AS MEANINGLESS AS THE ORIGIN by Bojan Louis
After the continuous days of drying gypsum and cleaning the hopper with cold bucket-water my hands had stiffened, the skin between my fingers split.
The homeowner, a fat-handed computer tech from the Northwest, watched as Lucas and I washed drywall mud from off our heads and bodies. He kept thanking us for all our hard work; it took artisans like us to float-out such smooth, no-texture walls – we doubted his automatic, meaningless sincerities. Despite having met the bid we’d gone a week over the estimated month and had never addressed the homeowner with anything more than degradation. We knew no one else would have driven out this far to hang sheetrock for a guy who had made many attempts to top the workday off with earl gray and female pop-music.
Lucas had said, “Listen, this isn’t a fucking bathhouse, asshole. Why don’t you go ogle some twinky Internet fucks and not us.”
I wouldn’t have called the homeowner a pushover, but he certainly had the slumped demeanor of someone used to antagonism, though thick-skinned enough to respond confidently because of the financial gain he’d made in his life.
“I wasn’t looking,” he said. “I was just thinking that you two look like skinheads. I put your checks under a rock on the front porch.”
He slammed his back door frowning; the translucent figures of me and Lucas were mirrored on the glass, and within, the homeowner stared doubtfully at his wet gypsum walls. It’d take two days to dry until he could paint over them, which we hadn’t told him.
“Sassy bitch,” said Lucas.
“Fucking right,” I said. “What skinheads do you know who’re Navajo or Canadian? Should have told him that the noble day of braids and mullets is over, and motherfuckers who don’t want to pay forty on a haircut keep it close.”
Lucas said, “He’ll rot along with his house. There isn’t anybody who’ll do the upkeep. This place will be an abandoned shell. Let’s get out of here.”
We dried ourselves with our shirts and gathered our tools. I finished off a joint while Lucas grabbed our checks and pissed on the front porch. The nasal squeak of some pubescent singer could be heard coming from the rear of the house. I stared off the hill toward the faint, eastern horizon and then back toward the house. There was no evidence that Lucas or I had ever been there; nothing of our thoughts to be considered; nothing in the structure or trim that held any personality. Our work was as meaningless as the origin of any of the material used in constructing the place.
So we laughed at its plain simplicity and left.
* * *
Now, as the sky swallows the silhouette of Humphrey’s Peak the highway becomes a darkened corridor of trees. The dual center-lines of the road stream yellow through the curves and hills, the distance ahead discernable in the weak beam of the truck’s headlights.
Lucas tells me he intends to make New Orleans a week after I make Alaska, my flight in a few days. He can afford the bus ticket; the long, cramped trip worth the inevitable claustrophobia. He imagines that by pursuing a girl to another city love’s inevitable. Together he and the girl can begin an existence in some inexpensive shit-hole – being together it’ll all work out. I have an old friend whose mother’s boyfriend is in need of framers – idiots who can sink nails, add, work twelve-hour days, and live on an island. The toughest part about the job, the guy said, was the seclusion, the limits of escape. I won’t know what I’m in for until I can judge what surrounds me and decide what’s meant by limits.
For tonight, Lucas and I plan one final trip to the peeler bar, our forlorn commencement for having lived in Flagstaff. We don’t look forward to running into anyone: the relationships either of us have had as short-term as memories after late evenings.
We discuss no longer having to listen to, or hear about, pseudo-literati zine writers bent on self-publishing photocopied journals of themselves and other remedial alcoholics; artists calling-to‑action local hacks to demand that galleries do away with phony Southwestern art made by Anglos, only to replace it with their own modern interpretations; live‑in tourists who own second homes bitching that the town needs more gentrification, the poverty-with-a-view sentiment no longer authentic; the unspoken club of good-ol’-boys who hire and contract within themselves so that most the builders are the same hung-over potheads who constructed every other piece of shit subdivision.
We continue the discussion recognizing that both of us don’t have an address that we’re destined to – neither of us having made prior living arrangements – and that e‑mail only replaces the inconvenient letter. One of us is bound to lose interest. The only thing, we agree, that’ll keep us connected will be a similar list of past let-downs and annoyances, which we’ll summon up when we’ve related to nothing in our new settings and reminisce about what better days were had. That is, until those memories begin fading.
“It’s like the job we just finished,” says Lucas. “You’re in it until it’s done. Then you’re on to the next one. The only thing you take is what you’ve learned from unforeseen problems and ways around them. Troubleshoot, you learn how to troubleshoot and improvise.”
Lucas is the most demanded laborer in town, whether it’s for tear-outs, trench work, drywall, carpentry, or tile, he’s the first on many contractor’s lists. His back and body outlast most, and he hardly bitches. He’s been told that his mind’s stronger than his body, the combination of the two giving him the potential to work anywhere – though I’ve known him to numb his thoughts repeatedly, and have witnessed the strain of his exhaustion and restlessness.
“What I’ll really remember is the sunset across the desert,” he says. “Nothing particular or detailed. Just the light across the landscape and then it being taken away in shadows.”
* * *
The first time I met Lucas was at a poetry reading that he’d organized along with another poet. Nothing struck me about the other guy, nothing in his demeanor or the work he read from – only that he had blue eyes. While an audience gathered inside the coffee shop, Lucas shouted lines from The Flowers of Evil in the street, which slowed traffic and drew uncertain stares from people walking past. When Lucas did read from his own work it resembled that of his influences: humans as disease, coital temptation replacing love and hope.
I didn’t read any of my own poems until a month later, after a friendship of books, music, and beers had begun. I calculated the atmosphere and decided against reading anything about indigenous identity in urban environments and read, instead, poems about promiscuity and pills blurring margins. Poems with titles like The Borders Bras Make, The Alternate Window, Passing Winds. Most of the crowd already knew I was Navajo anyway, having grown up in Flagstaff. As for the rest, I could have given a shit.
* * *
We pull up to a red light at the State 89 and Townsend/Winona intersection. The northbound traffic’s heavy toward Cameron, Gray Mountain, and Tuba City. Much of it are families come to town from the Navajo Nation, returning now after having spent a few hours at the mall, downtown, or taking in a couple flicks at the theater.
Lucas exits the cab and hefts himself quickly into the truck bed. He taps the rear sliding window, leans against the tool box lighting a cigarette. I release the window lock and Lucas slides it open, his facial features choleric from the glow of the sodium oxide street lights.
“Turn the music up,” he says.
After increasing the volume I roll my window down a bit so that the smoke’s not blown into the cab; both the sounds of the wind and music make for no conversation.
Driving into Flagstaff with the moonless sky above, I look for Navajo transients along the sidewalks stumbling drunk. At this hour of evening some are bound to be gathering together, combining whatever drinks they’ve been able to bum, and disappearing into the woods. Anglo locals see the drunks as destitute pests, always hustling with the same story of how they just need a few more bucks for a bus ticket out. The way these locals tell it, it seems as if every Navajo, every indigenous person, is like this, like our entire population exists on handouts and escapism – they dismiss a culture’s minute percentage of fuckups as an epidemic.
I consider the light cutting the darkness – car lights, convenience stores, local business signs advertising tin sheds and fencing – the depth of their illumination shallow in regards to this land’s expanse and terrain. I think of the move to Alaska during the beginning of summer, the possibility of the sun never setting. The guy needing framers warned that the sun doesn’t really go down; instead, the sky is like twilight or dusk for a few hours. There isn’t a complete transition. And once adjusted to summer’s evening, the coming winter pisses rain under darkness, and the sensation of twilight or dusk begins again, only to signify day rather than night.
This perspective seems irrational, like a hallucinatory setting for insomniacs.
* * *
I haven’t been to the peeler bar since I fucked one of the girls I’d met in a writing workshop. Her boyfriend was the reason I’d gotten a concussion and broken nose. She’d left town anonymously, and I’ve only thought of her in figure, her name forgotten to me, as if saying it aloud might bring about nostalgia’s laziness.
Lucas and I order a round of beer and whiskey shots. We shoot the liquor, tap the bar with the glasses for another round, and scan the place. Both pool tables are taken and the second-hand couch near the fireplace is occupied by two polo-shirt wearing bro-dudes and a girl dressed in a shiny, skimpy answer.
“Think they’re all just friends?” asks Lucas.
“Sure,” I say, “until they start fucking each other and one of those two assholes gets possessive.”
We laugh and clink cans, throw back our burns of whiskey.
“I’m not going to miss any of this shit,” says Lucas.
“No you won’t. You’ll feel the rush of unfamiliar settings. You can be less than no one. And by the time you get bored or broken-hearted, it’ll all begin to seem like the same old shit again.”
Lucas shakes his head. His girl’s been locked up for hooking herself a way out of town and was in care facilities for breakdowns, suicide attempts – either way there’s a lot of passion. Her past boyfriends have usually been drug dealers, keeping her dosed, calm. With Lucas it’s the threat of his temper, the comfort of his physical strength over hers. For me and the girl from the peeler bar it was the promise of our intellects, our interest in literature, and the anticipation of our bodies coming together – our pasts held no bearing on the future.
“Listen,” he says. “You want my advice. I’ve traveled with only a bag on my back and had to begin where I didn’t intend to be. Don’t do more than you think you can handle. You’ll only fuck yourself. That’s it. Don’t do more than you can handle.”
Lucas has always alluded to growing up in affluence: ivy-league assurance, high-rise condos, parents something to do with dignitaries between Ontario and Poland. He had hit the road in a van with guys bound for California. They’d only made it to Arizona after the transmission blew sixty miles east of Flagstaff. Lucas was the only one who stayed, having found a junk-collecting woman who allowed him to pitch a tent next to a wall of broken refrigerators.
“I’m learning what I can handle as I go along,” I say. “But I expect that I’ll take on too much at some point. It’s the only way to really know your limits.”
Lucas nods, drinks his beer.
We watch the two polo-shirts leave with the skimpy-dress following. She turns and smiles in our direction but not at us. Her happiness isn’t for us, neither is it for the boys she trails. Lucas and I avert our glances as she vanishes through the door.
* * *
An hour passes, maybe two.
A guy who’s laid tile on some of the jobs we’ve worked shoves his head between me and Lucas. We’d both been staring into our beers and shots quietly; me thinking about seclusion and anonymity giving me the space to write; Lucas about his girl probably.
“That better be whiskey,” says Conroy. Lucas and I shrug that it’s obvious that’s what we’re drinking.
Conroy’s voice sounds like he’s holding vomit back or has been recently choked. He takes pride in smoking a pack of unfiltereds daily, eating bacon sandwiches, owning body-armor hammer-molded out of aluminum sheets. He claims to have neo-Nazi associations – we suspect his so‑called association to be a self-conscious fantasy that justifies his balding head. There’s nothing in Conroy’s features that suggests any trace of Aryan blood.
“It’s good to see two rough, hardworking sons of bitches out tonight. I just rolled up my job. Mind if I sit with you two?” Conroy asks. He takes a stool on the other side of Lucas, placing his grout-splotched forearms, which appear leprous over his tattoos, on top the bar. We’d first encountered Conroy while patching holes made by electricians; he reminded us continually not to get drywall mud in his grout lines. He took to me and Lucas because we’d play black metal on the stereo, and from that he assumed we were like him. We weren’t. He was just one more low-brow tradesman eager to drink.
“Sit where you want,” says Lucas. “Just get the next round.”
“Not a problem,” says Conroy waving down the bartender. “Three of whatever fire-waters these two have been drinking.”
Raising his shot, Conroy makes a toast to the American working class and national brotherhood. He calls Lucas, brother, and me, chief. Neither Lucas nor I drink. Instead we place our shots down on the bar. Lucas knows I’m never cool with a stranger’s or acquaintance’s stereotyped jests, especially if ignorant or unintentional. As for Lucas, he’s easily annoyed with dismissive idiots mucking around in bastardized entitlement.
Lucas pushes the shots toward Conroy and tells him, “You need to dull your stupidity and catch up.”
“Come on,” says Conroy, “I know it’s been a long day for you two as well. What you two refusing for?”
“Just catch up,” says Lucas, making an opened handed gesture that indicates we’re waiting.
Conroy insists again, agitated and taking offense.
Lucas tells him, “Listen, don’t be a pussy. If you’re all you think you are, you won’t let a Polack and Trog drink you under the bar. What would be the pride in that? Now, catch up.”
Conroy looks frustrated and confused. He says, “I never made you for a Polack, man. You’re not a Jew, are you?”
Lucas answers, “No.”
Conroy shoots one shot. He looks at me and I think of how satisfying it’d be to just glass him, except I’m drinking from a can, and the shot glass doesn’t seem appropriate enough for the action. Lucas knows what I’m thinking because, as Conroy is focused on me, Lucas holds his can and makes mock motions of slamming it against Conroy’s head.
“He’s right,” I say, “you just can’t let us drink you under the bar.”
Conroy smiles and takes the remaining shot.
Lucas orders more.
The conversation shifts to metal genres and mosh-pitting, the three of us differentiating the nuances of satanic, black, thrash, satanic-black, gore, gore-thrash, sludge, grind, dirty-black, and experimental. Conroy’s inability to understand anything beyond satanic-black metal bands, generally from Nordic regions, leads him to tell us that his girlfriend is stripping tonight, and that we should watch her because she’ll strip to anything metal, and he wants to hear some metal.
Lucas says to me, “Shit, man, I think I want to see what lame bitch would allow this loser’s prick inside her.”
I agree that I’m curious about the sexual preferences of racists – the physical features – and I wonder if their spawn will turn out just as ugly and inarticulate. Lucas agrees, adding that we’re not spending as much as we would if Conroy wasn’t picking up some of the rounds.
Avoiding the seats around the stage, the three of us post‑up at the bar in the corner, and although we won’t be expected to tip the peelers on stage, we’ll be approached continually with offers of lap dances.
This round’s on Conroy and this time he doesn’t say shit about anything as he takes his drink. Instead he walks over to a thick-thighed, tiny-titted girl with black hair cut in the fashion of a skin-chick, long sharp bangs with the rest buzzed short. She’s flirting a customer, an indigenous-looking guy, Pima maybe, who acts as if he’s used to the attention of half-naked white women trying to get money off him. It’s a job, I think, in it for the wage no matter your dislike of the client. Conroy stands before them, his back to me so that I can’t see his expression. The Pima has his hands up, obviously annoyed, his mouth moving quickly. Conroy turns his head toward the guy a few times before gulping his drink and pointing at him while talking. The girl intervenes, standing now with a hand on Conroy’s chest. The Pima nods smiling at the girl’s ass, which isn’t bad and Conroy takes the girl’s hand attempting to move it. A bouncer and the bartender run and grab Conroy pulling him back toward Lucas and I while the girl makes apologetic gestures to the Pima and they move toward the walled-off private dance area.
Conroy’s face is red, spittle collected on his chin. He looks at the ground as the bartender tells him to keep cool and assures the bouncer, who’s new, that everything’s a misunderstanding; Conroy picked the wrong time to talk with his girl. The bouncer returns to his spot in the shadows and the bartender, patting Conroy’s back, walks behind the bar and pours us one on the house.
“Damn,” says Lucas, “I’m getting slightly shitty.”
“Same here,” I say, looking into my glass, swirling the liquid.
Conroy leans over to me saying, “What the fuck’s the problem with your cousin over there? He can’t see that I’m trying to talk to my woman, thinks he has some sort of right being here?”
“It’s a peeler bar,” I say. “You interrupted a business transaction. Besides, I’m Navajo, asshole. I don’t have shit to do with Pimas. We’ve got different beliefs and everything. I can’t speak for him.”
Conroy makes the noise of a punctured tire with his mouth. “Fuck it. I need a joint. Let’s go to my place. I’ve got whiskey there, too.”
While Conroy makes his way out of the club Lucas and I stare at each other looking for an expression of agreement. Lucas smiles.
“What’s the deal with this prick? He’s so dejected that he has to invite us over after throwing out slurs to us both, then tries showing off his lump of a girlfriend? But hell, free whiskey is free whiskey.”
“True. I’m down for a joint. But I thought skinheads only smoked meth. I’m pretty sick of his bullshit, though.”
“Forget about it,” says Lucas. “We’ll handle it, everything will be alright.”
Walking outside it seems as if the night’s brighter than the peeler bar’s interior. I look back and think that only the bar itself would stay the same: mirrors, lights, pole, faux velvet, peelers. The only thing I recognize from my last visit is the atmospheric voice of the DJ. The rest’s interchangeable: the bouncers, the girls, the customers. And it seems that we’re all the same person coming from work with money meant for better things; coming from a job we lost, wishing that the next one lasts long enough to get us by; coming from nowhere only to follow someone who needs something of us into a room where we hope they at least turn on the light before closing us in.
* * *
There’s a cracked mirror advertising Danish beer on the wall above a small television. The coffee table’s piled with titty and skin-art magazines and a full ashtray. On the floor, cigarette ash and butts left from previous nights. Empties and pizza boxes decorate the kitchen counters, which is complemented by the empties and pizza boxes in the dining area. Laundry hangs out of a doorway, snot like.
“Looks like my place,” I say to Lucas, “if I wasn’t so clean and couldn’t read.”
“I wouldn’t have expected less,” says Lucas.
Sitting on the couch, Lucas purposefully overturns the ashtray on the coffee table, and though it gives me a sense of uncertainty, I see that it makes no difference to the mess already created.
“What? You come over here to trash my house?” Conroy asks, bringing out plastic cups and a bottle of whiskey.
“There’s no adding to this heap,” says Lucas. “Can’t you get that girl of yours to clean all this up?”
Conroy hands us empty cups, pours himself a belt, and sets the bottle down. He drinks holding the burn in his mouth and, looking at us, swallows hard.
“She’ll do whatever I say,” he says. “I just don’t need you Polacks and Trogs fucking up my house anymore than I want it to be. Remember, this is my house.”
Conroy finishes whatever’s left in his cup and staggers to the rear of the house, toward what’s probably a bedroom.
“What the fuck?” I ask Lucas. “I mean the guy’s a dip-shit and we’re drunk and all, but why do you want to get him worked up?”
“Because fuck him,” says Lucas. “He won’t do shit. He’ll come back, we’ll have some shots, and we’ll get out of here, probably laughing our asses off. We’ll handle it.”
By the slack smile on Lucas’ face I can tell he’s drunk, drunk as any of us. He’s pale and he picks the bottle up, drinking straight from it.
I set my cup down and lean back on the couch mimicking patience, a calm assertion that all we have to do is leave. In Alaska, I’ll live in Sitka, the only town on Baranof Island, which stretches along the western coast for about fifteen miles and only goes inland about two or three. The entire island’s nearly a hundred miles long and fifty wide, but juts straight up and is so densely forested that to lay a foundation one has to dig through dirt and thousands of roots just to hit the solid rock of the island. It could take two feet, it could take twenty-five, it could never happen. The town’s a Russian-Orthodox settlement and home to Tlingit and Haida tribes. It doesn’t seem so far from this room. It’s beyond the door – it’s a flight.
When Conroy approaches from behind the couch quietly, it’s as if his sight has left him; he walks guided only by the intention of the tiny gun in his hand. A .22 millimeter of some sort – the kind priced inexpensively, intended for woman’s purses. There’s a cheap plastic swastika glued to the butt-end of the gun. Conroy hasn’t cocked the hammer and his finger is cinched tightly around the trigger.
Lucas stares at the gun, takes two gulps from the bottle. The dark circles around his eyes seem permanent, like the black blood of his head’s bleeding through.
“That’s a cute little thing,” says Lucas. “Where’d you get it from?”
Conroy appears patient, entranced.
“It’s my woman’s,” he says. “She’s supposed to keep it with her.”
“Well, what you doing with it,” replies Lucas. “You just showing it off?”
Conroy doesn’t reply – he’s as lost for words as I am. He begins taking deep, quick breaths, and turns red. I turn to Lucas to tell him we should apologize and go, but think that it’s Conroy I need to speak to; tell him to chill and to break out the joint. Instead I say nothing, doubting that I’d remain cool and confident if the gun were pointed at me.
“My father’s father came to this,” is all Conroy’s able to get out as Lucas rises from the couch hitting him once, the bottle not shattering, and then a second time on the opposite side of his head.
Conroy crumples down and forward. He lays on the floor as if passed out on his way to the couch. Blood seeps from his nose and I don’t know enough about injury to determine if it’s important or not. Lucas pours whiskey on Conroy’s head, drops the bottle next to him. We say nothing, the silence broken by voices beyond the door that fade toward whatever late night destination holds promise of more release.
I want to know that I know what Lucas was thinking, what Conroy was thinking; what this means in terms of my departure, what this means for my and Lucas’ friendship. I want to know what he’ll say next but I don’t.
“Whose father didn’t come here on a fucking boat,” he says through his teeth. And then smiling, “That was unforeseen. Thought he was just pouting.”
I remember reading that when Alaska was purchased by the U.S., some of the Russians cried as their flag was replaced by the stars and stripes – the disintegration of their life and language like the descent into winter’s darkness. And for the Tlingit and Haida, it was just another tongue of light skin occupying their homeland.
I move closer to the gun and bend down to look at it.
“There isn’t even a magazine in it,” I tell Lucas. “And the way he was squeezing the trigger I doubt anything was in the chamber. What should we do with it?”
Lucas rubs his hands over his face and shakes his head like a dog. He grumbles something and then says, “Fuck. Kick it under the couch for all I care.”
I do as he suggests and we both look at Conroy. Taking notice of his slight breathing we laugh, Lucas because I think he’s lost it, and me because I’m relieved.
This is a new beginning – another evening ending with the want of more of what will omit reality – an instance of guilt flickering and instilling wishes that I was never here.
Lucas turns toward me, grabs my shoulder, and says, “We should go. We should go someplace else.”
“As Meaningless as the Origin” is Bojan Louis’ first published fiction in a national literary magazine. He published a poem in The Kenyon Review.