18% Gray. Zachary Karabashliev
“Existentialism?” Pure disgust.
“. . . loses his love . . .”
“So you’re writing a love story?” Sarcasm, plain sarcasm.
“. . . himself . . .”
“And he finds a bag of ganja? Genius!” Elijah slams the table with his fist.
“But one night, one crazy night, as if in a dream, he stumbles upon a bag of marijuana.” I sigh and stop. I won’t bother telling the skeptical bastard what my story is about. He doesn’t ever leave his shit-hole because he’s too busy reading countless how-to handbooks on screenwriting written by losers who haven’t made a single film. I know Elijah is searching for the formula behind the romantic comedy. He talks like a character from a romantic comedy, yet he’s neither romantic, nor comic. Elijah is just a benign tumor on my life story, and Lord only knows why I like him.
Silence.
Tara nods at Steve. He goes to the post-it spotted fridge and starts looking for something. Somewhere among the numbers for insurance agents, dentists, auto mechanics, producers, actors, lawyers, bankers, handymen, and the like, is the link to Chris. Then Steve dials a number and makes an appointment for me for the next day. We drink more wine and go to bed very late. I fall asleep the second my head meets the pillow.
I dream about Stella.
*
I can’t remember myself ever doing less than three things at the same time, which has made me confusing—I suppose—for people who neatly catalog their acquaintances. In college, I wrote short stories and articles for the local paper, I loved photography, and played the guitar. While I did the former two less frequently and only for pleasure, I took my music very seriously. I had a cheap electric guitar, which I plugged into an old Russian radio, turned the volume up to the max, and wailed on the strings. I played with the volume cranked up because it was the only way to distort it enough to make the sound unidentifiable. I was looking for my sound then. Later, I added several more people to this mayhem and created something like a punk-rock band. We would play three-chord tunes all night long. Gradually, grandiose plans for worldwide success started taking shape in my head, and for some odd reason, they seemed realistic. I managed to inspire the poor souls around me with some kind of wild enthusiasm and belief, absolute belief, that we were destined for glory.
The lead vocalist was a metalworking machinery operator with thick glasses, the drummer was a cousin of mine who worked in his father’s beekeeping business, and the bass player was an overweight, acne-stricken kid from a small town nearby who was about to graduate in accounting. However, the three of them were good musicians, so the rest just didn’t matter. My own musical education consisted of a handful of classical guitar lessons and countless hours of heavy metal on the old Kashtan eight-track. I didn’t really know the guitar technically, which is why I tried to compensate with high volume, distortion effects, and insane onstage behavior. And because I was on familiar terms with only a few guitar chords, my songs were simple and exploded with the fury I felt precisely because I couldn’t write music. I secretly hated my inability to master the guitar musically, but, on the outside, I was all confidence and authority in front of the boys. It was my energy, I believe, that kept people coming to our small gigs. Stella spent hours with the band in basements and garages, a silent witness to the chaotic rehearsals and quarrels. She just sat off to the side and drew in those countless notebooks of hers, submerged in her own world whose soundtrack, I suppose now, was a compilation of my angry songs.
*
Chris and I meet at the Aladdin Café on the beach. It’s still overcast, but the skies seem promising. I tell him my made-up story, trying to sound like an inspired writer. This marijuana thing is just one of the story lines in the novel, but I want to sound authentic. I tell him I want to know what the odds are of my character being caught. I’ve heard that every other surfer around here is an undercover cop and, although everyone smokes, if my character tries selling pot just like that, they’ll get him sooner or later and the novel will have to end. That’s why I want to learn more, how it works, how he gets rid of a bag of pot, retail or wholesale, and, of course, everything will stay just between us. He knows who hooked me up with him so there’s no danger of . . .
“What’s your question, man?” The low velveteen Jamaican voice interrupts my stream of bullshit. I take a breath and shoot:
“How can the hero in my story sell a bag of marijuana?”
“He can’t,” the big black man answers calmly.
“What do you mean, he can’t?!“
“He can’t.”
“Well . . . how about half a bag?” I decide to take what I can get.
“He can’t.”
“Why?”
“He don’t know how.”
“That’s why I’m here with you, my friend. Tell me how.” Chris studies me carefully, sizing up the bruises on my face.
“Listen, man. Your hero has a problem. First, he loses, then he finds, yes? What he finds, though, he doesn’t need. And what he needs, he already has.”
“Well . . .” I clear my throat. “What can my hero do?”
“Let him move on now. OK, man?” The big black figure with a white turban leans back in his chair and sips his orange juice.
“Chris, you don’t think I’m . . . ?” I make small circles around my temple with my pointer finger.
“No.” He smiles for the first time and the big golden hoop in his ear trembles.
“You don’t think I’m a cop or . . .”
“No.”
“Then why?”
Chris turns his head. After a pause, staring at the ocean: “See the waves, man. Each one is born, it grows, it fights, it foams, and then comes ashore, bsh-sh-sh-sh, and it dies and becomes ocean again. Beautiful, yes? And again, and again, and so on . . . and so on . . .”
“You’re not helping me, man,” I say.
“I help, man. I help.”
*
We put together eight songs and found a studio where we recorded them on a primitive four-track recorder. The album was entitled The Winds of Hell. We produced a cardboard box of TDK cassette tapes, and now the only thing we needed was an album cover. I asked Stella to draw something. The next day, she gave me a picture. It was an expressionistic, somewhat naive silhouette of a girl, arms stretched out as if ready to fly out of the frame of a dark-blue window. It was beautiful, but the boys from the band didn’t like it. I didn’t think it fit, either. So we went to Angel the Artist. He listened to Judas Priest, wore ironed jeans, and lived with his mom in a gloomy apartment that always smelled like sauerkraut.
Our album came out illustrated by Angel the Artist, with a picture of a snarling monster clutching a guitar in its tentacles.
God, was I really that blind?
*
It’s clear that I’ll have to deal with this on my own. I need to improvise. There’s a bookstore across from the coffee shop. I go in and buy a roadmap of the United States, a college-ruled notebook, and two 99-cent pens. Then I stop at the photography section. I open a book of portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson. I sit down between the aisles tête-à-tête with the faces captured by the great master’s little camera. I turn the pages one by one. There’s Matisse with a pigeon in his hand; William Faulkner in the company of two stretching dogs; Jung with a pipe looking straight at me; one very innocent Capote; Ezra Pound, who here reminds me of my late grandfather, Stefan Nichts; a smiling Che Guevara; Samuel Beckett staring at the bottom left corner of the photograph; Albert Camus with a short cigarette butt in his smile and a turned-up jacket collar; a suspicious Sartre on a winter bridge over the Seine; Stravinsky with two large hands and a walking stick; a tired Marilyn