Still Life

It’s not exactly like Gaucho Rasmussen had been far out of orbit. He was no hermit. He liked the company of people. No drug addict either. Nothing hard anyway. Just hitched a smoke here and there, when the opportunity arose. Hardly antisocial behaviour.
 One thing he did do, Gaucho, was leave. Two years into his green card, he’d just dropped the mop on the floor of El Vino’s. No goodbyes. No claiming late wages either. He just walked straight out of L.A. Across bridges and suburbs, his apron still on, an unlit cigarette on his lip. Until he reached a whole spaghetti dish of highways looping into each other, and hitched a ride the hell out. By the second day, he’d needled into the jugular of the country, the eastbound interstate. He bought a used copy of The Grapes of Wrath in a gas station and started reading the chapters in reverse order. From California to the East Coast, to the beat of his rides. Pretty confusing but hey. As for the cigarette, he was going to light that with a New York match.
 He never did make it to New York. But that didn’t matter. It was the ride that counted. There he was, living an American dream. He wished his old friends back home could see him. He resisted the urge to buy a throw-away camera.
 What was the big deal about the West coast anyway? L.A. was like an overpriced refugee camp. Endless one-storey blocks, purring with air con. Sprawled without restraint on the desert floor, like an ogre’s pool of vomit. Endless cafes and restaurants, full of frustrated actors pretending to be movie stars. The pretending actors waited on anorexic movie stars. Who pretended to be actors, and pretended to eat. It was like some sort of perverted food-chain. The real loser was the chef.
 Somewhere past Phoenix he scored with a barmaid. He wasn’t very handsome. The foreign accent probably did it.
 “You from Europe or something?” she slurred as they came out of the bar.
 He wanted to take her back to his motel room, but they ended up doing it in the car park. His shoes crunching the gravel in little skids as they fumbled in a dark corner. One hand on her, the other against a dusty cement wall, he looked up and noticed the sheen of the Arizona sky. Starlight pouring equally onto him, her, good situations and bad, misery and good fortune. Ungrudgingly, unjudgingly.
 In the middle of it all, she froze and again asked if he was from Europe. When they were done, she hung around for a while, swerving slightly, smoking his unlit cigarette. He wondered whether she was waiting for money. But then she left.

Utah is where things started slowing down for Gaucho. The money ran out just past the state border. He got hungry. He was walking along the road. Blaring sun, power lines running straight to the horizon, curving with the globe. Just one dot broke the motif. The dot grew larger, and also longer. After half an hour’s walk, Gaucho could make out a tall male figure.
 The man was wearing an elegant pin-stripe suit and old leather shoes with perforated toe-caps. He seemed very dirty but his suit was immaculate. He looked disapprovingly at Gaucho’s attire, but smiled an expert’s smile when he came to the boots.
 “What are you doing here?” Gaucho said a little surprised.
 “What you doin’ here, fella.”
 Outmanoeuvred, Gaucho made to leave. But the man started walking alongside him.
 “Hey fella, you from Europe or somepin?”
 “Yeah.”
 “Come from out West?”
 “Yeah.”
 “What you do for a livin?”
 Gaucho almost missed a step. What did he do for a living? Waiter? That was the job he’d done longest. His shoulders slumped under the weight of his thwarted ambitions.
 “Back home I wanted to be a comedian.”
 The man gave a grunt of wisdom like he’d heard it all before. He stopped. Gaucho felt forced to turn and face him.
 “You came all the way out to California to make your fortune, didn’t you. Europe too small for you, huh? Only Hollywood would do for a talent like yours. So you come out here, wait tables for God knows how many years, and now you’re through. But here’s the thing. Mama told you not to go. Papa told you not to go. Lordy lord you just couldn’t go back empty-handed.”
 Pause. “Are you from a Frank Capra film or something?”
 The man laughed an expert’s laugh. “No son. That, I am not.”
 As evening fell, they set up camp a few metres from the empty road. The man did most of the work. You could tell he’d lit plenty of camp fires. When pangs of hunger woke Gaucho up at dawn, the man was gone. So were Gaucho’s boots.

So there was Gaucho. Nowhere to go, nowhere to go back to. With plenty of freedom, but no cash to enjoy it. And no boots.
 The man’s shoes gave up somewhere in Wyoming. Gaucho tried walking on with flapping soles, but he ended up tripping. He walked in his socks for a few more miles. Then he simply rolled up his trousers and carried on barefoot.
 This slowed his progress considerably. On top of which no-one was going to give him a lift. He hadn’t seen himself for a while, but he guessed it wasn’t a pretty sight. His beard was about one inch long. One inch of lumpy, dusty caveman shag. His skin was as parched as the caked earth he’d seen on the Utah roadside. Most of all he stank. His last ride, a pig farmer in dirty overalls, had kept the window open all the way.
 Water was the main problem. Civilised food he could do without, at least for a while. He stole fruit, ate roots when necessary. Not sure what they were, but he didn’t die. One day, he came upon a red bucket full of corn cobs. Probably some kid trying to sell them off to hungry motorists. But the road was empty and the kid wasn’t around. So Gaucho just walked off with the entire bucket. That was his best day for some time.
 The next evening the skies swelled, then opened up for several hours. A few pioneer drops thudded on the dry dirt, leaving thirsty imprints. Then the sky turned dark, the drops turned to ropes, and the dirt exhaled. Laughing out loud, Gaucho breathed in the musty air and drank.
 When he opened his eyes, he saw the silhouette of an approaching car, under a froth of drumming raindrops. The car came level. It stopped abruptly, and a giant of a woman stepped out. She strode up to Gaucho, seized the empty red bucket, and kicked him in the groin. Then she went back and the froth drove away.
 As he fell to his knees in pain and folded up in a puddle, Gaucho suddenly grasped how far he had drifted. There he was. Alone, all alone, in the middle of a crowded continent. As far as the eye could see there was just him, a dirty pair of trousers, a hole-ridden sweater, an old baseball cap. His dirty toes, fanned out on the tarmac. Vast expanses of dirt, bristles and prickles all around, walled in by mountains that never seemed to get closer. And now and again a deluge of rain that flushed nothing away. Like a cheap car-wash.

A couple of days later, Gaucho was crawling barefoot on the approach to a large town. More like a small city than a large town. There were plenty of skyscrapers, but the sky was very low, and the scrapers were squat. The streets were empty.
 Next, the streets got crowded. It was five o’clock and thick streams of smart office workers poured from the buildings. They poured into main streets, spilled into alleys, dove into subways. Now and again one tried to move upstream, like a spawning salmon, then rejoined the flow.
 Smelly, shaggy Gaucho observed from a fire exit. He tried to beg, but no-one noticed. His empty stomach tugged hard at his ribs. He hadn’t eaten for ages. Something had to be done. He had to find some food.
 He straightened his hole-ridden sweater, adjusted his old baseball cap, and stepped into the rush with eyes closed. But next thing he knew he was out again. Spun, digested and spat out into a car park entrance. He tried again. And again.
 The fourth time, he was thrown into a side square. There was a man selling balloons and candy. A few kids in designer wear were sliding down the spine of a blue dragon. Parents were conversing on parent-friendly benches.
 That’s when his trip finally ended. All the momentum was gone from Gaucho, all the energy spent. He just stood. Stood right still, like a statue. Baseball cap fallen to his feet, week-old eye crust in his tear-ducts. Staring at a blue dragon. Nowhere to go, nothing to do.
 Then a little girl pulled her father up to Gaucho. She pointed at his frozen form. Gaucho hardly registered the scene.
 “Look dad,” she said. “It’s the Beast. Where’s Beauty?”
 The father glanced at Gaucho. “Where’s Beauty?” he ventured.
 Gaucho didn’t answer. The father wavered for a second. Then he pulled out his wallet, dropped a quarter into the baseball cap, and swept his child away.
 Next a pale nerdy boy came with his father. As the father drew out his wallet, the boy took a good long look at Gaucho’s frozen form and said: “That’s not the Beast. That’s the Count of Monte Christo.”
 Thawed by the glint of money, Gaucho squatted and searched his baseball cap with unbelieving hands. But as he rose again, cap in hand, he saw the shock in his patrons’ eyes. The boy’s jaw had dropped. The father looked embarrassed but righteous.
 “You moved,” he complained, then replaced his wallet and was gone.