Quitting…
Or, This Was A Terrible Idea, Part 3.
Green. His hand (with moss and grass all over it) reached for the sky. I could see the little flowers move toward the sunlight. He closed his pebble eyes– inhaled deeply. Smoke. It escaped from all the cracks in his strange body, catching the thin wind and then blowing away. “At least you are knowing of the why,” he tells me. “The why is always being the beginning.”
[FIVE DAYS REMAIN]
I was sitting in an empty pool the day I quit. I’d always intended to give them two weeks notice. To work right up to my last day in California and have a check in the mail when I got to Carolina. That was supposed to be the day I told the boss, but she wasn’t in yet. And besides, it had been raining the day before and we couldn’t do construction on a pool filled with rainwater. So I took the pump and left headquarters for our old pool up in the mountains. I was thinking a lot about that day on my final week as I packed my things. Getting ready for the final goodbye. Only five days left on the west coast.
I loved days like that. When I could leave the office. I’d come to resent my job. Being a lifeguard in the winter meant working in a stale warehouse with an office in the corner. Shredding papers, counting dusty paddle boards, shredding more papers. But the money was good, and that was the bad part. I’d seen so many good people trapped by the drug of government pay. Sure the paycheck is good, better than a lot of other things. But it isn’t amazing. You start to think, I’d love to do something else, but where else am I going to find a job that pays this well?, and you never leave.
I’d been telling myself I’d leave for two years. I know people who’ve been saying that for ten. And it’s soul-sucking, it really is. There’s no need for ambition or passion, so it just isn’t there. Everyone knows they can do a mediocre job, so they do. From the locker-room attendants, all the way up the chain I’d seen people’s vitality sucked out of them by the comfort of their paycheck. The same way the muddy water was being sucked out of this pool.
I looked around me in the quiet. The hills in this isolated little pool were normally brown. But today they were still drunk from the rain, and very green. There’s a huge hill overlooking the pool, so steep it’s almost a vertical wall of grass. Last year while Mar, my coworker, was guarding the pool in her tower, she stole a glance at that huge green wall of grass and bush and tree. Lounging in the hill, hidden by branches, was a man. He was masturbating to her, or at least she hoped it was to her and not the children. She screamed and called the cops, but he had long dissipated into the Santa Clarita mountains by the time they arrived.
I could climb that, I thought, or I could sit here for another two hours watching this pool get slowly emptied. In a way, I’d been doing that for years.
There was no set path on the hill and my feet sunk in the damp soil. I made a jagged line, the shape of crocodile teeth all the way up. Cutting up and left, up and right, then back again. Halfway up I lost my breath and almost fell. I could see the tiny blue rectangle of the pool below me, slowly turning white. I had to pretend to be a mountain goat to make it the rest of the way up. I pressed myself against the hill and found my footholds, more terrified than I thought I’d be. But I made it up.
At what I thought was the precipice, I finally found a trail. I walked that for another twenty minutes to the top of the hill, which I realized was actually a small mountain. I had just driven up most of it to get to the pool. From that vantage point, I could see most of the Santa Clarita Valley. The sun was out. Almost every dessert mountain had turned green. The air was clean and it was fun to breath. I sat down on the edge and took it all in.
I could see Six Flags. I could see San Fransisquito road. The canyon trail I’d commute to and from my parent’s house, where I would sit and plan and hope for the future. Always waiting, never doing. I could see the freeway that led to LA, the city that terrified me so much I was running away to the other side of the country from it. And then I heard a noise. It was so loud I thought for a second there was an earthquake, but the ground wasn’t shaking.
Behind me, the hill was (what I can only describe as) molting. Small bits of earth and grass were falling off of it. Slowly at first, and then quickly. It was only too late that I realized that something was burrowing out of the ground, coming towards me. Something I couldn’t believe. But I was trapped on the edge of the cliff and had nowhere to go.
But maybe I did. Maybe I had time to get up and escape. Maybe I was just too curious to see what would happen. That’s just who I am. I believe that if an Alien came down from his space ship to talk to me, I would be a lot less shocked than expected. That I would adjust to the news, (ok so there really are aliens) and then direct him to nearest CVS to get some drops for his terribly red one-hundred eyes.
And that’s the way I reacted at this goat coming at me from underground. Ah, ok. Makes sense I guess. But it wasn’t a goat. Or not only a goat. It was a fish, too. A mergoat, if you will. A mountain goat all the way up to its (hips?) and then after that, a long Illustrious fishtail that was wriggling out of the ground.
Only it wasn’t either of those things. It was made entirely out of stone. A black stone that didn’t seem to belong to the hill. These stones were smushed together in the mosaic that made up its body. And out of the cracks grew all sorts of foliage. Grass and weeds and flowers and moss. Small worms and bugs were falling out and taking refuge from the sunlight back into the hole the mergoat left in its wake. Before I could really get ahold of myself he was upon me. Very close to my face, looking at me, breathing. His breath smelt strong. Like sweat, cut weeds, and skunk. “Good day,” he said to me.
For a while, I didn’t say anything. And when I did I still can’t believe that the words I chose were “You speak English?”
“I speak English not. But you do. So here we are.” That seemed to make sense at the time and I gave a studious nod. He plopped himself down on the ledge next to me, using his tail for balance. He reached his hands to the sky and breathed. As he exhaled, he let out smoke like a furnace from the cracks in his body. Looking through the cracks I could see a small fire that seemed to be floating there, burning all on its own. “Why are you here?”
“Well, I’m draining a pool.”
“This is the truth not.”
“OK, well I have a lot to think about. And I tend to think better when I’m high up.”
“Of what are you having to be thinking?”
And I laughed at myself, that I would find a mergoat to be my therapist. But like most surreal things, this would only make no sense if it wasn’t happening. Now that it was, I had a certain resignation to the fact. It seemed determined. Of course I’m talking to a fish-goat-rock-demon. There was never any other way. There was still some part of me that worried he might kill me. But I was too curious to leave now. And maybe a part of me wanted him to kill me. Maybe a part of me wanted to die. I wasn’t feeling suicidal, I just think all humans are naturally curious toward all things. And death is no exception. If we didn’t fear we’d be carted away to an institution, or slapped with the mark of Cain (mentally ill) then we’d all admit to those little whispers we get from time to time. Do it. Jump in front of traffic. Let’s see what the unknown kingdom is like. To die would be a great adventure.
So I told him everything that was on my mind. How since I came back from Spain I seemed to be frozen. Too afraid to take the next step. That I only planned to stay for summer before moving out again, and now it was February. But move to where? I felt dejected from all places. I felt like I had misunderstood the true purpose of university education; to network. And now I felt I had nobody to move in with and wouldn’t know where to begin. Would I go back to Santa Cruz? How about San Francisco? I could be poor in San Fransico, I could do it. And then there’s LA. Close enough to my family but still surrounded by artists and with plenty of Spanish speakers so I could keep learning.
But every day I would return home from work, open my computer to look at apartments and do nothing for hours. Just stare at the screen in fear. What was I afraid of? Maybe the fact that this was the first real decision I would have to make in my life. That my entire life had been on a set path before this, with clear steps to follow. Realizing I’m an academic that hates the academy ruled out the masters for me, so what else would I do? Where would I go? Most people move because of their work, but everything I want to do I can do from anywhere. I want to write and make art, that’s all I’ve wanted to do for a while, but I had to find a place to start. I couldn’t do it at my parents’ house. There were just too many personalities there, all desperate to be themselves. I seldom felt like there was any room for me. While I loved my family all I was doing was waiting. Saving all my money, only really spending it on the gas to get to work. Saving it for an apartment that I wasn’t looking for and had nobody to rent it with.
But there was also the fear of the mundane. Of paying bills, of working menial jobs, of finding a place to rent, of dealing with roommates. It all seemed too much. Of course, it wasn’t too much. Cold water isn’t too much, and yet we all freeze at the edge of the pool unless we jump in. And then I got the offer to move to North Carolina and rent my aunts apartment. That seemed to answer a lot of those questions for me. And besides, I wanted to be writing and traveling. If I left now and started writing, worked on making the money as I went along then that would be that. I would have jumped into the cold water.
But there was something about LA that was making me feel guilty for leaving it. Like I wasn’t up to the challenge it offered. And if I wasn’t up to the challenge, then I couldn’t enjoy any of the benefits. The culture, the food, the diversity, the closeness to family. All that came at a cost. The traffic, the high rent, the stress of the concrete jungle. A few weeks later, in Santa Fe, a girl would explain back-country Skiing to me in the same way:
If you can’t hang, then you don’t go.
“So you are fearing of the change, yes?” While I spoke he kept breathing out smoke. Sometimes in O’s. Shooting the little O’s through the big O’s.
“I guess I’m afraid of being a grown-up.”
“What is ‘grown-up’? Ah! Excuse me,” He started to choke on his own smoke and cough uncontrollably. I told him to just keep coughing until he caught his breath. “Ah yes, thank you. But what is ‘grown-up’? I am not knowing of this phrase.”
“I guess someone who makes hard decisions.”
“Why would anybody want to be doing that?”
“Because life is hard, sometimes.”
“My life is not being hard. The only thing being hard is my dick when I am with the nymphs of the river. Maybe your life is hard because you are wanting it to be hard, no?”
And I didn’t say anything for a while. I didn’t feel I’d known him long enough to need to be polite. I just stared at the mountains with a frozen rage. I get that way sometimes, when fear is telling me one thing, and logic another. I just freeze, all the while the water isn’t getting any warmer. And soon there will be none left. The pool will be drained.
“Listen, my friend. You are being like me. You are liking to climb mountains. You are dreaming of big dreams. This is what you are made for.” He got up, he brushed off a little more dirt, and he started to climb again. I was wrong, I was nowhere near the top of the mountain. Looking up at the path now, I couldn’t even see the top.
“Wait! What do you mean?” I called after him.
“I mean that maybe sometimes life is maybe being easy, no? Keep climbing your mountain. But be careful not to become mountain, like me, no? Hahaha.”
“What’s your name?” I yelled. He was moving slowly but steadily and was already very far up.
From a few hundred feet above me he yelled, “You are to be calling me Enki! It was nice to have been meeting you. We will never see again!” And then he was just a dot. So high up I could pretend I’d never seen him if I wanted. But the rank smell of his smoke still lingered and it made me think calmer. Enki was right. Maybe life was easy sometimes. Maybe when an opportunity falls in your lap like this, all you had to do was take it.
On the way down, the reality hit me. That I only had two weeks left in California, and how did I want to spend them? In a warehouse where dreams go to die? Fuck that. The pool was empty. There was nothing left for me here. I pulled the pump up, threw it back in the truck, and drove back to headquarters. The boss was in. I quit.
“North Carolina hu?” The boss said with resignation. “OK, well good luck.”
