Hitching to Nirvana: a novel
by Janet Mason
Hitching to Nirvana is a recently completed mid-life and adolescence coming of age novel by Janet Mason. Excerpts have been published in the Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, and in Drive: women's true stories from the open road Seal Press), The Kirkus Review, and the Exquisite Corpse and Philadelphia Poets. A version of this chapter (10), "Art", was published in a different form in the on-line magazine, Swell.

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Oz
(Adrianne, 2004)

When Adrianne wakes up, she is in a cheap motel in the crime-ridden section of a strange city. She has been here for nearly a month. This morning, like most mornings, her hand instinctively goes to the empty side of the double bed. She still reaches out for the Familiar Stranger-even though she tells herself she doesn't want to. Twenty years of habit, expectation, security-is this love?-- is hard to break. Adrianne came here, to this strange city where she knows no one, to try to find herself-still she reaches for the other side of the bed and finds it empty.

That evening she sets out in search of the jazz that was born in bordellos and played in the mournful and jubilant processions that spirited the dead away to a place that is said to be better. Adrianne stands in line outside of a crowded storefront that is so rundown that it appears to be sinking. An old wooden sign reads: "Preservation Hall." Inside, she sits on a wooden bench behind several rows of people sitting on cushions on the floor. The musicians pick up their horns and play the Weary Blues. Peanut Vendor. Tiger Rag. The air quivers. The band blows through trumpets, saxophones, clarinets. Mufflers on ends of horns squeeze music into flat notes. Tempos rise. Flare. The bass horn slides low tones under high. Fingers prance on piano keys. Ivories bite back. A foot taps the pedal on a bass drum. The earth throbs. A tuba wrapped around a waist turns into a python and nearly swallows the inflated cheeks blowing into the mouthpiece.

One set ends. Another begins. The lines of new people filter in. Others leave. Crowd replaces crowd. Adrianne stays. She rocks. She sways. She stands up and dances in the back of the room on the boxed in dusty wooden floor behind the benches. Her hands reach toward ceiling, beyond. She feels each note, each utterance. There are others around her, but she sways and sways and sways until it feels like she is alone with the music. When she looks up toward the ceiling she sees a faded old painting of Louis Armstrong. He is holding tight to his brass horn -- staring down the years.

She stays almost until closing and then leaves, her feet barely touching the street. The music trails behind her as she turns the corner from St. Peter Street onto Bourbon Street where the night swirls around her. The crowd is fueled with the desperation that comes from knowing that the world might end by morning and nothing is off limits. She
is in a city that lays, on average, eight feet below sea level, a fact that requires the dead to be buried above ground-in rows of mausoleums called the "Cities of the Dead"-so that the coffins can not be swept away in heavy rains. The City is shaped like a crescent and surrounded by three large bodies of water. Left to its own devices-without the intricate draining system that pumps around the clock-it would simply be a swamp banked against the Mississippi.
Later that year, a hurricane will spin sideways before it might have turned this city into a modern day Atlantis. Later still, the levees will break and the floods will come. At this point in time, there is still a widespread notion that Hurricanes are drinks, not natural disasters, and that they are meant to be drunk one after another until any thoughts of an actual hurricane dissolves into a hiccup. Adrianne peers down winding back alleys, shaped by voodoo and magic, tinged with mystery and, always, the threat of crime. Thick foamy heads of beer are everywhere. Faces like driftwood. Vacant eyes. Adrianne is standing at the intersection of illusion and history-a place where desire is not a streetcar but a bus that chokes her with its exhaust as it drives on by and leaves her standing on the corner, once again, alone.

People spill into the street as if it were a drink. The woman walking in front of Adrianne looks like an aging flapper. Her ivory dress started with spaghetti straps on her freckled shoulders and falls in fringed folds as she sashays down the street next to a man wearing a pale blue linen suit. Adrianne starts walking fast--as if she has somewhere to go. She passes the couple in front of her and glances at them. The woman is drinking a Hand Grenade from a bright green plastic container in the shape of a handheld bomb with a straw in it. When she drinks, she arches her long neck, still elegant, despite her wrinkled and tanned skin. There is something familiar about her--the long elegant neck, the flat planes of her shoulders, the loose limbed almost double jointed way she moves to music that propels her down the street. Diane moved like that, on the dance floor, across from Adrianne, at the club where they once whirled like dervishes. Adrianne tries to imagine this woman with layered blond hair-instead of the dyed mahogany that is on her head. If Diane had lived-into her forties, beyond the time that had actually passed, into her fifties and sixties--this could be her sashaying down Bourbon Street.

The woman takes another sip and then she stumbles. That quick the man in the pale blue suit steadies her with a hand in the small of her back. He moves his hand so naturally, so surely, that it looks like he had done this thousands of times before. He is her rock. Because of him, she can drink her Hand Grenade and sashay down the street-without fear of falling. A flush creeps up Adrianne's neck-maybe it is a hot flash or a wave of envy. She wishes she had someone to pay attention to her and to make sure that she is safe. Then as fast as the flush came it is gone. She likes going where she wants and doing what she pleases--even when she doesn't know what that is.

A young woman standing inside a storefront window is naked except for her G-string and pasties. Her eyes stare vacantly just above the head of the crowd in the street--as she swings around a pole. She bends her right leg to the outside, picks it up and then precisely wraps it around the pole, which she holds in the crook of her knee. She puts her hands in the air, in a pirouette, and arches backwards, nearly touching the ground with her left hand. A red satin strip barely covers her shaved crotch. She stands back up, unwinds her leg from the pole and, with perfect posture and timing, turns around and bends over, displaying her pale buttocks and, again, that red satin strip. She faces front again, pointing to a sign that invites the crowd in for the next show.

This young woman's body is thin and sinewy--like that of an adolescent boy. Her pelvic bones jut over her G-string. She is blond, waiflike with large dark eyes. Her long narrow face is so young and unformed that it is almost translucent. She resembles Diane when she, too, was young and desperate and did not think twice about putting her body on the line. Adrianne walks faster. She passes hand-lettered signs that read "Hurricanes, the Biggest and Best in the Quarter." She passes a muscled man, looking like Atlas, wearing only a G-string standing outside while a hustler hawks tickets to the all-male review. The hustler's words, the muscle man's body blur behind her into night. She deftly moves around the clumps of people that are everywhere--but she is still trapped. Dissonant strains of music-heavy metal, electric washboard, the crooning of a male's tenor voice--come together in a maddening cacophony. She looks up to see faces jeering from balconies. Men, who until recently were boys, yell at young women, who had not long ago been girls, and throw beads in exchange for a lifted shirt. Bare breasts hang pale and luminous--full and half moons in the neon lights. Adrianne walks faster, faster, twisting, turning. The crowd ends abruptly and as she moves through it into her own empty space-- breaking free.

She is standing--with a handful of people--at the intersection of Bourbon and St. Ann. She is alone, except for two or three men standing on the corner. Then in the circle of light from the street lamp, a white-gloved hand appears from the shadows of a doorway. The hand is upturned and its crooked forefinger beckons. The gloved hand comes from a blue sequined sleeve--behind it a majestic and sparkling bust line under broad shoulders and a heavily made up face framed by tendril-like curls that spiral down from a three-foot flaming red beehive hairdo. Painted red lips part and a voice, husky, haughty, says: "Come with me, my dear."

"Come to Oz."

Inside Oz, everything in the known world is turned upside down. People swirl around her, bumping up against her, but this crowd-unlike the crowd outside on Bourbon Street-does not seem desperate. Oz is, by comparison, a tranquil oasis.

Arms caress her back. People make their way around her.

"Excuse me, darlin.'"

The voice that speaks to her is edged with rivers of bourbon and gales of inhaled smoke. It is accompanied with another heavily painted face that momentarily peers into hers, before departing in a swirl of chenille and a whiff of aftershave. Tall palm fronds sprout from ceramic floor vases; Egyptian gold plated prints hang on the walls; and masks, sequins and feathers, dangling on long invisible strings from the ceiling, are everywhere.

Adrianne looks into the hollow eyes of the masks.

Empty eyes are watching her.

Adrianne might have traveled 1,000 miles to a destination where she knows no one, but The One is staring at her from the mocking hollow eyes of a mask that dangled down from the ceiling. The mask is covered with long plumes, but the eyes are the same dark pinwheels, bewitching and mocking, pulling her in, dazzling and confusing her, that belong to The One. These eyes are only concerned with their own reflection. Adrianne turns away only to see another set of hollow eyes staring at her. The feathered plumes on this one are long and purple and pinned sideways under the eyes like cat whiskers. Adrianne stares until the vacant eyes take shape. They are deep set and blue-a shade darker than glacial set in the mask like crater lakes, smooth, seemingly calm, and untouchable. Still, they beckon. Come swim in me, say the eyes, swim in me so that I can take you for granted. A tight rope runs through her-illusion holds tight to one end, humiliation pulls on the other. Adrianne is fraying in the middle.

She looks around, desperately, searching for something, someone who could save her from herself. Past the three-foot high wigs, the sequined gowns, there are other people in the room--tailored short-haired women (or are they men?) mingling with men in khakis and cotton shirts (or are they women?).

A young man in a G-string climbs onto the center bar, stepping between tall glasses, maneuvering his hips down low to accept the bills from eager hands. His g-string bulges--the edges of bills ruffling his abdomen-- but his body, smooth and hairless, resembled a lean athletic girl. In one movement, he stands up, spins around and shows his back flanks. He moves like a gymnast and Adrianne remembers Diane doing back flips across the concrete parking lot behind the school-like wind in sunlight.

Adrianne tries not to look at the masks hanging from the walls, the ceiling, but the feathers, the sequins, the hollow eyes demand her attention and when she stares at the masks she sees that they are covering the faces from her past-Diane, Helen, Dana, Thea, Art-and herself, Adrianne. Her own adolescent face stares at her, laughing, from the hollow eyes of a purple sequined mask. Behind that mask, those mocking adolescent eyes, there is something even more terrifying-her own absence. She is staring into an oval with a gilt frame and nothing inside. Long feathered plumes bent out from the back of the frame and brush her face as she moves closer, peering into what she thinks is a mirror, but there is no reflection.

She is looking for herself -- beyond that what does she expect to see? She wishes she could see someone who has it all together. She longs to see the tiny lines around her eyes, the faint crease in the center of her forehead. She wants to see a map of fine lines that will lead her into the future. "Don't worry about that picture frame. We're deciding what to put in it." Adrianne looks up, startled. A beautiful creature is speaking. At first she thinks she is looking at a nymph, the reincarnation of one of the girls she left behind. But then she sees that this is a young man with dark eyes made even more exotic by their painted outlines.

"Are you okay," he asks?

"I think I am," she says. "But I don't really know what I'm doing…"

She almost says "here," but she knows it is more than that. She doesn't know what is real and what isn't-and this had started long before she walked into Oz. She looks down and notices he is holding a tray full of drinks. "Don't worry, dahlin,' " he says as he lifts a martini glass filled with luminous pink liquid and hands it to her. "Your night just got better."

"This is courtesy of Mel."

"If you don't know who Mel is, you will soon."

"I don't usually…"

Adrianne almost tells him that she doesn't ordinarily drink hard liquor, but his salacious wink stops her short. "Dahlin', this is New Orlins and people do all kinds of things here that they don't usually do." Adrianne takes the drink.
"My name is Sammy. I'm here to make sure that you are treated like a queen.

Now you enjoy your Cosmo and you make sure that you let me know if there's anything you need--anything at all." Adrianne blinks and when she opens her eyes, Sammy is gone. She wonders if she imagined him.
"I'm Mel." Adrianne looks down at someone who is a foot and a half shorter than her. The face that looks up at her is round, wrinkled, pugnacious. Mel's hair is a shock of bristly white. Eyes with electric tendrils, eels, look Adrianne up and down-from her face to her breasts. They linger. Adrianne feels the eyes like a touch that sent a signal to her thighs and to the backs of her knees. She is sinking fast. Quicksand.

"Welcome," says Mel peering up into Adrianne's face, scrutinizing her. "This is a real pahty town. Finish your drink."
Adrianne raises the glass to her lips and tips her head back.

" My boy Sammy is bringing you a special treat-a Slippery Nipple."
When Adrianne stares down she notices that Mel's expressionless round face looks like it is set directly on the shoulders of a fireplug body.

"But, I don't usually…" Adrianne is going to say "drink" but her nipples are tingling and she likes the way the hot pink Cosmo spreads warmth through her from the inside out. "Thanks."

"My pleasure." Mel moves closer. The warmth of another body inches away. Her hand rests on Adrianne's hip. Then a short thick thumb moves down the inside V of her jeans. She feels an electric tingle that spreads warmth through the rest of her.

A stranger's touch--breathing new life into her.

Adrianne is standing in this particular place, this city that is sinking, inch by inch, every year until some day this would all be gone, and the place where everyone now dances and drinks and shouts and throws beads and makes love will have long ago turned into a swamp. Mel's thumb is now running down her zipper and a moan begins to form in Adrianne's vocal chords. And even though she is feeling the heat of someone who wants her, Adrianne feels her aloneness acutely--

She knows that people who are afraid of being alone are in danger of doing desperate things. She knows but she doesn't care.

She takes the Slippery Nipple.

"The only way to drink it is in one gulp," states Mel.

Adrianne throws back the Slippery Nipple and accepts another one.

Reality slips away.

She takes the hand that reaches out for her.

****

Adrianne thrashes in her motel bed, shoving the covers off of her onto the other side of the bed. Her head hurts. Her mouth is dry. She flings her bare legs over the lump of blankets and tried to piece together the previous evening. It is morning. She has a shadowy memory of bringing Mel here. She remembers a pair of boxer shorts and when she reaches her hand under the sheet next to her she finds them, wadded up into a crumpled ball that she pushes over the side of the bed onto the floor.

Adrianne groans. She is thirsty but she isn't ready to get up - she rolls back over, pulling the blanket with her, and goes back to sleep. Some time later-- an hour or two--a door slams in the hallway. Adrianne gets up and turns on the light. The boxer shorts, lying on the floor next to the bed, are patterned with white palm trees against a black background.

Adrianne walks into the bathroom and drops a tissue into the white plastic trashcan and sees two stretched out condoms and a pale green latex glove that looks used. Adrianne turns around, wadds up some more toilet tissue, and drops it into the trash where it covers everything.

She needs to take a shower.

Hot water streams over her face, neck, shoulders, arms. She turns it up, hotter, as hot as she can stand-until her skin begins to turn red. She wonders how she has arrived at this exact moment in time, standing naked and hung over in a shower stall of a seedy motel, with a stranger's boxer shorts crumpled on the floor next to her bed. Nearly a month has passed, since she stood in the airport and changed her mind about where she was going. It had all started because Adrianne misplaced her passport. Then she realized that Rome had been a bad idea along. It was just that she needed somewhere to go, someone who go to. The One was not the answer.

Standing alone in the airport, she realized she had no destination and she had no One. She took the next domestic flight that had a seat open and a destination that was of interest to her. The Deep South was preferable to the Mid West. In fact, for some reason--perhaps because she had family here even if she had never met them, she was drawn to this place where white and pink oleander bushes line the highways like lush lace holding everything in place.

She rinses the shampoo from her hair, cursing the fact that she forgot to buy cream rinse. Hot water streams down on her, entering every crevice. She lathers the washed thin bar of motel soap onto a coarse white washcloth and scrubs until she feels a layer of herself rinse away. Underneath there is something that has been lurking there all along-pure desperation. She does not feel clean. She feels ashamed. Suddenly, the hot water turns cold.

Shivering, Adrianne steps out of the shower and towels herself off. No one knows she is here. The Familiar Stranger has been leaving messages on Adrianne's cell phone--but she has not returned the calls. She has purposefully not called her father, but keeps telling herself that she will. She keeps the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and if she slipped and fell--if she died in this room--no one would find her for days.

The walls of this dingy motel room-- its two beds (one untouched, the other a mess), its empty metal ashtrays, its chipped bureau and its forsaken bible--are closing in on her.

***

Warm breezes blow from the Gulf of Mexico.

Diamonds of light shimmer above tranquil water.

Adrianne sits on the beach, her fingers sifting through warm white sand. She watches a single pelican perched on a wooden pole some fifty yards out in the water. The pole is attached to a wharf that is being eaten away by salt and water. It is disappearing. The pelican's long beak slopes toward water. Adrianne can't see the bird's eyes but she is sure they are vigilant, detecting small silver flashes beneath the water, beneath the light. There is a long narrow island in the distance. The sails of a small white boat catch the sun. Adrianne is wearing shorts and a T-shirt. She leans back and digs her toes into warm sand. Watching the tiny triangles of light hovering above the water, she is a grain of sand, a single sharp eye of a pelican watching for a silver glint, a breeze- a current of air passing through.

That morning when she looked at the map and decided to come to Biloxi-- this tiny Mississippi town on the other side of the two-lane highway opposite the beach, she wondered why she hadn't thought of coming here before. This is where her mother's father was born and raised, before he joined the Merchant Marines, went North, married
her grandmother and created a family that he abandoned.

When Adrianne arrived, she walked from the tiny old fashioned Greyhound Bus depot--with its dusty floors and wooden folding chairs -- through the town on narrow streets flanked with small white and brown wooden houses and Spanish moss hanging from Oak trees and Cypresses. She remembered her mother's stories and imagined the town-a "mudhole" her grandmother had called it-- before the streets were paved. An angry Baptist preacher-that would have been her maternal great grandfather-lived in one of these houses where he beat the fear of God into his son-- his son who would one day become a man, beating his daughter who will grow up to become Adrianne's mother and who will carry her pain to her grave. Adrianne doesn't have an address of where her grandfather's family had lived. Chances are that the house was long gone. She thought about looking for familiar names in a phone book, asking around, or simply looking at people to see if anyone resembled her. But then she saw the beach.

She is falling into warm breezes from the Gulf. Somewhere far in the distance, the Sirens are calling. The One had been a Siren wrenching Adrianne away from her life but now The One is only a memory-fading to a memory of a memory. Adrianne feels nothing when she thinks of The One-but now, with the breezes turning to music inside of her mind, she feels a faint flicker of gratitude as she drifts into sleep.

When she wakes the sun is a white ball in the center of the sky. She gets up, and gathers her sandals, backpack and the large silk rectangular scarf that she was laying on. She flicks the sand from her scarf and walks down the beach into the water. It is cold on her toes and then gradually warm around her calves and thighs until it darkens the hem of her shorts. She stands still as the water ripples around her and she listens to the breezes murmuring into her ears, Come, swim in me. Let me sweep you to sea and we'll never turn back. Adrianne suddenly realizes that she could never do this. She is not like her grandfather, the shadow of a person that he was in her mother's life. She could never leave the people she loved and not return.

She cannot free herself from her moorings.

She walks back to the beach and along the edge of the water until she comes to a wharf that is solid with shiny new planks of wood--it has been rebuilt. She walks along the narrow wooden planks over the water and at the end she sits down on a shaded bench and stares at the long island in front of her, now closer, larger. Checking her cell, she sees that the Familiar Stranger called again, this time not leaving a message. Adrianne starts to call the number back, but then instead she calls her father. She feels like she owes him an apology, but she finds herself just talking to him.
He is surprised to hear from her and sounds happy that she is in Biloxi and not Rome. She describes exactly where she is sitting, on the shady bench on the wharf, warm water lapping against the wooden poles beneath her, and her father replies, "I remember being there with your mother years ago. There's a long skinny island in front
of you."

"I'm looking at it," says Adrianne. "There's a cluster of palm trees in the middle, and the ones of the edge have curved trunks that arc from the sand until the palms lean over the water." She pauses.
"It's really beautiful here, just like mom always said it was."

"Yeah." Her father's one syllable is full of wonder and memory.

That fast, without asking how he is doing or if he needs her, Adrianne tells him that she is returning. She needs him.

Later that night, in her motel room, Adrianne is trying to pack, but diamonds of light shimmer in front of her eyes. She clutches her stomach and runs to the bathroom. Her skin is scorched and she is freezing. She can feel the blisters rising and if she wasn't in so much pain she could kick herself for her own stupidity. That was something that the Familiar Stranger would have done--told her to wear sunscreen. She comes out of the bathroom, and starts going through the dresser drawers, throwing her clothes into her open suitcase. A few minutes later, back in the bathroom, she bends over the toilet and heaves. Standing over the sink, splashing cold water on her face, her life swirls around her. Not only her life but her mother's life as well -- the life that brought her here. It occurs to Adrianne that not only had her grandfather abandoned her mother, he had abandoned her as well.

She lays down on the bed for a few minutes and then gets up and finishes packing her clothes and looks around on the floor to see if she has forgotten anything. The boxer shorts are still on the flor next to the bed. She picks them up, her fingers touching only the waistband, and puts them in bureau drawer--on top of the Bible. Then she plops down on the bed; picks up the remote and turns on the television. The local news announcer looks out from the TV screen. He is talking about a prostitute whose body was just discovered. She is the latest in a recent series of murders of prostitutes in New Orleans. The women all turned up missing--the ones who had someone to report their absence-and then their bodies were found in the swamps that surrounded the city.

Adrianne sits on the bed and shivers from sun poisoning and raw terror. Her room has no windows -- as if she is underground. Wherever she goes in this city, she is below sea level. The waves are washing over her, submerging her into a place where past and present are indistinguishable. She is surrounded by swamps, alligators, water moccasins, and the bodies of women who are used and thrown away. She falls asleep thinking of the faces behind the masks, the One, the Familiar Stranger, the girls she had left behind--Diane, Helen, Thea, Dana, Art, and herself, too, Adrianne. She dreams them onto the faces of old lost women who mutter on the trolleys--about alligators, swamps, and a sacred stump that can make the dead come back to life.

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