From: The Adventures of Tommy O'Pepper

The Adventures of Tommy O'Pepper -- Surfer Dude in Paris

by Thomas W. Graves

(copyright 2015)

Chapter 1

The Pannikin was the center of the Universe. It wasn’t the people, fascinating and beautiful though they were. It was the sparrows monitoring the tables from the hibiscus bushes along the sidewalk. They would swoop down onto them and jitterbug on the plates, frantically pecking at unattended meals and left-behind scraps. The croissants they devoured reminded me of subatomic particles — here one second, gone the next. Not that I’m a physicist, mind you. I’m an editor. I edit novels for a living, science fiction and horror mostly. But I did like to watch those little bastards hop around on the plates, especially the ones left unattended for a few minutes by La Jolla real estate brokers and exiled Wall Street Insiders.

Inside the Pannikin, itself, there were, in addition to tables and chairs, an old 80 cc Harley Davidson motorcycle above the fireplace, an oversized chessboard in the small back room, and oodles and gobs of local art work on the walls. Out on the balcony near the front door there was a big wicker basket for customers to share newspapers. A retired CIA officer by the name of Vern smuggled them home every afternoon after reading them by the fireplace. Seeing him sitting there like that with his back to the door always reminded me of Wild Bill Hickock sitting at his last poker table, just asking to be shot. Also on the balcony was a long blue wooden counter which served as a railing of sorts and afforded a nice view of the patio below and the Ferrari dealership across the street. Entrepreneurs and former big wave surfers perched there at the counter on the tall blue stools, drinking cafe lattes and reading literature like Crime and Punishment, Seven Types of Ambiquity, and The Art of War. Colorful flowers were scattered around on the tables in globular glass bottles and there was a large shade tree growing through a hole in the redwood deck next to the patio.

In the late afternoon after the crowds thinned out, the college-aged kids who worked there would turn the music up inside the coffee house and then it would be nonstop reggae, rap, and hip hop. Not exactly my cup of tea, if you know what I mean. That’s when you’d find me sitting under the shade tree, reading manuscripts, working on crossword puzzles, and watching the sparrows do their dance du jour.

Chapter 2

Of all of the Pannikin's fascinating and beautiful people, Tommy O’Pepper was by far the most interesting.

Even the way he ambled into my life was … memorable.

He silently appeared at my table one afternoon while I was bent over a crossword puzzle, and asked if I "had a light." A unlit hand-rolled cigarette was dangling from his mouth like Jean-Paul Belmondo. Visibly disappointed when I told him I didn’t smoke, he stood there, nodding his head and staring at the crossword puzzle lying in front of me, eyes shining like opals in the sun and red hair  glowing like Saint Elmo’s fire. Wearing  blue jeans, alligator skin cowboy boots and a black “mushroom cloud” Mac Meda tee shirt, he fit right into the uber-cool Pannikin scene. I continued working on my crossword puzzle and tried to ignore him. He must have intuited that I was stuck on a word, because he volunteered the answer: “unfathomable.”

It worked, so I wrote it in, put my pen down, took off my glasses, and asked him who the hell he was.

“My original name was Tommy Mahon, an ancient Irish name, but then when I was four-and-a-half months old it was changed to something else, but my first name stayed the same.
My friends call me Tommy, Tommy O’Pepper, but you can call me anything you want,” he said, smiling broadly and displaying a brilliant set of teeth which contrasted well with his surfer 's peeling nose.

Intrigued, I invited him to sit down and soon found myself engaged in a rambling conversation about crossword puzzles, labyrinths, and bronze age battle axes. Then he started telling me about a dream he’d had the the night before and spoke nonstop for an hour. That was when I learned just how convoluted Tommy’s dreams are. Like never ending, man. Like when you take a strip of paper, put a twist in it­ glue the ends together and you’ve got a Mobius Strip. A mathematical anomaly. Cut it down the middle and you’ve got a bigger loop with two twists in it.  The outer surface is inner and the inner is outer to the point that one could say that there is no surface at all.  I soon found out that Tommy’s stories are never-ending, too. The problem was I never knew if he was relaying a dream or talking about something that had happened to him. Like when he stole a boomerang from one of his private students and was throwing it at an abandoned quarry “where Napoleon Bonaparte slept before the Battle of Austerlitz” and it “clipped the top edge of the cliff and cartwheeled off into the blue sky and disappeared like forever, man.” He said he walked around looking for it for a very long time and that losing it seemed so “impossible” and “magical” at the time that he’s “got to go back there someday to look for that freakin’ boomerang” . . . and when he finds it, he’ll return it to its rightful owner and “everything will be alright with The Universe, again, man.”

All this thinking about Napoleon and Tommy O’ Pepper reminds me of what somebody wrote centuries ago about a notorious Norman prince by the name of Bohemond —

“A certain charm hung around the man but was partly marred by a general air of the horrible.”

Tommy, like Bohemond and Napoleon, can be charming as hell. But a prince he isn’t. Although it’s true that his biological father got a degree in English literature and was one of the best all-around athletes to ever live in San Diego, and his adoptive Dad was a well known La Jolla eye surgeon as well as an accomplished golfer, musician, and magician, but Tommy hasn’t done squat. Not only that, but he has an astounding array of character defects and as a result, no one can put up with him for any length of time. As far as I know, bookstore owner Dennis Wills and myself are the only two “friends” he’s got. I have no idea why Wills puts up with him. Maybe it’s because they both are addicted to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Me? I tolerate him because he, … well, … he stimulates my mind.

For the last few years, Tommy’s been living in his beat up old camper van and hanging out at the Pannikin, bragging to acquaintances and complete strangers alike that he’s writing a novel. Yeah, right, a novel. He started writing this magnum opus a few lifetimes ago. The last time I asked him, he said he had it down to seventeen pages, kinda like Hemingway.

Lord knows he’s smart enough to write a book, but he’s one scattered and lazy dude and he never seems to finish anything. But he presents well. When I first met him at the Pannikin about  twenty years ago, he made quite an impression on me, alright. At that time he was in his late twenties, stood an Apollo-like six feet five and weighed two-hundred-and-twenty well-muscled-from-surfing pounds, and had that long red hair and those light blue eyes that could look right through you, man. And man, could he tell a story. Or a dream for that matter. 

Chapter 3

Tommy relived some serious dreams with me over the years, and the first story he told me was a doozy, too.

 Let me set the scene.

A light breeze was rustling the leaves of the tree in the patio one afternoon when he leaned back in his chair, took a drag from his cigarette, and blew  a couple of smoke rings which slowly spun around each other and disappeared. When the last wisp faded away, he leaned his lanky torso across the table and the nearby sparrows scattered in all directions.

“Check it out, Gordo.  I’m working as a gardener and handyman in La Jolla and a retired movie director and his wife I’m working for invite me to a dinner party, right? So I go to it and get I there a little  late. I  take my place at the table and look to my left and see I’m next to a fat woman who  talks with an  accent.  Like from Bulgaria or some freakin’ place. So I make a point of totally ignoring her, right? I know that  Mary Lou, the hostess, is really pissed at me because every time I look at her across the table she gives me the ol’ “stink eye.”  But I was pissed at her for inviting me to a dinner party just to sit next to a fat woman from Eastern Europe. After dinner we  all go into the living room and the lights of the Beach and Tennis Club are glowing like a string of pearls way down below us as we break up into small groups and talk. That living room was really plush, man.  Expensive furniture, pre-Columbian pottery, potted palms, the whole nine yards.   Delmer, the host, was standing in the middle of the room, talking with a short dude with little round glasses and  a goatee, so I walk over and join them. Before long the  little guy turns to Delmer and says I look just like a peasant in a Brueghel painting.  Delmer smiled and nodded, so I took it as a compliment.

But then curiosity got the better of me and I went downstairs to his study where I’d seen a book on that Brueghel dude a couple of weeks earlier.  I pick it up and start thumbing through it. I come to a picture called The Peasant Dance and I’m surprised  at how ugly and stupid-looking the people are. I go back upstairs in a rotten mood, and I see  Miss Fat Bulgaria 1948 sitting on the sofa speaking French with the little goateed midget jerk. They stopped talking when I entered the room and I saw her lean over and start whispering something in his ear while he smiled at me, nodding his head slowly. Then she finished whispering and they both just sat there staring at me. I gave them both the finger and they laughed and got up and left the party. After they left, I got totally wasted on Delmer and Mary Lou’s Chivas Regal. Somebody put a song by The Rolling Stones on called “Under My Thumb,” maybe you know it, Gordo, and I grabbed this hot chick in the kitchen and started dancing with her.  While showing her my best move I bumped into a  strangely-shaped ceramic jug on the counter and the freakin’ thing broke into a thousand pieces when it hit the floor. But I gotta tell you, Gordo, she was drop dead gorgeous. Green-eyed, black-haired with a light complexion, and I could see she liked me, but  when I broke that damn jug, I guess she’d had enough and walked out, leaving me dancing by myself like a freakin’ moron.  She left the party a few minutes later with some guy in a Maserati and I got so wasted I had to take a taxi home. 

When I went back the next day to get my pickup, I asked Delmer about the dwarf and the fat lady.  He told me the little jerk’s a professor of art history at the University of Paris and is the world’s greatest authority on Pieter Brueghel the Elder. And the fat woman, the fat woman’s the midget’s wife, and Del said she’s famous in Parisian black magic circles for putting the Mother of all Hexes on some poor guy who offended her at a dinner party.”

With that, Tommy stopped talking and sat there staring glumly at the table, and when I left a few minutes later, he was still sitting there, looking for all the world like a zombie.

Chapter 4

Tommy disappeared for about a week and then one afternoon while I was  absorbed in a crossword puzzle, he was there at my table again. He had a cup of coffee with him and his ever-present hand rolled cigarette. Expecting him to launch into one of his sagas, I put my pen down and took off my reading glasses. He gazed at me with a particularly strange look in his eyes and then launched into it, like a surfer taking off on an outside Windansea bomb..

“That Ernest Hemingway guy really had writing figured out, Gordon. He said you shouldn’t tell the reader too much. You should make him use his own imagination.” Tommy paused. “Know what I mean, Gordo?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Well, in so many words he said less is more when it comes to writing. So I’ve applied it to my own and knocked my novel down from ninety pages to twenty-seven. I hope to eventually get it down to one or two.”

“Pages?,” I said, incredulously.

Tommy took another drag on his cigarette and exhaled slowly. Through his nose.

“No, words.”

“Of course,” I said. “I should have known.”

“He always had a ‘lucky piece’ with him, too,” Tommy continued.  “It was different things at different times: you know, a pebble, a champagne cork, a chestnut, what ever. The only thing was it had to be given to him by someone to bring him good luck. He said his lucky pieces got him through a lot of tight spots, like two World Wars, and winning money at the races with money he couldn’t afford to lose. Me? Hell, I faked high blood pressure to get out of the draft and I almost never go to the races. But I have had my share of tight spots. All I know is nobody’s ever given me a lucky piece. I guess you have to ask for one. “

“You know what the Bible says, ‘Ask and ye shall receive,’” I said, making quotation marks the air with my index fingers.

“Every once in a while,” Tommy said, “I find something that looks like it’ll bring me good luck, but then I always seem to lose it, so now I just rely on my lucky number. It used to be seven, but I changed it to four when I started reading about the American Indians. Then when I was in the Czech Republic something happened that made me change it back to seven. I know now that it doesn’t matter what your lucky number is. What’s really important is whether or not you’re lucky, Tommy said.

“That makes perfect sense, “ I said, nodding my head solemnly.

“Which reminds me of the time TK was driving me to L-A-X,” Tommy continued, unabated. “I was flying to Paris on a non-refundable one-way ticket and $800 in my pocket,” he continued. “Everything’s going along smoothly until we run out of gas thirty miles from the airport. There’s nothing to do but start pushing the car up the hill towards the next off ramp. A tow truck appears out of nowhere and tows us to the nearest gas station for only twenty-five bucks. Fourteen hours later I’m in Charles de Gaulle airport. But it’s getting dark and raining like crazy and I don’t know where I’m going to stay and my heels are hurting like hell from the stone bruises I got when I sold my car and now they’re worse from pushing TK’s freakin’ car and from lugging around my three suitcases. The airport’s huge and there’s lots of remodeling going on and I don’t know any French except “oui” and “merci beaucoup.” I’ve got to do something about these suitcases and get organized and figure out where I’m going to sleep tonight. I find a cart to put the suitcases on and push it down to the far end where there are no people. On the way I pass a man sitting on a bench, reading a newspaper in Arabic. He’s wearing a rumpled suit and he’s got a little shelter made out of cardboard boxes and luggage carts and it looks like he’s been living like that for awhile. I finally reach the far end of the terminal and open the suitcases and put my stuff in a big pile on the floor. I start going through everything, deciding what to keep and what to leave behind. I go through this three times before the pile is small enough to fit into one suitcase. I’m leaving behind lots of perfectly good clothing, man, and the two big blue suitcases my mother gave me when I was going off to college. I really hate to let it go, but I know it’s good for me in a Zen sort of way because it’s making my life less complicated and  it’s going  to make someone very happy, right? It does make me feel real good to make other people happy and, heck, I even practice random kindness sometimes. But right now, in this big Paris airport, the only thing I can think about is finding a cheap place to stay. Luckily, there’s a nice French lady who speaks English at the information kiosk. I ask her if there are any hostels I can stay at. She calls a bunch of them and they’re all full, except for one, the last one on her list. They have one vacancy but they close at midnight. I run out of the airport with my suitcases and after three buses I’m within a quarter of a mile of the hostel. It’s still raining and I’m carrying and dragging my suitcases as fast as I can. It’s five minutes till midnight now and I’ve got a couple more blocks to go and it’s raining even harder now and my heels are killing me, but finally I’m there. And the door is locked. So I’m standing there with water running down my back and I knock on the door and this pretty woman in a skimpy nightgown opens it. I ask if there’s a vacancy and she smiles and says, ‘Yes, there is. You know, you really are very lucky. I locked the door just a few minutes ago and had to come back downstairs to fetch something and just happened to hear you knock. Normally by this time I’d be upstairs getting ready for bed,’ she smiled. I stood there in the rain, not knowing what to say. Finally she said, ‘Please, come in.’ I stepped inside, dripping water on the floor and I said, ‘I guess you’re right. I am a lucky guy.’ She showed me my room and told me I could pay in the morning. I turned off the light and collapse on the bed like a dead man.”

Tommy stopped talking and sat there looking at me.

“Well! That’s an interesting story, a bit anti ­,climactic at the end, but interesting nevertheless,” I said, putting my glasses back on and trying to concentrate on my crossword puzzle.

Tommy sat there, watching me.

“By the way, have I ever told you my theory about schizophrenia and synchronicity?,” Tommy blurted out. They’re connected, you know.”

“I’m afraid not,” I said, taking my glasses off again and placing them on the table.

“Well, the way I see it, everything around us is significant to us on a personal level, just like Jung’s theory of syncronicity says, but normal people don’t tune in to it because it would overload their brains and drive them crazy. So they just filter most of it out and call what does seep through ‘intuition’ or ‘mystical experience’. But schizophrenics don’t have that filter and so they’re crazy, of course, constantly connecting the dots, so to speak, because everything is significant, after all, isn’t it Gordo?”

I said nothing.

Tommy took a hit on his virtual joint and exhaled slowly through his nostrils.

So whaddya thinkin’ there, Herr Doktor?”

“Sounds plausible to me,” I said. “But the proof’s in the pudding, as they say.”

“Yeah, the tricky-tacky tapioca pudding of life,” Tommy beamed. “Connecting the lumps to the slips of the tongue while jitterbugging to Spooner Rhythms on the Jimmy Buffet dinner table,’” Tommy said. “Of course you realize that all this talk about dancing and tables and desserts reminds me of lap dancing, which in turn reminds me of Arizona, which makes me think of Afghanistan, which reminds me of lapis lazuli, and the stone-cold fact that I had the strangest damn dream that night in the hostel in Paris I told you about. Wanna hear about it, Doktor Gordisimo?”

“Why not? I’m free for the next couple of lifetimes.” As the last words were leaving my mouth, I realized that I was making a bad joke.

“It was more like a dream within a dream,” Tommy said. “I was underwater, swimming against the current in a clear mountain stream and everything was crystal clear. Below me the bottom was covered with multicolored cobblestones and I was thinking to myself, ‘This place must be highly mineralized.’ I was swimming underwater for a real long time and then I came to a submerged wrought iron fence. Like underwater, man. I rose slowly to the surface and floated over the fence and then I floated a bit further and found myself in the entrance of a flooded gold mine. I looked up at the granite lintel or whatever it’s called directly above me and saw the word Hammond, Indiana chiseled in it in big classic Roman letters. It was dark inside that gold mine but I knew there were a lot of tunnels in there and they were all interconnected, man. I slowly floated farther into the mine and it was so dark and spooky in there that I didn’t want to go in there any farther. So I willed myself to start floating the other other way and I floated back over the top of the fence and start drifting downstream with the current. So then I was floating down stream and I saw a clump of willows growing along the bank. Their branches were trailing in the water and there was a bunch of crows sitting on the upper limbs. The tallest tree had a wooden coffin in it near the top with big thick branches grown around it like it’d been there forever. It’s got hieroglyphics on it and there’s a big black crow bobbing up and down on a corner hanging over the river. ‘Kah! Kah!’ it seems to mock me as I float by. I lash my two blue suitcases together with my belt and crawl on top of them like a raft. The trees with the jabbering bird disappear from view and the stream grows wider and becomes a river. It sweeps me slowly around a bend towards an island with a big wooden temple on it. As I drift closer I can hear a Billy Idol’s White Wedding coming from somewhere deep inside the temple.

“It’s a nice day to start again…”

“I paddle over to the island and crawl up on the muddy bank . I see smoke rising in the distance and rotting human heads impaled on posts a lot closer than I like. I hear the pounding of drums and wild chanting and it was getting louder, too, and people were screaming out in pain and ecstasy, too, which was really scary. I looked around and spotted an old dugout canoe lying in the weeds. I dragged it down to the water and got into it with my suitcases and paddled to the other side of the river as fast as I could go, man. When I got there, there was this fat woman standing on the quay across from a huge cathedral with flying buttresses and gargoyles.  She was wearing a black dress with big white stars in constellations like the Big Dipper and Orion and she was wearing Wayfarer sunglasses and shaking a white cane threateningly in the air and shouting …”

Tommy suddenly stood up and yelled. ”Who will take me to The Scorpion and the Archer, damn it?”

People in the patio looked at us with startled expressions on their faces. Then impeccablly-dressed “Big-Wave Larry”, looking for all the world like an aged Tab Hunter and sporting his favorite mirrored sun glasses, his fedora hat, and his necklace from Nepal, put the I Ching Book of Changes down on the long blue counter and yelled out —

“Forgeddabout it! Surf’s Up! Cowabunga!”

Tommy sat down again and grinned maniacally as several people got up and left the patio.

“Exactly like that! The Big Kahuna intervened!,” Tommy said gleefully, taking a sip of coffee and a hit on his cigarette, exhaling the smoke through his nostrils again. “But you know, Gordo, that voice faded away and all those poodle-walkin’ passersby continued on their way like they hadn’t even noticed what’d happened, which kinda freaked me out a little bit and so I opened my big mouth and said something I should never have said.”

Tommy paused and I remained silent, waiting. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer and asked, “OK, Tommy, what did you say?”

Tommy leaned towards me and whispered, ‘I’ll take you there, mam.’

“Oh My God, how could you?,” I said.

“I couldn’t help it, Gordo” Tommy replied with a frown. “Something must have come over me, you know, in my dream, at least that’s what I think it was – a dream within a dream. All I know is that she turned her toothless smiling face towards me and rattled her cane on the cobblestones and I was a goner. I put my suitcases by a rotting dugout canoe on the quay, walked back, took her by the elbow, and walked her across a bridge and through a maze of narrow lanes to a bar with a sign with a big scorpion and a man shooting two arrows into the sky, one after the other. I said, “Well, here we are at the Scorpion and the Archer, mam.” She smiled a big toothless grin again and insisted that I come in and have a drink. It was dark inside but we made our way to a couple of empty stools at the bar. A beautiful topless gal came up to us and the old woman told her to bring me “the usual.” A couple of minutes later she brought me a sweet-smelling drink, dark blue in color, like lapis lazuli, with little glowing green flecks floating around in it. I drank it slowly and it was so good, man. I asked for another. She brought it and set it down on the bar and smiled seductively. I drank it slowlyly, watching her big boobs bob up and down as she giggled. Then she asked me my name, but the damnedest thing — “ Tommy’s voice trailed off like someone falling into an abyss. He took a sip of coffee and a drag on his cigarette while gazing at something far, far away. Then he slowly turned his head towards me and said,

“— I couldn’t remember my own freakin’ name.”

An eerie silence descended upon the Pannikin. A cold breeze rustled my papers on the  table. The low pitched humming sound of a giant bumblebee grew louder and stopped. I  looked around. Four sparrows were hopping around on the tables again, pecking wildly at a  half-eaten croissants and bagels. Tommy’s chair was empty and several of his cigarettes  were lying cold in the ashtray.

Chapter 5

Feeling in dire need of a “cultural fix”, I went to the La Jolla Museum of Modern Art the next day to see a highly-publicized exhibit of local artist Manny Purchase’s most recent paintings. After looking at one of them for a few seconds, I suddenly had to run into the restroom. The great painter himself came in a few minutes later. I noticed he had a copy of his book, Modern Art as Marketing, tucked under his elbow and that he was chugging a can of Steele Reserve. Glacing at the mess on the floor he said, “Nice artwork, dude! Reminds me of String Theory and Jackson Pollock all rolled into one. By the way, who’s your agent?” “The same as yours evidently,” I said, and left.

Chapter 6

A few days later I was reading a library copy of Modern Art as Marketing when Tommy  returned to the Pannikin and resumed his saga.

“I woke up the next morning in that hostel with the worst damn hangover I’ve ever had, Gordo. Everything was spinning and I didn’t know where the hell I was. My bed was soaking wet like I broke a fever in my sleep. I looked over towards the window and saw the sun was shining and the Eifel Tower off in the distance and it dawned on me that I was in freakin’ Paris, and it’s mid morning already. I get up and splash some cold water on my face and take a couple of aspirin and a few minutes later things are spinning slower and I’m starting to feel better. I drag my wet suitcase downstairs to the front counter where the pretty red-haired woman smiles at me and asks me if I slept well. I stammer out a ‘Oui’ and say that I really don’t need a receipt thanks anyway and l Iimp over to the dining room and have croissants and orange marmalade and coffee. When I’m finished, I have to go back to the front counter for my suitcase but I’m not limping so badly now. She smiles at me again and says, “Adieu, you lucky boy.” I smile and wave goodbye and then I spazz out and can’t open the freakin’ door. She gets down on her knees to turn the lock and while she’s down there she presses her shoulder against my groin and rubs it back and forth and opens the damn door and pats me on the butt and I limp off towards a Left Bank bookstore called Shakespeare and Company.

Chapter 7

I went bodysurfing at Boomer Beach later that afternoon, just to clear my head. There’s nothing like bodysurfing for clearing your head, and being around Tommy O’Pepper even a little makes a guy want to go bodysurfing a lot.

There was a big north swell running and I caught a couple of waves, but I was held under by an inside bomb and scraped my knee on a boulder. I decided to get out because I didn’t want to attract a Great White shark with my blood. I’d heard that a scuba diver was carried away by one around the point at La Jolla Cove a long time ago. His diving partner said he saw his lifeless body being carried under in the jaws of a twenty-footer, never to be seen again, though local legend has it that he resurfaced in Mexico a couple of years later with a new wife. I was thinking about this while drying off on the grass, wondering which story was true, when a couple of young longhaired bodysurfers came in and walked past me. One of them snarled, “You bodysurf real good for an old fat guy.” I said, “Yeah, with all this extra blubber I can tread water for hours and not get cold like you skinny-ass punks.” They laughed and one of them said, “You float so freakin’ well, you’ll drift away some day and be eaten by ‘The Landlord’. They like old fat guys like you.” I thought for a few seconds and said, “Then I guess I’m gonna have to get younger and lose a little weight. Maybe I’ll even let my hair get real long and dye it green,” but they were walking away, laughing loudly, and didn’t hear me.

Chapter 8

I was finishing a crossword puzzle the next afternoon with a bandage on my knee when Tommy suddenly announced his presence by intentionally bumping into someone who was leaving a table a little too quickly. Tommy, ever the surfer, athletically regained his        balance, apologized to the victim with a big smile on his face, turned gracefully towards me, and sat down grinning like a matinee idol. I watched him closely as he rolled a cigarette, lit it, and took a drag. He didn’t exhale right away but just sat there smiling at everything and everybody. I was relieved when he finally blew the smoke out his mouth and continued his story, which that time was becoming very lucid for me, too.

“So I’m in Paris and it’s a beautiful morning, right?”

“Yes, Tommy,” I said, nodding my head.

Tommy smiled and continued.

“ I take a couple of buses and get to Shakespeare and Company around 11 o’clock, but it’s closed. Inside, an old man’s at a desk covered with papers and books, reading what looks like a manuscript. He doesn’t notice me standing there, watching him through the window. Outside, in the small patio, irredescent starlings are flying back and forth from some bushes to a black iron fountain. I look through the window again and watch shafts of sunlight pierce the darkness, turning a vase with flowers on the desk into a still life painting. Dust particles are swirling around the old man’s head. They fly off into space when he turns a page of the manuscript. I gently tap on the window and he looks up. I smile nicely and point hopefully at the doorknob.  He frowns, rises from his chair, takes a couple of steps towards the door. Then he stops and just stands there, watching me through the glass as two drops of sweat slowly roll down my forehead, gain speed as they zigzag between my eyes, quickly negotiate the bump in my nose, and hurl themselves off the end, heading directly towards my left foot. Having just started to move my suitcase away from the door, I swing my left foot to the right as fast as I can, trying to avoid the drops of sweat. My aching left heel comes down hard and hurts so much that I cry out in pain and lose my balance. I stumble a couple of steps and reach out at the last second and hug the fountain. I’m still holding onto it when he suddenly flings the door wide open violently and says in a loud voice,

“Yes, what the hell do you want?”

Letting go of the fountain, I wipe away a drop of sweat perched on my eyebrow, smile sheepishly, and say, “Good morning, sir. My name’s Michael Mahon but my friends call me Tommy O’Pepper. I’m a friend of Dennis Wills in La Jolla, California. He gave me this letter to give to you.”

Mr. Whitman looked at me skeptically, took the letter and read it slowly.

15 Sep 93 George Whitman,

Noel Riley Fitch will speak here on 2 Oct with regard to her new book Anis: the Erotic Life of Anis Nin; I believe she intends to speak at Shakespeare and Co. as well. Tommy O’Pepper, who delivers this note, is a friend of mine on his way to Prague. Do you have any space for him upstairs while he is in Paris? I hope all is well with you there. We recently had Gary Snyder and Yevgerny Yevtushenko read here. We hope to have Derek Walcott soon and Allen Ginsberg in February. Best regards to a bookseller colleague,

D G Wills La Jolla, CA

Mr. Whitman folded the letter, clears his throat, looks me in the eye and says, ‘I see. So, you’re on your way to Prague and you want to stay here for a while. Well, I’m thinking about opening a bookstore there, too, but I don’t have any space for you now. Check back in a few days.” He hands me the letter and starts going back inside.

‘Oh, really?’ I say, ‘that’s interesting.’

Mr. Whitman stops and turns around slowly and looks at me like he expects me to continue. Another drop of sweat started its downward journey high on my forehead.

“The part about your opening a bookstore in the Czech Republic, I mean. See, I’m going to teach English for a year there to get some experience and then I’m going to Japan to make the big bucks.  I was just hoping to experience Paris on the way, if you know what I mean.’

Mr. Whitman just stood there staring at me with one eyebrow raised and his mouth open wide. After a few seconds he sighed and shook his head and walked back. He waved the manuscript in my face and said,

‘This was written by a published author. He’s moving out this afternoon.’

My intuition tells me that he’s wondering if I, too, am a writer, so I smile broadly and say, ‘I’ve got to tell you something, Mr. Whitman. I’m not.’

‘You’re not what?’

‘I’m not a writer.’

Mr. Whitman appeared to go into a trance. After a long pause he blinked twice and asked weakly,

‘Well, can you pretend?’

‘Yes sir,’ I say. ‘I drove taxicabs in San Diego for six years, so I can fake anything.’

Mr. Whitman’s eyes sparkled and his face softened a bit. He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘What the hell. Bring your suitcase inside and sit down for awhile. The other guy’s not leaving until three or four. How’s Dennis, anyway? How’s his bookstore doing? Is he selling any books? Is he still drinking beer by the case?”

I say, ‘He must be doing pretty darn well because a lot of big time writers and poets have been pushing their books there recently, and yes, he’s still guzzling that Pabst Blue Ribbon.’

Mr. Whitman tells me to put my suitcase behind some bookshelves at the back of the store. I do so and return to the front and sit down in a stuffed chair facing his desk. He’s resumed reading the manuscript of the guy who’s moving out in a few hours. I try to see what it’s about, but I can’t read it very well upside down. Something about Dostoyevsky and self-reward. I look around and see books everywhere.  I notice an interesting-looking book on a nearby shelf about ancient myths and something called the precession of the equinoxes. Light’s streaming through the window as I sit there watching dust particles swirl around Mr. Whitman’s head like planets swirling around a distant sun. I take a picture of him reading at his desk with the vase and the carnations and the sunlight coming through and the dust still circling and flying away and coming back and circling again. I doze off and he wakes me up a couple of minutes before four and tells me to take my suitcase upstairs and introduce myself to the residents of his hotel.“

Tommy took a sip of coffee and a drag on his cigarette.

“It isn’t a real hotel, Gordo, it’s just Mr. Whitman’s private library. He lets  poor writers and poets stay there for free and he calls it the Tumbleweed Hotel. When the store’s open, anyone can go up there and read the books. He got some of them from the woman who owned the original Shakespeare and Company bookstore but had to close down during WW II. She became famous for befriending James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway and other writers of the ‘Lost Generation.’ From midnight, when the store closes, until noon when it reopens, only the True Residents can be there. It has a few sofas which serve as beds and tables and chairs and high bookshelves filled with books, and a narrow kitchen of sorts along the hallway on the floor above it. There’s a stinking squat toilet in a small closet on the third-floor landing with old books stacked all around and no toilet paper, so a lot of those old books are missing pages. Each Resident is expected to write every day and is required to work in the bookstore for a couple of hours each day, too. He also has to write an autobiography and give it to Mr. Whitman within a few days. It’s a great place to stay if you don’t mind the bedbugs and I’m staying there and I’m working the cash register and doing odd jobs for Mr. Whitman, but I’m not doing any writing. Because I’m not a writer, you know, and I’m starting to feel a little self-conscious about that. I know I gotta write something, so I buy a postcard, a detail from a painting by Bosch, and I wrote a few words like ‘Having a great time’ on the back.

“How creative,” I say. Who did you send it to?”

“Myself,” Tommy said as he got up from from his chair and left.

I sat there under the tree, staring at my crossword puzzle, trying to eavesdrop on the people

around me to see if they were talking about my strange friend. They didn’t appear to be, at least not right then, and I didn’t see Tommy again for a few weeks.

Chapter 9

A few days later Tommy sat down, took a couple sips of coffee followed by a deep drag on his cigarette, blew three strange smoke rings, and leaned back in his chair with a glazed look in his eyes.

Ritual complete, he started talking.

“One day Mr. Whitman pointed to some boxes of books and told me to take them down to the cellar. I said, ‘OK. How do I get down there?’ He shook his head sadly and said, ‘You really don’t remember, do you?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’ He walked to the front door, took a key from above the door jamb, and walked outside. I followed him. He walked over to black door I hadn’t noticed before, unlocked it and went back inside the bookstore. I pushed the door open and looked inside. A long flight of wooden stairs dimly lit by a small lightbulb went down to a dark place far below. I went back inside the bookstore and got the boxes of books Mr. Whitman wanted me to take down there. I carried them slowly down the stairs and when I got to the bottom, I set the boxes down. I stood there for a minuite, and when my eyes got adjusted to the low light, I could see massive arches in the ceiling and black doorways off in the distance. Something smelled both alluring and repulsive at the same time, like expensive perfume mixed with old urine. The longer I stood there the stronger it got and the repulsive part finally won out. I started going back up stairs but stopped in my tracks when I heard something moving in one of the corners. I looked over there and saw the long pink tail of a rat disappearing slowly into a black hole. Wondering where it had gone, I went over and found a tunnel at the base of the wall, about two feet in diameter, clogged with trash and sloping down towards the river.  The rat was nowhere to be seen and I had a strange urge to explore the tunnel right then and there, to see if it went all the way down to the river. But I didn’t have a flashlight with me, so I went back upstairs. When I was back inside the bookstore,  Mr. Whitman quickly walked up to me and asked excitedly, “Did you see those arches?’ I said that yes, I had, and I asked him what that place had been. With a twinkle in his eye he whispered, “It was a monastery.”

Tommy stopped talking, took a long drag on his cigarette, and sat there gazing at something in the distance while strumming his fingers on the table.

“Well, that’s an interesting story, or is it a dream?,” I asked, watching the sparrows ravage a half-eaten muffin at the next table.

Tommy sat there silently, watching his cigarette burn in the ashtray.

“What do you suppose it means?,” I asked.

“I don’t have a freakin’ clue,” Tommy replied ruefully as he took another long drag and exhaled. “Could you please analyze it for me?”

I remained silent, knowing that he would soon continue. After strumming his fingers on the table for a another minute, he started talking again.

“The next night I was alone upstairs in the narrow ‘kitchen’ and found a flashlight and some old rubber gloves under the sink. Later on, when everyone was asleep, I crept downstairs to the cellar. I didn’t see any rats this time, just the boxes I’d left near the foot of the stairs and the trash at the entrance of the tunnel. I put the gloves on and got down on my hands and knees and pulled out the trash I could reach. The stuff I was pulling out looked like it was really old, like rotten parchment or something. I crawled down the tunnel and cleared it out some more and went down a little farther. I continued going farther and farther down that tunnel, Gordo. A couple of minutes later I found another tunnel leading off to the right and then after awhile it wasn’t a tunnel any more, but more like a passageway that I could walk down without hitting my head and there’s water dripping from the ceiling and a few minutes later I find two more passageways branching off in different directions. I’m standing there trying to decide which one to take when my freakin’ flashlight goes dim all of a sudden and starts flickering, so I decide to go back to the bookstore. I barely make it back out of the tunnel before the flashlight goes out completely, and I’m starting to feel that I might be a pretty lucky guy after all. And then later that night, Gordo, later that night I dreamt I was back in that freakin’ tunnel, walking down that passageway going off to the left. I’m walking down it and It drops down and curves slowly around to the right and I’m still walking down it and shining the flashlight around in front of me and it starts straightening out and in the distance I can make out niches with what look like marble busts and statues. I slowly approach the nearest one and come face to face with the white marble heads of Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. Their eyes are rolling around and their mouths are opening and closing and their lips and tongues are are moving like they’re arguing, man, and I go on and come to another passageway which branches off to the right this time and I take it. I come to an alcove with a huge statute of Zeus holding a lightning bolt of pure gold surrounded by a bunch of griffins and gargoyles flapping their wings and jumping all over each other and I’m thinking to myself, “This is one Hell of a dream, man.” I pass more alcoves with weird creatures in chains and then I’m standing in front of a big old oak door and saying to myself, “What the hell, man, you only have a dream like this once.” I knock on the door and the sound reverberates like crazy and the whole place starts vibrating. The door opens slowly and I find myself looking down at a little goateed guy wearing a jester’s cap and glasses. He smiles at me and grabs my elbow and jerks me inside. The door groans as it swings shut behind us and I find myself inside a big room lit by torches on the walls. I see wooden tables covered with strangely-shaped glass containers and bubbling liquids of different colors. There’s a fire in a fireplace on the far wall and it’s being tended by a fat woman. On the tables there are liquids condensing in coils, dripping into strange glass containers. In a back room there are a couple of glassblowers making more glass things, and there are a lot of old books, with drawings in them that could hypnotize you if you looked at them too long, scattered about on the tables, There’s a white tent-like structure in the middle of the room with a big wooden wheel with seven spokes hanging from the ceiling directly above it. I hear a woman laugh and turn and see the fat fire-tender smiling at me. There’s a skinny, long-haired man wearing a leather apron with holes in it. He’s got stained hands and he’s mumbling something in Latin from one of the books. It looks like he’s performing some kind of ritual at one of the tables, putting pinches of different colored powders into a a glass bowl that has some kind of smoking liquid in it. I see some big shards of glass lying in a pile in the corner and walk over and see that one of them has a twisted handle coming out of it. I pick it up and look at it and there’s a three-dimensional image on it like a hologram or something. Looking closely, I see that it’s me, and I’m dressed up like a peasant in a medieval village, dancing with a bunch of other drunk peasants in the village square. I look younger and the eyes of my dance partner seem to watch me suspiciously no matter how I turn the piece of glass. I gather up the other ones and I’m in the same peasant scene in every one of them. I start fitting them together and pretty soon I get it all together and I’m holding this thing in my hands, man, with it’s twisted handle that somehow goes through itself and connects to itself and the whole thing’s a weird bottle that shouldn’t even exist, man.  I turn it upside down to see if it says where the hell it was made and it says “Hungarian Hand-Blown Klein Bottle Company, Hammond, Indiana.” Just then the fat firetender woman comes stomping up to me and takes her sunglasses off. She rolls her blind eyes around and freakin’ morphs into a hot chick who looks just like girl I’m dancing with in the glass shards. Then she takes another step forward and yells in my face, ‘You bastard, you! I saw you looking at that Van deer Meer hussy when you thought I wasn’t watching! No gruel for you tonight, you, you…… bunghole, you!”’ I look down in shame at the floor and I’m surprised to see that I’m wearing medieval Dutch peasant clothes. The bottle explodes into a rainbow-colored cloud of dust and in each piece of dust there’s a tiny hologram ad in each one I’m dancing drunkenly in that medieval square. And in each one of those midieval Dutch squares, my drunk peasant friends are sitting at a picnic table wrestling over a strangely-shaped jar and there are a couple of broken jars lying on the ground around their table, and they have strange-looking handles, too.”

Tommy rolled himself another cigarette, lit it, and inhaled deeply. He held the smoke in for a long time and when he exhaled the smoke, it took the form of a slowly rotating sphere.

“The dust settles and the midget with the jester’s hat and goatee growls that it’s time for me to go. He leads me to a door at the back of the room and opens it. He pushes me hard in the small of the back and I lurch through the doorway, hitting my head on the ceiling. The door slams shut behind me and there I am in the passageway again. I can hear people laughing hysterically somewhere way down below.”

Tommy paused and sat there gazing into the distance. Without turning his head he asked, “Have you ever felt like you’re already dead and you’re just wandering around, waiting for the stars to get to the proper alignment so you can get to he other side?”

“All the time,” I said, “but for me it’s not the stars, it’s the planets. Why do you ask, anyway?”

“Just wondering,” Tommy answered as he took another sip of coffee.

“See, Gordo, I have this theory that we all exist in an infinite number of slightly-different universes and after we die, our souls wander around in something like a communal holding tank that’s connected to all the other communal holding tanks, and we’re always bumping into ourselves but don’t know it. Right now I’m just trying to figure out how reincarnation fits into the whole thing. Got any ideas on that, Gordo?”

“Not at the moment,” I said. “But maybe it’s like Yogi Bera said, and it’s just too early to tell the future.”

What I really felt like telling him was we really should talk more often, Tommy, to help you cope with your disturbed and disturbing dreams. But before I could say it, he jumped up from the table and said, “Which reminds me, I gotta go find me some shades.” as he walked off in the direction of the drugstore and the setting sun.

Chapter 10

Tommy didn’t re-materialize at the Pannikin for three days, and when he did he was wearing a pair of scratched sunglasses.

“Wanna hear the rest of that dream, Gordo?” Tommy asked hopefully.

“Sure, why not,” I said, taking my reading glasses off and slowly laying them on top of my newly-started crossword puzzle.

“I started walking down that passageway and came to another door and opened it and stepped inside. I looked around, and there I was in the freakin’ Egyptian wing of  the Louvre, looking at hieroglyphs inside a sarcophagus that only the dead pharoh was supposed to see. I felt a tug on my sleeve. It was an old woman dressed in a blue uniform. She whispered in my ear, ‘The museum will be closing in ten minutes.’ I nodded and she shuffled off to the next room. After studying the sarcophagus’ lid for a couple more minutes. I made for the door through which the woman exited, but the lights went out when I was halfway there. Instead of walking straight towards where I thought she went and taking the chance of bumping into a display, I slowly feltl my way counterclockwise around the wall until I found the door. I opened it and found myself standing in full sunlight outside an old church with a bunch of strangely-dressed poor people. We’re standing around a holy well, drinking water from a wooden ladle, and we’re starting out on a pilgrimage to Spain. I’ve got a satchel full of ‘holy relics’ with me that I sell to people along the way, things like knuckle bones I’ve dug up in cemeteries and pieces of wood with nails in them that I’ve found here and there.”

Tommy smiled wistfully and took a long drag on his cigarette.

“Someone passed a bottle of plum brandy around and we got good and drunk before starting out. We had a lot of adventures on the way which I’ll tell you about someday, Gordo, but when we got to our destination a couple of months later, I split from the group. My feet were so sore I could barely walk, so I knocked on the door of a monastery, looking for help. A grouchy old man in a black cloak opened the door and I told him my story. He said I could stay there for a while but I would have to work for a few hours every day and I said ‘OK.’ About a week later he sent me on a chore down in the cellar and one thing lead to another and then I’m in a dark tunnel, with doors on both sides, but this time I’ve got a candle instead of a flashlight.  I open one of the creaky old doors and go inside this big dark room with a lot of dark doorways, and there’s a stack of wooden boxes filled with scrolls and there’s a tunnel in a corner and I see a lot of trash scattered around on the floor in front of the tunnel entrance, like someone’s recently cleared it out. There’s a weakly-glowing candle hanging from the ceiling near the creaky old wooden steps. I can see a big black door up there at the top. So I go up the stairs and try the door knob, but it’s locked. I knock on it and a skinny old man jerks it open. I see bookshelves behind him and there’s a table near the front door with a bunch of manuscripts on it and there are flowers in a clear glass jar, kind of like a still life painting.

The old man frowns at me and says, ‘Yes, what the hell do you want? Don’t you know we don’t open till noon? If you’re looking to stay here, I don’t have any vacancies. Where the hell’s your letter of introduction, anyway?’
 

I can hear the old blind woman laughing somewhere far below us and while her laughter is still reverberating I tell the old man that I’ve already shown him the letter of introduction. He scowls and says, ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s just that the last guy who came here had a nice letter of introduction. You might as well come in and sit down anyway. You look tired. Here, sit down in this chair by my table and have something refreshing to drink.’ He handed me a drink that was thick and dark blue in color and had little glowing specks of green floating around in it and it smelled delicious, but I shook my head and handed it back to him and said,

‘No thanks. The last time I drank that stuff it knocked me on my ass.”

Tommy smiled sardonically before taking a sip of coffee and a drag on his cigarette.

“Good call, Tommy,” I said. “I’m proud of you. There may be hope for you yet.”

“Yeah, Gordo. Sure. But remember what Yogi Berra said, ‘When you come to the fork in the road, take it.’ All I know is that when I started looking around that bookstore I had the feeling that I’d been there before, but there was something different about it which I couldn’t quite put my finger on.”

Chapter 11

Tommy smiled wryly, rolled another cigarette and lit it. After once again looking for a long time at something in the distance, he resumed his story,

“So, there I am, Gordo, staying at  the infamous Tumbleweed Hotel and exploring that  tunnel every night when the Residents are asleep and I’m trippin’ out down there, man, and I’m not upstairs very much during the day. When I am, I’m reading books or gazing out the window at the cathedral, which I can almost reach out touch, it’s so close.  I’ve been there for almost a week and haven’t written anything yet, not even my “autobiography” for Mr. Whitman, and the Residents are starting to suspect that I’ve tricked him into letting me stay there. Then one afternoon a hip, twenty-something poet from Seattle saunters over to where I’m reading a book about Pablo Picasso’s “Blue Period,” and he stands there, waiting for me to acknowledge his presence. I ignore him, but then he clears his throat and says, ‘So…, what are you working on?’  I glance up at him and quickly look away. My mind’s racing, feeling like it’s gonna explode like an old engine red-lining on old oil, but before it does I backfire and sputter,  ‘I’m wr-writing a n-novel!” The Hip Young Poet’s eyes widen. ‘Oh yeah? Cool!’  Then he pauses for a couple of seconds.  ‘What about?’ The True Residents looked up in unison from their table in the center of the room. I slowly closed the book about Picasso and set it on the sofa. The Hip Young Poet’s was standing there grinning down at me and I could feel the stares of the others, waiting. I said, ‘It’s about a guy from southern California who’s traveling around Europe, sleeping in bookstores, pretending to be a writer.’ The Poet stood there staring at me for a few seconds. ‘That’s freakin’ brilliant!’, he yelled out and returned to The Others, shaking his head in disbelief. I stood up, put the Picasso book back on the shelf, walked over to the window, and looked at Notre Dame on the island right in front of me.  A car backfired on Boulevard du Palis and a flock of pigeons rose into the air from the square in front of the big famous church. I watched them as they circled the square twice and wheeled off towards the east.  ‘See you later,’ I said as I skirted past all the writers and poets who were still staring at me. I went downstairs and out the door onto Rue de la Bucherie, and turned right at the first corner. I went into a little store and bought a cheap bottle of red wine and a loaf of bread. Back outside, I decided to have my first drink of the day. I took the bottle out of its bag and looked at it in the sunlight. I always buy burgundy because I like the way it tastes and the way it looks when light’s shining through it in the bottle, especially the way it is when there’s just a little left and the reds and the greens glow because it reminds me of stained glass windows and how my art history professor in college was always saying  juxtaposition. I put the bottle back in the bag, having forgotten why I took it out in the first place, and started walking again while munching on a large piece of bread. I strolled up the street from the store and entered a park with a modernistic sculpture in the middle and benches and an old church partially visible at the back. The only other person in the park was a little old goateed guy who was feeding pieces of bread to about a hundred pigeons flapping around all over him and one was even perched on his head. I sat down on a bench near the fountain and watched the little guy do his thing with the birds and then I remembered that I, too, had some bread, and I ate some of it. Then I pulled the bottle out of the bag and, pushed the cork into the bottle with one thumb on top of the other, and looked inside the bottle to make sure that there weren’t any pieces of cork floating around on the surface. “I sure as hell don’t want to die in Paris choking on a piece of cork, “ I thought to myself as I took a big swig. “To choke to death on a piece of cork in the most beautiful place in the most beautiful city in the world would be very ironic. Tragic, actually.” I laughed out loud and decided to drink to irony and tragedy, and to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald because they used to live in Paris and were such great drinking buddies and F. Scott Fitzgerald kept passing out and having seizures when he was drunk and Hemingway would have to cover for him. I took a big gulp and it burned a bit as it settled in my stomach. I started chewing slowly and deliberately on another piece of bread. I was trying really hard to ‘savor the moment’ in the most beautiful spot in the most beautiful city in the world, and I almost pulled it off but a mangey old pigeon landed next to me on the bench. I thought about the pigeon for a while and decided to incorporate it into the moment, too, and, in-so-doing, actually found myself savoring the moment for a moment. After this near-religious experience passed, I took another swig of the glowing red wine and put what was left of my bread back in its bag and sat there gazing at Notre Dame I’m feeling grand and take another swig and I’m getting drunk with the pigeons just like Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and my bottle’s glowing red and green and clear now, too, and in my mind’s eye I can see the Celtic temple that was there before the Roman bascilica that was there before the church that was there before Notre Dame itself was there, and I sit there thinking about this sequence of historical events for a long time. I get tired of thinking about it and decide to walk to the far end of the park to look at the rear of the old church. When I get there it looks like it’s leaning outwards towards me. I back up a few steps and take my dog-eared second-hand ‘Tourist’s Guide to Paris’ from my back pocket. It says that the church was destroyed by the Vikings in the 800’s and that it’s been rebuilt a few times since then, it used to be a Dominican church, and St. Thomas Aquinas lived in the nearby monastery and Gregory of Tours attended a council of bishops here in 580. It says one evening while on his way to give Mass, Gregory “tripped over a malodorous drunk who had fallen asleep inside the chapel and recognized the man, a known false prophet who sold fake holy relics.” I laugh out loud and take another swig and stand there swaying, looking at the old church that’s leaning outwards and is going to collapse on me any second. The guidebook says that this church, St. Julian le Pauvier, is the oldest church in Paris and was finished just before the larger and more famous St. Severing across the street. The guidebook says that one wall of St. Julien leans out to accommodate a sacred well that used to be there and that it was the first stop on a pilgrimage route to Spain. ‘So it isn’t me after all! The wall is leaning out!,’ I shout and take another swig. I start leaving the park to go look at the front of the church and I glance around and see the guy with the pigeons giving me the finger. I give him the finger back and walk through the gate, shuffling up the sidewalk to look the church some more. I take another swig and the bottle looks truly heavenly now as I hold it up to the sun. I start walking uphill again, turning left at Rue Garlande, and right, up Rue Dante. I can hear strains of a Jimi Hendrix song coming from somewhere further up the hillside. I follow the sounds like a lost man following a twisting and turning line of string in a cave and then I’m standing below an open window in a cobble-stoned square. It’s magical, man, and I know two things for sure: I’m drunk and this is where I’ve always wanted to be. The sounds coming from the window are twisted, warped, bent back on themselves and everything’s connected, man.”

There’s a red house over yonder, that’s where my baby stays…

I take another swig from my bottle and yell “HENDRIX!” as loud as I can. Everyone in the square stops and stares at me. A college-aged boy with long hair appears at the window, looks down at me, flashes the peace sign and disappears. I stand there, beaming. ‘Alcoholic Fucking American,’ an old woman in the square yells as the others laugh and shake their heads and turn away. The student opens the door and asks me in English if I’d like to come up and have some wine. I accept, of course, and we’re halfway through our second bottle when I notice a colorful old print on the wall. He tells me that it’s a painting from the 1500’s by Pieter Brueghel the Elder called A Topsy Turvy World and that it shows about one hundred Old Dutch proverbs by portraying a the people of a medieval town doing a bunch of crazy and stupid things. There’s a man carrying a basket of glowing light out through a doorway, there’s a woman tying a devil to a pillow, and there’s a man shitting out of the second-floor window of a house onto the people below.  When we finish the second bottle, the student sheepishly tells me he doesn’t have any more. I thank him for his hospitality, say “goodbye,” and find myself down below again, standing in the square, and another Hendrix song is blaring from the window.

If I don’t meet you no more in this world, I’ll meet you on the next one

…and don’t be late.

For some reason listening to that song right then reminds me of what I’ve read about cosmology, the tuning of musical instruments, and archetypal door posts. It resonates with me, Gordo, and then suddenly it hits me, and I know that I will write a novel, damn it, and it’ll begin,“The hip young poet walked over to the stranger who was sitting on a sofa, reading a book about Pieter Brueghel the Elder.” All at once I felt the earth spinning and wobbling under my feet but I somehow managed to keep my balance. I laughed out loud and took a long, slow swig of wine which I dedicated to wine, the blues, my muse in particular, and inspiration in general. I’m turning around in a slow circle, the glowing bottle raised above my head like a pole star, measuring time and space with ellipses orbiting wider ellipses in the middle of the square where Descartes himself is said to have walked. The music is still coming from the window and I yell “HENDRIX!” again but this time the student doesn’t appear at the window. I flash the peace sign in the direction of the electric sounds and start wobbling down Rue Dante, smiling moronically as I wind my way  back down towards the timeless river. I look at the bottle and see that there’s still a little wine left and there’s a cork bobbing around in there. I start wondering why in the hell anyone would put a cork inside a wine bottle and eventually come to the realization that the French are a very impractical people. I stumble back towards the bookstore, and when I get there, I go too far up the stairs and open the door to the stinking squat toilet, so I go back down one floor and lie down on my mattress and fall asleep. When I wake up it’s three in the morning and everyone’s snoring and I start writing my autobiography for Mr. Whitman. I call it “My Topsy Turvy World’” and it’s about some of the more foolish things I’ve done, and how they can be seen, figuratively speaking, in that painting. Like bang your head against the wall, throw pearls before swine, and count your chickens before they hatch. It ended up being twelve pages long but it was stream of consciousness so it didn’t take long to write. I’d finally met the autobiography requirement and convinced the other residents that I, too, am a writer, and I belong.”

Chapter 12

I had a nightmare the other night that I haven’t had since I was a young boy. I was running as fast as I could, trying to get away from something terrible, something horrible like a Great White shark on land, and just before it was going to catch me, I jumped. I jumped straight up as high as I could and started to float away like a helium balloon higher and higher in the sky. It was exhilirating looking down and seeing the monster getting smaller and smaller, but when I reached a certain point just below some clouds, I started getting scared and tried to start coming back down, but I kept going higher and higher.

Chapter 13

Tommy O’Pepper took another sip of coffee. Then he took a drag on his cigarette. He exhaled and sat there with  that peculiar look in his eyes. At last, he turned his gaze towards me and said,

“You know, Gordy, maybe someday I’ll be able to admit to myself that I’m just a dreamer and this idea about writing a novel is just a big pipedream.  Maybe I’ll write all of my interesting little  experiences on little strips of paper and wad them up and toss them into an empty instant coffee jar and label it ‘My Life In A Plastic Jar’ and put it on top of my refrigerator.” Tommy paused and thought for a moment. “Then maybe one day one of my artist friends will visit me and see the jar sitting on top of the refrigerator and will ask me about it and I’ll I tell him and he’ll say, ‘That’s brilliant!’ and he’ll tell some people he knows and one thing will lead to another and the next thing I’ll be a famous performance artist and my piece de resistance will be a huge plastic instant coffee jar with a red plastic twist-off lid and hundreds of big wads of white paper inside. Each piece will have a different idea or memory written on it and it’ll be on permanent exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. And each time I have a new idea or memory that I think is worth writing about, I’ll write one sentence about it on a piece of paper and wad it up and climb the ladder to the top of the jar and twist off the lid and put the wadded up piece of paper inside the jar and then put the lid back on and then come back down the step ladder and walk out of the museum and get into a long black limousine and leave. And I’ll do this in front of a large paying audience as they stand there in reverent silence, even on days when I don’t show up. Now I’ll tell you about a few of the things I’m gonna put in that jar…..”

I must have dozed off or had an out of body experience or something while Tommy was droning on. All I know is that I found myself standing in front of a drawing by Brueghel in an art museum in Berlin. The drawing was called ‘The Alchemist’ and I’m standing there with my face about a foot away when I realize that, facially, the old man in the drawing looks a lot like me . Then I’m in an ancient, dimly-lit room with an infinite number of doors and rooms showing holographic movies. After watching a few of them I wake up, come to my senses, whatever-you-want-to-call it. I look around and see I’m sitting under the old shade tree at the Pannikin. Tommy’s sitting at my table, gazing into my eyes. But his eyes seem to be focused on something far away. He slowly smiles and takes a puff on his cigarette. He nonchalantly blows three slowly-rotating smoke rings which merge into a wobbling figure-eight before fading away.

Tommy leaned back in his chair and said, “You know, Gordo, one day not too long ago I was here, drinking coffee and reading a book about Picasso on the balcony when a young man sat down at the table next to me and started writing on a pad of paper. He’s drinking coffee like he’s addicted to it and writing fast and I notice that he never pauses or crosses anything out. The guy’s writing pure stream of consciousness and I’m getting pissed not only because I’m an aspiring writer myself, but because he’s slamming his damn cup down every five seconds. He’s writing like a freakin’ maniac, and now I’m totally distracted from my book. On my way inside to use the restroom, I intentionally bump his chair hard and say, ‘Excuse me’ and give him this big friendly smile. He looks up at me with a startled look on his face. On my way back a couple of minutes later, I bump his chair again, harder this time. ‘Let him add that to his stream of consciousness,’ I say to myself. I sit down but can’t read anymore with this son-of-a-bitch writing like crazy, so I decide to leave. As I’m squeezing past him I look over his shoulder to see what he’s writing. But he isn’t writing. He’s drawing a portrait of me. And he’s got me looking just like a freakin’ peasant in a Bruegel painting! I want to scream at him that I don’t have all those wrinkles and my nose isn’t so big and bent like that and my chin is not so weak, and I don’t have such big ears and my face isn’t so freakin’ asymmetrical, and for God’s sake, man, I don’t have freakin’ jowls and I’m not missing all those damn teeth, either.”

Tommy paused.

“But then I realized I was twenty-five years older.”

Tommy blew one last big spinning smoke ring through a gap in his teeth and smiled a crooked smile. I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down wildly as he finished his coffee with a slurp Then he fixed me with his crossed eyes and said something that reverberated like a drum roll for the doomed,

“I’ve decided to make you the narrator in my novel.  I  hope you don’t mind.”

His words didn’t register right away. Then they hit me like a two by four between the eyes and I jerked around in my chair and yelled,  “No, damn it, don’t do it! “What the hell are you talking about?” Tommy, come back here you son of a bitch!

But Tommy O’Pepper had disappeared into the ethers. Like one of his smoke rings. And I was sitting there under the all too real liquidambar tree, with my manuscripts and my unfathomable crossword puzzle.

Epilogue

A couple of years ago someone told me Tommy’d blown his brains out in his camper van. They said he’d left behind a note complaining about a toothache and a blown engine.

Perhaps coincidentally, just yesterday a postcard arrived, postage-due and postmarked Hammond, Indiana. It was addressed to “ Mr. Gordan K. Naught, The Pannikin Coffee and Tea House.” It showed a detail from Hieronymous Bosch’s nightmarish Garden of Earthly Delights. On the back in the middle Tommy had written:

Dear Gordo,

Having a great time here and you will, too.

How’s the novel coming along?  

–Tommy

P.S. I never did find that boomerang.