How I Found Myself Swashbuckling On The High Seas During My Desert Vacation
Who knows how these things begin? You’re sitting at a Las Vegas lunch counter. One minute an old man is asking if you know what time it is, and the next minute he’s got his psyche all over your aura telling you what color it is.
(Pink and blue, if you must know, but don’t go spreading that around.)
Turns out this sunglassioed guy was the love child of silent movie actress Velma Banke (rhymes with hankie), which somehow gave him supernatural powers of observation. It makes more sense once you know he’d inherited these powers from his late mother, friend of Claudet Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, Cecil B. Demille, Debbie Reynolds, and now Jesus.
Huh?
No, it makes no sense whatsoever, but that didn’t matter because he was on a roll. “You don’t like water, do you?”
Huh?
“The sea. Swimming pools. You don’t like them.”
A moot point here in the middle of the desert, where the only precipitant moisture came in the guise of an extremely localized shower that licked my car and spat a gust of sand on it, so that I drove through the rest of my trip in what looked like a breaded shrimp. But no, he was right I’ve always had a thing about drowning. Took beginning swimming at camp for 5 years running.
“Do you know why that is?” he asked me.
“No.”
And that’s how I found myself drowning in the Atlantic Ocean in 150 pounds of Medieval armor, just yards from my desert motel with the incongruous view of the New York, New York (Casino) skyline, construction cranes and everything.
Huh?
Oh yeah, I guess I left out the part about him telling me I am drawn to the middle ages. (It so happens I had spent a good amount of my sober time in New Orleans looking for a plaster medieval saint–not Renaissance, not Gothic or Victorian, medieval. And the previous day I’d been looking at Celtic art in the bookstore. Because everyone knows the one thing you have to do in Las Vegas is go to the bookstores. But that’s another story.)
So then, he tells me it’s all because I died in a battle at sea in the middle ages. No, not as a pirate (my baseball loyalties notwithstanding), but as a low aristocrat. (Evidently we can’t all be Cleopatra in our former lives.)
Swashbuckling.
Well, of course that’s my word. The word he used was “drowned.”
Later, as I drove through Wyoming, I decided that I had also lived before as a cowboy because I like the fashion so much. Or maybe a cowgirl.
Except that I have to figure out a way to get around the fact that I don’t much like horses.
Maybe I was Catherine the Great, too.
But these weren’t my only brushes with royalty on my summer vacation. No sirree. (See how naturally that cowboy dialect comes to me?) I also got to visit Elvis.
Well, his grave, anyway.
And his trophies.
It was quite an experience. His grave, I mean. There I stood, hands clasped reverently before me. Like so many before and since, I stood in silence, solemnly gazing upon the final resting place of The King and his beloved mother.
Then faintly, in the stillness of the moment, I heard the soft and tremulous whisper of passing gas–timid at first, with a sneaking start and stop, then little by little gaining confidence until it finally came tumbling out in one long breath of relief. Surely one of the truest exhalations to be uttered in that setting in quite a while.
Which points out how long-winded I’ve become. My point (You were wondering whether I even had one, weren’t you?) is that if you really like “the true noxious blare of the human soul,” you can find it just about anywhere.
–Julie
(This essay originally appeared in the Summer 1996 issue of my personal newsletter.)
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