Prose by Mikael Covey

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Out There - Going to California

by Mikael Covey

Where I was and where we’re all from, now so sullenly removed, I watched it go by like a fat sacred cow swishing tail at everything, sauntering across the dark dusty road in the middle of young night in the middle of summer into a black long row of endless impenetrable fields gone forever, vanished from headlights into memory gone given up lost. But it was wild.

In between all the slow dull reality, it was wild. Every night was Saturday night, that contradiction of mood when everything is going on, love and lust and all of life, but it’s usually never enough. But the freedom, the freedom of being young unbounded and it was all was so easy and peaceful amid all the hurry and stress and bother of whatever older meaningless people were doing in their older meaningless world. And I was always secretly afraid it wouldn’t last. That you’d have one shot in life before you die. And that you might miss.

Like my first time in Wyoming through Belle Fourche hitchhiking with the truckers three days waiting and partying with the kids out there, even some kids from Michigan working there in a gold mine, of all places, I’d never seen before or since and wild west cowboy bars with sawdust on the floor all night in the warm black summer far away from whatever home might be.

Then crossing the border into the wide-open Montana sky of a million miles of blue and dark green hills and get this, no fences just wild wide-open, no people, no animals, not even birds, just nothing for miles and hours and you better not run out of gas because there aint nothing here. No telephone state patrol and never gonna be, so just “look at it all, what’re you gonna do.” And what could you do but just look?

Later on down the road there’s maybe a big jackrabbit or two, and finally, herds of elk, hundreds of ‘em wild free running alongside the road and open range about half mile away and me, so amazed afraid almost they’d stray in front of us across the empty highway.

Finally we stop in Lame Deer for a cold drink. That wild mountain village stuffed full of gorgeous young Indian girls so all hot and sultry and ready in tee shirts and soft cotton shorts or cutoff jeans and all surrounded by those hard mean cutthroat young men with their scarred eyes from fighting over all those girls. What I wouldn’t give for an endless weekend here and not get killed, so fresh and wild that even the air was sweet and cool in the pine mountain altitude.

Places like that are hard to leave, impossible to stay in, like the past, but that’s all fenced in now.

Forget that. Think of a liquid summer day of white hot prairie dust spilling across the dusty road into a night of running all night long under the black stars with no place to go but back into indiscernible morning. We get out of school in the little Nebraska town and decide to go to California. Not even so much decided as pushed out forced to go like schizophrenics and people understand so little and care so little less. That last year of broken spirituality sitting in the modular study room, the social studies room, not wanting to be there and not wanting to leave.

The school had modular scheduling and aside from a few prerequisites all your classes were elective, like college. Classes were twenty minute mods, or groups of two or three mods for a test or special activity. On Friday I had only one twenty minute class. It was religion, twenty minutes worth.

Buddy and Deke would just take off and go down to the bar and shoot pool. That’s what they learned. Sometimes we’d just go cruising around looking at spring oozing out of winter snow like being young and dead. But mostly I’d sit there in the social studies mod that was really history with an uncool name which is all this life trapped inside of books with pictures of how I felt sitting there with my desk turned sideways to the window watching the grade school kids playing outside. I watch them all day long and that’s what I learned that last year of hard lessons. Can’t open a book, can’t even finish a simple lesson. I know it’s all gone and never coming back. I worship here, I am a godless god; this is a holy place, and nobody knows it.

In religion class we had a retreat thing where young priests in black clothes and white collars with psychology, sociology, divinity degrees and kind eyes came and talked to us in group discussion about life. The nice young fellow asks some questions about it and nobody says anything. That’s the way it is. Everybody talks and nobody says anything. Nobody ever talks about what’s important. And if someone does, nobody’s ready to speak up or join in ‘cause it’s uncool and they’re shy, don’t know what to say, don’t want to reveal themselves and be laughed at and dead forever. I speak up ‘cause that’s what I do, it’s all I can do. I tell him life sucks. And he probes like a psychologist, like a young priest who cares. He wants to know why and me and what I don’t like about it as if he could somehow take away the pain or take it upon himself and rid me of that. I tell him it’s dull, boring, meaningless, always the same, the same old shit, pointless, it all sucks. My friend in class is surprised.  We hang out together all the time, drink beer, cruise around, laugh and joke and drink more beer. “You mean you don’t like all the stuff we do all the time?”  No, I hate it.  It’s killing me, I’m killing myself with my own life. Not what I’d do if I could…if I weren’t just a follower who just hung around with the crowd and did whatever was being done, and not so shy about revealing myself and risking death. Oh well. Now he’s bummed-out and what good does it do to open your eyes when everyone else is blind, or is it the other way around, like taking me years to figure out with logic and research what everyone else already knows without even thinking about it.

The last good thing in life was basketball season with all the little darlings in the hot crowded gym in their short sweet pep club outfits that not even the old dead people could criticize for being so short and catchy. Just to look at these mouthwatering girls with a blank dumbfound and hungry look like some kind of drooling lone wolf that has to eat, too, regardless of what the good people think. And the other ones, the punk girls with their skin tight torn jeans and touchy feely tee shirts just watching and waiting and being there being watched by me.        Outside it’s so damn cold out in the mix of winter spring with the winds of spring blowing across the remaining snow and dark black sky. And inside so steamy hot like the young girls themselves with their bare skin all icy cold and distant on the parts you can see. Yeah right. Anyway we always had to go have a few cold beers during halftime and it got so that sometimes we didn’t make it back for the second half and sometimes not past the first quarter.

That’s what a losing season does for you. It doesn’t build character or make you strong, it just makes you hurt and sick and wanna go crawl away and hide somewhere and get drunk and forget about it. Should adjust, should just find some sweet girl and enjoy and not worry about it. But can’t, want things to be perfect, want life to be perfect. Like my friends Buz and Leo, good ballplayers, surrounded by geeks. Can’t win, geek coach. Everything fucked up, just slip-sliding away and no one cares. Or sure they care, it hurts, but nobody does anything about it. Just let it slide.

And suddenly basketball season is over and no more hot sweaty gyms crowded with all those girls. Nothing left, just nothing, but spring and Eliot saying it’s the cruelest month with lilacs breeding out of the dead tubers. I was about seventeen if time and age would ever have any meaning, and green as a cucumber. But I knew of things, everything by some kind of natural knowing or understanding through unspoken words and unread books. Like five a.m. sunrise bright as a stage in middle forest, the whole town asleep except me wandering around in someone’s backyard garden picking a white rose because it’s all so everything unto itself scented symmetrical geometric unmade. I want it to give it to someone who isn’t there. That’s everything I ever knew and never learned more. Sad, true, whatever.

That was then, and for some reason nobody talks about the past like it’s a dead tuber or something, some kind of unkind sinful low life disgrace because we’re all supposed to be in the present or the future for our own emotional wealth and hell being like some kind of psychological bullshit that people with bullshit degrees thought up because they don’t know a goddamn thing about life or couldn’t explain it anyway.

And maybe they don’t know but I reckon everyone gets the unsubdueable from time to time or forever, and once it gets you, you’re caught sure as fishnet or grappling hooks. You can’t get away, can’t walk away or run or sleep for days on end, like so much adrenaline burning you up with fever that isn’t even there or anywhere but inside and can’t get out like Faulkner’s honeysuckle air filling your lungs like drowning. Some try to drown it out with beer and whiskey shots one after another like a game you always lose at.

Others try to burn it away in a blur with marijuana and all other kind of drugs that dull not absolve the pain like a funny walking coma where you can’t even feel your feet and aint that cool but your heart still stabs with every pulsing ache and I guess that’s what it’s like for a drunken junkie. You can never calm down that all pervading overpowering restlessness again ‘til you quiet that cat scratching raw clawing ripped open ache in the middle of your belly and on up and through the top of your head blowing your eyes right out of their sockets. Maybe it’s love or want or sex or all of that, and maybe more.

Maybe that feeling of mortality pulling at your feet and you resisting with all your unknown self and doing whatever to forget or somehow get you some eternity to balance up against it. Call it cabin fever stir crazy spring fever seven year itchin’ puppy lovin’ free floating anxiety heartache mania, it’s all the same and clutches at you like the color of your skin so tight you can’t get out, can’t hardly breathe and all you can do is move and keep on going ‘til you can’t go no more.

That was us, going to California where it was golden in those days like sunshine and ice cold beer after a lot of both, or maybe not, just an idea in somebody’s head like mine. And I never really had any beliefs except daydreams of sunny beaches and cool palm trees and warm friendly girls half-naked in the blue water and the warm sand without pretense or befuddlement, just easy and peaceful and there.

Not that I really believed any of that but it was something nice to think about. More likely the west coast was just the leftover dregs of a party that’d been over for a long long time depending on who you are. If you’re Indian I guess it ended when the Spanish got there and then the gold rushers and ranchers and film directors and critics and cynics and apartment builders trashing and destroying everything until there’s nothing left.

I guess we got there late, after the hippies and sixties and Scott MacKenzies, Eric Burdon’s San Francisco flower children taking over college campuses and telling the freakin Board of Regents what to do instead of being told all the time. Imagine that, students telling the powers that don’t give a fat flying fuck what they wanted or needed to get out of all that money they forkin over and years of hard hard work and study that’s about as tough as anything you’ll ever do and more fun than you’ll ever have again. But then of course you’re up to your fuckin armpits in dumbshit administrators thinking it’s still like kindergarten and just couldn’t be, just couldn’t get by without their dumbfuck meaningless rules, and who’s life is it anyway. Why is it always someone else’s to be running it for you?

We’re leaving all that kind of shit behind as fast as we can, at least as far as high school is fraught with it, and hate to be away from all those sweet young girls with the slinky teenage thighs but not gonna miss all the dumbass teachers and principals and neo-gestapo-type bootjackers.  We’re chucking all that behind us and heading out. And not that we’re all that excited about it or anything, just bored with what we’re doing and looking for someplace to go like different places could somehow change you. And thinking and fully believing that we’re the really exciting and cool types and it’s just everybody else what caint recognize that or get with it. And there’s more truth to that than we would ever know sad as it may seem.

Of course we got no money, since none of us work and that’s another thing. We all truly dread the idea of working at a goddamned job. And if it’s gotta be some kind of no choice inevitable chained to the factory type thing then at least we can do it someplace cool, like the great golden dream of California.

Mikael Covey lives in Dakota with his five-year old girl. His work has been featured on Litmocracy, 3:AM Magazine, Storyglossia, Dogmatika, Savage Manners, Daily Kos, The Beat, Word Riot, Outsider Writers, The Whirligig zine, Paris Bitter Hearts Pit, Straight From The Fridge, and Joined-Up Writing.

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