Just About Four Seconds Flat
April 1970
(Note: Just About Four Seconds Flat is a story I wrote while in graduate school. All of the other stories in this collection are mostly autobiographical; this one is clearly not. The reader is warned that both strong language and strong content is contained in the story that follows. RC)
Four rides in four hours, and only a hundred miles. I was pissed. Six miles outside of Turlock, with six hundred to go. Twelve noon on the hottest day of the year, and me without even a tree to stand under.
And then, outta’ nowhere, this big old fancy blue van pulls over and stops, and the next thing I know I’m haulin’ butt down 99.
“Where to?” the cat asks, and I say Mexico.
“Well then, you’re in luck, son. I’m going down that way myself. We should make the border by sundown.”
I nod my head but don’t say no “thank you sirs”. Little while later the cat looks over at me and says ain’t it just a beautiful day for drivin’ and I say, “Sure is,” wondering how much the cat would like this here ‘beautiful day’ if he was stuck out there in that sun and didn’t have no fancy-assed air-conditioner to keep him cool.
He didn’t say no more after that, and in a while I got to feelin’ pretty good about ridin’ all the way to Mexico in his big old air-conditioned van. Only hassle now would be at the border.
We stopped for gas just south of Fresno. I jumped out of the van, stretched my legs and then walked across the street to buy a pack of smokes. It was a little trucker’s café packed full of truck drivers, and when I ask for change, this old fat bitch of a waitress say’s she ain’t got no time to be making change. I tell her that’s fine, if she ain’t got the time, I’ll just jump over the fuckin’ counter and take care of it myself. It don’t take more than four seconds flat for her to make my change, but when I come walkin’ out of the joint with my cigarettes, I see that big old blue van is gone, and my suede jacket gone with it.
Right then and there I decide to kill the motherfucker if I ever lay eyes on him again, but before I can do anymore decidin’, the cat taps me on the shoulder and says do I want a coke. So the next thing I know, I’m sittin’ back in the truck stop, sippin’ on an extra large root beer and thinkin’ how glad I am I don’t have to kill the motherfucker.
We got to talking in the cafe. He asked me how come I was goin’ down to Mexico, like on a vacation, or what? So I say, sure, a vacation, and I tell the cat about how I got these rich friends down in Ensenada, and how these rich old friends of mine got themselves some villa rented right on the beach, and I go on and on, with him eatin’ it all up. Then I ask him why he’s goin’, knowing damn well he ain’t goin’ for the same reason I am. Cat’s too straight, and got too much money. ‘Course I know plenty cats who got money and still go down to score. That’s how they get it in the first place. Lots of money in that shit if you know who you’re buyin’ from. But he says he’s going just to take some pictures and mess around, and I believe him ‘cause he looks too straight to be doin’ anything else.
I ask him what kinda’ pictures, but before he can say anything, the fat old bitch of a waitress comes up to the table with our check. She gives me a badass look and I give her one right back.
“Well, we’d better head out if we’re going to make it by sundown.” He says this and then he pulls out his wallet and gives her a ten. I’d say ‘bout the hardest thing I ever had to do in my whole life was to unglue my eyes from that dude’s big fat wallet. Man, it was so full of bread the cat had to use both hands to stuff it back into his pocket. That’s when I got me a plan.
Between Bakersfield and L.A. I did most of the talkin’. I was having a good old time tellin’ this chump about how I was a college student, and how I got a football scholarship and was studyin’ to be a scientist or a doctor, I couldn’t decide which, and just going on and on with my fine line of crap. And he just drove and nodded his head, eatin’ it all up, but not sayin’ much. After a while, though, I got to runnin’ out of things to tell him, so I asked him about the pictures he was gonna to take in Mexico. The guy told me that he was a teacher, which I already kind of figured, and that picture takin’ was just his hobby. His ‘avocation’, he said.
“So, like, what kind a’ pictures you take, man?”
“All kinds,” he says. “Here, you can see for yourself. There’s a book in the glove compartment with some of my photos.”
I open up the glove box and reach inside for the book, but the first thing my hand hits is somethin’ cold and smooth. And next to it there’s a box of bullets—thirty-two’s. I grab the book and close the glove box real quick. Son of a bitch, I think to myself, this is some sweet ride to Ensenada I got me.
It was a thick book with a plastic cover, like they have in libraries. I read the title—‘Life-Loving: Photos and Verse by George Arents’. I turned it over and I’ll be damned if the cat’s picture wasn’t on the back. There was a camera slung over his shoulder and he was standing next to his fancy blue van. “George Arents” it said, “educator, poet and one of the most exciting new photographers on the American scene, makes his home in….” I quit reading and looked at the cat.
“Hey man, this is you.” He just smiled and kept his eyes on the road.
“Wow, like, you’re famous, man. Says here you’re a poet and everything.”
“I’m not much of a poet, I’m afraid. Do you like poetry?”
“Man, I love poetry. I read all that shit in college.”
‘Course I lied about diggin’ poetry just like I lied ‘bout goin’ to college. But I figured I’d read a couple of old George’s poems and then tell him how triple-stone-outta sight they was. Well, I got to readin’ and, funny thing is, them poems of his were okay. Really, they weren’t no poems at all, they were just little stories with pictures to go with ‘em. There was stories in the big old book about almost anything you could think of.
There was this one about how the cat gets up real early one mornin’ figuring to go to the beach. But he sees it’s raining and cloudy and shit outside, so he decides not to go after all. He just spends the day moping ‘round the house, feelin’ all bummed out. That’s all there was to the story, ‘cept that, near the end, he thinks maybe it would have been good to have gone after all, that maybe it would have been pretty at the beach just the same. And sure enough, you look across the page, and there’s the ocean, just about the prettiest damned ocean you ever saw. And you figure that it was the rain that made it that way and that old George, he shoulda’ gone.
‘Course not all the stories was about him, only the ones with “I”’s and “we’s”. Some of ‘em was about other folks. Like this one I read where these two little nigga kids is playin’ on the sidewalk. The story told about how they’d just play and play on the fuckin’ sidewalk, and about all the fun they was havin’ just kickin’ a Pepsi can back and forth. ‘Cross from the story there was a picture of this big old mountain with trees and streams and green grass and everything. Way far away on top of the mountain you could see these two people ridin’ on horses. Well, I looked a long time at that mountain tryin’ to make sense out of it. It was about the best lookin’ mountain I ever laid eyes on, but it sure as hell didn’t fit with the story that was across the page. I read the story again, and saw that it was called the same thing as the book—Life-Loving.
“Say man, what’s this here ‘life-lovin’ mean? You got it in two different places. What’s it mean?”
“It means anything you want it to mean,” he says, without taking his eyes off the road. But I could see he was smilin’.
“Shit, man, I don’t WANT it to mean anything. You the cat wrote it, ain’t you?”
“Sure I wrote it,” George said, “But you’re reading it.” He was grinning at me like I was some kinda damned fool.
“Just ‘caus I don’t understand your motherfuckin’ poooettttreeee don’t mean you got to laugh at me.” I was pissed and he could see it, ‘cause he quit grinning and looked over at me all serious-like.
“I was NOT making fun of you,” the asshole said. “I was only laughing because the question you asked, many other people have asked, and I’ve never been able to give a good answer.“ Now it was my turn to laugh.
“You sayin’ you wrote this here story ‘bout some niggas playin’ on the sidewalk, and you don’t even know what it means?”
“No, I mean that I don’t know how to….” He stopped and looked over at me again. He had a funny kind of look, like he had a pain somewhere that he couldn’t do nothin’ about.
“Alright,” he said, “I’ll tell you what life-loving means. You like that picture there?” He pointed at the green mountain with the horses and stuff and I nodded.
“So you like the photo?” he asked.
“It’s okay I guess.”
“What’s okay about it?”
I thought for a second. “I like the trees. And I like them horses.”
“You like the trees because they’re green and beautiful and lovely?”
I looked at the cat thinkin’ maybe he was puttin’ me on, but his face said he wasn’t so I answered him.
“Yeah, George,” I said, they’re fine lookin’ trees. But what’s that got to do with this life-lovin’ jive?”
“Life-loving is just a way to describe in words the way those trees make you feel. It means that they’re alive and you’re alive and you love them because they’re beautiful. It means they bring you pleasure, and that makes you love life. That’s all.”
“But what about this story here that goes with the picture? The one about the kids. They sure as hell don’t think that old dirty sidewalk of theirs is luv-ell-lee.” I said this real nasty, figurin’ I had him there.
“But maybe they DO think the sidewalk is beautiful, or perhaps it gives them some pleasure. Don’t you understand, it DOES give them something? They can play kick-the-can on it….they can play hop-scotch, they can….”
“No chance, man. When I was a kid, I had me the same old sidewalk in the baddest hood in East Oakland there is. Only pleasure that sidewalk ever gave me was when my old man used to give me a quarter for cleaning up the mess the whores and their johns used to make in front of our house .”
“And when you got your quarter, what did you do with it? Did it make you happy or sad?”
“I ain’t NEVER been sad ‘bout getting’ me some money, dude, that is for damn sure. But no sidewalk ever give me money, no sidewalk ever give me nothing.”
Old George he didn’t say nothin’ for a long while after that. He just kinda’ stared out at the road with that look of his. I was just about to tell him that I didn’t give a damn about his poetry crap anyhow when he spoke.
“It’s like this,” he starts out slow, “those kids in the poem have the same amount of potential for…..ah, they have the same amount of love in them that you or I or the people in that picture have. If they lived on that mountain, they would see its beauty and they would love it. But they don’t live on the mountain, they live in the city, and so they find beauty and a reason for loving life there, where they live. You see, beauty is a relative value that….”
“You ever live in East Oakland, man? Ever even BEEN THERE? Ain’t a whole lot to love ‘round there ‘cept a little ass when you can get it.”
“No, I’ve never lived in Oakland, but I know….”
“Man, you don’t know shit then.” We didn’t talk no more after that.
I slept for a long while, and when I woke up we was already through L.A. Old George, he had the radio goin’, listenin’ to some crazy-ass baseball game. I don’t care nothin’ ‘bout baseball so I got to lookin’ through that book again. This one story was about this dude n’ chick ballin’ and just makin’ fine damn love. I didn’t get the way it ended, but I didn’t ask no more questions. There was a lot more good stories to read, with good pictures too, so I’d just skip over the bullshit parts that didn’t make no sense.
I must a’ gone through half that book before I noticed my first dog race sign. You can always tell when you’re getting close to T.J. ‘cause of all the dog race signs.
“How much further?” That was the first thing either of us had said since before the Grapevine. I figured the cat was still pissed at me for sayin’ what I said. And I didn’t fuckin’ care.
“Only a few more miles,” he said, without looking from the road.
I got to thinkin’ about crossin’ the border. There was a chance they wouldn’t let me through. They pulled that on me once before. ‘An undesirable’ is what I was. Fuckers. Took me nearly a day to sneak through, and by the time I got to the Ensenada people who I was s’posed to drive for, they’d found somebody else. Always cats around waitin’ to drive shit across the border. I gave myself an extra day this trip, but I was still plenty nervous about makin’ it on time.
It was after six when we got to the border. The place was jammed with cars and we had to wait about twenty minutes before they signaled us to pull up. When we were half way through the island, two fat Mexicans in uniforms came up to the van, one on each side. The one on my side stuck his head through the window and checked out the back, but not before he gave me the once over. “What’s this n_____ doin’ in this fancy assed van”, I could hear him thinkin’.
“Vacation” was all George said. The Mexican on his side nodded and asked, “How long?” The other guy was still looking the back of the van and me over.
“Oh, I’d say about a week. Going just south of Ensenada.”
Now both the Mexicans was lookin’ at me.
“What about him?” one of them asked George pointing at me. “Maybe you better get out of the van and….”
“Now, wait a minute. This young man is traveling with me. He’s one of my students. We drove down to try our luck at deep-sea fishing. Is that a crime?”
“That’s right, officer, sir, we gonna do some of that deep sea fishin’. Hey, they biting’?”
The two Mexicans waved us through.
We drove straight through Tijuana without stoppin’ or sayin’ a word. I think the old dude was a little nervous about lyin’ and he just wanted to get back on the open road. In twenty minutes we were driving along the coast with T.J. behind us.
“Hey man, thanks.” I said it without looking over at him.
“Not a problem,” was all he said.
I got to thinkin ‘bout how it was a pretty damn decent thing he done. How he could a’ threw my ass right out of the truck, especially after what I said about him and his book.
“You know,” I said after a while, “I been thinkin’. I guess some folks might think a sidewalk was a good thing. I mean, if that’s all they had was a sidewalk.” George looked over at me and smiled. He didn’t say nothin’, but I knew that patched things up.
We were about thirty minutes from Ensenada when I got to thinkin’ about the plan.
“Pay road’s just up ahead. You always take the pay road, man?”
“It’s fastest, isn’t it?”
“Maybe, but those fuckin’ Mexican bandits want too much money, they’ll soak ya every chance they get. Best way’s the old mountain road, don’t cost a cent.”
“That’s alright,” George said, “it won’t break me.”
No shit, I thought.
“Well, I’ll tell ya’ why I like the old mountain road. It’s the view, man, the fuckin’ view. Christ, you can see half ‘a Mexico from up there. Bet you could get some good pictures from up there. And ya know, I was thinkin’, the toll cops could end up hasslin’ me like those two fat fucks back at the border.”
“All right,” he says suddenly, “the old mountain road it is. Where’s the turn off?” And just like that, the plan comes together.
In half an hour we hit the summit. It was just a few more miles into Ensenada and we hadn’t seen a car since we’d turned off the highway. The mountain road was so bad even the Mexicans didn’t use it much. I was countin’ on that.
I waited until I saw a place for old George to pull over, and then I sat up in my seat and looked at him like my eyes were gonna’ bug right outta my head.
“Wow”, I said, “just look at that damn fine sunset. If that ain’t a life-lovin’ sunset I ain’t never seen one. Make a good picture for one of your books.
“You think so?”
“I KNOW so, man, that there’s one lovely old sunset.” From the summit the pay road looked like a little piece of string winding along the beach, and beyond that you could see the sun easing down all red and yellow into the ocean.
“Maybe you’re right”, he said. Old George slowed the van down and parked right in the place I’d picked out for him. Then he grabbed his picture takin’ shit and walked over to the ledge. I got out too and stretched my legs. The old dude looked excited and he was hurryin’ with his little three-legged camera stand so as not to miss the sun before it went down. I walked over to where he was standin’ and looked over the edge.
“One helluva long ways down.”
George was still fiddling with his camera and he didn’t even hear me. I went back to the van and got in. The keys were still in the ignition. I watched as he fooled with the camera.
“Come here,” George shouted over his shoulder, “I want to see what you think of this shot before I snap it.”
“Okay”, I yelled, reaching into the glove compartment. My hands were shaking a little, but I took three bullets out of the box and loaded them into George’s pistol. I stuck the gun in the pocket of my suede coat and walked over to him.
“Take a look through the shutter.” He had a grin on his face a mile wide. Man, did this cat have a pretty sunset to shoot. I bent over the three-legged stand and put my eye up to the little peephole.
“Prettiest damn sunset I ever seen, dude.” I stepped back. “Better go for it though, ‘fore the sun goes down any further.”
He stepped in front of me, and when he bent over the camera I took the pistol out of my pocket and emptied it into his head, right above the left ear. George fell over sideways and his arm hooked on the three-legged stand and they both went down. I ran over to the van and started it up, then drove it right to the edge of the cliff, jumped out and loaded George into the back, making sure not to get any blood on my coat. I reached in his pocket and grabbed that big old fat wallet. Then I threw the camera and the stand into the front seat, the seat I’d been sitting in all day, and slammed the door shut. I figured it’d be worth some money, but I didn’t like the idea of carryin’ it all the way into town.
I went around to the other side of the van and reached in for the automatic gearshift. I was just about to pull it down into drive and step back when I remembered the book. I reached over and grabbed it out of the glove box, pulled the gearshift down and them jumped back.
That big old blue van made it down to the bottom in just about four seconds flat. From where I was standing old George’s van looked like a crumpled up milk carton thrown on a garbage heap.
The sun was all the way down when I started walking, but it still lit part of the sky yellow and red and pink. One damned pretty sunset, I thought. And it got me to thinkin’ about all them good stories in George’s book, and about all them good pictures that went with ‘em. That old George, I thought, that cat was really somethin’. One smart son of a bitch, ‘cept when it came to that life-lovin’ jive. Ain’t nobody gonna’ be lovin’ life while they’re playin’ on some crappy old sidewalk.
Post Script
When I was twenty-one and enrolled in graduate school at San Jose State University I entered a short story called Just About Four Seconds Flat in a writing contest. The contest was called the Phalen Competition, which included student entrants from San Jose State, Santa Clara University and Stanford. There were various awards for poetry, blank verse, essays and short stories, but there was an overall prize for the very, very best entry of all, regardless of the category. And the overall prize was $500 (a HUGE amount of money for a college student on loans in the early seventies), but even better, the prize included being the guest of honor at a dinner hosted by novelist Kurt Vonnegut.
After Hemmingway, Vonnegut was, and still is, my favorite American novelist, and the thought of hearing him speak at a banquet, much less sitting next to him at dinner, chatting with the guy, just looking into his eyes, was, well, almost more than I can describe even all these years later. And yes, a week before the banquet, I received a letter in the mail informing me that Just About Four Seconds Flat had won two awards: best short fiction and OVERALL GRAND PRIZE. I couldn’t believe it. I cried and danced around the apartment and my wife and friends and the whole neighborhood celebrated for two days. Lots of us in our little group were want-to-be writers and the award was, in a way, recognition for our entire little artist community.
I went out and bought a cheap sport coat and got a haircut and wrote and re-wrote and re-re-wrote my acceptance speech. And then I waited and waited for that Wednesday night when I’d meet Kurt Vonnegut and he’d say something like, ‘kid, I liked your story’ or ‘pal, you may just have what it takes’ or even just ‘hey, not bad’. It really didn’t matter what he would say, because I knew he’d be there, in San Jose that night, because of me. ME.
About mid morning on the big day the phone rang. It was a guy I knew from my Tuesday and Thursday morning writing class….not really a friend, an acquaintance. “Hey, man, we missed you last night. What a bummer. Vonnegut was great. He even made a joke about you. Said you stood him up. Where were you, man?”
I got on my motorcycle and drove the 12 blocks to the English Department in Thompson Hall on Seventh Street. I wept all the way, the chilly wind drying the tears almost as quickly as they rolled across my cheeks but, even though I stopped in the men’s room to wash my face, I knew that the secretary could see I’d been crying. She recognized me right off, knew, I’m certain, why I’d missed the dinner, and shook her head as if to say, ‘there, there.’ She handed me an enveloped. “You’d better check inside just to make sure,” she said softly. Yes, there was one check for $200 and another one for $500.
It would be over thirty years before I wrote another short story. Kurt Vonnegut died a few years back. I know this is goofy, but I’ve sort of half believed, all these years since 1971, that someday, somehow, I’d get to meet that guy. And in my imagining he’d remember ‘Just About Four Seconds Flat’ and he’d say, ‘You know, pal, you shoulda stuck with it. You shoulda.’