#manilabeach

About three days after that panic attack at the Co-op, on the eighth of September, I woke up early—around seven in the morning—feeling restless. I was still being docked shifts from work, so I had nothing to do. Chloe had to work from eight to ten, so I hung around the house for a while, cooking up some breakfast and talking to Steve. When Chloe got home, we smoked some weed and she told me she had to run some errands and that she had to go back to work at four. I really didn’t want to hang around the house anymore—the weed immediately had me in fight or flight mode—so I took off on one of the bikes that one of the roommates had hanging out on the back porch.

A relatively easy five miles later, I was seated on a piece of driftwood on Manila Beach with my shirt off and my bare feet rubbing indentations into the sand. The cloudscapes had been unreal all morning—gigantic cumulus clouds that came and went, changing shapes as they drifted across the blue horizon. I stared at them, and watched them come and go, and I breathed deep and felt good, right down to the bone. So good, in fact, that I laid down in the sand right there by the ocean and fell asleep.

I’ll be damned if I didn’t fall right into a slightly more modern version of that dream I hadn’t had since way back in what? 1983? 1984, maybe? The dream of being kidnapped in the night by a skeleton. In this version of the dream, I was in our bedroom back in Arcata, lying next to Chloe on our mattress on the floor in that white room with the white walls and the white tile floor, and I woke up and rolled over and saw this skeleton standing in the corner by our closet. He still had that faint glow to him that I remembered from my childhood. But this time, instead of scooping me into his arms, throwing me over his shoulder, and running outside to a pick-up truck, all the skeleton had to do was beckon me. He stood there and stuck out his left arm and shook a boney finger at me, and I got out of bed—being sure not to wake Chloe—and I walked right up to him. He didn’t say anything, but lifted his right arm toward the door, and I stepped into some jeans and grabbed a t-shirt off a pile of dirty laundry by the door and walked out of our bedroom and out of the apartment, where I found myself standing at the base of a large mountain of ice. I turned to look for the skeleton, but behind me was only a horse, which neighed loudly, right in my face, and then took off, galloping away along the base of the mountain. It looked like it was almost flying or something. I don’t know, it was a dream. Then there was a cold blast of wind and I turned around, again and again, looking for our apartment—anything recognizable really—but everything was gone. There was nothing around me but ice, and I was in a goddamned t-shirt with bare feet.

I woke up with a start, and I was lying on my stomach with my arms out to my sides, the right side of my face pressed down into the sand, and the ocean water lapping at my bare feet. My feet were numb, actually. I stood and brushed myself off. I had sand everywhere—in my pockets, down my pants, in my underwear, in the crack of my ass. I had probably been thrashing around in the sand something fierce. The sky was much darker; a rather ominous storm cloud was approaching over the Pacific. I put on my shoes and shirt and started walking back to the bike to get back to Arcata before I got soaked.

Manila can actually be a pretty foreboding beach to visit. As I left I had to jump a fence put up by the gun club that had a warehouse and targets nearby, and there were a few radio towers with warning signs and such that I hadn’t noticed on the way in. The Moonstone and Lieufenholtz beaches were both far more majestic, with their redwoods and tall, rugged sea stacks jutting out of the water, but there were always people on those beaches. When I went to Manila, I was greeted only by the dunes, and the occasional gun shot in the distance. The Conservation Corps also did a damn good job on the trail through the dunes to the beach—it wound down through the trees that had been contorted by the gentle but relentless ocean breeze, and then climbed a steep log staircase before coming out on the rolling hills of sand that bowed towards the water.

When I got to the staircase on my way out, I saw another person standing still down at the bottom of the stairs, and I jumped a bit, startled. He was a large man with a floppy brown knit cap on his head, and a long, gray beard. He wore a brown handkerchief around his neck, black rain boots, and a long grey wool jacket with holes in the sleeves, and he had his hands in his pockets. A lump formed in my throat. I lifted my hand in a friendly wave, and continued walking down the stairs, towards him. When we got close enough to hear each other, I said, “Hi, there.”

At first, the man did nothing but stare. I wondered if he wasn’t crazy. One too many hits of acid in his day. Then he frowned. A deep, dark frown that sent chills up my spine. And he said in a gravelly baritone: “A storm is coming.”

I smiled nervously and walked calmly by him, then sprinted out to the road and the bike and took off, out to Samoa Boulevard and back to Arcata, being chased by the rain the whole way.

When I got back to the apartment, I hopped off the bike and opened the front door, and I really just wanted to take a nap and try to sleep off the memory of that skeleton and the psychopath in the trees. But I pushed through that door with the front wheel of the bike, and I steered the bike into the kitchen past the refrigerator, and sitting right there in front of me on the goddamned couch was John. He was smoking a three-foot tall glass bong with Brie and Chloe, who had just got home from work.

“Dan Duffy!” he yelled.

“John?!” I looked at Chloe and she smiled, then kind of raised her eyebrows a bit and shrugged. “What the fuck are you doing here, buddy?” I asked.

“I’m the new guy on the couch!” John said. He laughed.

“Where the hell did that bong come from?” I asked.

Brie yelled, “IT’S A PARTY!” and got up to get herself a beer from the fridge.

John grabbed a djembe from next to the couch and pounded on it. “I brought a couple drums, too,” he said, standing and putting the djembe’s strap over his shoulder. “I’ve got this one, some bongos, and a talking drum. I thought we could find you a guitar and go play some songs out on the street. Try to make a little money.”

I smiled. “Maybe, man.”

About an hour later it seemed like the storm had completely missed us, so Chloe, John, and I had walked up Bayside to Union Street, north and uphill to 13th, then east and up a steep hill to the Redwood City Park, where a crowd was gathering in the huge, well-manicured grass square in the middle of a ring of redwoods. We initially avoided the crowd and cut off the road, onto the trails that wound through the ferns and the gigantic trees. Chloe had a bottle of water with her and a backpack full of beer, and John had his talking drum. I had nothing. We hiked way up into the hills of Arcata Community Forest, climbing up fallen logs as big as train cars, absorbing the scents of pine and wet earth. When we were up in the woods as far as any of us wanted to go, we sat on an old growth redwood stump that had to have been some twenty feet across and Chloe packed a bowl. She handed it to John, who smoked it and offered it to me, but I waved it off.

“What are you talking about, man? I just got here!”

And that was all it took. I smoked, then Chloe smoked, then she laughed a cute little laugh and took off downhill through the ferns, over fallen redwoods and down the massive hill back towards the city park.

John and Chloe bounded through the ferns ahead of me, down the steep incline. The towering redwoods dwarfed them, and they splashed through puddles of sunlight—the sun having reappeared momentarily through a break in the clouds—sunlight streaming down from infrequent breaks in the sea of pine needles that all of a sudden seemed to swarm like insects high above our heads. I got itchy. None of the pine needles were brushing my arms as we ran, but I started to feel them itch, nonetheless. The ferns also felt like they were prickling my skinny legs through my jeans. I eventually stopped running, and hung back behind John and Chloe and felt sick.

As we neared the bottom of the hill, I could hear drums—some low and rumbling, infrequent like thunder; others high-pitched and almost constant, like the onslaught of a machine gun. The sweet smell of marijuana blended with those pleasant, earthy scents of pine and soil. As clouds rolled in overhead, John—now only about twenty paces ahead of me—peered down through the pines and yelled, “We made it! We’re at the park!”

My stomach turned, and I scratched at my arms. Chloe fumbled around in her backpack, there was a clinking of glass, and as I caught up to her she handed me a beer.

“You alright, man?” John asked, cocking his head to look into my face.

I looked behind me, up the hill we had descended, up the towering tree trunks to the pine needles above, and beyond them to the sky that had once again turned grey and lifeless. Then I turned back and looked past John and Chloe, out to the wide-open, grassy clearing dotted with nappy headed men and women—all of them young and white, and wearing various shades of brown, green, grey. All flannel and denim and corduroy. Dogs chased each other in circles. Clouds of smoke hung in the air roughly ten feet above everyone’s heads. I was observing all that when John shoved a joint in my face. “Here you go,” he said, smiling. “Take the edge off.”

Chloe looked at me with a moderate look of concern on her face, then sucked down a bowl full of weed in one massive hit and slapped the ashes out on her leg. And all of this was happening under the relentless drone of those drums.

“Let’s go check it out,” Chloe said, inadvertently blowing her hit in my face.

I threw back half of my beer, shoved the bottle between my legs, and lit the joint. My heart pounded in my ears as I inhaled, and a rock formed in my gut. But a voice in my head—quiet at first, then slowly gaining volume—said, “Fuck it.” After a couple of minutes it was screaming, screaming to be heard over the drums as we walked out of the forest onto the grass and Chloe took her shoes off.

This was the city park in Arcata. A large, square field of green grass surrounded by hills of towering redwoods. There was a strange energy to it all, an uneasiness that I knew must come from something other than the drugs, the relentless drums, the evening fog settling in, making everything seem suffocated, claustrophobic, as if a tarp was being thrown over the town. Chloe had her shoes in her hand and was padding around in the thick wet grass as John handed her freshly packed bowl to a shirtless young man with patched corduroys and a feathered vest. The young man smiled and handed his drum to John—a small aluminum high-pitched thing that John stuck between his legs and attacked with a flurry of fingers.

I smoked my joint, put my hand to my heart, and counted my breaths. The eyes I was getting from the drum circle were too much for me, so I looked away, towards the redwoods, now draped in fog and shadow. It happened so suddenly. There were ghosts in that forest. I began walking towards them, away from the deafening machine gun fire of John’s fingers, away from the eyes. Then a young woman took my arm and did a little dance around me, her skin sliding over my arms, her hands moving up my rib cage as she slipped behind me, and then she was in front of me, her knotted hair smelling like burnt sandalwood, her smile open-mouthed, her yellowed teeth shimmering with spit and booze, her cheeks and nose red and shiny, her eyes bloodshot and blinking rapidly. Then she was gone as quick as she appeared, and I was seated on the grass, petting a wet dog, thinking of my family’s first dog—poor Aggie—Aggie who had run out onto the train tracks one evening chasing something—chasing what, we would never know—and had been destroyed by a west-bound Union Pacific that probably hadn’t stopped, but had barreled through the snowy Midwest, out into the Great Plains, up into the mountains, down into the hot, dry desert, and all the way out to the Pacific coast with a piece of my childhood splattered all over the front of it. That poor dog—small, part Labrador, part schnauzer, bearded, awkward and overfed, living a comfortable Midwestern life with all of its needs taken care of, but she still couldn’t resist the chase—still couldn’t resist taking that one shot at attaining the unattainable, and she had her spine shattered for it.