Hotub DIrt

PART 2

After leaving El Paso, I was so broken I barely stopped until the car made me. A fan belt broke in Barstow, California, home of the Western American Railroad Museum. I was out of money, and slept on the side of the road for a day or two while my generous, brother wired me the money to get the car fixed and get to his house in Los Gatos ( The Cats), California. Neal Cassidy's son lives there. He plays in a cover band at Coffee Shops and Mexican Restaurants. Jamba Juice, knick knacks and very healthy animals.

When I get there, my brother and his wife are gone.... working. They are doing this in Alaska, and I'm left with Manuela, a German Nanny, and my brother's two stepchildren, Brittany and Trey. I'll only be alone with them for a week or so at first, until we meet the family up North in Lake Tahoe for a weekend of skiing. Things were looking up for me, but I wasn't looking down.

After skiing, I went on the job hunt, and finally found one at a maintenance firm in San Jose. We had a contract at ADOBE. That's the company that makes photoshop, illustrator, and most of the other programs we now use to put our paper together. It was the nineties, the internet was rollin big, and I was putting together bookshelves in Charles Geschke's (one of the founders) office on the top floor of this huge innovative building. A different chef came to the cafeteria every week. There was a workout facility and televisions that came out of the ceiling. Geshcke came in and talked to me and asked what I wanted to do with my life. Everyone who was making a lot of money on the internet seemed to be really into self-help, and I didn't know what color my parachute was. I told him I wanted to start a newspaper. He told me I'd have to learn how to use all his products. I was putting books about algorithms on his shelves by then, and just wanted him to stop looking at me.

"I'm not really a janitor you know."

"You should learn computers."

"Yeah, maybe I will."

I stocked power bars and organic milk in conference halls and break rooms, crawled in air conditioning shafts, re-organized storage facilities, and watched 5500 successful young adults run a giant corporation without ever really knowing what that corporation did. I was too busy trying to hide, trying not to look at them. Hoping they were not looking at me, in my Izod shirt, JANITOR in script on top of my heart. Now of course, ADOBE products are a huge part of how we make our living. Weird, but everything then was a giant domino stack of coincidences and dream-like trances that kept me from facing all the terrible, wonderful things were going to happen to me.

El Nino was also brewing out in the sea and it had been raining for weeks.. I'd just cleaned up a homeless camp outside the ADOBE building. There were shit stains on the concrete that had to be pressure washed off. I remember the spray reflecting off the concrete being brown, yet I could still see the faint picture of a rainbow. I figured that must have meant something, but I didn't linger too long.

I was already well into an affair with the Nanny, Manuela. Kissing and tugging and grabbing in the laundry room while the kids were sleeping, her broken English washing over me and letting me pretend I was somewhere else, that I hadn't just seen a rainbow in shit water. I went home that day and tried to bite her to pieces on the couch. Afterwards, she took my German Shephard and put it in the Garage down the hall from my bedroom, and took the kids over to their father's house down the road. Joint Custody.

Sometime that night I awoke to a loud, explosion. I thought it was thunder. It was about 1000 tons of mud that had fallen from the mountain and lodged against the side of this beautiful home full of pictures and nice sink fixtures, weird shaped soap, stainless steel and rain sticks. I heard my dog raising hell, and walked down the hall to the garage door. I couldn't open it and noticed a brown watery fluid seeping into the house under the door. I thought I was dreaming. (The shit water). I could hear my dog, along with my brother's dog, drowning. But I couldn't pull the door open. I didnt know it, but the garage was filling with mud. Finally another boom, and the front of the house sheered off in front of me. If I could've opened the door, I would have been looking at the front of our house spilling down the hillside. Sparks were flying, things were breaking, and I ran back to my bedroom and out the back door. When I jumped off the porch I landed in the mudslide. Thick sludge full of insulation and wood and nails,wires, and fire headed down the hill to a small creek that ran beside the house. I can remember seeing a light pole snap, and sparks go everywhere, then a punctured gas canister go by. I really remember thinking that I would probably die, but that it wasn't as bad as I used to think it would be. I made it up a hill to a neighbors house, broke the window and went in, tracking dark mud across her white Berber carpet, past the candles, past the mountain bike, past The Road Less Traveled.

I called my Sister-in-Law from her phone and told her that there was a hole in her house and that I didn't know what happened. I'd never even heard of a mudslide. I thought maybe I'd done something. I thought it was something Manuela and I had done.

I dug for two weeks through the sludge looking for my dog. I found him with his head missing, and buried him, which is kind of silly, I guess. I also found a letter Id written the day before the mudslide, to a friend named Will Swinney. In it I claimed to feel kind of Muddy, that I didn't really know what I was doing out there. I found my car under the hot tub down in the creek. Coincidence?