Free Spirit Page 6

  For a man whose name was synonymous with exasperation, Bob was remarkably sanguine about his housemates’ discontent. “I don’t know what they’re yappin’ about. I built them that hot tub.” No one could dispute this. The gigantic concrete hot tub took up much of the backyard. True, the water didn’t technically get hot. And, yes, the hot tub reeked of the same toxic odor as the half-melted, sun-baked garden hose that delivered its water. But the hot tub was most definitely there. Bob had built that marvel of aquatic engineering and thought that should count for something. And, if it didn’t, the whole pack of ungrateful bozos could go stuff themselves.

  Before the Frog House People’s Democratic Subcommittee on How to Kick Bob Out could reconvene, Bob announced that he’d found a subletter for his room—some dude he knew who was getting out of treatment. The housemates needn’t worry because the lucky bum was getting a steady flow of rent money from his parents until he got back on his feet. As for us, we were taking to the open road.

  Our home for the next few months was Bob’s box-shaped blue van. It had once belonged to a bakery whose ghostlike name was almost discernible through the layers of blue house paint. Although metal was its base component, the van relied on all manner of tape to maintain its integrity: duct tape over dents, packing tape on the headlights, masking tape over the split in the steering wheel, and scotch tape holding on the rearview mirror. The van had everything we needed to make ourselves at home: a full-size bed in back for the three of us, hanging mesh baskets to store our fruit, a propane camping stove, and a small wooden marimba to play when the need for music arose.

  We began our wanderings up the coast, following Highway 1 north and parking overnight in fallow fields or empty parking lots. I spent a lot of time staring out the dusty back windows, watching the crooked highway flow out from under us. Claudia was invariably perched in the passenger seat, passionately preaching about the Struggle against Capitalism and gesturing like a sign language interpreter while Bob scanned the roadway for found objects or diners. We stopped at every road sign that said free on it. Free samples, free tours, free boat launch.

  Somewhere between Bob’s victorious whoops upon finding a perfectly good cooking pot on the riverbank and Claudia’s three-part indictment of the United Fruit Company for war crimes in Guatemala, the two of them made a pact for the future. They were going to found Utopia. Bob was going to build and teach at our new community school, and Claudia was going to grow the food and help raise the children. The question of location came down to the twin criteria of politically sophisticated people and land-based living. Mexico and Canada were out because they had no rural intellectuals and, like the Bay Area, their urban intellectuals were too divorced from the land. Claudia didn’t know where to begin but, after all his travels, Bob could think of one place that met both criteria: Mount Lassen. Good people were working the land there already.

  “Are we going to visit Mount Lassen before we move there?” I asked.

  “No, bud,” said Bob. “But if we are going to take on a project like this we’ll have to head over to Sacto and see Mr. James.” The next day Bob’s funky blue van pulled off the freeway into an industrial area of Sacramento. The van bucked and rattled as the streets deteriorated into a minefield of potholes. We bottomed out over a dozen train tracks before finally pulling up to a walled compound festooned with scraps of sheet metal and topped with razor wire.

  “This,” announced Bob with proud giddiness, “is Mr. James’ place.”

  A small flock of children opened the massive metal gates for us, and we rolled into an industrial, post-apocalyptic Third World village. Blackened hulks of machinery and a fleet of vehicles in varying states of disrepair stood out like islands amid a domestic lake of wandering animals and playing children.

  Mr. James was a sixty-year-old African-American man who wore a leather golf cap above his impossibly thick glasses and white fuzzy sideburns. They’d known each other for a long time, maybe from Bob’s train-hopping days. Mr. James was Bob’s mentor and guru, someone who’d mastered the art of living off of society’s discarded, or almost discarded, waste. Bob introduced us as his woman and her boy. Mr. James wanted to know how old I was.

  “Four and a half. But I’m almost five.”

  “Almost five? I got me an almost fiver too. Bradford!? Where Bradford at!?”

  Bradford stepped out from the semicircle of children curiously watching us. He was holding some sort of deformed cat in his arms.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “He a piglet,” Bradford educated me. “That a baby pig.” He grinned: “We gawn eat him!”

  “For real?” I asked in disbelief.

  “For reals,” said Bradford. “Ain’t you never had bacon before?” I shook my head. “You a poor little boy.” I laughed because Bradford was shorter than I was.

  We ate beans and rice at a table saw in a makeshift barn with Mr. James and some of his family. His wife was about my mother’s age. She was very dark-skinned and was nursing a plump baby at her breast.

  “Don’t she look like she from Africa, Bob?” asked Mr. James.

  “I don’t know,” said Bob diplomatically.

  “Well she does. Like she just came off the boat,” said Mr. James. “I got me a good one, Bob. She love me something fierce.”

  Mr. James had apparently found several good ones because, from what I could tell, everyone else in the compound—from the fat baby up to the balding guy with the limp—was one of Mr. James’ children.

  “Why do you live in a junkyard?” I asked Bradford.

  “That the way it is.” He shrugged. “Where you live?”

  “Right now, in that blue van.”

  “Why you live in the van?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That called: That the way it is.”

  We played with the piglet, and Bradford told me about all the times he’d seen naked ladies. I’d seen lots of naked women too, but I felt more embarrassed than proud of it, so I didn’t compete with his tallies. After lunch it was time to get down to business, and Mr. James took us on a tour of the inventory. “Now, Bob, when you is starting out a new place, what’s the one thing you need most? Shelter. And if you is planning on up and building your shelter, especially on the side of some mountain, you is going to get cold and rained on and stuff. So what you need is to bring your shelter with you. Follow me?”

  “Well, we’ve got the van, Mr. James. We’re living in it now.”

  “That little thing? Bob, you know what a caboodle is? No. No one know. Right now you going round in a caboodle. What you need is a kit and a caboodle. And this baby right here is the whole kit and caboodle.”

  We’d arrived at a big green bus. It looked like it might have been used as a military transport, shuttling soldiers on and off a base somewhere. Inside it had a fold-down sleeping platform, shelves on the walls, curtains on the windows, an old rocking chair, and a rug.

  “Wow,” said Bob. “Mr. James, this is amazing.”

  “That ain’t the half of it,” said Mr. James. “Listen to this.” He slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “You hear? It purr like a kitten.”

  “It really does sound like a cat purring,” confirmed Claudia.

  “Sure it does,” said Mr. James.

  “Are you selling it?” asked Bob.

  Mr. James turned off the engine. “Bob, this here is a four-thousand-dollar bus. I got a two-thousand-dollar bus over there, but I ain’t even gonna show it to you. You a friend a mine. And being that you a friend a mine, I could give this here bus to you for three grand.”

  “That sounds fair,” said Bob.

  “And that includes a full tank a gas.”

  They shook on it and, all business being concluded, we filed back outside. Mr. James peered down through his magnifying glass lenses at Bradford and me.

  “You know what I likes, boys? I likes me a race.” Mr. James straightened up and squinted into the distance. “You see that caterpil
lar tread all folded up by where the chickens is fighting? First one there and back is a winner.”

  Bradford solemnly transferred custody of the piglet to Mr. James, stretched his legs, and went into a runner’s crouch. I tried to imitate Bradford’s athletic movements, but I didn’t want to put my hands down in the dirt.

  “On your mark, git set, go!”

  Bradford tore off ahead of me like a proud gazelle. I churned the dust after him and almost caught up, slapping the rusty steel of the caterpillar tread just as he was turning back. I turned to follow but felt my strength draining away. My side hurt and I couldn’t get enough air through the dust. My handmade Mexican sandals were sliding all over my feet, and my floppy hair was in my eyes. I slowed to a jog and watched Bradford cross the finish line ahead of me and heard Mr. James’ congratulatory “Alright!” I walked the last few steps and came to a halt in front of Mr. James and Claudia. Mr. James was misty-eyed, shaking his head. “Ain’t that a sight. To see a little black boy outrun a white boy like that.” I looked up to see that my mother was misty-eyed too. She was nodding. The racial healing accomplished by me losing that race was apparently quite moving.

  On the van ride to nowhere in particular that evening, Bob and Claudia discussed the green bus.

  “But you heard Mr. James. We need it for shelter. Plus how else are we gonna move all our stuff up? You gonna hire movers?”

  “Bob, I agree with you about the bus. I just don’t see how we’re going to pay for it.”

  “Mr. James told me he’d give us a couple of months. Do you think we could ask your mother?”

  “To give us three thousand dollars!?” Claudia snorted.

  “To lend you the money so you, her daughter, and her grandson can have a proper roof over their heads.”

  “Bob, I have so much negative energy with her. So much rage. I’m not asking her for anything.”

  “She’s in Arizona, right? How about we just go explore the Southwest for a while? Stop by to pay her a visit. Let her see her grandson. And if the spirit moves me, I’ll ask her for you. No. Big. Deal. It’s for the Cause, right?”

  Only the blue van made noise for a while. Claudia stared out at the swamp passing by the window.

  “OK, Bob. Fine.”

  “Great! We’ll head back toward Berkeley, pick up your Welfare check. That should be in by Monday, right? Then we’ll follow the winds into the Southwest and maybe borrow us some money for the bus.”

  As we drove, the undulating ridges of the Nevada desert lay hidden in the darkness. Little patches of tan sand bloomed and bubbled at the edge of the headlight beams before withering away back into blackness when we changed lanes.

  I stared out the cracked passenger-side window of Bob DiNardo’s funky blue van. Claudia was crashed out in the back. Bob was behind the wheel, whistling old-time hobo songs. When he was younger, Bob told me, he’d hopped a lot of trains and befriended some of the legendary train-hopping tramps of yesteryear. Men like Catfish Russell and Jerky Ray. These were real men of character who managed to crisscross this great land of ours without working a day of their lives. When Bob meditated, he told me, he projected himself back into those halcyon days when dangling your legs from the side of a boxcar and roasting up some roadkill for grub were your only order of business.

  “Bob, when will we get there?” I asked without turning my head to look at him.

  “Get where?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “We are somewhere.” He was annoyed with me for asking so many questions, but I was too bored to stop. “Bob, why do we have to live in the van?”

  “Can’t beat the rent!” I could hear the earnest smile in his voice.

  “Where are we, Bob?”

  He took a hissing sip from his can of beer, burped, and said: “We passed Battle Mountain a while ago, buddy. We’re comin’ up on the Utah line probably pretty soon, OK?” We traveled on in silence for a while before I felt the van slowing. “I’m gonna pull into this truck stop, buddy. Looks like they’ve got a diner. You wanna come in with me?”

  The van smelled of gasoline and brewer’s yeast and a thousand farts. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Put on that hat I gotcha, buddy.”

  The hat in question was an old tattered baseball cap with a grease stain snaking down the brim. Bob found it for me in a field behind a service station in Sacramento and, when I complained that it was too itchy, he washed it out for me in a marsh north of Arcata. Claudia said it made me look like an urchin. Bob loved the look.

  We parked in the darkened perimeter of the truck stop, and I followed Bob into the light. Massive arc lamps floated in the ether above like a constellation of suns. In the gritty, artificial brightness, semi-trailer trucks lumbered about like grumbling dinosaurs, and tanks, wires, and hoses intertwined overhead to form a mechanical jungle.

  Bob summoned me out of my disorientation: “Buddy, in here.” He held a door open into a fluorescent hallway. “You always wanna enter a restaurant by the side door,” Bob schooled me. “That way it looks like you’re just comin’ back from the bathroom.” At the end of the hall the bustling little diner opened up before us. Bob stopped and stooped. He stood poised like an eagle surveying a field of mice. “Follow me, bud.” Bob stepped forward with casual confidence and wove his way through the forest of rumpled and weary diners. I trailed behind, following the tan stripe of Bob’s bald head as it proceeded toward the far corner. I could tell from the bobbing of his baldness that he was smiling and nodding as he went. Bob closed in on the booth in the corner, where a leathery old couple were unfurling their gnarled frames from the strictures of the table.

  As the couple hobbled forward, Bob spun gently, slid into their booth just behind them, and brought the old man’s coffee mug to his lips. Bob gestured to me with his left hand and then slid the old couple’s stack of dollars seamlessly off the table and into his lap. I knew restaurant rituals well—Uncle Tony had schooled me in everything from ordering to tipping—and Bob had clearly violated every commandment of patronage. I pulled myself into the booth next to Bob warily lest his antisocial behavior escalate into eating the sugar packets or peeing on the table.

  The table in question was littered with the remains of a mostly eaten hamburger and a tangle of vestigial fried eggs and ketchup. They were orbited by a side salad, two triangles of toast—one of them bearing a perfectly semicircular bite mark—and a debris of soiled glasses, silverware, and napkins.

  “Here, buddy, you want some toast?” Bob slid the untouched triangle of toast my way.

  “But, it’s somebody else’s,” I protested.

  “It’s yours now, buddy. They didn’t want it anymore. Woulda just gone to waste, right in the trash. Look, it’s perfectly good toast. You want me to put some jam on it? The jam’s free. You can take as many of these packets as you want. Put some in your pocket.”

  I didn’t want to put the little white tubs of jam into my pocket. They might leak. And I didn’t want to eat the old people’s old toast. It just wasn’t done. It would be like walking around naked, which Bob was also fond of.

  “Can I get you folks anything else?” The waitress was standing over us, swinging a battered coffeepot in one hand. “You want some more…” The coffeepot ceased its mindless rotations through the air. The waitress was staring at us. She squinted suspiciously, like a mother sparrow scrutinizing the cuckoo eggs sleeping in her nest. “… coffee?”

  “Miss, I would love a refill,” Bob said, offering up the old man’s coffee mug as his own. Bob leaned toward her as the waitress began to pour and confided in her, “I’ve gotta stay awake. I’ve gotta hit Frisco by morning so I can get little bud here back home for the funeral.” And then he mouthed a few more words silently to the waitress.

  What was he talking about?

  The waitress’s clenched face softened, and she nodded as she poured Bob’s coffee.

  “Oh, and you can bring the check for the hamburger and whatnot. We’re ready for it.” Bob added:
“Oh, and do you mind bringing buddy here some more toast? He dropped his on the floor.”

  The waitress nodded again: “Sure thing.” And she walked away.

  “Josh,” Bob said, “I gotta go make a numero dos like you wouldn’t believe. When the waitress comes back, order us some pie.” Bob got up and tiptoed toward the bathroom, clenching his buttocks.

  I watched the diner’s cast of characters come and go. The truckers with their netted hats and flannel shirts, the white family that held hands and prayed before they ate, the state trooper brooding alone. We weren’t in San Francisco anymore.

  The waitress came back with the check and the fresh toast for me. I thanked her and asked her for pie as Bob had instructed.

  “Sure thing,” she said. She lingered over me as I figured out how to work the jam packet. “Where’s your mommy at?” she asked. I peeked at her from underneath my tattered hat. The waitress was old, but she looked younger at first glance because her face was slathered with makeup. I’d seen this kind of face-painting on the transvestites in the Castro before, but never on a woman. “Did your mommy pass on?” she asked.

  “She’s sleeping,” I said, turning my attention back to the jam.

  “With the angels, baby. With them angels now,” she said softly and turned and walked away.

  Bob returned invigorated after his numero dos, and started in on the hand-me-down salad. “Josh, did I ever tell you the time I got put up in a hotel for free?” He hadn’t, so he proceeded to tell me about this one time he’d gone into a hotel just to use the bathroom, but they’d assumed he was there for some conference. The next thing Bob knew, they’d given him a name tag and a packet of papers about insurance. “In hotels, buddy, they’ve got something called room service. It’s super duper. They bring the restaurant to you.”

  The waitress returned bearing a dish of chocolate pie.

  “What’s this now?” Bob wanted to know.