I went on this way for another twenty feet or so until Mrs. Stigler stood up suddenly. Her face was flushed as if she were embarrassed. Her white gloved hands were trembling. “Oh… my goodness!” she stammered. “I can’t believe what I am hearing.” She looked off into the distance, scared and shaken, and then turned and hurried back up the path toward her palatial doublewide.

  I stopped pretending to drive and dismounted from the tricycle. Something mysterious and horrible must have happened to Mrs. Stigler.

  “Claudia, why did she run away?”

  “You said a… well.” My mother stopped pulling weeds and gave me her undivided attention for the first time that day. “You didn’t do anything wrong, but she was probably upset by some of the words you were using.”

  Me? This was about me? The woman hadn’t so much as noticed me all day. And words? I thought back on my day and was sure I hadn’t said anything racist or sexist. “What words did I say?”

  “Well, probably fuck. Just fuck.”

  Fuck? What was wrong with fuck? It was just a word you said, like shit, or whoops, or ouch. Claudia saw the confusion on my face.

  “Joshey, I don’t understand it myself. It makes no sense. There’s nothing wrong with fuck, but some people just don’t like that word.”

  “Doesn’t it really just mean sex?”

  “Yes, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You can say the word whenever you want, but you should know there are some people like Mrs. Stigler—straight people—who will be offended by the word and won’t like you if you say it.”

  Who were these people who went crazy when they heard a random word? “Straight people?”

  “Yes. Straight people. You know…” Here, Claudia adopted a cold android face, stiffened her arms, and spoke like a robot. “Well. Hello. Josh-u-a. I am Missus Stigler. How are you. I am fine. Boop. Beep.” I knew she didn’t literally mean that Mrs. Stigler was a robot. She meant that she was rigid, unimaginative, and uncreative. And probably that, as a rich person, she could afford to buy a robot.

  That night, lying on my sleeping bag, I felt like a GI who, having tromped around Tokyo for a year in boots, discovers it is considered offensive not to remove your shoes. I’d been saying fuck my whole life. I’d probably met maybe a dozen of these straight people over the years and unknowingly offended them. And now they hated me. I swore to myself that I’d never say fuck again.

  As fuck slipped out of my vocabulary, spring slid into summer, and a new generation of Stiglers slipped across the property line. Amy was my age and had long, raven black hair. Jenny was seven, two years older, and possessed a fiery mass of red curls. They were the Stiglers’ granddaughters, and they came fueled by curiosity and a hatred of boredom. When they discovered me, I was sitting on a stump in front of the cabin, packing unwilling kittens into a shoebox.

  “Do you live here?” asked Jenny.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I always thought this was a shed.”

  “It’s like a shed,” I said, “except for humans.”

  The girls giggled. “You’re funny,” said Jenny.

  I had never been so proud.

  “Are you a boy or a girl?” Amy asked, crinkling her nose.

  “Amy, that’s rude,” scolded Jenny.

  I didn’t mind. I knew it was because of my long hair. I went for the laugh again: “I’m a long-haired human boy.”

  That got the desired effect and, when they were done giggling, I showed the girls my kittens, my chickens, and my collection of sticks. Then I brought the girls into our half-built cabin, where they studied everything hesitantly and carefully like anthropologists in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. They marveled at the bookcase-lined walls, inspected our Indian tapestries, and commented on the inexplicable absence of a television set. In the next room, the paintings stunned them into silence: the massive collage of naked and copulating figures; the half-naked/half-skeletal woman; the peasants slaughtering the anaconda behind Victor Jara; the man clutching his bird-woman; the blue landscape of Sandinistas roasting a pig alongside Iranian revolutionaries, Menachem Begin, Virginia Slims, and Shirley Temple.

  “Claudia’s an artist,” I offered, to coax them out of shock.

  “Who’s Claudia?” Amy asked.

  “Here she is,” I said, introducing my mother, who’d just returned from gathering pine needles for a new art project. Claudia smiled and gave each girl a slight bow of respect.

  “You’re his mom, right?” asked Amy.

  “Yes, I have that great honor,” Claudia said.

  “Well, how come he doesn’t call you Mom?”

  “Because Claudia is my name.” The girls were puzzled by this, but clearly entertained by the strangeness of their new neighbors. Soon they were peppering my mother with questions, and she seemed delighted to be interviewed by them. The girls looked anxious when they learned that television was a corporate trick that rots your brain and makes you buy things you don’t need. The girls’ eyes grew wide when my mother told them that a bum had been stabbed to death on the slide in our neighborhood playground in San Francisco. And they were impressed by Claudia’s home economics when she explained how two hundred dollars a month in Welfare benefits could get you a lot farther renting in the country than in the city.

  When their interrogation of my mother started to slacken, I invited them to consult the oracle of the I Ching with me by throwing coins. I wasn’t surprised to find they didn’t know the first thing about divining fate from the casting of lots. “Straight people,” I thoug
ht, “you have to teach them everything.” After the girls had posed their questions for the oracle, I taught them about yin and yang and the straight and broken lines, and coached them on how to throw the sacred pennies we used. Claudia looked on approvingly and gave us some background on the Shang dynasty.

  In response to Amy’s query as to whether or not she should get her hair braided, the I Ching advised that fear was natural in her situation but that sometimes war is the only path. We interpreted this as a Yes. Before we began Jenny’s consultation, I excused myself to answer the call of nature: “I have to take a shit,” I announced.

  The girls snorted uproariously. Jenny turned to my mother: “Do you allow him to say that!?” she asked. Claudia shrugged and smiled and returned to gluing pine needles onto a picture of Fidel Castro. Jenny’s question distracted me from my mission to the bathroom. The idea that my mother would “allow” me to do or say something was almost too strange to conceive of, but her question meant that Jenny and Amy’s mother controlled what they could and couldn’t say. Who were these straight people, fascists?

  About then Mrs. Stigler rang a dinner bell and the girls jumped up with Pavlovian obedience. “We gotta go,” said Jenny. “Or we’ll get in trouble. Bye.”

  I only saw Amy and Jenny a few times after that. They weren’t allowed to visit me anymore, they said, so our contact was limited to clandestine visits when old man Stigler was passed out in front of the ball game or when no one noticed their absence at a Sunday brunch. When they came, they smuggled contraband desserts to me in exchange for some time playing in the chicken coop or another peek at the illustrated Kama Sutra. I felt sorry for the girls. They had everything that money could buy, but their minds remained in total poverty.

  Walking down the mountain toward town one day, Claudia and I passed a blonde girl feeding a donkey tethered to a tree at the side of the road. We stopped to talk with her, and to help with the feeding. The girl, Christine, was about my age and lived in the redwood house up the hill. We agreed to come back and visit her someday soon and then took to the road again, my hitchhiker ears desperate for the sound of some rumbling car that might spare me the forced march down the mountain.