chase scenes

by Basil Rosa

The world chases money, so you chase money too.

—Arnold Wesker

Winter memories were waiting to be found. Markets were closed. Anything hot had been claimed. So, roundly arid, I learned how to drift and how to re-varnish each surface I’d worn. I heard and rejected as vital the lie that success is conquest and gain that my charter should equal Ginsberg’s Howl, and that I should use only a Number 2 pencil whenever I tried to sketch a dog’s laughter. 

The mind, a trunk full of impressions, and I couldn’t write to empty it. I had ideas, such fiery obsessions, lists of whom to enshrine and defend. Green mountains, milky ponds, the kingdoms to come where I’d mingle, seeking places to stand fresh, hopeful, looting, and locked in.

I took advice whenever possible toward the pursuit of means and began to realize the ultra-rich, like the ultra-poor. are invisible. I read Paul Fussell’s piquant Class, where he lays it all out succinctly. It’s “new” rich who show off their lucre. They want others to know they once had much to prove.

I began to not labor, but to be merely an embodiment of size, cunning, and arrogance, seeking to show more than indifference or piety. I grew less popular the more I avoided either/or and all-or-nothing-at-all approaches. Half measures made the most sense and kept me whole when flagging. Spending time in Russia, learning the language, seeking to fit in, I began to appreciate survival as a means of doing and thinking by half. Not all. Never all. The rumors of my failures were only as exaggerated as I allowed them to be in the stand-off between what’s seen and doubted, versus what’s rumored and manipulated and spun as truth.

Finding a saint or two to emulate, favoring Augustine and Francis of Assisi for starters, I began to decorate myself for each stranger in every hive where I could meet them, absorbing their eloquence, erudition, and applications of efficiency and belief.

I’m still living a one-lifetime ride up and down, dipping after dosing on scales that weigh the reaches between goodness, sloth and licentious. Not the whole of anything, but just enough of any spontaneous eruption to keep me humble as a form of imperfection seeking refinement.

I have my deaths, my chase scenes, bouts of paranoia and longing as I lament what I believe to be engineered forms of demise. I have my memories of a day’s work done. These bring peace and kinship with the giving soil. Long ago, I moved to city life, and I miss farm work: the fresh air; the ride home from my days working in North Carolina tobacco-hanging barns, riding in the back of an F-1 Ford pick-up along winding roads with blankets of kudzu spilling down from the steeps and across the macadam. Off in the distance, a wavy line of sapphire blue, and beyond that another horizon, a greener blue that was hazier and formed a seam of low hills to mark earth from sky, and I’d get lost in those seams. Before I knew it, I was back at my boss’s house with the others in his family, including his son and brother, and all the day’s work and the chase scenes were over, and it was time to feast and be grateful in our weary bones.

Recently, I rode through those hills west of Asheville after being away for thirty years, and I kept thinking the quiet’s gone, the solemnity, that there are too many cars, storage units, and dollar stores. Too many dry cleaners, payday lenders, and empty storefronts in the town. I didn’t even recognize the boss’s old farm since it had been chopped up into lots, each of the barns and coops—remodeled, leveled, or else used for other purposes—owned by different families and concerns. I thought it a detachment from the land thoroughly executed.

I watched a car pull into the driveway of the boss’s house. It was a car that looked like all the other cars, a two-door sedan, gray, made in Asia no doubt, and assembled by robots. Not a trusty Ford F-1 pick-up anywhere in sight. Not one truck on what had once been a farm of over 1,000 acres tucked away as if – at least in my mind – a sanctuary off the beaten path.

A woman got out, and I saw she was alone and looked pale and lonely and tired and was maybe thinking of bar-coded food and a screen experience and some form of narcotic and a weekend to come without companions and not needing to drive once more into the growing cities that kept moving closer and closer. I thought back to times before banking was mostly direct deposit and online to those evenings when my weekly check would arrive. The eagle flies on Friday, Saturday I goes out to play. I carried coins then for phones, vending machines, for a street beggar. I can’t remember when I last jingled coins in my pocket.

Happiness, I suspect, cannot be taken away because it isn’t given. I viewed it then as I do now, as earned, lost, rediscovered. I remember, paycheck in hand as I clocked out, how I’d smile out of nervousness at the misery I saw in my co-worker’s faces. Was I just as miserable? Some of them glared at me as if I were a lunatic. Others sneered while others cheered. A mixed bag, as always, when it came to co-workers. I often refused their invitations to go drink at a favored gin mill until I was blind. Perhaps some of them were right. Perhaps I was a lunatic. Perhaps I still am and perhaps there are no angels and no stormy Mondays and no freedoms and none of this is a beautiful dream.

*****

I used to work on a packing line with William. We called him The Waltz King. Such moves he had. Such a singing voice. Some guys get by in a factory because they don’t let anything kill their spirit. William believed nothing existed until it was seen by more than one person.

Enrico worked with us too, and he was always laughing at William, because Enrico believed all that existed passed through each of us, one at a time, as a unique form subject to interpretation. Enrico’s spirit lives on inside of me, too.

Lastly, there was fat Jacques with his ginger beard, who I swear walked out of one of Shakespeare’s popular comedies, and one day at lunch told us that his reason for living was his search for an eighth age to add to his famous “seven ages” speech in As You Like It. This proved I’d been correct in assuming Jacques wasn’t real, that someone had dreamed him up, even though he was one of the fastest and most efficient workers on our line.

You can learn a lot about human nature and resilience and your own shortcomings by working a line for a while.

*Originally published at The Argyle Literary Magazine

Image of Basil Rosa

BIO: Basil Rosa’s novels include Tax Free Ride On A Midnight Carousel, and A Million Miles From Tehran, both published in Australia by Jaffa Books. Recent stories have appeared online in the UK at close2thebone.co.uk and retreatsfromoblivion.com.