Clearly Now, the Rain

A Memoir of Love and Other Trips

By Eli Hastings

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Eli Hastings
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-077-0
CHAPTER 1

We'd been fired into America like pinballs. We were joyous young clichés, Louis and I, with our jointly owned VW van, Kerouac stories, and bags of drugs. We'd only become close in the last year and we were a strange pair: Louis near six feet, broad shoulders, black hair shorn mostly off then; I was short, skinny, blond hair growing into impossible tangles which, to my eternal mortification, I'd later try to pass off as dreadlocks. He carried the love of many people because of the high school years of designated driving, generosity, the shoulder he offered for adolescent crises. In short, he was full of humor and kindness and I was intense, rather self-absorbed and embittered. But we sensed the space our friendship had to grow into and the will to go was something we shared in that spring of 1996.

There were a lot of elements that went into my momentum away from Seattle then. Only two months after we tossed our tasseled caps, Louis and I had moved into a newly constructed, spacious five-bedroom with three other high school friends, courtesy of a crooked realtor who demanded cash and no rental contract. The scenario was, at first, the culmination of a dream we'd all shared for years: no more classes, no more books, no more busywork and what passed for education at our inner city high school. We all got service sector jobs and pooled our money for discount groceries and beer, believing giddily for a time that we were crafting an adult community from the ranks we all considered as close as family. But the dreams of high school die hard and the mismatched workaday schedules, the filth multiplied by five adolescent males, and the pressures of bills came together with considerable speed—as fast as we'd alienated our entire residential block with parties and late night dramas on the back porch.

One January night Louis and I lounged in his back bedroom, the drapes pulled against the nastiness of the winter; I recall waterlogged leaves splatting against the pane in the wind like wet rags. A drunk stranger weaved past Louis's open door, presumably looking for the bathroom. I shoved it closed and turned Bob Marley up on the stereo, sliding a glance at Louis who, for the first time I could recall, was scowling along with me. In the soupy light of the candles and the far-away optimism of the reggae, we both silently discovered in that moment that this communal party life was not what we'd dreamed. It was no kind of destination and, at least for now, in the middle of that dead, freezing post-high school season, Seattle had become a husk and we had to empty our bank accounts and try a more extreme version of freedom: a road trip with no destination.

I'd also left behind a disturbed friend. There had been a fissure running through him for years, and in the last months it had finally yawned wide, becoming full-fledged schizophrenia. This development brutally erased any hope I'd harbored of helping him. Getting physically distant was a partial balm to my guilt, disappointment and fear, conjured forth by a very rough ride at his side.

My brief experience with corporate America, as an espresso jerk in the financial district, was another element that caused me to walk away from my familiar life with a straight spine. They had rules, which now seem a reasonable part of customer service but then caused me great consternation: you had to "strike up chat!" with and smile at every single customer who came through the door. That little shop hosted some angry and sad moments: when they 86'd the Professor, a sweet and silent homeless man who voluntarily swept our sidewalks, because a banker complained about his smell. It was not a context in which I fit and the impulse to untie the apron and fling it down in protest grew acute quickly.

My most vivid memory from that job is the phone call: I was in the midst of the mid-afternoon rush, whirling from the espresso machine to the garbage can with a steel tub of scalding coffee grounds in hand when the phone rang. The apple-faced manager said with bright annoyance that it was for me (we weren't supposed to receive social calls at work, needless to say). I dumped the grounds, absorbed the pointed sighs of the waiting businessmen, hooked the phone under my chin and learned that one of my best friends, Hugh, had just lost his big brother—a role model to us all—to suicide in his parents' home.

These were some of the events that sent me off bitterly into America, to be as naïve and recklessly free as possible until college began in the fall. I believed I deserved it, as if it were my only chance, as if I weren't on the track to a private liberal arts school and a life of sampling experience, of the luxury to explore.

With these blinders on, with this momentum, I traveled toward Serala for the first time.

One of my and Louis's first stops was Sage Hill, the small college we would enter six months later. Our friend Jay had already started there, straight out of our ghetto high school. By the time Louis and I made it down to visit that corner of Riverside county, beneath the brown air and hard sunlight of the desert, Jay was already deeply in love with Serala.

Jay wasn't the type to flip easily over a girl. I'd known him since the seventh grade when he'd a been an intellectual band geek, his passion and authority on many subjects so grown-up that it used to dumb most adolescents into silence—those whom it didn't grew comfortable in Jay's orbit. In the eighth grade we'd been urged into an extracurricular debate class together and I'd come to appreciate Jay, and to see that his bombast—always impressive, not always welcome—arose from insecurity. One thing he'd always had, though, was a funky and intimate relationship with rhythm, and he graced the high school jazz band, and, in college, both punk rock and hip hop crews with leadman presence. He had thinned and refined into an oddly handsome and sophisticated cat by the time he met Serala.

Man, I don't know how to tell you, I'm really trippin' over this girl, he'd reported to me late nights on his dorm phone that winter, blowing smoke out in frustration. There's no way for me to say what it is she does to me. She's hard but so good—like drugs almost. But she loves different.

The first time I saw her, I was scared of her. I wonder if it showed.

She is sitting in the corner of a cinderblock dorm room. She smokes furiously—not fast, but with drags that seem lethal. She is silent and her eyes are purple, bagged, like they've weathered a storm. Her south Indian skin is as dark as her pupils. She watches us severely. I try to tell myself that she is clearly a hamper on the good times we've planned with Jay, and that I don't give a shit what she thinks. But these falsities evaporate every time I feel her aloof gaze hit me.

Soon the silver dollar sun is halfway dropped, shadows are growing and someone has produced malt liquor. We are in a dorm room next to Jay's that has been abandoned in typical private college fashion: the administration has not even noticed that spoiled teenagers are turning it into a den of vice. Someone scrawls a quote on the wall and I follow the lead. I rise with drunken steadiness in the dying sunlight that leaks in from the window over Serala's shoulder, and slash a large RIP for Hugh's brother across the east wall. I tell myself I'm eulogizing my dead classmate, but I'm also thinking that this might...