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House of Coates
By Brad Zellar, Alec Soth COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Brad Zellar and Alec Soth
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56689-370-1
CHAPTER 1
HERE'S TO THE prisoners of disenchantment, the lost, broken men bullied and inoculated against hope as children and eventually immunized against all notice or attention. To the lost boys and invisible men. To those who have been carved small by the glaciers of time and memory. To the fundamentally amnesiac, nurturers of the selective oblivion of the neglected. To the men who keep secrets even from themselves. To the ceaselessly retreating armies of the lonely. To the men who play hide-and-seek. Here's to Lester B. Morrison.
YOU KNOW LESTER as a man and a boy you refused to see or acknowledge. There are, from the time of childhood, Lesters all around you, and, try as they might, they never entirely disappear as adults, even if you still persist in not seeing them.
EVERY HOUSE is a halfway house. Every adult is a vulnerable adult. Everybody who lives with or among other people is a codependent. Everybody's some kind of junkie. Every dream has a giant eraser poised above it, just waiting to do its job. And every truly lost man knows exactly where he is.
THE HIDING CIRCUIT is in fact a sort of orbit. It is possible for a broken man to eventually break out of this orbit and end up alone in a kind of interstellar isolation, but there are usually predictable stages on his journey out. Way stations where men may live apart but that also offer communal portals frequented almost exclusively by similar sorts of lost characters. The men who run and the men who hide tend to be a deeply regressive fraternity, and as such their de facto clubhouses are largely governed by the cardinal rule of the original forts and clubs of boyhood: No Girls Allowed.
YOU MAY, OF COURSE, find men hiding, as it were, in plain sight, even in areas of extreme population density. Isolation is largely a psychological state, a breakdown of connection, but idealized isolation is something else, and is often the central component of whatever fantasies broken men still harbor.
SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED to Lester once upon a time. A series of things, actually, that had the cumulative power of a cataclysm. That's not always the way it is with broken men, but that's the way it was with Lester. He seemed to have been born with what the Portuguese call saudade, a sort of eternal, metaphysical homesickness. He was lonely, but it wasn't the loneliness of a man sitting around bored and waiting for someone to call. Lester had an instinctive understanding of the difference between apart and a part, and knew that the syllabic bridge that somehow made belonging out of be and longing was a linguistic deception that was nonetheless incapable of obliterating the terrifying distance between such puzzling and perilous words. The world is one sprawling racket of collaboration, and there are those who don't carry the collaboration gene.
ONCE YOU CAUGHT your first glimpse of the refinery towers you were no longer in the city. There were freeways and interchanges and overpasses and then there was the sprawl of the airport and then you crossed the river and left it all behind and there was just the one straight road running south through the industrial scrub.
The Kingdom of Nah, Lester called it. Oz after the apocalypse. The dark place. The place of lonely men. Find a cheap place out there to hide and in the middle of winter you could convince yourself that you were somewhere in Russia.
It had been a fallback retreat for Lester for fifteen years. When he didn't have the money or the energy to get someplace warmer or farther away he would drive down there and hole up. He knew places where he could get a cheap room or small, bombed-out apartment where no one would pay him any notice whatsoever. It was a place where all the flimsy affirmations of the culture he abhorred could be effortlessly refuted.
The spectacle of the refinery was Ruskin's Pathetic Fallacy on the grandest and most wrenching scale, a place that mirrored the way Lester felt and the way he saw the world, and it was no metaphor: the smoke and fires of the refinery towers at night and the stench and soot and the tens of thousands of light towers did nothing but demonstrate how pervasive and impenetrable the darkness was.
It was like living in the furnace room of hell. Every place that did any sort of business out there catered to people who'd had the light beat out of them. Fifteen or so miles in any direction from the refinery was like a resettlement zone for all the extras from Night of the Living Dead. Just as you entered this zone coming from the north there was a sign along the road that read: Toward Zero Deaths.
Lester didn't have any idea what that sign was supposed to mean, but it meant something, and he noticed it every time.
THERE WAS AN old Cessna on the roof. The airplane didn't fly anymore. It wasn't going to fly anymore. The airplane on the roof was just another bad idea that someone had once had. The place was a dark strip motel called the Airliner, and the Airliner was done for. The sign out front was no longer legible, and the owner now rented rooms by the week or month. The refinery was just up the road. There had once, in the not-so-distant past, been a town directly across the highway from the refinery, but other than a handful of ruins and a dozen or so trailer squatters, nothing was left but a neglected and practically invisible cemetery that was the final resting place for a bunch of old settlers and Civil War veterans.
That forlorn little cemetery could make a fellow feel like he'd been dead for a hundred years.
Have you ever had the feeling that there wasn't a soul left on the planet that remembered your name or face or the sound of your laugh? That was a Lester question, and his answer was yes.
NO ONE WOULD bother you if you slept in your car in the parking lot of the Airliner, and Lester had done so on occasion. In the middle of winter, though, he would pay for a room. There were always a few stray vehicles in the parking lot, every one of them a piece of shit.
The Airliner was right in the flight path in and out of the international airport. Jets were always going up into the clouds and falling out of the sky. Lester believed one day one of those planes was going to come down somewhere out there. He'd seen it in his dreams too many times for it not to be some kind of prophecy.
"Mark my words," he would say.
Lester liked to tell people to mark his words, and in some sense he likely meant it literally. You'll often find that these men who most long to disappear are also in some inexplicable way desperate to make some sort of mark on the world, and most in need of some assurance that they aren't—and won't be—entirely forgotten.
The refinery was slowly but surely annexing land on all sides and fencing it off with razor wire. Farther north and south of the refinery there were clusters of what the temp agencies called "light industrial" factories, places that made things like mud flaps, hoses, windshield wipers, packing materials, ice scrapers, and artificial Christmas trees. Pretty much all the workers at those places were itinerants.
Lester wasn't more than forty miles from the place he'd grown up, but he might as well have been on another planet. Which is exactly where he wanted to be.
THERE WEREN'T MANY permanent residents out along that stretch of the road. The refinery's hulking presence made the idea of human permanence laughable. Any sort of permanence, really. There didn't seem to be any children anywhere within at least a dozen miles of the place.
There were some old-timers dug in out there, mostly in the trailer park back by the river behind the cemetery. The faded sign outside the trailer park had only two words on it: Trailer Park. Weather permitting, the remaining residents sat outside with their oxygen tanks, smoking and drinking beer. They weren't regarded as a welcoming bunch.
THE CLUBHOUSES of the hiding men are generally public places—strictly speaking, at least—but they are most often tucked away in the country, at the outskirts of small towns, or in neglected parts of big cities. If you were to happen into one of these places by accident there would be no mistaking it as anything but a meeting place for men in hiding.
There were a number of such places in the Kingdom of Nah; a truck stop—the Travel Plaza—and several refinery bars and cafés, and they could provide either mute communal refuge or a pulpit for the twisted philosophy, paranoia, and conspiracies of the broken men.
THE TRAVEL PLAZA was a sprawling place and all-around lonely-man magnet. It had showers, a laundry, restaurant, game room, and lounge. You could buy groceries or pornography or fireworks there, as well as all manner of worthless geegaws, patriotic accessories, and jerked meat products. There were a handful of regular prostitutes who used the place as a sort of locker room and staging ground. Some of them danced in the refinery bars a bit farther south down the highway.
Lester would contend that the Travel Plaza was as inspired and visually arresting as any museum installation in America. Every time he went in there he found something that almost made him feel as if he was living in an age of wonders.
THE NOTION OF INVISIBILITY is a neat fantasy when you're a hyperimaginative boy, and when you are still able to think of it as a power you can turn on and off at will. But when there comes a time that you no longer seem to have any control over it and when you start to feel as if no one can see or hear you, or wants to see or hear you, that's when you might once again embrace invisibility as a fantasy you can control.
You can run. You can hide yourself away. You can choose to be as unseeable as possible. That's what Lester did. There was obviously conflict and confusion in this choice. And the men on the hiding circuit tend not to be distinguished by any particular aura of serenity, which isn't to say that literature of gossamer nonsense couldn't be summoned for romantic justification when needed. There are a lot of plenty smart men hiding in America. Lester was a smart man.
Family, childhood, and memory are almost always touchy subjects with lost, broken men, but the reasons for the evasion aren't always cut and dried. A happy childhood can be almost as crippling and inhibiting to social growth as an abused or neglected one. You'll find an awful lot of stunted, nostalgic characters in retreat from life.
If the earliest memories are of a time of relative security and simple contentment that is markedly discordant with later childhood and its experiences of peer pressure, structure, bullying, and other such adaptive nightmares, and if those later relationships and patterns become the defining experiences of early psychology and the way we come to see our place in the world, then it makes a sort of perfect sense that a man might hold tight to those truly formative memories. Paradise before the fall. In the crucible of persecution and loneliness both philosophy and intensely personal theologies are often born.
Lester's own childhood had gone downhill in a hurry.
He once received an Alvin and the Chipmunks coloring book for Christmas. He could not bring himself to color in the pictures; it seemed an unnecessary violation. The coloring book was an intended collaboration that was for Lester perfect as it was. The black-and-white line drawings were intoxicating enough as launching points for flights of fancy.
If he were to color in the book he would be subjecting its pages to inevitable wear and tear; there would surely be mistakes. He carried that coloring book with him in a plastic bag in his knapsack, intently inspected its covers and pages each night for signs of wear. He treated the Alvin and the Chipmunks coloring book like an archival object that had been entrusted to his care. He couldn't bear to be parted with it, and studied it obsessively at every opportunity. Other children noticed this, of course; it is the nature of children to take careful note of obsessive vulnerabilities, and to mock or disrupt them whenever they can.
One day at school Lester's Alvin and the Chipmunks coloring book went missing, and he was inconsolable. For several months he pored over his copy of The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook and set out to find the thief or thieves of his coloring book. This dogged investigation was ultimately fruitless and only led to more mockery and further marginalization.
There was another nostalgic hotspot in Lester's memory. He'd had a cousin who received an elaborate dollhouse for Christmas one year, and the dollhouse had fascinated Lester for several years. He was drawn to that tiny and tidy little world. It looked so manageable, a refuge or sanctuary for the loneliness that was already growing in him. He longed to live in the dollhouse, tucked away in the corner of the girl's bedroom. She would eventually grow up, and there would come a point where he would be left entirely alone.
He made the mistake of asking for his own dollhouse one Christmas and had never heard the end of it.
So that was Lester as a boy. Awkward, different, harassed for his otherness, for his mute defense strategies, which were, of course, wholly ineffective. There were boys in his neighborhood who had bedrooms full of trophies and ribbons, one more great mystery to Lester. Some people just woke up every day to discover they'd won something new. You might picture Lester, later, in his basement, intently assembling Famous Monsters models and replicas of hot rods. Or reading superhero comic books or the stories of Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson. These things he would eventually recognize as fantasies, and they provided a good deal of the fuel for both his disenchantment and his retreat from the world.
A broken boy needed consoling fantasies, and Lester began actively to dream of places where he could indulge these fantasies. And at some point in early adolescence he started to have the intense and very real sense that he had been shipwrecked.
Most broken men become through time and circumstances shipwrecks, and end up feeling shipwrecked. Lester went about it the other way around; he was precociously shipwrecked, but it took a couple of decades for him to recognize that he had somehow come to inhabit and carry around with him the wreckage of his own ship. This shipwreck was his life, and the island on which he'd found himself shipwrecked was the world. He once read somewhere about a lonely British inebriate who spent well over a decade and most of his fortune booking cabins on increasingly ragtag Pacific ocean steamers, always with the hope that he would eventually find himself shipwrecked on some forlorn island where he could at last crown himself king. It never happened, of course, and he finally ended up in Hawaii, broke and begging for liquor money from tourists.
THE LITERATURE OF hermits and solitude is full of serenity, self-discovery, and wisdom; it's a world of saints and scholars. You'll encounter the occasional ornery or eccentric character, but even these tend to be homespun archetypes. Most of the legendary recluses embraced solitude; their message seemed to be that a man's business was to find his place in the world and hold his ground. The writing is full of so much blather about contemplation and silence, and so much preachiness, that it leeches a good deal of the essential mystery and motivation out of the act of retreat.
Even the nihilists and the most philosophically bereft loners can't kid themselves. A person can't properly hide in this world unless they believe there's someone out there looking for them. There's a good deal of ego invested in the act of hiding. Or maybe these fugitives think there's someone out there in the world who wants something from them that they're not prepared to give. The sad truth, of course, is that the world seldom wants much of anything from such people, and that is a truth that could do nothing but further hurt the feelings of men who had had their feelings hurt so many times and in so many ways that they could no longer feel anything but hurt.
Lester wasn't just running, though. He was looking for something, even if he wasn't quite sure what he was looking for or even willing to admit that he was looking. The day such characters finally admit to themselves that they actually are looking for something and start mulling what that something might be is when they truly become missing persons. Not missed, necessarily, but missing.
SOME LESTERISMS:
The devil is a breeder.
An invisible man spends a good deal of time wrestling with the word repellent.
The world is a manhole.
Innocence is the last great American myth.
Hope is an imposter bird.
God's nothing but Einstein in Vegas.
Dante should have suffered more. Scrooge's hell was much more terrifying.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from House of Coates by Brad Zellar, Alec Soth. Copyright © 2014 Brad Zellar and Alec Soth. Excerpted by permission of COFFEE HOUSE PRESS.
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