Naked

  The jade was picked up later, somewhere in Washington State, where he also learned to cut and polish. “That’s where the skill comes in,” he said. “Take a look at this rock, it’s nothing, right? Just a dusty hunk of nothing.” Jon stood on his artificial feet. “Now, take a look at this!” He lifted a sheet off a nearby table, revealing a half dozen brightly polished slabs of jade fashioned into timepieces, the battery-powered minute hands jerking past blobs of gold paint used to represent numbers.

  “What is it?” he asked, holding up one of the larger models.

  “A clock?”

  “Well of course it’s a clock, but what else? What’s it shaped like?”

  I tried to make sense of it but the best I came up with was a slice of bread, its corners chewed away by ants or mice.

  “It’s Oregon, dummy. Everyone knows the shape of Oregon. Maybe you haven’t spent much time here, but that’s still no excuse. The yokels in this town are going to snatch these babies up like you’ve never seen! I’m charging a hundred bucks a pop, which is nothing compared to what some of these jokers are getting for their wildlife paintings. What with Christmas right around the corner, I’ve got to get cracking and start churning these suckers out, and you know something? You’re going to help me!”

  The moment he said it, I knew he was right. Opportunity had presented itself, and I saw no reason not to run with it.

  It was Jon’s habit to begin each workday with a prayer. “Am I the only person in this room?” he’d ask. “My pal Jesus is looking down here saying, ‘I know that’s Jon, but who’s that puddin’head with the stupid smirk on his face?’ Hurry up now, get down on that floor and act grateful you’ve got the knees to bend on.”

  After I had assumed the position, he could commence. “Hi there, Lord. It’s me again, your old buddy Jon. If it’s not too much to ask, I’d like you to keep an eye on this disrespectful mutt I’ve got working for me. Let me be patient and try my best to teach him about you and this precious jade you’ve given me. And hey, thanks for the coffee, but do you have any sugar? HA!”

  “You can joke with the Lord,” he said one morning, removing his right leg to apply ointment to the bandaged stump. “Hey, up there. I sure hope nobody takes me to court. I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. HA!”

  The religious instruction was delivered with a charm that quickly faded once it was time to begin work. The jade was sliced upon a pressurized saw equipped with a hose that prevented the blade from overheating. Jon cut the rock into slices, and it was my job to sand them, using a variety of graded discs that fit upon a rapidly spinning wheel. Once they were smooth, I would polish the quarter-inch-thick slices against a rotating leather belt. The friction generated a fair amount of heat, and despite the gloves, I would occasionally let go of an advanced piece, sending it shattering onto the floor.

  “You stupid, clumsy jackass,” Jon would shout, pounding his canes against the table. “Do you know how much work went into that piece? You goddamned silly mutt!” Having exhausted me, he would take his case to the heavens. “Hey, Lord, why are you treating me this way? Is this some kind of a test? Did you send me this butterfingered fuckup in order to teach me a lesson? What did I do to deserve this stinking shit?”

  The door leading from the basement to the first floor would open and a woman would poke her head over the banister. “Brother Jon, is there a problem?”

  “Oh, I’ve got a problem all right. This son of a bitch just dropped four hours’ worth of backbreaking work on the fucking floor. That’s my goddamned problem.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” the woman would say, covering the ears of her five-year-old daughter.

  This scenario repeated itself until the day the child addressed her mother as “shithead,” and it was suggested that Jon might want to find himself a more secluded workshop.

  “Get the equipment into the car,” he said. “We’re clearing out of this rat’s nest.”

  He found another studio, a former beauty salon located on the outskirts of town. We moved the machinery in the morning, and by afternoon he was back to tracing the shape of Oregon onto the slabs of polished jade and cutting them on his jigsaw. Quite often during the course of our workday, we were interrupted by members of Jon’s church who popped in to see how we were getting along.

  “Pete, Kimberly, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll let you have one of these clocks for seventy-five dollars. Don’t try to talk me out of it, this is the Lord’s discount, not mine. I… what was that?” He’d look toward the ceiling, cupping his hands to his ears as if trying to decipher information from a distant, crackling speaker. “What? OK, if you say so.” Turning back to his company, he’d shrug his shoulders. “The Lord told me to throw in the batteries while I’m at it. What do you say? Seventy-five dollars.”

  Whether he was speaking to Phil and Dotty Frost, Walter and Linda Tuffy, Hank and June Staples, the Mangums, the Stenzels, or the Clearwaters, the response was always the same. “We appreciate the offer, Brother Jon, but I’m afraid that’s a bit out of our price range.”

  “I’ll let you have it on a payment plan, how’s that?”

  His fellow parishioners would chuckle, trying not to meet his eyes. “We’d love to take you up on that, we really would, but the bank’s already got us on more payment plans than we can handle.”

  “Fucking cheapskates.” Jon would stand at the window, waving as the visitors pulled out of the driveway. “Hey, Lord, why’d you send me these cheap, good-for-nothing friends?”

  Until the age of seventeen I had been forced to attend the Holy Trinity Orthodox Church. The service was delivered in Greek by a robed priest and involved endless rounds of standing, sitting, and kneeling. Every few hours the altar boys would roam the aisles with smoldering tankards of incense, and one by one the congregation, woozy from fasting, would drop like flies. Because I could never understand what was being said, I formed an idea of a God who wasn’t judgmental, just painfully boring. Christ was a mystery to me, and Jon and his friends were eager to fill in the blanks. There were days when I would leave work convinced that there was a five-hundred-dollar reward for the first person who could dunk my head into the nearest river or plastic baptismal pool. I was a lump of unformed clay surrounded by a guild of willing sculptors. These people were the only contact I had outside of the men and women who picked me up hitchhiking back and forth to work every day. I’d arrive at the shop, listen to Christian radio, get blessed out by Jon and blessed back in by his visiting friends and neighbors. It was like being sent to a foreign country to be immersed in a language that somehow, over time, became your own.

  “Peace be with you, brethren,” “You know what they say in John thirteen,” “The King is coming!” I fought it like crazy, but my only alternative was talking to nobody. I’d tried that already and had wound up lecturing to cows until the farmer told me I was ruining their digestion. This God was someone I wound up turning over and over in my mind each night as I returned to my increasingly cold trailer. Was He punishing me with this meal or was He rewarding me? Did He actively watch me or take me for granted like a fish you don’t notice until it’s floating on the surface of the tank?

  With a newfound spirit of forgiveness I wrote my friends ten- and fifteen-page letters, and again, they never responded. They couldn’t manage to send a postcard while here all these people — the Halbergs, the Cobblestones, Sam and Charlotte Shelton — had mailed invitations asking me to join them for Thanksgiving dinner. When I declined, some people had taken it upon themselves to deliver a turkey to my trailer door. Unfortunately, the offering was decorated with slices of canned pineapple, but still, they’d made an effort. The gift embarrassed me, and so did the others. I found myself ducking into the bedroom several times that day. A car would pull up and I’d run into the other room, pretending I wasn’t home. I was shamed by their goodwill and mortified by their cooking. There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marsh-mallo
ws.

  “What did I tell you,” Jon said. “The best people in the world, and you’ve got them right in your own backyard. Did your friends back home give you a basket of homemade stuffing? Did your folks bake you a marshmallow pie or a tray of crescent rolls? Of course not! They could have, but they didn’t.” He walked to the window and shouted up at the sky, “Hey, Lord, in case this numbskull hasn’t said it, thanks for the stuffing.”

  From time to time during the course of the day, Jon would shut down his saw and turn to me saying, “I’ve got a friend who wants to have a word with you. He says he’s been trying to reach you but you won’t take his calls.”

  “Well, it’s hard, seeing as I don’t have a phone.”

  “Don’t need one. This guy speaks straight to the heart. Why don’t you talk to him? What have you got to lose, happiness? You’re not happy now, I can tell you that much. You’re searching in the weeds for something you’ve got right under your snotty little nose. You’ve got to reach for the joy! It’s not going to drop into your lap, ya stupid nitwit, you have to ask for it. That’s all you have to do, is ask.”

  My trailer had water but it wasn’t hot. Since arriving, I had always boiled my bathwater, but by the last week in November it had gotten so cold that the water assumed room temperature upon impact with the tub. My heating system consisted of a space heater, the oven, and a toaster, none of which did any good unless I hovered directly over it. The warmest spot in the house seemed to be the refrigerator. I went to bed fully dressed and removed my gloves only when bathing and scooping the change from my pockets. Because the studio was heated, I took to spending more and more time there. Jon would leave at five, and I would remain to sweep up and work on my own projects. The clocks did nothing for me, but the jade itself could be pretty if it wasn’t polished to death. Jewelry was too fussy, and bookends seemed a waste of time. The thing to make, I decided, was a stash box. Jon promoted his clocks as being both a needed object and a conversation piece. The problem was that you needed to be stoned in order to really talk about them. No one else was going to sit around and appreciate the fact that at three o’clock the hands fell on the cities of Eugene and Arlington. Stash boxes were the supplement that would make these clocks bearable. They needed to be simple yet charming. Not so elegant that guests would reach for them and not so luxurious that the owners would be reminded of all the other nice things they might own if only they didn’t spend all their money on drugs.

  There were nights when I’d work until midnight and sleep on the cot Jon kept folded in the back of the studio. Just before dawn I would wake, muddled and wondering where I was. “Go back to sleep,” a voice would say. “You’re in a former beauty salon surrounded by battery-operated clocks. It’s nothing to worry about.” Was it God talking?

  I’d always thought of my life in terms of luck, but what if there was someone actually in charge of our destiny? What if all our plans amounted to nothing? Think of the guy who trains all his life for the Olympics and steps on a nail the day before the competition. What about all those perfectly nice, hardworking people who lose their homes to floods and fire? I listened to a woman on the radio. Burns covered eighty percent of her body. “The Lord doesn’t send us any more than we can bear,” she said. Like Jon, she didn’t seem bitter about her situation, far from it. She sounded practically ecstatic, her voice so high and melodic that I thought she might burst into song. “God doesn’t close one door without opening another.” Was this peace, this total trust and surrender? Because I was lazy, I’d adopted the philosophy that things just happen. It was much easier to blame others than it was to take initiative. Was it accidental that Jon had picked me up hitch-hiking just when I’d thought of returning home? Could I have been sent by a higher power to this small town? Had the Lord arranged for me to make stash boxes?

  I was entertaining these thoughts early one morning when Jon arrived saying, “Lord, I must be doing something right today! Last night I prayed this lazy mutt would show up on time and here he is, the coffee brewed and waiting.” He took no interest whatsoever in my boxes, dismissing them as a waste both of time and materials. “What are you going to put in there, three fingers? A couple dozen Q-tips? They’re not even big enough to hold a deck of cards. Who needs a thing like that? A clock, on the other hand, everyone needs a clock. Someone shows up at your door asking, ‘Am I early?’ Where are you going to look — at a box? Of course not! A lady says, ‘I was supposed to boil that pudding for half an hour, maybe if I look at a box I’ll know if it’s done.’ It’s ridiculous. The point is to give people what they need, idiot. You want to fiddle around after work, go ahead. You have the skill and I was happy to teach you. The ability, you’ve got. The brains? I wouldn’t hold your breath. You’ll have to ask the man upstairs for help in that department.” He paused to refill his mug. “Say, this coffee’s good, isn’t it? Let’s thank our friend, Jesus, for providing the beans. Come on now, bow your empty head and then let’s get to work. Time is ticking. Ha!”

  Our time was ticking toward the upcoming crafts fair in Portland, where Jon planned to make a killing. He’d paid a good amount to reserve the booth but expected to make that money back within the first ten minutes. “These yahoos around here are all so broke, they can barely afford to pay attention. Portland, though, that’s different. Portland’s where the money is. If I don’t clear three thousand bucks by the end of the day, you can set fire to my legs and watch me walk home on my hands. You hear that, Lord? What do you say, Big Guy, do we have a deal?”

  The fair was to be held at an outdoor market on a Saturday two weeks before Christmas. We spent that Friday making price tags and loading seventy-five clocks and four stash boxes into the station wagon. Jon was in a festive mood and gave me a ride home, interrupting his lecture on salesmanship to point out a young woman standing beside the pay phone at a filling station. “Sweet merciful Christ on a cracker, look at the cacungas on that one! Oh, Jesus, I could suck on those titties till the cows come home. Lemme at ’em, lemme at ’em.” I’d seen him act this way once or twice before, but this time his eyeballs were popping so far out, they were practically bumping up against the lenses of his glasses. After pulling himself back together, he dropped me off in front of my trailer and set a time when he’d pick me up the next morning.

  Waiting for me on the door that evening was a plastic bag containing six letters along with a note from Hobbs apologizing for not delivering them sooner. It was his habit to drive to the mailbox each morning, and these letters, having arrived over the last few weeks, had been sitting on the dash-board of his truck. I approached my mail the way a starving person might sit down to a banquet. It seemed best to consume such bounty in small portions, but still, I couldn’t help myself from devouring each letter whole, my eyes running up and down the page as if I were looking at a picture. I would swallow first and then, upon the second reading, begin to chew each word into a paste. There was a letter from my sister Lisa and another from my mother, each of them hoping I might be home for Christmas. My mother, in her familiar, slanted cursive, described an automobile accident she’d witnessed on the beltway. Lisa’s letter, neatly typed, informed me that she wanted a curling iron for her birthday and a case of either shampoo or champagne for Christmas. I had apparently drawn her name in absentia and would be held solely responsible for her happiness this coming holiday season. There were two letters from Veronica, the first recounting her happy Thanksgiving and the second detailing her recent breakup with “the son of a bitch who used to be my boyfriend.” There was a letter from my friend Ted and another from an old college roommate. I read each one again and again, tracing my fingers over the word love until I could see each of them clearly, sitting at their desks and kitchen tables. To describe the feeling as warm would be doing it an injustice. It was as though after I had mourned and planted flowers on their graves, my dead had approached me in a restaurant explaining that it had all been some terrible mistake.

  I was sitting by the oven with
the toaster and space heater at my feet when a harsh light shone on the wall, and Curly came to the door. “Long time, no see,” he said, pushing past me and examining the contents of my refrigerator as if he had been sent for that specific reason. “I thought you’d left town until Dorothy told me she’d seen you hitchhiking on the road to Hood River. How’s my mother’s coat treating you, Einstein?” He had grown more forceful but no more attractive. “I could have you arrested — you know that, don’t you? Stealing coats is a crime in the state of Oregon.”

  It didn’t worry me that I might spend the night in jail for accidentally taking the jacket of a madwoman whose son considered a newel post to be an erotic object. I gave him his mother’s coat and apologized for the misunderstanding, thinking that might be the end of it, but he kept coming at me, cuffing my head and inviting me to wrestle. “We can do it without the toys if that’s the way you want it,” he said. “I’ve got a bottle in my truck and we can use that. Come on now, Einstein, you owe me.” Every time I brushed him off, he came back harder, driving his knuckles into my skull and working me toward the bed. “You ticklish, are you? You like being fluffed up like a pillow, is that what you like, Mr. Tickle Toes?” I’d escape his embrace for a moment or two, but the man was just too fast for me. For the first time in months, I was actually sweating. He pinned me down against the floor. “Get off of me!” I shouted. “I can’t do this with you because… because I’m a Christian.” I felt then as though both my heart and the mucus-producing glands of my nose and throat opened simultaneously. There was, upon my gloved hands, so much snot that when I united my palms in prayer, they cemented themselves together as if they’d been glued. I wept and wailed and then I sobbed. “I’m a Christian. I love Jesus, can’t you see that?” The words rang true to me, and I cried even harder. “A Christian, I’m a Christian. Help me, Jesus, I’m a Christian.”