Tom Robbins can let fly with the devil may care phrase with the best of em. Shit like— the Grand Canyon as the Canyon of Vaginas. Or, traveling on Thanksgiving day in his Dodge wagon he calls the cosmic turkey.
Henry, who has writer’s block, is reading Robbin's book Wild Ducks Flying Backwards to trigger his poetic mind.
Writing on his travels in Nevada Tom says,
If something is so hazardous and destructive and ugly and spooky that we don’t know what to do with it, we stick it in Nevada. The state is blotched with danger areas immense— guarded, off-limits, concealing every imaginable kind of high-tech poison, as well as various weapons systems that sup on or excrete those poisons. In Nevada, a fluffy little cloud can suddenly exterminate a whole flock of sheep. And Nevada is the place the Bomb calls home.
We dump on Nevada because Nevada seems so useless and empty because it seems that there is less there than the there that Gertrude Stein couldn’t find in Oakland. Of course, any couch turnip who’s caught The Wonderful World of Disney knows that the desert is teeming with life.
Let’s bury Tom for a moment.
Henry pours a drink and looks out the window at his Key West neighborhood, thinking nothing. He picks up an underground paper with a real hip shot of Lenny Bruce on the cover.
Yeah, Lenny was funny at times, the bit, I Can’t Cum, was a masterpiece. He was persecuted, right, sure, physically and spiritually, but, and this a deadly but, he was obsessed with bad voodoo, bad mathematics.
Lucia, Henry’s drop-dead sexy Cubano wife walks into his study bitching,
I’m tired of your drinking and partying,
what? We’ve been partying non-stop since we met at The Gato Bar in Havana a decade ago.
You're worse than me Henry.
who’s the judge?
Me,
you, you’re the judge?
Yes, I am, and you ignore me too, chicas need attention you know.
I’m writing a bit on the death of Lenny Bruce for the German magazine SYBILLE. Lenny’s story, the story of his life, not his death.
Are you suffering, Henry?
No, but junks suffer, once they take the shit they spend every waking hour looking for the next fix. Lenny functioned on junk though, he did his comedy bits in the clubs and fought the speech dicks and legal bullies tooth and claw in every courtroom in America. It destroyed him, the poor fucker was shot to pieces in the end— dead of an overdose in his Hollywood Hills home, forty and looking like he’d lived a century.
What about us, Henry? What’s in it for us?
Everything’s in it for us, the world’s at our feet. Let me wrap things up and we’ll take the Chis to Dog Beach.
Lucia goes to the bedroom, slipping into her thong swimsuit and a bulky Oxford shirt. Henry follows in a few, putting on cut-offs and a T ripped at the collar. Then she braids and oils his waist-length hair.
In no time the couple and the Chihuahuas, Che, and Mia are in their 73 Malibu cruising to Dog Beach, feeling relieved, leaving the what-ifs and junk speak on the further side to evaporate.
They park and get out of the car. Lucia Lugs her large Gucci bag and the Chis follow.
At the entrance to Dog Beach, a free beach, they're met by Lazy Carlos, who has a bamboo hut of the same name with rental umbrellas, beach chairs, and seaside sundries for sale.
Carlos is overjoyed to see the couple, greeting them like old friends saying,
I’ve got some killer weed for ya, Thai stick, two tokes, and your gone.
Henry helps Carlos with the beach chairs and umbrellas, which they carry to the couple's favorite spot, between two palms.
Settled in their chairs they light up, the Thai stick smothers them, swallowing the couple in a mighty haar.
Fifty meters out to sea, a series of glares flash off the windows of a fishing boat run aground, catching the couple's eye. The rusted vessel has been in the same place for the last year and looks forgotten.
The Chihuahuas run in the sand, nipping at each other’s heels— mimicking the livestock herding behavior they were originally bred for in Mexico.
Hot, the dogs run into the water for a swim. They’re natural swimmers, swimming instinctually.
Mia begins to struggle as she’s snatched in a cross current. Che swims towards her to help and is caught in the same current.
Out of nowhere, Lazy Carlos bulldozes through the waves, unfettered by the currents, seizing hold of the shaking pups with one arm, floating till he can stand then walking in the sand to Henry and Lucia saying,
Jesus, your pups almost drowned, they’re like kids, you gotta watch em.
Lucia begins to cry and wraps her babies in a large beach towel, Henry’s grateful, saying to Carlos,
I feel awful, we owe you.
Howza bout a case of Bucanero Beer?
You got it, we'll ring The Tipsy Rooster.
Henry and Lucia walk to their Chevy Malibu and the Chis follow. He says to her,
Luckily, our baby's memory is short.
Shut up Henry, they almost drowned, and your sermonizing like the nerd you are. I hate you sometimes.
The ride home is heavy with human vibes— Henry's and Lucia's. The Chis stick their heads out of the half-opened windows and bark at the world as it floats by.
Henry accidentally turns on the car radio with his knee as he’s reaching for something on the dash. Fresh Out, played by Kingfish Ingram and Buddy Guy, whales through the speakers. The music lifted him into a unmaped space.
At home, they order Chinese food from Po Po Hot Pot and sit in front of the living room TV watching Bob Ross The Joy of Painting on NPR. Lucia giggles with enjoyment saying,
Oh, his paintings are nothing especial, but I love his Afro— his voice is maravilloso, so peaceful, it draws you in, he makes me feel good.
You got that right babe, Bob Ross is the ultimate calming presence.
As they watch Bob communicate with his TV audience he lays out gobs of paint in a semi-circle on his palette, each a different color— Alizarin Crimson, Van Dyke Brown, Yellow Ochre, white, black.
When it came time for the first strokes of paint on the canvas— Bob gently brushes some bright orange figure-eight marks to represent the sun on the horizon.
You just can’t help but watch Bob as he waves his paintbrush like a wand creating delicate pine trees and majestic mountains.
The soft scratching sound of his brush hitting the canvas and his gentle voice, that's just a smidgen louder than a whisper, narrates each step of the painting process as he encourages viewers every chance he has.
In every episode, Bob explained his art not merely as a way of layering paint, but also as a way of capturing the eternal beauty of the world and living free regardless of the challenges of life.
As he filled his canvas with light color he say things like,
this piece of canvass is your world and on here you can do anything that your heart desires.
When he painted a cloud, he might say,
a cloud is one of the freest things in nature.
Or,
clouds sort of float around and have a good time.
And when he’d turn his painter’s knife on its edge and carved out a crisp, snow-capped mountain, he sometimes point to one side and say,
this is where the little mountain goat lives, right up here. He needs a place to call home, too, just like the rest of us.
Bob Ross was a force of pure positivity in a world without a lot of it. By the end of the eighties, his show Joy of Painting had eighty million worldwide viewers and received two hundred letters every day.
It’s hard to nail down the draw Bob had on people in TV Land, but before Joy of Painting is over in the Lucowski bungalow, Henry, Lucia, and the Chis are sound asleep on the living room sofa.
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