The King of Kansas
by Joel Van Noord
His sister carried for six months but it died and during the entire development he was asking, “Why.” She found it hard to explain but there was always a plethora of gestures and the occasional utterance of a need.
I had knowledge he was in Kansas and I lived by the example of things. He won’t return my call and I’m driving and I haven’t felt right in six years. Which isn’t true. It shouldn’t be, at least. So I remember it like islands in a river and I want to be unconscious. He’s a jester and lucky for it.
They’re doing research on him, he says; and thing are poetic. He speaks of the people around him, he’s rational and by research he means something else. He says his dad is a failure, an engineer on a pipeline in Saudi.. I believe that. It is a truth. But by failure he means something besides money. The man is swimming in it.
Once I took him into the lab and showed him some specimens. Ritalin was kind then and we had encyclopaedias to mouth about everything. Magic is gone when the illusion is learned. But it was only ever an illusion. Things have become reticent and the real experiment is to view the distance. Comparing the end results without influence.
The skin flaked like snow and the jars were yellow. Some were from 1890 and the university was proud. Half are now extinct. That’s how we met the Italian’s that night long ago, they were driving as we trumped through the thick snow outside the university attic.
That was when he said, “I love you man, honestly.” There was two feet of fresh powder on the ground and that was two years before I left for Utah. Gave it all up one winter to sleep on a mattress on the floor with a girl and her twin. One was punk and jumped from planes into fires in Montana, way up there near the border in the Kalispell desolation. She’d parachute down and blaze a line and flee.
It was fateful one early October as a storm brewed and the plane confused a right up a tributary and left the safety of the main-stem canyon. The fog blended to snow and the water was tumbling. Granite outcroppings were the only thing discernable and the plane crashed and rolled to a stop in the fresh snow.
The pilot put his head through the windshield and three others found objects had violated their bodies. They wordlessly bled away. The twin crawled out and returned for somebody whose shirt had burned off. It is better to not be alone. He was in shock and she took clothes off a mangled corpse, gave him a jacket, and put a splint on his leg.
He was mad like a raven and she slapped him and put his arm around her shoulder and dragged him out as the snow built like a Christmas dream. He got frostbite and she kept him alive for two nights and this twin was a Hemmingway type hero. She spoke on all the morning shows. She was Hemmingway winning the battle but she didn’t die senselessly in an idyllic field. The senselessness was someone else’s. She was fortunate. She got 400 thousand from the Forest Service and a little more from Cessna and she moved to Salt Lake to ski and climb and she hates Mormons.
The word hero is foreign and people often say, “It’s worth it” when they hear her tale and the sum. That’s what he says, my long lost friend, the King of Kansas. He says it’s worth it. The money is worth it, is what he means. He’d want that experience and he’d want that money; is what he wants. But it’s all over and done with. Drugs are the bravest things he’s done..
He’s a coward. He’ll say things like, “It’s comedic to ask our generation to fight for anything, Iraq war? That’s comedic, no one will ever ask us to fight because they know there’s nothing to fight for.” He’s brave for speaking for an entire generation and this speech has only become annoying.
He’d get drunk or eat some pills and he’d ask me to join the war with a smile. He says they need translators and he’s the one that took 5 years of Arabic. He’s the one that swam in the Red Sea. He’d tell me Kansas sucks if he wasn’t a coward and if I knew what he was hiding from I’d show up and surprise him with it. I think it’s me.
His sister wanted a baby to have someone. To have a tiny thing that would love her unconditionally. “Those things are expensive,” her brother would say, “and they don’t last forever.”
The twin has bought the best in video game entertainment and I spent that winter wisely at the console as the powder rose. The sister had a comfort now with money so close and I felt the approximation. Beer was imported from adjacent states and it was strong and thick. I sat on the modest couch and even with all that money there wasn’t a coffee table. But there was Alta and Snowbird whenever we wanted and I’d routinely enter a warmth while playing Grand Theft Auto.
We’d hike above the city and the sprawl is worse than LA. The mountains and salt flats are a pure, people-less nation. The cities are a mistake. There is a large Iranian and Polynesian component because of the missionary. Everything becomes adulterated but there are more and more creative ways to find intolerance.
I forget. One of the points is coming and feeling the throat accept and the additional distance so generously gone until all is limp or the elegiac cycle starts again and we move to the bedroom.
The other point is my friend is a coward and I am too. The point is that night in the attic of the Midwest with the 24 inches of snow in three hours and the two of us outside hitching a ride from Italians in a red sports car. The roads were empty and it was comical slipping through the deep fluff like a toy.
We got out and the snow by this club was melting form the humanity inside. Hair was done and legs were spread and breasts were wet and the skin was beaded with droplets. Girls were out in rare form with tank tops and short dresses and furry Uggs. This was one or two years after September 11th and we were so out of place there in our parkas and hats but we still managed to snag a cat for a harmless twirl. The King of Kansas and I.
That was a little off. Sorry, the point is that Kansas is bleak and incomprehensible. The word Wrath means much here and I’m relating it to Steinbeck’s misery.
“Kosinski committed suicide.” I remember saying to him once with a little too much excitement.
“Yeah.” He said and it was four months before Hunter’d do it. “Why is it that all my heroes have killed themselves?” He’d then ask and how was I supposed to know more than this.
If I had the conversation I’d tell him Bukowski lived until he was mid 70’s. H. Miller was an old wrinkled bastard with platoons of tents on his lawn. But Kansas took him. Or he took himself in Kansas. He left his girlfriend there and she didn’t know what to do.
I don’t know what to do. She had stayed and no one had told me about anything. No one knew how to contact me, or thought to, apparently. He had emailed me when I was in Panama. It must have been shortly before he destroyed it. It was a short note with nothing but an address.
The last time we talked he was leaving to sell Persian rugs and we’d laughed at how Arabians hated Persians, historically. At that time he mentioned several cities and it was their business to go into a market and have clearance sales and undercut the competition and leave. Indiana was mentioned and I have images of that state.
His poor girlfriend is like a doe, lost and unable to find footing on linoleum. I cried and she cried. I smashed my fist against the wall and I think she sobbed from a cocktail of things. She had known sorrow and it was written in her bones; her frame carried it. She had shrunken. It was impossible to comprehend. He’d been the only friend I’d ever had and he was a bastard to me.
It was platonic that night as we cried the pillow wet. We were alone together and my dreams had characters I’d long since abandoned. The next night was bestial. We had feelings no one should have, and for such an incomprehensible nothingness, too. We needed to find feelings to kill feelings. No reason. No note. No explanation. He did not leave in victory like Hemingway I don’t want to finish it.
It was always a touch not, “weird.” The right word isn’t coming. He often said to his girlfriend, “Don’t ever cheat on me with any of my friends. Except for Wren. You can sleep with him if you want.”
And he said it often. She would always look at me and the thought was real. We acted like it wasn’t.
There’s ice in Kansas and it even snowed in Malibu. The entire country is blue. I don’t have a job and she is starting to become numb. There are too many billboards with bibles and I have nowhere to take her. Everything is far away. She has nowhere to take me and we don’t have a good idea of any cities to go to. I was traveling and he was my destination. His name is on a piece of stone hundreds of miles east. He’d been the only friend I’d ever had and he’d been a bastard to me.
There is little left to do. It is important to seek that sliver of joy. I am living in his derangement of things. There is a certain clock ticking. He’s always held a small thrill with the idea of New Mexico. Old Mexico is appealing. Could I continue with her? For him? If she ever had a child it should be with me. We were, as it is, the closest people can be.