On the wishlist: red wine, a red bicycle, and a chance
What’s the difference between a ravine and a ditch? The word ravine has a French flavor to it. If you say the word more than once you’ll start saying it differently with every breath. At first it’s just a ravine. Soon it becomes a “ra-VEEEN” and begins to sound artsy, maybe even beautiful.
Beautiful dead people are found in ravines. Drunk actors drive Porsches off into ivy-covered Hollywood ravines. Every now and then someone will stumble across a rusted pistol or tire iron said to be linked to the Black Dahlia or a member of Charlie Manson’s family or some other high-dollar murder. James Dean and dead hippies lurk in shadowy ravines.
A ditch on the other hand, is about two feet deep and runs alongside a road. Thoughts of a ditch conjure visions of plastic Chik-fil-A cups and broken glass. Cracked plastic hubcaps and dead animals. Wildflowers and spit and remnants of those Repent Now! religious tracts that get left on the backs of men’s urinals.
The most beautiful thing in ditches are found just after a summer rain when oil leaking from junk cars is washed off the road and into little whirlpools. There it makes those swirling and heavenly rainbow colors that dance in after-rain light. If you smell centipedes and exhaust fumes, you’ll know you found this rainbow.
The red bicycle was found in a place that’s a cross between a ravine and this ditch. It was down a hill that went from a half-paved backroad to the railroad tracks. It was the dark side of town. People dump garbage off the side of this road. A stench of dry possum hair, household garbage and cheap crime lingers around these places. Half-buried amongst the pine trees and garbage was the rusted red bicycle.
When we were kids and this bicycle was in the store all shiny and new it called to us. A machine this slick had to go fast. The tread on those tires would take you anywhere. The seat fit perfectly when you pulled the bicycle into the aisle and threw your leg over it. This was the one. All those gears meant that the FUTURE was where you were going and you would get there quick. You could really outrun your problems on that red bicycle. Children know the way out of here is simple. All you have to do is be good and stay hopeful. Santa Claus winks on your way out of the store and you knew it was just a matter of time
And Santa Claus delivers. By spring you learned how to ride. Somebody jacked that bicycle seat up and gave you a good solid push. It was a now-or-never push that told you nobody gives a damn whether you ride or crash so you might as well ride. So off you went wobbling down the road with the wind in your hair and a smile forming in your eyes. The future was yours.
And here we are. The future is now and all you want is to hide from Kris Kringle and his sparkling minions. The televisions say that you’re supposed to be out spending money you don’t have. You’re supposed to be stuffing your gut with pounds of food in restaurants with loved ones you don’t even like. When you start feeling sick you go home and lay down all warm inside with frost on the windows. This is the holy season. This is how we worship unless you’re a godless Grinch.
When I realized Santa Claus was a con, I took that godless way out. I spent my Christmases in old smoke-filled billiards clubs listening to Warren Zevon and learning the real truth of things in all-night talks with some girl in an alley behind the bar.
I met a guy named Ken in those places. He knew it was all a con too. That’s all we had in common but it was enough to make us friends. One year we spent the holidays in an old house in Highland Park with a bunch of other people who had nowhere to go.
We were all drunk. Somebody brought out a cheap guitar and we passed it around singing songs and laughing. When I got the guitar somebody put a harmonica around my neck and I pretended I knew what I was doing. Ken just sat leaned back on the couch in silence. He never said much and nobody said much to him. That’s how he was.
Ken would get this look on his face sometimes. His eyes would look scared and his eyebrows all confused. Sometimes you’d look up and Ken was staring at you like that. He’d always look away. Other times he’d look scared and he didn’t know you were watching him. It was a frozen look like there was something that caused him shame and he was terrified someone would see it. Something he didn’t understand and feared at the same time. But when you tried to see what he was looking at, there was never anything there. A tree. A window with nothing but white sky and powerlines outside it. A girl nobody knew. Nothing. You’d catch Ken looking at a brick wall that way.
But he stayed with us and we were glad he was around. Ken said later that he had never been surrounded by as much talent as he was that night in Highland Park. I laughed. None of us were talented. We were just drunk. He still said it was the best Christmas he ever had.
The last time I talked to Ken, we talked about a story on drag queens I was working up. He invited me to come see the shows at Chuck’s Condom Shop where he was the bartender. We made our plans then I had to go. When I was nearly gone I looked back to wave and he was watching me leave with that look on his face. The story never went anywhere. I never went to Chuck’s and that was the last time I saw Ken.
One day he just disappeared. Nobody knew where he was. I tried to look him up until Georgia detectives and the news channels got involved. Someone found him on a piece of surveillance tape with a beard and ball cap walking out of a gas station in Flintstone. The camera was looking down and caught that look on his face that I knew so well. Ken wore glasses in the video and his beard was long but it didn’t hide that look. Where he went after that nobody knew.
I followed the story of Ken disappearing for as long as it was out there. The story faded after a while. I thought he had done what we all dream of. He just picked up whatever he could carry, took what money was in his pocket and left everything. My old friend Ken, despite that strange look of fear on his face, had the bravery to do what the rest of us only dream of: scratch our losses and disappear. I smiled thinking about that clever bastard.
Months went by but I still wondered about him. Nobody can disappear all the way. I looked his name up one day and read on the Chattanoogan’s news page:
Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson announced that the human remains found Tuesday afternoon in a wooded area off Georgia Highway 193 in the High Point Community have been identified.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab has positively identified the remains as Kenneth S. Dues, 36, of Flintstone. Dental records were used to identify Mr. Dues.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation medical examiner ruled the death a suicide by hanging.
He’d been out there for five months.
I felt the way anybody else would feel.
It’s Christmas again. Smoky barrooms lose their charm after a while. Once you spend so many nights learning from women, you start to realize you’re hearing the same things over and over again. Life starts to feel like another con.
Time does weird things to us. I went walking down that backroad wondering why my old friends are all gone. All I had anymore was myself and two bottles of red wine. But when I spotted that red bicycle, I heard Warren Zevon again. He was singing about Boom Boom Mancini: “when Alexis Arguello gave Boom Boom a beating / seven weeks later he was back in the ring.”
I pulled the bicycle up the hill. Took it home. Turned on the radio and started on the wine.
What do you do?
Knock the mud off. Put some oil on the chain.
Nico, Lou Reed’s haunting Nordic girl, crashed such a bicycle on her way to buy dope. She died on the side of the road.
Put her on the radio and wrap an old shirt around the bicycle seat. Tighten up the spokes.
Let it be for Nico.
“Wishful Sinful” came on and Jim Morrison croons. Sex and death were the same thing to him. He put to song ”Le petit Morte,” as the French folk call it. The little death. Ken appeared when this song played, dressed up like a German beer garden girl, smiling but that look was in his eye.
Let it be for Ken.
But the man whose birth we honor on Christmas said, “Let the dead bury the dead.”
Maybe you should find some poor kid to give it to.
Do something, for God’s sake.
Make the red bicycle new again for yourself if you’re all you have. Put on your shoes and coat. Tie that three-dollar bottle of wine to the handlebars and pedal out through the cold in honor of that dreaming kid you used to be and all the other people you’re not anymore. Sometimes you have to leave yourself behind, too. But you have to keep going.
Where are you going?
Hopefully somewhere we belong.
Where’s your home?
Don’t know but we’re on our way, pedaling wine-drunk through the holiest season of the year with breath coming out of our mouths like clouds that go up to mingle with the stars.