pleased precariously

They’d just had a fight, a particularly nasty one. Reminded me in many ways of the fights we had during those last couple months. I didn’t watch it happen. I could just tell from the way he was holding himself - he had that same numb disbelief, that same shattered aspect.

We were on the sidewalk staring at his beat up old Buick. There was a sign which had been bent toward the street, it’s pole wrapping over the car and blocking the driver’s side door from opening.

“That was some fight,” I say quietly, standing about a foor behind and to the right.

“Yeah. I just don’t understand it,” he responds, hands open, palms up, head down.

Sensing that action would be more soothing than conversation, I walked in front of him and put my hand just behind the passenger door and leaned into the car, using it’s crappy shocks to help me tilt it away from the sign.

He opened the driver’s door a little and squeezed in behind the wheel. He tried the key a few times, and all we got was a sputter.

“Start it on the hill again?” says I.

“Sure.”

I get behind the car and lean hard into it to get it moving. Once the door is clear of the sign he gets out and, one hand stlil on the wheel, helps push it toward the crest. When the car is still a few yards away from the start of the incline my keys fall out of my jacket pocket. I stop and bend over to get them and look back up and see Aaron, alone, at the top of the hill. No car.

“Aaron, what the…?” I say loudly as I jump to his side. I look at him, and he’s just staring.. staring a thousand yards away down the long hill. Staring well past the 1978 Buick that’s now careening toward the house at the bottom. There are a couple of skateboarders to my right who are also staring, slackjawed. One says to the other, “whoahh.”

Just as the car reaches the wide, white concrete driveway, it executes a textbook hollywood slide and hits the garage door at 90 degrees, plowing through wood and metal and plastic and glass, end up some 8 feet inside the house.

I look once more at Aaron, who has completely checked out. I race down the hill, followed closely behind by the skateboarders.

Man it felt good to be in the water. The warm sun beat on my face and chest as I floated leisurely on my back. Buoyed by salt and the sound of the water lapping against me, I smiled big and closed my eyes.

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been there - we’d parted ways some weeks ago, me and that friendly crew. They’d picked me up under very similar circumstances, floating on my back, smiling up into the sun. They’d mistakenly thought I was a castaway, someone that needed rescuing. They’d thrown a rope to me and pulled me aboard and offered me food and water. I refused, saying I felt fine, and offered to show them by helping the slaves with the oars. I sat down next to a dark man with sun bleached hair, grabbed the oar, and started rowing along with the others. I figured I could do this for a while, and ended up staying with them for months as they travelled aimlessly around the ocean. They never made it to a port, and sometimes I wondered if they had a destination at all. If they didn’t, I thought, it didn’t matter. I hadn’t one either.

I came to, back in the water and found my body was going through the motions I’d been daydreaming only moments before. Pulling my legs up to my chest, extending my arms, then pushing my legs outward and pulling my arms in, leaning back into the water a little more. I felt disoriented, probably much the same as someone who wakes up while sleep walking. I’ve never sleep walked. But I guess I can now say I sleep row.

I swam over to one of the Posts and climbed onto the top, sitting a few feet above the surface, dangling my legs off, kicking the water. There were four Posts, immense wooden things sunk into the ocean floor far below, spaced a few hundred meters apart in what appeared to be a perfect square. There were old nets strung between then, sagging at the midpoints so much they were five or six feet beneath the surface of the water. Whatever this structure’s original purpose, to keep things out or to keep them in, it was doing neither very well these days.

Below me about 20 or 30 feet, I could see a shark swimming back and forth near the post. It looked like a great white, which didn’t make much sense in these tropical waters. I couldn’t really make out everything he was doing, but I was pretty sure he either hadn’t seen me or just wasn’t interested. Not the first shark I’ve ever seen, and definitely not the closest, I thought. I looked up and scanned the horizon, looking for nothing in particular, while the warm sun on my back lazily turned water into crystal.

I looked down again to see another shape, much closer. A barracuda. He looked very interested in my feet, swimming purposefully in their direction. I brought my legs up out of the water, lifting them close to my chest, and wrapped my arms around them. Balancing there on the Post.

I came to, lying on my back, on top of the covers. My book, still opened, was page-down on my chest, the same place it had been the night before when I decided to rest my eyes. My legs were lifted off the bed, knees bent.

my head came up with this maybe not so jumbled mess last night:
…

I had just moved into a huge apartment that took up both the first and basement levels of a three story building. I was living there with at least 2 other people, both skaters. One of them was David, the teacher from It’s Yoga, the one that moved last January.

One of the rooms in the basement was a little skatepark. I had my board with me, but for some reason I was wearing sandals. Jackson was there, much more capable on a board than I would have thought. I decided to run upstairs to my car to get my shoes on so I could actually do things. Flip flops suck for skating.

When I got to my car I realized I was really thirsty so I drove over to safeway to get a bottle of water. I picked up two and while I was in the checkout line, picked up a Forbes magazine and flipped to their special feature on Astrology. It was about 10 pages long, full of an interesting slant on relationships based on star signs. I flipped around, skimming, desperately looking for something, anything about Taurus and Sagittarius. Some angle the money guys had that my astrologer friends had overlooked. Something that said it could work. I wasn’t going to find it before the guy started scanning my items, so I put it on the belt to buy it. “Are you kidding?” the woman behind me asked. “Forbes is expensive.” “It’s my money,” I responded. When it was my turn, I picked up one of the water bottles and ran it across the scanner. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” I admitted, smiling. “Don’t do it again,” he said cooly, as he took the bottle from me and dropped it in the plastic sack.

I got back to the house, dropped off the bag in the kitchen and, sitting at the table, put on my shoes. Walked downstairs and opened the door to find the skatepark empty. I tried the next few of doors to see if everyone was hanging out someplace else.

The third door on the right opened to laughing and dancing women wearing nothing but bras and panties. It was as if I had stumbled into an underwear commercial. Girls staring me in the eye as they exaggeratedly waved their tits and asses in my direction, daring me to look away, to steal a glance, to break eye contact. I backed up against the door and looked around the room at everything but the girls. Along the right edge, 20 feet from the laughing girls there was a bench and some folding chairs where my roommates were having what looked like an impromptu skateboarder bible group.

I walked over and interrupted David while he was reading a passage from some book of the bible… John, I think. I hooked my thumb over my shoulder and asked “how late does the skatepark stay open?” “5:30,” he answered, and turned back to his bible and continued reading. I looked at my watch. 3:00. Cool. I walked out of the room and back down the hall.

I could hear her crying as I stood by the skatepark door. I walked the rest of the way to the kitchen to see her and her father sitting at the table. He stood up as I entered and took a picture of me with his digital camera. He put the camera in playback mode, handed it to me, and told me to sit down.

I sat across from them, and started browsing through the pictures on the camera. He said, “every one of those pictures, over a hundred, is from this week. Every one of her friends came to visit her, sometimes more than once. Where were you? Aren’t you supposed to be her boyfriend?” I didn’t know what to say.. Things came to mind, of course: “I was feeling overwhelmed…” “I needed some time off…” “I had a lot to do here…” “A week isn’t that long…”. All of them felt rather weak, even if they were all partly true. I got to the end of the photos, to the guilty picture of me, then looked up at her for the first time. She was staring back at me, her face wet and angry. She pushed the Forbes magazine across the table to me. I looked down at the open magazine, turned to a dogearred page. On the page was the heading: “Taurus and Sagittarius: Why it’s worth it.” It had been underlined three times.

She stood up and left.

This one also happened the same night as the last one, but it took me a while to get to writing it out.. It felt weird, I normally don’t consciously think about the fact that I’m dreaming while I’m dreaming. anyway.

…

I was at 3614 26th street, second floor. My mom and little sister had come to visit us for a while, and I was re-making the bed for them after doing laundry with Leila. My mom and sister were in the kitchen, talking about making dinner, and Leila was in the room with me at her desk, grading papers. The house looked the way it did back in March - newly occupied, clean, but cluttered. The map leaned against the corner in the living room, still unhung. For a moment I had a weird feeling - this is not the house I remembered. I looked around at everything, and had the very distinct feeling that I was dreaming, or had traveled back and sideways through time to some alternate past where my family had made it out to visit us, and we were happy together.

I finished making the bed (which was just a mattress on the floor) for my mom, and walked into the kitchen. Leila joined us a few minutes later, and we talked about what the food options were. falafel, tamales, the organic veggies we’d bought, homemade pizza, or maybe just going out to Moki’s.

It was during a rare lull in the conversation when all of us were considering the options that the first tremor came. I heard glasses vibrate against each other for an instant. I looked at the shelves and back at the women - neither my mom nor my sister had noticed. Leila’s eyes met mine, a similar look on her face, as the second tremor hit. The kitchen cart we used for a chopping block and storage space moved about 6 inches and we all had to steady ourselves against something - window sill for me, counter for Leila, stove for Melissa, and table for mom.

The next tremor was even more violent. We picked ourselves up off the floor and hurriedly moved to the foyer, with its 4 doorways. I was standing to the left, in the office doorway. Leila was nearby in the doorway to the bathroom. Mom was in the kitchen doorway, and Melissa toward the living room.

We were thrown to the floor again with the force of the next one, accompanied by a loud creaking sound. The floor in the kitchen split noisily about 4 feet back from the entryway. I could see the linoleum straining and tearing.

Another strong shake followed by a cacophony of crashes and creaks and groans as the building gave up the fight. Then a sudden feeling of lifting, my stomach rising to meet it. Miranda’s table fell forward and crashed into the bookshelf by the door, wysong and water scattering and splashing everywhere. My mom shakily slid into the foyer and shared the doorway with my little sister. Leila let go and dropped to join me. We started walking our feet up what used to be the front wall in order to stay upright. I looked into the office to my right and saw the ground coming up to meet us. Air rushed in behind us where the building was splitting apart. I reached down under the book shelf near the front door and even though it seemed to take forever, I managed to pull out my sandals and put them on, perfectly balanced as we all fell.

I was walking back to my car from the bar full of sweaty bike messengers where Winona Rider was performing when he approached me. He was a middle aged Chinese man, taller than me, muscular, and tan. He was walking through the darkened, foggy, panhandle with his little son because, he told me, it reminded them both of their home in Portland, where they did a lot of hiking.

I was walking to my car to get some stuff to take back to the bar, and he was walking that way, so we shared the bike path for a couple of blocks, his son darting in and out of the shadows and streetlamp halos some 30 feet ahead of us. I often couldn’t see him which made me a little nervous, but the guy seemed comfortable with his little boy running about like that so I didn’t say anything.

At my car I got the plastic bag out of the trunk. In it was 100 feet of climbing rope and and a child’s snow shovel. I was taking them back to the bar to donate, so they could sell them at the door for some extra cash. Every little bit helps. The guy looked at the shovel and asked me where I’d gotten it, his son would love something like that. I told him he could just have mine, pulled it out of the bag and handed it to him. He thanked me and called his son over. His son never stopped running, just a blur running back toward us empty handed and then away from us swinging the shovel above his head. Off to dig a hole in the playground ahead, maybe. Maybe all the way to China.

..