Demon Box

“Never mind. I don’t want to hear. It’ll just depress me. If you’ll promise to spare me your tale of woe I’ll buy you lunch in town.”

“Lunch isn’t what I had in mind, Mr. Deboree.”

“What exactly did you have in mind?”

“I’m an artist, not a mooch. An experienced singer/songwriter. I need a job with a good little country-and-western group.”

O, dear God, I thought, as if I knew a country-and-western group, or as if any group would want to take on this whey-faced zombie. But I kept quiet and let him ramble on in general about the shitty state of everything, about all the fuckin psychedelic sellouts and nut-cutting feminist harpies and brain-crippling shrinks and mother-raping bulls who run this black fuckin world.

It was a week or so after the Lennon killing, a day yet before the winter solstice, so I tried to listen to him without comment. I knew he came as a kind of barometer, a revelation of the nation’s darkening spiritual climate. Still, I also knew that, as black as it might be, the Victory of the Young Light could always be expected after the darkest time, that things would get better again, and I told him so. He didn’t look at me, but I saw the side of his mouth move to make a smile, or a sneer. The expression was unpleasant, like an oyster lifting a corner of a slimy lip from a cold cigarette, but it was the first that had crossed his puffy puss and I thought maybe it was a hopeful sign. I was wrong.

“Get better? With seventy percent of the nation voting for a second-rate senile actor who thinks everybody on welfare should be castrated? Hell, I been on welfare! Food stamps too. It’s the only way a legitimate artist can survive without selling out to the fuckin vampires. Fuck Jesus, if you knew the rotten shit I been through, with that bastard bus driver and that trigger-happy bitch in Idaho and now this fuckin poison oak—”

“Listen to me, punk,” I said, gently. For I figured that anybody who doesn’t have anything better to do than travel 4,000 miles to try to get a fat old bald retired writer who he hasn’t even read to get him a job as a singer in a country-and-western band that doesn’t even exist is in dark straits indeed; so I decided to give him the benefit of some of my stock wisdom. “Don’t you know you got to change your mind? That the way you’re thinking, tomorrow is gonna be worse than today? And next week worse than this and next year worse than last? And your next life—if you get another one—worse than this one… until you’re going to simply, finally, go out?”

He leaned back and looked out the window at the passing Oregon puddles. “Mister, I don’t give a fuck,” he said.

So I gave him three bucks and let him off at a Dairy Queen, told him to get something to eat while I did my shopping. For the first time his eyes met mine. They were pewter gray, curiously large, with lots of white showing all the way around the pupil. To certain oriental herbalists, the white of the eye showing beneath the pupil means you are what they call sanpaku, “a body out of balance and bound for doom.” I concluded that Patrick’s curious eyes must indicate a kind of ultra-sanpaku, something beyond just being doomed.

“You’re coming back to get me, aren’t you?”

Something both doomed and dangerous.

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I’ll have to think about it.”

And handed him his duffel. As I pushed it out the door at him, I felt something hard and ominous outlined through the canvas. It gave me pause.

“Uh, you think you’ll need more than three bucks?” I felt compelled to ask. He had turned and was already walking away.

It had felt about the size and shape of an army .45. But, Christ, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t get much wiring purchased, either. I couldn’t decide whether to leave him at the Dairy Queen, or call the cops, or what. I kissed off the electrical shop and went on to the video rental to trade in “Beatles at Shea Stadium” for a new tape, then I circled back by the Dairy Queen. He was already out on the curb, sitting on his duffel, a white paper bag cradled under his chin as though to match the chalky swatch on his cheek.

“Get in,” I said.

On the way back to the farm he started coming on again about the hard-hearted Easterners, how nobody back there would help him whereas he had always helped others.

“Name one,” I challenged.

“What?”

“One of these others you’ve helped.”

After some thought he said, “There was this little chick in New Jersey, for example. Real sharp but out of touch, you know? I got her out of the fuckin hypocritical public junior high and turned her on to a true way of living.”

Made me mad again. I turned around and drove the little bastard back to the freeway. That evening when I came back from dropping my daughter off at her basketball practice, there he was, hunching along Nebo Road with his duffel over his shoulder, heading toward the farm.

“Get in,” I said.

“I wasn’t going to your place. I’m just looking for a ditch to sleep in.”

“Get in. I’d rather have you where I can keep an eye on you.”