My friend Eric had this great big gap tooth he was really proud of.
He told me when he was a little kid his dentist asked him if he wanted to get braces to fix it.
He’d said, “no. I like my gap teeth. My dad’s got a gap tooth. My grandpa’s got a gap tooth. I bet my great grandpa had one too. What’s the matter with having a gap in between your teeth?”
I guess the doctor didn’t know how to respond.
The gap was like his source of power. It drew him into different lives.
The two of us worked together at a fancy steakhouse in Portland called Ox. We became friends right away because we were the only cooks there who hadn’t been to culinary school. One day the dishwasher called out with some family emergency and one of the cooks had to cover. All the culinary school guys got real quiet. They hadn’t gone to culinary school so they could go do dishes afterwards. Eric and I, though, were arguing over which one of us was going to get to be dishwasher.
“No way man,” I said. “There’s absolutely no way you’re faster than me. I’m doing it.”
“I can wash circles around you boy,” he said.
“Boy?”
I turned for support to the chef de cuisine, Chef Kyle. “Chef, is it okay if I dish the first half of service and Eric does the second half and you can tell us who’s faster at the end?”
He grinned, “yeah sure.”
Then he wouldn’t tell us who was faster.
But that’s how me and Eric became friends.
Everybody from Ox would go to this bar called Billy Ray’s right across the street after work. We knew all the bartenders.
“Hey Tyler, what’s going on,” I said. I never had to order because I always got the same thing. He handed me a mug of Hamm’s and a shot of Old Crow.
“I'm going with an Eric,” Eric said. He’d created his own drink.
Tyler handed him a whisky cranberry.
“Thank youuuu.”
We went to sit down out back on the patio.
Billy Ray’s had this great patio with lights strung up around the sides and heaters and tables everywhere. It was so big and so dark that the Christmas lights didn’t do anything at all. It was like all the light in the space was getting sucked over into them.
We sat down and I started talking about camping. “It’s been so fucking nice out lately I just wanna sleep outside. I need a reset, you know, sleep under the stars and wake up when the sun rises and the birds start singing. I just gotta get out of the city, man. I’m in a rut.”
Eric said, “you camp much?”
“Not really,” I said. “But I like to and I got a bunch of gear from my uncle when he became a Buddhist and gave all his worldly shit away.”
Eric took a sip from his drink. “Mmmmhmmm.” He smacked his lips and shook his head back and forth. “That is one tasty beverage.”
“You will never convince me on the whisky cran,” I said.
He grinned his gap toothed grin. Said, “I don’t camp a lot. But I got a sleeping bag if you got the other shit. I like camping. Grilling hot dogs, sitting on a log, looking at stuff. Way of the road.”
“Is that Trailer Park Boys?” I said.
“Yep, greatest show ever made.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. Ricky is like the Dalai Lama on Xanax. Half of what he says are quotes and proverbs and pieces of wisdom that he doesn’t understand or remember correctly. He’s like drunk white trash Winnie the Pooh. Who grows weed. He’s the funniest character on tv.”
“Hmm,” I said.
We drank our drinks.
“What days are you off this week?” he said.
“Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,” I said.
“Me too. Let’s go camping.”
We planned it all out right then and there.
We would go out somewhere in the desert.
People at work made jokes. I think the term gap-toothed-blow-job came up. We said it was gonna be more like brokeback canyon.
“Who knows what’ll happen out there,” Eric winked.
We filled my car up with wood and beer and hot dogs and we got a bottle of corn whisky. I don’t know why we got corn whisky because I never drink corn whisky. But it seemed like something you would get when you go camping.
We got out into the high desert around Sisters and drove down little forest service roads for hours drinking beers and listening to road music like Neil Young and the Doors and the Rolling Stones and shit like that until we found a good spot to camp. It was right under this big steep hill that turned into a craggy spine at the top.
It wasn’t quite a canyon but it was close enough.
The first thing I thought we should do was set up camp, which is usually a good call when you’re going to get fucked up when you’re camping.
Eric was confused.
“What do you mean set up camp?” he said. “We didn’t even bring a tent with us.”
“Well yeah but you know we can get the chairs all that set up and our sleeping spot and all the other stuff.”
He looked at me funny. Pulled his sleeping bag out and threw it in the grass.
“Okay my beds ready.”
“You don’t use a pad?” I said.
“Listen here. I slept on a pallet with a sheet of plywood on top for two years when I was a missionary in Nepal. This dirt’ll be like a dream.”
So we just put our chairs up and started a fire and opened the corn whisky. Eric took a big pull and then he passed it to me.
I took a big pull too and I coughed. “Woof,” I said.
He nodded. “Yeah, it’s rough.”
“Corn whisky,” I said.
We opened some beers and started cooking hot dogs.
I looked into the fire down at all the little crackling branches and watched them turn red and then white and then disintegrate into one another.
“What was it like living in Nepal man?” I said.
“I dunno,” he said, “different, cool. I liked it there. Tough people, you know, they live hard lives. But they’re kind too. Good people. People there would give you everything they had if you asked for it.”
He looked around at the crags above us, sipped his beer and turned his hot dog.
We looked at the fire and cooked our hot dogs and nobody said anything for a while.
“The craziest thing is how strong and tough the people are,” he said, like he was really thinking about it now. “The white people who came around could never understand it. Somebody would ask for a light and a Nepali would take a coal out of a fireplace and light their cigarette with it and then put it back in the fire. I actually saw people do that.
“One time I went on a little walk with this English guy who was another missionary at my church. He was this big jacked up gym guy. He was huge. Like six two, probably two-twenty. One time we went for a walk and we were coming up this big hill back to the village and we saw an old lady hauling a pile of wood up the hill. She had one of those big racks that hangs on your back and has a little band that goes on your forehead to even out the weight. The rack was full of wood. Just a giant stack of wood. There was more wood than old lady. We saw her coming up the hill and even we were out of breath it was so steep. We were like damn, that’s an old lady and that’s a big pile of wood.
“So my English buddy, he’s like, I’m gonna carry that wood for this old lady. I spoke a tiny bit of Nepali and he didn’t speak any so I told the old lady my buddy wanted to carry the wood for her. She set it down and took the thing off her head and her back and let my friend have it. He was probably twice her size.
“He couldn’t even get it off the ground. The old lady just laughed at him. He tried for a long time. Then she picked it up and laughed this loud laugh like, ‘HA!,’ and kept going up the hill real slow.”
“Damn,” I said.
We looked at the fire, cooked our hot dogs.
“It was just different, you know, they way they life there.” He pulled his hot dog out and looked at it closely, then he put it back over the fire. “It was just this tiny little village in the mountains,” he said. “I was there for two years so I was pretty much like a local by the end. I knew every person in the village. Everybody came by the church a lot because we gave them all kinds of things like blankets and food and stuff like that there. And we had a doctor and all that so I mean I really did know everybody.” He reached for the corn whisky and took a swallow.
“When I knew it was time for me to leave I sat with some of the elders and we all sat in a circle and held hands and prayed and I had a vision that I would move to Portland and work as a cook at Ox Restaurant.”
“What do you mean you had a vision?” I said.
“You don’t have to believe me, man. I just had a vision. God told me what to do. I’d never even heard of the place before.”
He took a drink from the corn whisky and gagged and drank a big mouthful of beer to wash it down.
“I don’t think I like this stuff,” he said.
“No, it's terrible,” I said. “We should’ve got bourbon.”
“Hmm, or tequila. I like a nice tequila drunk lately.” He thought for a second. “At least this stuff’s strong.”
“Finish the story, man,” I said.
“What story?”
“Your Nepal shit. What do you mean?”
“That’s the story, we prayed and God told me to go to Portland. So then I went to Portland.” He pulled his hot dog off the fire and put it on a bun. He rooted around behind his chair and came back up with a bottle of mustard. Squeezed a fat caterpillar bead across the frank.
I passed him the ketchup.
“What the hell you think I need that for?” he said.
“I dunno, your hot dog,” I said.
“Ketchup doesn’t have any place being anywhere near a hot dog. Only mustard.”
“What?” I said. “No ketchup on a hot dog?”
“You wouldn’t put ketchup on a sausage, would you?”
“I dunno, yeah maybe.”
“No. The right answer is no. You would not put ketchup on a sausage. And a hot dog is a sausage, right?”
“Yeah I guess so, but….”
He held up a finger, “Ah, ah, ah, nope. Don’t even try. You won’t convince me.” He slapped his hand on his knee.
“Okay,” I said. I put a bunch of ketchup on mine.
We ate our hot dogs.
Eric Foltz ate with relish the inner organs of the all-beef kosher frank.
Other than the Big Mac and the combination of imitation crab sticks with Japanese mayonnaise, hot dogs were Eric’s favorite food in the whole entire world. He made a bunch of noise eating. Grunts and growls and burps and slurps. Breathing so hard there was an oscillating whistle, in out, in out, as he panted wind through the gap in his teeth.
He kept a rotation of hot dogs going on the fire. Ate five before he stopped. I ate two and watched him go.
I drank more corn whisky.
“You just left Nepal, though, just like that?” I said.
Eric stuffed the last of his dog into his mouth in one enormous bite.
“Yeah pretty much,” he said through a full mouth. Wiped his hot dog greasy mustard fingers on his pants. “I guess they threw me a goodbye party.”
“A goodbye party?”
He kept chewing. “Yeah, actually I kinda forgot about how fucked up it was.” He swallowed a pained swallow and tapped his fist against the center of his chest and burped. “Oh man, okay.” He motioned for the corn whisky. I passed it and he took a long drink. “Yeah, they threw me a big goodbye party. Every once in a while they’d have a big party for a special birthday or a holiday or something like that. Everybody in the town would get together and basically just have a big picnic party all day. Except the meal was always a goat. And there was always a kind of ceremonial slaughter. The guest of honor got to kill the goat.”
“You killed the goat?” I said.
“I killed the goat,” he said. He shook his head, stuck his tongue between the gap in his teeth. “It was horrible, I don’t like to think about it.”
“Don’t you not believe in violence?”
“No, I don’t. Not at all. But I think it’s more important to God that I not offend people.”
He passed me the bottle. “So you killed the goat?” I said.
“Yeah I killed it bad,” he said. “It was terrible. There’s this little hill right in the middle of the village with a clearing on it where everybody would always get together and watch the slaughter. It's not a very steep hill so the whole crowd can see the top, it’s kinda like a stage that way I guess. The goat’s tied up to this post at the top of the hill and there’s a little chopping block right next to it. Normally whoever was gonna kill the goat would get to pick out of a whole bunch of different kukris, you know those curved knives they got? Anyway, normally there were all different sizes of kukris. Usually they’d just pick a big one and chop the goat head off in one swing. But when I did it they only had this one little kukri. I didn’t know if they were playing a trick on me or what, or if they just couldn’t find the other ones.”
“So I had this little knife and the whole town’s watching me below on the hill and I go up to this poor little goat tied up to a post and I take its head and I jam it down on the chopping block. It didn’t make any noise or anything. It was weird. It was so calm. It just had its nasty bugged out eyes staring right up at me and I could see that it was scared, you know, like really scared. It was terrible. I didn’t want to do it but the whole town was watching me. So I choked its neck and I held its head down as hard as I could and I tried not to look at its eyes but I couldn’t not look at its eyes.”
He took a pull from the bottle, looked down at the fire. The sun was just beginning to set and cast a dusty yellow light over us. All the bugs and birds were out for one last dance.
I was getting smoked out in my seat. I whispered, “I hate rabbits.” Moved my chair.
“What?” Eric said.
“Nothing,” I said. I threw more wood on the fire and waited for him to go on.
“So I held the goat head down as hard as I could and I lifted that little knife up as high as my arm would reach and I closed my eyes and I prayed to God that he’d forgive me this awful thing I was about to do and I brought the knife down hard, as hard as I possibly could, so the hooked end came down right on that things bony little neck.”
He took another pull and shook his head. He passed me the bottle and I took a drink too.
“Such a terrible feeling to have a knife just land thud like that. It didn’t hardly do anything, just cut it all up in this big nasty gash and got tangled in the neck fur. Then the goat started screaming and making these horrible sounds, it was bleating and gurgling and its buggy eyes were wiggling around all over the place and its tongue was hanging out. I lifted up the knife and cut the thing again. Just as hard. And again and again and again. There was blood spraying all over the place and it got all over my face and the goat was just screaming this awful scream.”
He shook his head.
“I couldn’t tell you how many cuts it took to chop the poor thing's head off. But I finally did it. When it was done, I had blood all over me, like totally soaked in goat blood. I looked like a warrior coming out of a big battle. I mean blood was dripping off my face and my hands and my shirt was all soaking wet.”
“I don’t even know what to say, that’s so gnarly,” I said. “That kinda thing must happen sometimes though, right?”
He kept looking down at the fire, shook his head real slow, “no. It doesn’t. When I turned around, after I finally killed it, I turned around and the whole village was staring at me just looking horrified. Like totally disgusted and appalled. People had their hands on their mouths and sick looks on their faces and kids were screaming. A couple old ladies fainted. It was horrible. Not normal at all.”
“Ohhhhh, man.” I laughed and put my head in my hands. Looked at the fire. “That’s fucked up.”
“It was extremely fucked up,” he said.
“What’d you do?”
“I dunno, what would you do? I just stood there. My ears were ringing. All I could think about was how freaky I must have looked.”
He drank more of the corn whisky and then he was quiet.
A log popped and threw a swarm of firefly sparklings up into the dry ponderous pines above us.
We turned our heads to watch them on their way to the Garden of Ascension.
“Did the goat taste good?” I said.
“I didn’t eat it.”
We sat there looking at the fire for a long time as though goat blood and horrified Nepali villagers were rising up and being born out of the flames.
And what from my life could have been resurrected around a campfire?
I wanted to tell a story too. But I didn’t know any.
The yellow light of the late sun had turned orange and pinkish and had this waxy quality to it that made everything look a little bit soft and unrealistic.
“Hey,” Eric said. “You wanna catch the sunset from those rocks up that hill? I’ll race ya up there.” He took off up the hill.
I raced him.
We made it about a third of the way up before we stopped really racing. It was much steeper than it looked and we were pretty full of beer and whisky. I almost puked. But we slowly made our ways to the top just before the sun set. I picked a big flat rock that made a nice spot to lie down on and watch the day end, and Eric picked himself a spot probably fifty yards down the ridgeline from me somewhere I couldn’t see him.
I laid down and I thought I was gonna puke and it took me a while for me to catch my breath. I laid there and panted and I watched the flocks of starlings rorschach the ballet slipper sky. The birds made these incredible designs and I wished that I could only understand what they meant. They were big diaphanous blobs that danced and tornadoed and constricted and expanded and twisted back into something that was always changing before it was ever formed. I knew that there was a way for me to understand it. I just didn’t. I laid there and I felt so lonely because there were so many of them all dancing together up there and they all knew something about life that I didn’t.
Lying there on that rock with the sun setting all around me I felt like the only person in the whole entire world. I looked around and I wondered how old those rocks were, how long they’d seen the shapes of birds in the sky and how long they’d known their secrets. If the rocks had a story to tell me I bet they’d have told me about death and dying, about a thousand black suns each with a hole in the middle where your life was supposed to be. And they’d have shown me how every bird was the middle of every one of those suns. How every little starling was your life and how they were all different and dying their own little lonely ways and going to their own lonely places that only they knew about. How their dance was all the lives you ever thought you might have lived all together at the same time dancing one dance. Together. As one.
Or maybe they would have told me to go see a psychiatrist. Or get out of the city for good.
I don’t know.
Who the fuck does?