The Gold Coast

63

When Jim tracks home later that night, he is feeling about as low as he can remember feeling. He’s below music, he doesn’t even try it. Just the sounds of the freeway as he types in the program for home and tracks along, slumped back in his seat. Even in the middle of the night the lightshow is pinballing all over the basin, a clutch of silent helicopters hovering over the Marine Station like flying saucers, jets booming down onto John Wayne, the flying freeways almost at capacity.…

Again home strikes him as an empty shell, a dirty little studio under a freeway, filled with futile paper and plastic attempts to stave off reality. Which isn’t such a bad idea. He goes to the videotapes, sees the stack of them that Virginia and he made on their bedroom systems, when they were first going out. Perversely he feels a strong desire to look at one. Virginia undressing, in the casual routine of taking off clothes, with the thoughtlessness of untying shoelaces. Standing naked before a tall complex of mirrors, brushing her hair and watching the infinity of images of herself.…

“No!” The repugnance at his desire rises faster than the desire itself, a new feeling in Jim. If he becomes captive to her video image tonight, just hours after their last fight, how much easier will it be in the weeks and months to come? It’ll be so easy just to concentrate on the image… and he’ll be in thrall to it, having an affair with a video lady, like so many other men in America.

Fearfully he grabs up the stack of cassettes. “I’m pulling out for good,” he shouts at the video, and laughs crazily. He pulls an eyedropper of Buzz from his bookshelf and lids drops until he’s blind. Instant hum in all his nervous system, replacing lust. Like the buzz in the telephone wires, or the freeway magnetic tracks, a sort of drunkenness of the nerves, which makes him want to get really drunk. He goes to the fridge, pops a Bud, downs it. Downs another one.

Back to the cassettes. “I live a life of symbolic gestures, and not much more,” he tells the room. “But when it’s all you’ve got…”

There are nine cassettes of Virginia and him, the labels penciled over, sometimes in Virginia’s hand: US, IN BED. Should he save just one? “No, no, no.” He throws them all in his daypack, goes outside.

It’s a warm night. Overhead the freeway hums, right in phase with Jim’s nerves. He can see the sides of the cars in the fast lane zoom by, one headlight each. One of the freeway’s great concrete pylons thrusts out of the sidewalk just three houses down. The maintenance men’s ladder starts ten feet up, but the neighborhood kids have tied a nylon rope ladder to it. With some difficulty, aware of his buzz, his drunkenness, Jim gets the daypack on his back and ascends the ladder. When his head is at the level of the freeway he stops. Buzz of cars passing, lightshow of headlights strobing by, zoom zoom zoom zoom. Funny to think that only the little units extending down from the front axle, not quite touching the shiny strip of the track, are guiding the cars, and keeping them from running into each other, or over the rail above Jim’s head, down onto the houses below. Magnetism, what is it, anyway? Jim shakes his head, confused. Concentrates on the task at hand. Left arm wrapped over a step of the ladder, he frees the daypack from his right arm and twists it around to unzip it. Out comes a cassette. All the cars’ tires run over approximately the same part of the freeway; they’ve made two black bands on the freeway’s white concrete, a couple feet to left and right of the track, and almost two feet wide themselves. He’s not too far from the nearer one.

He slides a cassette over the concrete, and it stops right in the black band. The next car to pass crunches it to smithereens. Loops of tape blow off to the side.

“Yeah! Good shot!” Jim continues to cheer himself on as cassette after cassette skids onto the tire track of the fast lane, and is reduced to plastic fragments and streamers of tape.

The last one, however, goes too far, landing between the tire marks and the guidance track. Without pausing to think about it Jim climbs onto the freeway, catching the daypack on the rail and practically pulling himself off into space. Oops. During one of the rare gaps in traffic he runs out into the fast lane, recovers the cassette, trips and staggers, puts the cassette on the tire marks, scrambles desperately back to the ladder.

A big car crunches the cassette under its wheels.

Carefully, awkwardly, Jim descends. Safe on the ground again, he sucks in a deep breath. “Probably should have kept just one.” He laughs. “No backsliding now, boy! You’re free whether you like it or not.” Overhead, long tangles of videotape float across the sky.