If a friend offers you a plane ticket for a meditative mountain rest cure, go.
T built his own house right on top of a mountain, some 7,000 feet up. The house is marvelous, somewhat Japanese, open and flowing with a sky room jutting out of the roof. His brothers and one cousin helped him do the lifting and hammering and nailing. Can you imagine conceiving the idea of a house then actually doing it? Especially when you never did anything remotely like that before? The interior is manly, sleek yet comfortable, and decidedly Swedish. The deck wraps around a view of neighboring mountaintops a hundred miles away. Grab a drink, slip into the hot tub, and you may think that you are on another planet. The air is thin, but drowning mermaids are always gasping for oxygen, even at zero elevation. T understands this.
He warned me about the mountain rules. 1. Always look outside before you go outside. Black bears, grizzles, and mountain lions wander around at whim. 2. Do not leave any food, not even a wrapper outside. It will attract all sorts of wild creatures. 3. The hot tub needs to be covered when not in use. Otherwise snakes slither in.
I was on a rest cure in a freaking zoo!
My biggest wish was to go trout fishing. T had mentioned it on one of his visits at my house and I had been dreaming of it for over a year. So he took me to a sporting goods place and outfitted me in waders (haha!), a little vest, and some flies of my own. His dad had given him some poles, which he had never used. T hadn’t been trout fishing either. We didn’t even know if the trout would be running this time of year…didn’t matter.
Saturday night we went off for dinner. As T says, “There is only one place I know of in all of Denver where you can smoke.”
We ended up at a little bar, heard some music playing, and went in, sliding into a booth away from the bar. We heard two measly country/blues songs, and then the band went on break. T wanted to shoot pool, me too, but I had on a short skirt and well, it didn’t seem like a good idea.
T kept eyeballing this little round man with red suspenders that was taking on everyone in the place. I knew he wanted to see if he could beat him, so I suggested he go for it. “You sure?”
“Yes.” “Just get an extra beer and set it at your side of the table. I don’t want any men bothering me while you play.”
Everything was going good when my eye caught the eye of a smoldering Italian man at the bar. He was with a girl with long black hair. I couldn’t see her face since she was looking at him. He was looking at me.
The next time I glanced toward the bar the Italian man was hugging the girl, tracing his hands over her back, his eyes locked on me.
I looked over at T shooting pool. He was tied up, 6:6, with the round man.
I tried not to look over at the bar, but I did.
Adonis was still staring at me. I stared back at him. Suddenly I realized that he was pretending that she was me.
What a repulsive dick!
But I couldn’t look away. I felt my breathing change. The jerk was turning me on like crazy. He was pissing me off and arousing me at the same time. And he knew it. He blew me a kiss.
I tried to resist, but I wanted to feel it. Ass! Stop it! You can’t be with one girl and get another girl hot. IT IS AGAINST THE RULES!
I wanted to touch my skin. Rub my hands all over myself, and he knew it. He nodded his head. How the fuck did he know what I was thinking?
He pointed toward the bathrooms.
No way! I shook my head.
Thankfully T came back to the table beaming. He had won. Bad though because I knew that meant that he would need to play another person. I asked him if he would mind if we left.
T and I drove back up the side of the mountain in his Land Rover, the sky to the southeast taunt with electrical charges. I didn’t say a word about what had happened. T acted like he thought he had done something wrong. Of course he hadn’t. So I ended up telling him. He laughed like a wildman. “I get my life together, now just need the finishing touch of a woman, and you come here and get turned on by a strange horndog on the first day. Damn, my luck.” T and I had decided long ago that having one friend we didn’t fuck was a good idea, it changes the dynamic and you can never go back to just being friends. So he wasn’t getting any tonight either. Poor guy. I keep trying to tell him that telling women that he is looking for his next ex-wife doesn’t work. Sometimes men act deaf.
We hot-tubbed for about an hour, no stars because we were IN a cloud. Haha! Mountain living is so perverse. T said having a bikini-clad Midwestern mermaid in his tub was almost unbearable. “Next time put some clothes on.” he said. “All of that anti-terrorist talk, and me being a fucking gentleman is the only thing that saved you.”
Early the next morning, after a frittata breakfast, we headed off down the path to the river 12 miles away. I was so afraid of snakes that I told T I wanted to wear my waders. Damn did you ever try to hike in waders? Bad idea. When T said they he would gladly suck any and all snakebite poison right out of me, I went back to my high tops. But I was still thinking that wrapping my legs with aluminum foil and duct tape would have been a good idea.
Brautigan’s “Trout Fishing in America” comes to mind. The whole event was closer to his gestalt prose, than Robert Redford’s “A River Runs Through It.” Mostly we laughed and slipped and fell in and recast our poles again and again. Then we decided that there must not be any freaking fish in that damn river for us to catch. So much for a fresh trout dinner. And I wanted to learn how to clean a fish. Another time.
When we returned to the house I worked on some sketches, wrote a lot of stuff, and lazed about. T said he liked the way I scented his house. I laughed. What does that mean? I stink?
Something needs to be said for a man whose culinary talent lies in burnt barbecue chicken. I actually love it, which is worse. So do our mutual friends who lived on it back when we were all in school together. T is nearly 15 years older than us. He erased his first life and started all over again.
We had a weekend of fun and now it was over. We ended our last night watching “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” T loves it too. It’s a good giggle. He contrasted all of the scenes with those in some book called "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Matainence." I think he was just making it up...a hilarious adlib.
He also gave me a necklace with a charm in the shape of a little key. It says, “Key To The Future.” “With this you will get anything you want. You are a bright star. Don’t forget that.” He knew about the darkness I had been feeling about the loss of civil liberties and about war. I am glad that someone believes I will be okay, and more importantly, that the world will survive in a good way. Plus I love it when men lie to me, especially when “bright star” has a massive stress pimple on her face.
The flight back on Monday was horrible. Security guards with biting dogs. It made me very nervous and brought me right back to where I was before I left...harnessed to fear.
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