on the beach

 

I decided to go down to beach today.

I remember I used to like to go down to the park there and watch all the little kiddies play. Not because they’re the light of our lives or they are the future—none of that sentimental crap—but because they remind me of what alcoholics or the insane would be like if they weren’t carrying so much baggage around. That stare, that blank stare; it’s intoxicating. I wish I could go back. I wish I could unknow everything. EVERYTHING.

I stopped going because quite frankly, a middle-aged man sitting alone in the park staring at little kids all day is really creepy. At some point, they were going to lock me up for things I did or did not even do.

I’d go down to the booby hatch and watch the crazies run around if they’d let me, but they don’t sell tickets to the madhouse anymore. They used to do that, you know, charge admission to mental asylums. At St. Bethlem Hospital in England (known the world over as Bedlam Hospital), it was called the Human Zoo, and wealthy patrons could roam the halls and check out the freaks for a mere shilling or two. They don’t do that anymore. Besides, nowadays you’re bound to get poop thrown at you, or worse.

I used to go to a psychiatrist when I was young. My parents thought (like most suburban parents do), there was nothing wrong with me that a couple hours of therapy and a few prescriptions couldn’t take care of. They were wrong.

Why should I be the one who has his brain tinkered with? I was right, after all. I wasn’t seeing things. I wasn’t making shit up. You know what they say: you’re not paranoid, if you’re right.

Anyway, it was the doctors who were crazy, not me. I’m not crazy, I tell you. Like I said in the very beginning: I just know too much.

Besides, don’t psychiatrists always play sinister characters in the movies? There are lots of reasons for that, but one doesn’t have to go back any farther than Dr. Walter J. Freeman to see why. Often referred to as the Father of the Modern Lobotomy, Dr. Freeman performed more than three thousand lobotomies in his lifetime. He worked so fast, in fact, that he even offered drive-thru service in his Lobotomobile.

Despite the fact that Dr. Freeman had no formal surgical training, he invented what was known as the “Icepick Method,” whereby he would insert a metal pick through a person’s eye socket and just rake the thing back on forth on the person’s brain until enough damage was done so they would turn into a drooling idiot.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, over almost a twenty-year period, more than a million people were lobotomized in the United States. Still think I’m the one who’s crazy?

Did you know in the year 2215 the world will discover that most people aren’t crazy like they thought? Instead, it’s the psychiatrists who are really the crazy ones? I learned that while time-traveling one night and shooting off in the wrong direction.

Anyway, the only therapy I needed was a good day on the beach.

There’s a book, you know, from the 1950s, called On the Beach. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel by Nevil Shute about impending doom, and the inspiration for the Neil Young album of the same name. Impending doom, huh? Sounds about right.

I used to come down to the beach all the time: Santa Monica Beach, Will Rogers Beach, Venice Beach. The beach is the only place that feels clean anymore.

It isn’t crowded, either. You’d think that the beach in a city of almost twenty million people would be jam-packed all the time—like Coney Island in the 1920s—but it’s not. Seems like the only people who come down to the beach anymore are speed freaks and volleyballers. There’s certainly no one just sitting here staring out at the edge of the world, contemplating life—like me.

Besides, I have to live by the ocean. I have to be the first to know, just in case Fulmer’s right.

You might think Fulmer’s crazy, but there’s a lot of truth to what he says about the Chinese, especially the part about how they’re going to come riding in on a wave someday. Whether you know it or not, it’s happening already.

According to the publication The Free Republic:

 

Ten Chinese men were arrested after swimming naked to the California shore near Los Angeles. “They arrived naked with their clothes in plastic bags,” said Francisco Arcaute, US government spokesman. “Some got dressed in business suits, others in workout suits. A local resident saw them and they were caught by police and are being questioned.”

 

It’s also in the movie, The King of California.

I have to have my escape route, just in case the shit goes down from the other side as well. I have to have my way out.

Where will I go? Who knows. How will I get there? Good question.

I suppose I could build a raft made out of palm trees and just sail away, like in the movie Cast Away. How hard could it be?

Why not just hop on a cruise ship? Have you seen what goes around on cruise ships these days? These days, it’s not just dysentery, it’s Noroviruses, Influenza, Clostridium perfringens too. Besides, taking a cruise is expensive. A hacksaw is much cheaper.

Think I’m kidding? There are still desert islands out there, you know. While every square inch of the Earth might have been spied on by Google already, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some uninhabited islands out there still. The Phoenix Islands in the South Pacific, located thousands of miles from any known civilization, remain virtually untouched by human beings even today.

I could live on a desert island, too. Like Robinson Crusoe. And just like Robinson Crusoe had his man Friday, I could have my gal Fanny. Being almost a nurse, she’d really come in handy. Being a woman, she’d come in handy even more so.

I actually saw this documentary once about this kid, no more than 18 years old, who went and lived on a desert island. He even talked a woman into going with him. He was inspired by the movie The Blue Lagoon. Now, that sounds like paradise.

Imagine that, Fanny and I on a desert island together, just like Christopher Atkins and Brooke Shields. I could see us now: running on the beach together, holding hands, rolling around in the sand. We could build a house, just like the Swiss Family Robinson, drink coconut milk all day and eat fresh sea trout and crabs. It would be paradise.

What a pair we would make, Fanny in her coconut shell and palm-leaf bikini, me in a leopard-skin wrap of my own design, our trusty pet iguana, Hasenbosch, constantly getting himself in precarious predicaments—all the hilarious hijinks. I could change my name to Jonas, hers to Ginger.

Instead of riding my bike to work I’d be swinging from vine to vine, Fanny keeping house in our treetop mansion, turtle soup stewing in the pot, waiting for me when I got home from work every day.

And what sort of work would I be doing on a desert island? Collecting and bagging infectious germs and hauling them out to the trash? Not hardly.

I’d constantly be fighting off pirates and privateers, a new adventure every day as I kept the island safe from cutthroats and cannibals alike. I’d wrestle snakes and wild boars as I strove for dominance of the island, keeping my woman safe from legendary creatures like Gigantopithecus, and the Wild Man of Borneo.

And when we were through horsing around, when we’d curtailed our love making to just a few times a day, we’d start a family of our very own concoction. We’d have a daughter and we’d call her Girl; we’d have a boy, and we’d call him Son.

We’d live every day just like it was the very first. We’d never get sick, we’d always be happy, and we’d forever be young. When it came time for our children to grow up, all of a sudden there would be others, exactly their age, for them to marry and start families of their own. No explanation would be necessary as to how these newcomers arrived, or where they even came from.

Why? Because in paradise, you don’t have to explain yourself. Everything is exactly as it should be, and life is never complicated.

Our home would be a bamboo palace with all the amenities. There would be a big bamboo dining room, with a big bamboo dining-room table and a big bamboo chandelier, and we would play big-band music from old 78s that came from who knows where, and played on who knows what. Who cares.

And when we got tired those old 78s, the Wellingtons would show up to play a live performance.

We would dance the nights away, a gala event every night with everyone dressed to the nines, and where all the gowns and tuxedos came from, who cares? It’s paradise.

We would have a casino and make a wheel of fortune of out the boats steering wheel. Don’t think it’s possible? Just watch an episode of Gilligan’s Island sometime.

Don’t think Gilligan’s Island can be real? When the show first began, the Coast Guard in Hawaii was flooded with letters begging them to please help those poor people get off the island. True story.

But there would be no one pleading for our rescue from our island. And anyway, who would want to be rescued from paradise? You’d have to be a fool to leave all that behind.

But paradise was a long way away. For now, I’d settle for a short time-machine trip back to the 1920s. The 1930s, even. Southern California wasn’t so bad during the depression, not if you had money.

Time was running out. If I was going to win Fanny back I needed something big, and I needed it fast. Then, I got an idea: a Big Idea.