Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 2
Bowing to peer pressure (God, I am so easy!), I’ve decided to just go ahead and serialize Crazy Good Fortune twice a week instead of once a week. Some of you may recognize one of the episodes in this chapter, as I excerpted it earlier for Halloween. But this version has an unexpected coda that wasn’t recounted earlier. The intro to the series is below today’s installment.
Chapter 2:
This was the deal: Jane and her husband, Horace, had moved down to Costa Rica several years ago to care for Jane’s aging parents until they died. In the meantime, one of their sons, Paul (twenty-something at this time), had taken up with the wrong crowd in Dallas and was getting into trouble. So they wanted him to move to Costa Rica for a while, to get him away from corrupting influences. They suggested that he might want to explore the possibility of starting an import-export business there, which he had decided to do. He needed a partner, though. And that was where Richard came in.
Jane had talked to Richard’s dad recently and heard that he was looking for work. Jane loved to employ friends and children of friends, and cousins, spouses, and in-laws of friends. Apparently, in her hey-day, she had practically been a one-woman employment agency, hiring all of Richard’s hippie college friends to paint her houses, clip her hedges, drive her cars, and start up film and video companies. Richard had babysat Paul when he was little, and she knew that Paul liked him a lot. Even better, she knew that he looked up to Richard. She was calling to ask if we would be interested in moving down to Costa Rica for a couple of years while Richard tried running a business with Paul. When Richard hesitated, dumbstruck by this extraordinary good fortune, she exclaimed:
“Aw hell! This is what we’ll do. I’ll send you and Celeste round-trip plane tickets to San José. You can come stay a couple of weeks and see how you like it. If you decide you don’t want to take us up on our offer, you can just consider it a free vacation. If you decide you want to work with Paul, we’ll pay all your expenses to move down here, we have a darlin’ little apartment here at the house we can put you up in, and we’ll send y’all to language school for six weeks. What do you say?”
Well. We certainly weren’t going to say, “Screw you! We don’t need no stinking vacation!” Although, we actually needed the job more than the vacation. On the other hand, a job that started out with a two-week vacation sounded most appealing. After Richard hung up we sat looking at each other in speechless amazement for about twenty minutes.
Way more excited than is seemly for grown-ups, we made arrangements to leave as soon as we could. A good friend of ours who was living close to the Bay Area offered to let us stay over at his place the night before we needed to leave from San Francisco, and in fact, he even drove up with his girlfriend the weekend before so that he could fetch us and take us to the airport.
I should preface the following story by saying that Artie is one of the most eccentric persons I’ve ever known. He used to carry his dental tools to his office in a chainsaw case and for many years his business card read: “Artie Schleisman, Chainsaw Dentist.” He does tarantula imitations with his hands that are so lifelike they’re downright scary. And one of his favorite pastimes when he was in dental school involved leaping into a tippy recliner chair, executing a frantic somersault while inverting the entire recliner and somehow landing on his feet while he wore not one, but two pairs of sunglasses. He is a very wonderful and peculiar individual who attracts high strangeness in a way that I have rarely encountered in another person. I myself am apparently quite eccentric and weirdness magnet (according to my friends; I think I’m perfectly normal, of course), so when the two of us get together, you might imagine that our experiential universe can become downright bizarre.
We got a late start from Redding the night we planned to stay at Artie’s place, leaving around 9 p.m. or so. We were traveling in Artie’s sporty little Alfa Romeo. After we stopped for gas in the small town of Dunnigan before heading out on a remote cut-off that would take us to the Bay Area, we switched drivers. Artie and Zoe cuddled up in the back while Richard drove and I rode shotgun.
The cut-off, 505, takes a diagonal route from I-5, the main North-South interstate for the West Coast which passes through Sacramento, to I-80, the main East-West freeway in Northern California which leads to San Francisco. It’s a little more populated today, but back in 1982, it was all but deserted. Especially at night. There were no services, just some big farms and ranches and empty land.
We had been driving for about a half-hour when Richard looked down at the instrument panel and said, “Hey, Artie—does your temperature gauge work?”
Artie sat up and leaned forward to take a look. “Usually it works just fine. The needle stays about in the middle.”
“Well, it’s not working now. It’s on dead cold and we’ve been driving for about three hours.”
Artie shrugged. “Must have broken,” he replied. “I’ll get it checked out tomorrow. The car’s driving okay, right?”
“Yeah, it’s driving fine.”
Artie settled back again and five minutes later Richard cleared his throat and remarked, “Uhhh . . . would you all look out the back window and tell me if I’m hallucinating—or is there a big jeep behind us without any lights on?”
We thought he might be pulling our legs, but we all turned around to look out the rear window. We were startled to find that not only was there indeed a big old jeep without any lights, it was driving about a foot from our bumper.
“Jesus!” exclaimed Artie.
“Do you think—it just lost its lights or something?” asked Zoe.
“I suppose it could have, but I’ve been checking in the rearview mirror all along and I never saw this thing coming up on me. I haven’t seen any headlights at all. It must have lost its lights a while ago.”
“But I mean, how fast are you going?” I said. “How could it have gotten here without any lights?”
“I’m going about seventy,” he told me. “So this thing had to go at least that to catch up with us.”
We fell silent, feeling most uncomfortable. Soon, Richard spotted a pick-up truck ahead of us and he said, “Good! We’ll get this thing on his tail.” He passed the truck and when we settled back in the right hand lane, we breathed a sigh of relief. Two seconds later, however, the truck came roaring up behind us and passed us like we were standing still. This left the mystery jeep back on our rear end. I sneaked a glance behind us and saw that oddly, sparks were shooting out from under the chassis. Was the muffler dragging? Why was this car driving so fast with no lights and a scraping muffler? At first we thought that it might get off at one of the few exits that we passed. We told ourselves that it was just following us to get to the next exit safely where it would stop and get help. But it ignored every single exit that we passed. It hugged us like a lamprey eel glommed onto the side of a fish.
Eventually, we came upon another car on 505, so once again we tried to pass. But this time, the mystery jeep passed with us! It no longer seemed interested in just following a set of lights; it seemed particularly interested in us. When the headlights from the other car shone through the interior of the jeep, I tried to glimpse what manner of person was driving it. I beheld a very peculiar shape. Either the driver was wearing some kind of Darth Vader helmet or he/she/it had a bowl for a head. There was no neck. No hair. Just a smooth, hard-edged semi-circle propped on a pair of wide, boxy shoulders.
“Maybe we should get off at the next exit,” suggested Zoe, her voice wobbly with fear.
Richard shook his head. “I’m not about to end up in the middle of nowhere with that thing.”
“Oh, right,” she mumbled, sliding down even farther in her seat.
“Well, maybe if we slow down, it’ll pass us,” Artie offered.
Richard hesitated, then thought, apparently, that this might be worth a try. So he eased up on the gas pedal. The jeep swung out into the left hand lane and it looked, for a moment, as if it might pass us. But when it drew even with us, it swerved toward us, attempting to force us off the road!
Richard stomped on the accelerator. We shot out of there so fast it was like we squirted down the highway. Richard hit a hundred and didn’t slow down for miles. Then he dropped down to eighty and cruised there for a while. We kept checking out the rear window to see if we had outrun the thing, and it looked like we had.
Then Richard groaned, “Oh, man.”
“What!?” we all exclaimed in anxious unison.
“Look at the temperature gauge.”
We all craned our necks to see. The needle had climbed back up to the middle of the gauge; it was back to normal. It had either not broken in the first place, or it had just spontaneously fixed itself.
We didn’t speak much until we got to Artie’s place in Bolinas, the former home of hippie poet Richard Brautigan and a slightly spooky place in and of itself. I haven’t been back in years, but at this juncture in its history, it appeared to inhabit a time warp, stuck dreamily yet somehow ominously in the middle of 1968. In addition, the entire town was slowly being swallowed up by moss. I always got the feeling that if I stayed too long, I might end up as an exotic topiary ornament in some local’s landscaping collection.
However, when we all crowded into Artie’s tiny little cottage—a rustic, one-room abode which barely had enough room for Artie’s bed and two sleeping bags on the floor—we couldn’t stop talking about what had just happened. We all wanted to believe that we had merely encountered some deranged, homicidal nutball in a jeep using a muffler as a rudder, but two significant details kept troubling us. How did the jeep get to where we were driving without using its lights? It just appeared out of nowhere. It’s not like he followed us from the gas station in Dunnigan. It’s not like there were some headlights on the road behind us for a while that then vanished as he approached. Either he was driving for an amazing length of time in the pitch black at more than 70 mph, or he had materialized behind us. But even this could be rationalized somehow. It was the temperature gauge thing that we couldn’t really explain. When the jeep appeared behind us, the gauge went to the bottom, pegged out on “Cold.” When we got away from it, the needle resumed its normal position. What in the hell was going on?
Believe me, since then, I’ve combed the paranormal literature looking for some other tale like this one, but I’ve never found anything. I still have no idea what really happened or what was behind us. I’m just glad that now there are some gas stations along 505.
Of course, as we bedded down, still too wired to sleep, Artie had another story to tell that was almost as peculiar as this one.
“It was really weird,” he said, clearing his throat in a nervous way he had, and working his square jaw, “I was driving along one afternoon outside of Boston and I noticed that someone was following me. Every turn I took, it took, and I was driving a fairly complicated route. I started to get pretty freaked out, so I decided to try to lose this guy. But I was having a really hard time. I turned down road after road, each one funkier than the last until I turned into this little development out in the middle of nowhere. And this car came right after me! At this point, I was really freaked out, so I decided that the safest thing to do would be to turn into a driveway like it was mine and hope that whoever it was would leave me alone. So I did, but the car turned in right behind me into the driveway! I nearly shit!”
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed, getting goose bumps all over. Just what I needed—another scary story. I was going to have nightmares all night as it was.
“So what happened?” prompted Zoe.
“Well, I rolled my window down and stuck my head out. And the guy rolled down his window. And I shouted, ‘Can I help you?’” Artie paused. We all waited. “And he said, ‘Yeah. You can get out of my driveway. Do I know you?’”
If anybody else had told this story, I would have felt fairly certain that they were making it up, but as this was Artie’s tale, I could feel just as certain that it happened exactly like he said it did.
“Was it really his house?” Richard asked.
“Oh yeah. He backed up, I pulled out, and when I looked over my shoulder as I was driving away, he was using his keys to open his front door.”
As keyed-up as we all were from our brush with the bowl-headed monster, this story gave us all a terrible case of the giggles, which made it even harder to get to sleep. Just when we thought we had quieted down, a tortured, snorkeling, snickering sound would leak out of one of us, or we would quake violently with silent, wheezy laughter, which set all of us off again. But finally we dropped off to sleep.
Needless to say, this encounter didn’t exactly seem the most auspicious beginning to our journey. It made us a little jumpy, in fact. On the other hand, such an odd occurrence, even if terrifying, is a clear indication that the universe has all kinds of unexpected things up its sleeve. Awful things can happen, but so can outrageously good things. We reasoned that a year of ignominiously fruitless job-searching coupled with a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse instigated by a bowl-headed monster driving a Jeep Cherokee had surely fulfilled our quota of bad luck for a while. We dared to hope that we were due for at least a year of outrageously good fortune … .
Above: That is me after spending just one night in Bolinas!!
Intro:
At the end of 1982, both Richard and I had been out of work for a year, despite constant looking, and the best we had been able to come up with was scrounging for odd jobs. It was an economic climate much like the one we’re in now, and we were feeling both dejected and panicked about what the future might hold for us. We certainly could never have imagined what happened next.
I’ll be serializing a memoir that I wrote about the year-and-a-half that Richard and I spent living in Costa Rica for the next few months. It was quite the adventure, living with a an eccentric and flamboyant heiress* from Dallas, her elegant and erudite husband who wrote Westerns, and their handsome, bad boy son, whom Richard used to babysit. Oh, yeah, and next door resided the safe house for Eden Pastora, aka “Commander Zero,” leader of the Contras who were waging a civil war with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua at that time.
This was a particularly golden era in Costa Rica’s history, before it became “discovered,” even before the introduction of television there, really (it started coming in during the time we lived there). It was wild and exotic and magical and amazing.
So twice a week, I’ll be excerpting a chapter from Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue until I’ve told the whole tale (36 chapters in all). I hope you enjoy these stories!
*Jane, sadly, passed away not long ago, but she left a legacy as colorful as she was. In 1984, she commissioned one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere, a set of standing stones in Arlington, Texas that were designed and built by sculptor Norm Hines. Caelum Moor has been a source of enormous controversy over the years, which I’ll write about one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to Google “Caelum Moor” and see what turns up. It’s fascinating.
Monday, March 23, 2009