Excellent Greenfields

Prologue

Good writing combines various proportions of perverse honesty and charming cleverness. My writing lacks both elements, but not to a degree which will inhibit the story I am about to relate. For, as much as writing matters in telling a story, the specific content of this tale is so fantastic, so romantic, so intimate, so violent, and so important, that my telling will only disrupt the narrative occasionally. Essentially, it is the fall of one young man, from a place of great power and promise, to a place of deprivation, desperation, and sensual oblivion. It is a story of decadence and a story of the puritanical Western American. It is a story of death and sexuality and addiction. Most of all, it is the story, particularity irrelevant, of one young man's disappearing life. It is also a comedy.

1. High School Magic Show

I met a wonderful human being, some years ago, when he was still a child. Fresh, full of the crispness of a ripe affluent life, this boy found himself in one of the most beautiful places on earth. In his family life he had good company. The part of the United States of America that he grew up in was surely the most vibrant cities the world will ever see, home to many cultures and businesses. There are so many stories that have come from the place our hero comes from. He is, at least literarelly, in famous company.

This story begins on a back road winding through rural Washington state. On a glistening lawn of several acres a few couples pose for photographs. In the night, flashes illuminate the eminent darkness, showing glimpses into the vast canopies of elder evergreen trees. Imagine the incredible anticipation, like Christmas morning for patient lovers.

This particular evening in May, quiet with anticipation, happens to be the Senior prom of Gerald Greenfields. Young, well dressed in recently purchased striped gray suit and a tie his father had given him, Gerald exuded success. He grasped his date firmly, touching the small of her back with conviction. This was a special night, for sure.

No less anxious, she had been trying to hold his gaze all evening. Stephanie Moore, a girl who's name he would barley be able to recall only a few years later, was his date. He remembers how she came to him that night, from across his parents lawn, swishing in her green gown, childish and evocative, intoxicated by swollen circumstance and wine coolers, stolen. Three years later, she now takes photographs of herself, letting go of life on the little campus of an East Coast liberal arts school, with boys who are functionally illiterate, notably employed, perfectly deformed by time and television. Their sex flashes in the cool darkness of booze-soaked Saturday night. These are echoes of an impossible future that has already come to pass. Husky men play echoing beer pong, even how, in carpeted rentals near the quad. I seek nothing more than to be different from them. For me, it is a thin, but heartfelt conviction.

She tried to help Gerald with the pasta, but spilled. Was this a good sign for a young, sexually ambitious man? Gerald had not been drinking. He didn't know the other boys in his group well enough. The last time he's been drunk was at his parent's summer home in Italy. From the summer before, under the shining Tuscan cloud layers, he remembered the taste of wine in the back of his throat. Tonight was too important to be drinking. He wanted to remember his Senior Prom.

The lights of downtown, a luminous ballroom, an apathetic DJ from another class, all quite typical. Nobody remembers it, if they were with who they wanted to be. I remember crashing waterfalls of pink punch and the way each gown hung to the floor, just touching the wet sidewalks.

Finally they were all heading to the afterparty in a mansion overlooking the city. Someone's uncle, a very nice guy, bought beer and more wine coolers. I remember the wine coolers tasting sweet and thick like syrup.

The couples, by this time, had entered a heightened state of awareness, though the only thing Gerald could focus on was Stephanie's tits, moving slightly as she finished another wine cooler. Also, Gerald was angry because Stephanie complained, more than once, that the coke she had done right before leaving for the formal dance was beginning to become a less pleasant sheen on reality, she might have said "an insipid buzzing." Gerald doubted Stephanie had found anyone to buy cocaine from, let alone done it in his parent's bathroom. What a troubling, titillating thought. His wishful mind refocused again.

Now he was sitting on the back porch, listening to music with the other kids, glancing up at the sky to see stars. Stephanie was indoors. He was paralyzed. Where would then go? This was the night, but nothing was happening. They had been getting along well enough, and then she had gone upstairs with some of the other girls in their class. They stars seemed to move slightly. Could he see the stars spin away from him as the Earth moved? No, he felt certain it was all too slow.

From a second story window a light flashed on, then off. Trees from atop the hill, cresting a few hundred yards behind the house, stirred dryly.

He decided he wanted to sleep with someone else, and forget the last few months. What did it matter? There were other girls, especially (he assumed) in college, and Seattle tonight was so remote and sexual, it whispered to him a thousand things in a language he didn't understand. Promises.

Stephan finally came downstairs and sat beside him. She reached for his hand and took it in hers. He didn't resist. He knew it was her decision. And she had decided she wanted to fuck him.

They went back behind the house, up to the top of the hill where there was a little grass. The lights of the city shown brightly.

A few months later he found out that they had gotten pregnant that night. From Cape Cod, he flew back to Seattle to see things through. He told me later that it had to be done. They were on again and off again all of freshmen year.

As he flew back to Princeton, these kinds of impossible thoughts were in his mind. Still, the their errant fertility gave Gerald something he could not have found in the pages of schoolbooks. He was becoming someone different. Even as he stepped on to the jetway, his hands shook with a new kind of terror. He was occasionally aware of time passing in a way it never had before and a desperation seemed to be coming into his perfectly formed heart.

Truthfully, Gerald and I attended the same high school and our paths crossed many times. I would meet him again much later in life and he would tell me about the life he began after he left our quiet city forever.

2. He Has Not Met Friends Like These

On the plane to Princeton Gerald read all of This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald. It bored him, but he had already finished his suggested reading for the summer. Plane flights were a terrible waste of time, even in first class.

In college, Gerald was at a loss about what to do. He wanted to go into business, so he thought that he should start out with some economics classes. The dreary science bored him, but at least reading the texts would give him an edge on the meatheads trying to do some kind of business track. He was constantly optimistic.

He focused on making new friends. Through his parents he already knew several boys of his freshmen class. Most of them were uninteresting. Camden, a boy who's father own a seaplane company based out of Lake Washington, was his roommate in the freshmen dorms. They got along well until Gerald realized that Camden was good with women. On their second weekend in the dorms the young ace bedded two sophomores in their little sharded room, leaving Gerald, locked out until three am, to read his economics textbook in the floor lounge. Apparently the three had met at a mixer for children who's parents owned private transportation companies.

That night was won of the first Gerald spent obsessing over his future success in academia, then in business. He imagined himself attending and giving lectures, managing grad students, and being highered out of college to run a small investment division at a wall street bank. Gerald was not a creative person, and his sense of work and play was quite conservative compared with other students his age, who often dreamed of becoming a part of the second Obama administration, or designing green energy infrastructure for as-of-yet-unoccupied bits of Africa and the Middle East. He was a practical person, because he knew that money and power had to be taken forcefully, had to be grasped for and then completely locked away from the harsh, liquid-neon world: retail sales, hourly pay, fast food chains, commodities trading. He wanted nothing more than a stone palace.

Finally, a few weeks into the term, Gerald made friends with two boys living on his floor. Alex and Jack had found Gerald on Facebook. For reasons unknown to Gerald, the two found him endlessly interesting. They invited him to their room.

"What's up dude? You seemed cool on Facebook. You like good music." Alex spoke these sentences in a lazy, coastal drawl. Alex was stalky with inconsistent stubble and sweatpants.

"You smoke buds right?" asked Jack. It wasn't much of a question.

"Uh yeah. Where should we go?" answered Gerald.

"We know a place," said Alex.

"You guys finished with homework for the day?"

"Yeah. The Chem homework is done," said Jack.

"Cool," said Gerald. Finnaly, he thought, some normal kids in the dorms. Maybe making friends would be easy.

They followed a path away from the dorms and into a stand of trees, their leaves a deep, wilting green in the late summer night. They sat on a bench.

"Where are you guys from?" asked Gerald.

"We're both from Portland," said Alex.

3. Certain Classes

"Did you really think you could get away from all your money? At the end of the day when you are sleeping on that nice fucking mattress your parent's payed for, as you smoke your last cigarette and watch a fly buzzing around the light in your shitty appartment, you could still just call your parents and they could take you home. And all this would be over. That is, unless you do this with us now. What we're about to do will never be over."

4. Darkness On The Edge Of Town

On the edge of town, way East on Interstate 90 near North Bend, there is an old gas station owned by an uncle of someone we went to school with. The guy was an ex-artist who used to live in Manhattan, but came back to Seattle to retire from that scene. He said, to whoever would ask him, that art isn't worth shit, especially in NYC. He would say that you could put your whole being into a piece and make a million dollars from something so beautiful it could make the whole world cry, and the feeling you get when the sale was over and the show was taken down, was the same mild satisfaction he could get from selling a pack of cigarettes to a truck driver, coming from Colorado on a fourteen-hour drive.

I guess the guy was friends with Warhol and Lou Reed but he got tired of all the compression and creative stagnation of New York. He came back to the West, spent a few years in the Southwest working on ranches and for the Bureau of Land Management. Eventually, he got homesick and headed north to Seattle.

Gerald sat in a beat up Chevy parked behind the gas station. There were a few old cars back there, in a dirt lot which was sometimes a real parking lot. Every once in a while, the uncle still liked to throw parties for people he knew in Seattle. Some of them were artists, a few were in real estate or software, but most of the people he knew were just good friends, older people, who still liked to drink and smoke pot and run around the woods in the middle of summer, trying to find something that their day jobs couldn't give them. Now as I remember those parties, I imagine that uncle as part sleazy juke-joint owner, park Dale Chihuly, and part Tom Waits. He was old, and not at all wise or set in his ways. He had enough money and he threw the weirdest parties.

5. Outside Of America

6. It Always Comes In the Night

10. Going Back To The Places He Wanted To Hate

11. Into The Infinite Night, Warmer

The air in the city was warmer than he expected. The ocean was around him. He swam through the night like he used to swim through Seattle nights, colder and more lonely in high school.

After his parents froze his bank accounts. He set up new ones and used a connection his father had made for him, years before, to get an internship working at tech firm in the Bay Area. The company was a start-up working on ways to integrate and refine social networking cites into cloud-based computing and web 2.0 email.

12. Afterward In Another City

Working odd jobs in San Fransisco to pay rent, Gerald tried to forget Seattle. He couldn't forget Stephanie, though every day he spent in the city seemed to dull her memory. During the day he would fill in on entertainment production jobs. At night he did bouncer work if he could get it through people he knew in the Seattle music scene. With the economy as bad as it was here was more money in entertainment than in software. After his shifts, or if he had the night off, he would go back to his apartment in West Oakland, take a shower, and go out to search the bars for faces of people he recognized, and women he thought he could love. He knew that some part of him hoped he didn't meet anybody he knew from Princeton or Seattle, or any beautiful women. He did not feel ready. He had a few friends in the Bay area now. Soon, he would probably be able to find a regular job, and after that maybe things would change. Maybe the haunted part of his mind would disappear, and drift under the Golden Gate, out to the Pacific in the morning vapors. Until then, he could hope for his memories to be good to him.

As for me, I see Gerald occasionally. I'm not sure if he remembers me, but we seem to always be running into each other. Maybe we're still friends and he doesn't even know it. Maybe we'll be at the same show someday, and we'll say hi and go out for drinks. It's hard for me to see Garald go through all the things he's gone through, but at this point, I can't really be involved. I've been getting really bust at my work lately; my girlfriend has been getting really serious about moving in. It's just been a lot. These last few years have left me exhausted. I'm glad we have the rest of our lives to sort through it all. We've got some time, now that things are quiet. I Could sleep for a thousand years.