Tourist Attraction
Written By Guest Contributor, Hugh Scott.
You can find them in Lansing, in Tampa and in Jefferson City, Missouri. Go to Omaha, to Sacramento, or to Evansville, and you will see them there. They congregate at designated truck stops and at rest areas where certain things are said to have the potential to happen. They gather in the unused wings of failing, independently owned motels where the management will still let you a room without a credit card. Sometimes you see them hitchhiking along a freeway whose sole purpose is to connect two other more important freeways, walking on the danger side of the guard rail. Backpacks swing from jagged shoulders and their thumbs point to a sky that doesn’t care. Their eyes flicker at the traffic with something that might look like hope, but is much more desperate. I drive past and study each face, searching for my son.
There is a train to Pittsburgh that runs through the town where we lived when we were a family. When Ian left, I thought he might have taken it there. But in Pittsburgh, he wasn’t with the feral teens that sat on the raked slab of concrete outside a used record store. They laughed at the fake laser background on the photograph I passed of Ian from the start of tenth grade. I tried to decide who among them were really trapped in that life, and who were masquerading for the sake of fashion and would go home to freezers full of food and weekly washed sheets. The difference was impossible to detect. They were all hollowed out at their rib cages and they all grew sketchy towards their outlines. One boy with a thousand safety pins stuck in his denim vest told me to check Nashville because “Nashville was where everyone was trying to get to these days.” A girl I figured was his girlfriend, on account of the several clothespins in her lip, asked if they could both hop a ride there. I lied and said I wasn’t heading that way.
Nashville is full of seekers, a city of people trying to find something or trying to be discovered, which explains why I fit right in. The characters that spill out onto the streets once the live music venues have closed are stock minstrel. The blonde in boots. The country singer with a voice like a dying wolf. The skinny boy with a pawn shop guitar and a two day old t-shirt. I knew Ian wasn’t among them; he was too young and quiet to fall in with those 22 year-old dreamers. Since I didn’t want to be proven wrong later, I checked the all-ages club. Inside a converted mechanic shop, a fog machine blurred the faces of girls in poodle skirts. They danced against boys with slicked back hair and tightly pegged pants. A band that called themselves The ‘Rockabilly Space Rangers’ stumbled their way through a set of 50’s covers, sped up to punk rock double-time. Exhaled smoke from unfiltered cigarettes suspended itself above the crowd. The patrons were all nostalgic for something they’ve never known. Their rebellion was in homage to a gone decade. Not like Ian, who defied the world with skull t-shirts and floppy bangs that hung down over his eyes. I checked my map and tried to find a place that could never be mistaken for Nashville.
Hope was making me tired. On the way to Topeka I stopped at a truck stop on the Kansas side of Kansas City and paid a fee to park in the giant lot overnight. At midnight they dimmed the brilliant floodlights to help the truckers get some sleep. Every few minutes a voice would come on a loudspeaker and announce that a particular numbered shower was ready. Around 3:00 A.M., the loudspeakers screeched with feedback and the voice said something I couldn’t figure out, but it sounded angry. The inside windows of my Honda were fogged with heat generated from my body. I had to piss and got out of the car to walk towards the all night coffee shop on the premises. Then I saw them, scurrying towards and away from the parked trucks. Mostly girls in skirts folded at the waist to make them shorter. They wore drugstore lip gloss and their shoulders were so white they glowed in the night air. A few boys were among them. They walked with their eyes pinned to the ground and their hands jammed into the pockets of cut-off shorts. One of the boys passed by me and caught me staring.
“See what you’re looking for, sir?” He asked me as he straightened his posture to showcase his wiry frame.
I looked into his pale eyes. I scanned the translucent freckles that sprinkled a face still too young to be scraped by a razor. I tried to see Ian. I don’t know if it was wishful thinking, but Ian wasn’t there. But still I knew I had to find him or this was where he would end up, scurrying like an insect with a short life span between the cabins of parked trucks.
“No,” I told the boy.
He walked away, dragging his worn sneakers across the piss-dampened asphalt. I wasn’t tired anymore and I was to creeped out to pee.
Once I got to Topeka the blur of all the cities and highway caught up to me. I’d either been coming or going so long I couldn’t remember the last time I ate. Probably in Pittsburgh. I settled on one of those fanfare restaurants that specializes in pancakes and serves them around the clock. I got a corner booth with a cushioned vinyl seatback and a view of the dining room. A waitress took my order and brought my food. The pancakes stuck to the spaces behind my teeth and turned back into batter. I could only eat half of it. My stomach was shrinking, adapting to the road. At a two-top table towards the center of the room, a girl with brown hair and a grey face sat across from a man. She was busy with the complimentary crayons and drawing paper. She’d press down hard and scribble and nearly half the crayon would disappear. The man wore rose colored glasses and a bad plaid shirt. I could hear him telling her to try to eat. She just kept scribbling.
I paid at the register. The girl was there, staring at toys behind the glass case. The objects of a childhood she’d been removed from. Her hooded sweatshirt was torn at the sleeve.
“I come down from Billings Montana,” she said to me without looking up from a stuffed panda with pink fur.
“You’re a long way from home.” I said.
“That’s not my home. My home is closer to Missoula, almost in Canada there.”
I took the picture of Ian out of my back pocket, told her it was my son, and that he’d been missing a month.
“Ain’t seen him. He’s probably in San Francisco, though. We all end up in San Francisco at some point.”
“I might give it a try,” I said. The girl was making me uneasy. She looked younger than Ian, but she was haunted by someone already much older.
“I’m trying to get to San Francisco myself. I’ve got a friend there can get me a job in a record store. Maybe I could help you find…what did you say his name was?”
I thought about it for a second while the waitress rang me up. Finally I told her his name and nodded. She nodded back.
“Go start your car and pull up front. I’ll be out in a second,” she whispered.
I saw the man in the rose-colored glasses appear on the curb as we pulled away. He looked for her between cars and around the side of the building, but she was hiding in the space under the glove box in front of the passenger seat. I hoped she wasn’t lying when she assured me he was not her father. We sped off in a general way for San Francisco, but I knew we’d have to go through Davenport and Boise first. There is a lot of ground that stretches between Topeka and California, especially when you’ve just been born again into crime.
Outside the Quad Cities I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, and when they were open I was seeing things that weren’t there. I swore a truck we’d been following was carrying a load of Christmas trees, which was weird for early September. I got up close and the trees turned out to be some green italic letters advertising a local furniture chain. Colleen had to grab the wheel because my head kept rolling forward and my hands would jerk the wheel in response, causing me to swerve. A motel sign spelled itself out in blinking neon ahead.
Colleen seemed relieved when I sprung for the extra room, but I wasn’t being generous or gentlemanly, I just needed to be alone. I went straight into the bathroom and locked the door. The tub was clean even though it was a cheap place. I turned on the water and let it fill around me, too hot when it hit my toes beneath the wide open faucet but just warm enough when it finally lapped against my shoulders. I tried to picture Ian in San Francisco, but each time it was just his cut-out head from the laser photo on top of a post card memory of the city. My son riding the cable cards. My son half as tall as the Golden Gate Bridge and standing over the water. My son so well-nourished he can feed the happy sea lions half of the sandwich his mother packed him.
The next morning thick plastic drapes protected my sleep from sunshine. The only order of business we had to attend to in Davenport, was in the form of a drive through breakfast, and extra ketchup was Colleen’s contract point. The highway cut through corn and stretched beyond the horizon without a bend in the road.
And if Ian passed through those countless town that line either side of the Rocky Mountains he did so without leaving a trail. He wasn’t in Cheyenne, or Pueblo, or Cortez. Colleen and I blazed our own path. Down from the Utah Plataea and through the heat of central Nevada we could feel the myth of California begin to perpetuate itself, the gravity of the Pacific pulling us forward. That promise of personal fulfillment made possible only in sweet green valleys and dry canyons. Colleen was growing more animated and starting to act her age. We rode across the Bay Bridge into the city that sold its soul and was living off interest generated from the sale.
San Francisco is still Disney Land for runaways, mostly because the price on a hit of LSD has held steady at five dollars. I know because that is exactly the amount of money the teens who ride the gutter in the Lower Haight District ask you for, and they aren’t shy about telling you how they plan to spend it. Because my credit cards had the ability to do things like buy them pizza and orange juice, Colleen’s friends more or less accepted me. I think they assumed I was just one in a series of much too old men that was taking advantage of her on a number of different levels. It wasn’t true, but I didn’t do anything to convince them, it would have just made me look guiltier.
These kids had their own world, spoke their own language, and didn’t live by any rules. They never referred to their condition as homelessness. They were “on tour,” like they were in some giant travelling band. Their presence on those steep San Francisco streets was part of a show and everybody else was just the fans, just the ticket holders. They called the sidewalk the beach and when they sat on the curb they were surfing. When the waves died for the day they would retire to the treehouse, which was just a thatched fort they built in Buena Vista Park down the hill from Haight/Ashbury. Usually I wasn’t asked back. I’d spend my nights in a hotel that gave rooms at weekly rates. I forwarded messages to the FBI Agent in charge of Ian’s case, things like “keep checking the ski-ball arcade in Laughlin.”
One day after I treated the underage denizens to pizza slices, I was finally invited to the treehouse. They lucked into a turkey bag full of psychedelic mushrooms and were eager to “blow the street scene and munch the caps down”. It was a straight walk up a path lined by coastal redwood trees. When the litter started to multiply, I knew I was close. What amazed me when I arrived was the number of people claiming residency at the treehouse. It was like a refugee camp, complete with makeshift tents and a freshly dug hole for feces. Most of them clearly never left, the ones who made it down to the Haight were really just the ambassadors, the public face of the treehouse. They banged drums with disregard for rhythm and danced erratically, their movements a mockery of grace. The ones who were lucky enough to get their share of the mushrooms carved tribal patterns on dead trees or just sat lotus-style and stared into nowhere. They nodded to each other once in a while like they knew a secret and if it were annunciated; it would cease to hold truth. If they looked at each other too long they would burst into laughter that ended in tears and prompted another staring contest into blank space.
No one had seen Ian; although I’m sure he looked nothing anymore like the boy whose memory I held in that frayed photograph. I didn’t see Colleen, and it dawned on me that I hadn’t for two days. The city was panning out to be another dead end. Nobody even seemed worried about Ian. They didn’t understand my concern, because they were all more or less in the same situation as Ian, and from their point of view, doing just fine. “He’s just doing his thing,” or “it’s hard to catch butterflies without a net,” is all they would say. I walked down the hill away from the people who called the trees home. I was ready to leave San Francisco and already thinking of Fresno, Salinas, and Redding. I got halfway down the hill before I realized I was being followed.
“You lookin’ for E-Man?” The boy asked. If this boy was indeed a treehouser, he hadn’t been for long. His brown hair didn’t yet look like flattened greasy pasta and he wore a track jacket that made pains to look second hand even though it screamed brand new.
“You mean Ian?” I said.
“He goes by E-Man now. It’s his tour name.”
“How do I know it’s the same Ian as my son?” I asked, refusing to call him something else.
The boy smiled. He was sure in that sixteen year old brain of his that he was already way smarter than me. “He took off with Colleen the day before yesterday. They said you’d be looking for him. He also said he seen you and you should look harder next time.”
It was good news, the first bit my tour had brought me. Still, they way the kid was smiling when he told me made me want to lap him across his sniveling drug-hole of a mouth. But if Ian did take up with the treehousers, it meant he had found a bit of provisional bit of safety, and I was glad for that.
“Where did they go?” I asked him.
“Let’s roll to the ATM. I’m not about to give that answer out on layaway,” the boy replied.
I knew I was running low on funds because of the way the ATM took a while to produce the $400 I withdrew from savings. As soon as it came out, I put it in the greedy waiting fingers of the boy.
He took the money and said, “It’s hard to get to, but you’ll find it if you can figure out how to look. There is an old commune north of Eureka on the road to Oregon…”
“How do I know you’re not lying?” I asked.
“I took your money ‘cuz I need it. I woulda’ told you anyway. E-Man isn’t gonna make it on tour. He don’t got the heart and he don’t got what it takes to get started.”
I had to pay additional taxes in the form of a Bay Area traffic jam on my way out of town. Each stopped car was a wall between Ian and me that I had to destroy. Once it cleared, I drove with the ocean on my left and the road behind me evaporating into salt water air. I must have circled in and out of Eureka four times before I found the break in the eucalyptus trees.
The compound was like the treehouse on steroids with an older crowd. I got there at meal time. A girl with a headband doled out a hearty soup to the residents. Everyone took turns staring at me. I stared back until a woman with eyes like dead light bulbs and a rope of braided hair asked me to sit down.
Her name was Nekko. She wouldn’t respond to direct questions about Ian but told me she could help me experience the future in the now, that she could dream what was to come in other’s lives, and the way to do that was to relive the past. She explained she wasn’t psychic, but pre-cognitive, there was a difference. If I looked, I could find her after evening chores. Since everyone else there would either respond with silence or an impatient nodding smile when I begged for information about my lost son, I followed her advice.
“You’ve arrived,” she said. She carried a small boulder with giant tongs into an animal skin tent. I followed her inside.
“Your shoes,” she said angrily. “Take them off and leave them outside. They carry karma from the road. Take everything off. And wait for me.”
I got undressed outside the tent. I waited what seemed like a long time but maybe I just wasn’t used to my own nudity. I smelled something burning, a mixture of herbs. Finally, she reappeared, her nude body somehow affirming mine.
“I’ve re-cleansed the structure and we are ready to begin,” she said, the light bulbs in her eyes flickering to half life. I crawled into the tent and sat across from her, but she pulled me towards her so I was sitting in front of her, my back supported by her stomach and bare chest. Her skin was smooth and cooler than the air in the tent. I allowed myself to relax against it. She reached around me and poured a thick tonic onto the rocks. I breathed in and menthol filled my lungs and sinuses, clearing them instantly. She took the weight of my head away from my neck with her fingers. I exhaled and the world outside the sweat lodge fell away from me. She nudged me backwards and I felt like I was falling but it also felt safe.
When I hit the ground floor she took my hands in hers. Her hands were slippery from freshly applied lotion. She kneaded my hands and the lotion grew warm. She lowered herself onto me. Energy poured from our hands into each other; a human electricity conducting itself between us. It moved like that until it formed a loop. Everything outside the tent was outer space and inside the tent was the entire world. Her sweat dripped onto me. It mixed with my sweat and rolled onto the floor in single beads, so much of it pouring off of us that the dirt floor softened to mud.
She opened her mouth to my ear. “What you are looking for is not yours to find. But you will find peace by continuing your search.” I jerked as I received her words. She let go and Ian takes my hand and he is six years old again. He is holding in his other hand a clear green squirt gun I bought him earlier today. His mother and I had a fight about it, she never liked guns. He aims the gun at the sun and shoots. We are in the vegetable garden and I am taking a break from pulling weeds in between rows of tomato plants. He likes to be near me when I do yard work.
“Plants need water daddy,” Ian says.
“That’s right, Ian. Water and sunshine. They can make their own food.”
He points to a small tomato plant and says, “Do you want me to feed that plant with water to make it grow?”
“I think it could use it,” I say. Ian smiles and fires several streams from his water gun onto the furry stalks. Water drips from the plant to the soil. His gun is empty now and he lets go of my hand and runs away to fill the gun at the sprinkler that swallows him in beaded mist and forms a rainbow that disappears too soon.
My body went slack on the mud floor of the sweat lodge. Outside Nekko was gone and the compound was empty except for the breeze. I stood there, putting on my clothes, but I was also already gone. I drove with the windows down and let the air rush. My feet didn’t move from the accelerator until I hit traffic at the Canadian Border. It was dawn and the sun was rising in a way that reminds you anything is possible and lets you forget how very unlikely a favorable outcome is. The car ahead of me passed through the checkpoint. I took Ian’s picture out of my pocket, put it under the visor, and waited my turn to be waved across.
There is a half-abandoned ski resort in central Alberta that the snow-birds use as a nest. If you go in late autumn, the few aging stragglers will welcome your company. Go to St. John, to Medicine Hat, and Thunder Bay. In certain pockets of French Quebec they would just as soon not ask questions than speak in English. If you see E-Man, please pass the information along to him. There are fire roads that do not connect to main roads, but whose sole purpose is to protect the forests from each other. Make your way, but take your time, and get to Yellow Knife, to Quebec City, or Prince George, Vancouver. The ferry boat to Nova Scotia in the summertime roars with low-stakes gambling and the eager drinking of vacationers. I lean over from the safety side of the guard rail and watch the cold Atlantic waves test the fabric of the ship. My brow wrinkles from the strain of trying to remember and my feet tire from all the running away. If E-Man looks, he might find me.
Written by guest contributor, Hugh Scott.
