Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
26.1
Gadi Dechter
Joshua TreeA few weeks ago, I couldn’t sustain an erection. I spent half the night in a fit with my girlfriend, Megan, trying to calm me down. My chiropractor, Kelly, suggested I take Megan to Joshua Tree, a national park two hours from L.A. in the Coachella Desert just above Palm Springs. It had been a rainy March in L.A. and Kelly thought the dry heat of the high desert would do us good. “It will also help your back,” Kelly said. She’s been helping me with this degenerating vertebrae I have in my lower back, and we exchange confidences between spinal manipulations.
~~~
“Put on your seatbelt, my frisky lamb,” Megan said as we wobbled down the San Bernardino Freeway in my Datsun. The two mountain bikes we borrowed from my parents were mounted unsteadily on the back fender. They upset the normal balance of the light car, and we swerved between lanes until I got used to it. I buckled in and saw Megan’s face relax. She’s so worried for my safety.
We played “Guess the Ethnicity” as we drove through the Inland Empire. That’s a game I made up where you try to guess the ethnicity of the driver from the make and model of the car. It’s not as easy as you might think. An F-10 pick-up trailing a dune buggy with a license plate that reads, SND HOG. White trash? Mexican. A beat-up Cutlass Supreme with sagging tail pipe. Black guy? Blonde girl. The only ones we got right were the lowered Japanese subcompacts with the screaming decals. “It’s better we’re bad at it,” Megan said. “Otherwise, we’d feel racist.”
Her hair was gathered in a knot above her head, and the tiny hairs along her neck glowed in the midday sun. She was examining her left knee with her fingers. “My knee is too abrupt,” she said, frowning. “It interrupts the smooth line of my leg.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Your knees are your best feature.”
“What else?” she said.
“Your smile.”
Her face crinkled into a grin. There are moments when she looks like an angel. She undid her seatbelt. “Drive very safely now,” she said, twisting around like a pretzel and reaching for the boom box perched on the back seat. Billy Bragg started singing: I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song/I’m twenty-two now but I won’t be for long….
“Is that true?” she asked. “He was only twenty-one when he wrote it?”
Megan is twenty-two. I am twenty-six. That may not seem like much difference, but whereas she’s in her first year after college and amusing herself with a part-time job teaching nursery school, I’ve already been fired from one company and laid off by another. I’ve got three gray hairs. When it’s humid or rainy, my back actually stiffens and creaks. Megan’s cheeks are soft and round. Her skin is smooth as porcelain. When she’s across the court from you, in a baggy T-shirt and skimpy running shorts, she could be a fourteen-year-old girl in a summer tennis clinic.
I was lying. Her youth, that’s her best feature.
~~~
The Joshua Tree Inn doesn’t look like much, another bleak motel in a landscape of desert scrubs and beige rock. We passed it twice while driving up and down 29 Palms Highway. “Gram Parsons died here,” I said when we finally pulled into the lot. Megan attempted an interested smile, but she doesn’t know who Gram Parsons is.
We were met by the owner, Evelyn, a woman in her mid-fifties whose gray sack dress matched her starchy gray hair. She greeted us with hearty warmth and showed us to our room. “You’re going to love it,” she cried as she unlocked the door to Room 10.
It was an explosion of dark lavender. The heavy purple drapes on the two small windows filtered purple light from the parking lot outside. The walls crawled with painted purple flowers. The wicker-frame bed—where I had planned to recover my manhood—was already occupied by a massive pink teddy bear and was covered in a loud floral-print spread. Even the thick braided rugs on the floor were emblazoned with startling purple plant life.
“Did he die in this very room?” Megan asked when Evelyn had left.
“Next door, Room 8. A lethal mixture of tequila and morphine.”
“And wicker,” she added grimly, repairing the teddy bear and bedspread to the closet with a surprising flourish of matronly efficiency. “That must have been the last straw.” She pinned back the purple drapes and opened the rear door that led to the parking lot. Our florid dungeon was suddenly awash in dusty light. Megan brushed a strand of sweaty hair from her eyes and surveyed her work. I told her the room looked much better.
“Yes, but we have to spend as little time as possible here,” she said.
“Do you want to go somewhere else?”
“Of course not, honey. We’re here together. That’s what matters.”
I believe she means these things when she says them.
She went out to the car to get her bags. I lay on the floor and did some stretches that Kelly taught me for when I was away from her. I closed my eyes and imagined myself hanging from a tree like a bat, my spine stretched taut and straight. I imagined a space widening between the lower vertebrae. This fantasy is not part of my directed therapy; it’s a vision that comes to me. I’ve been having it ever since Kelly showed me on the x-ray the disintegration of cartilage in my backbone. I want to open up those spaces.
My back popped.
“That sounded like it felt good,” Megan said.
She was standing above me in her underwear, changing into exercise clothes. Her ribs showed through the skin on her back. Her spine was curved into a graceless arc. Her bony shoulders jutted forward as she bent into the neck hole of the tank top. Her breasts looked like tiny saucers, the kind that hold dollhouse tea cups. Faint dimples of cellulite rippled across her thighs. I closed my eyes again.
“Get dressed, my plant,” she said. It was the same tone of patient authority she uses with her three-year-old wards. Let’s not forget our jackets. Everybody find a partner. Time to come off the jungle gym, my little monkeys.
I shuffled around the room in my boxers, looking for shorts suitable for bicycling. When I bent over to search my duffel bag, I caught an eyeful of loose skin folding over my belt. My back seized in a needle of pain. I groaned and straightened slowly. Megan was watching me. Was she as dismayed by my body as I was by hers?
“Maybe you should rest before we hit the park,” she said.
“But we don’t have time,” I said. “We’ll lose the sun.”
“I don’t mind.”
What precocious maturity. We’ve only been together five months and she’s already accepted me entire, bad back and worse. This should be a glorious feeling: permission to be comfortable in your own skin. But I suspect it entails reciprocity, and I’m not sure I want her to be comfortable in hers. Especially if it’s going to dimple.
~~~
“Opposite Old Mining Road it looks like there’s a backwoods trail,” Megan said, reading from the map we got at the Rangers’ station. She made sure we had plenty of water. We got the bikes off the rack and started down a sandy wash heading straight into the low horizon. There were occasional steep grades and small boulders, but mostly we powered over level ground.
“It’s hard when the sand is thick,” Megan called from ahead of me. Her wheels slid in the sand but she managed not to slip. She yelled out a cheer of success. I caught up to her and we rode side by side, pedaling hard, enjoying the exhilaration of exertion.
We were in the middle of a massive valley. The mountains that contained it looked like piles of chocolate rubble. The desert floor was carpeted in Joshua Trees: spindly, spike-leafed evergreens with crooked branches that look like waving hands. The smaller ones resembled squat, hairless palm trees. Megan made us stop several times and take pictures. We were alone in the great landscape like wanderers in a cartoon. She made sure we drank plenty of water.
“Look, jumbo rocks,” Megan said. Up ahead a crop of smooth, massive boulders seemed to sprout from the ground. We stopped and scrambled around the rocks, chasing each other. Megan wouldn’t climb very high, she’s afraid of heights. We lingered on one of the lower boulders, spreading out on our backs and shielding our eyes from the sun. Megan ran the backs of her arms and hands across the face of the rock, as if she were carving a snow angel. “They’re so supple,” she said quietly, gazing up at the boulders that loomed above us. “They’re like huge breasts.”
I laughed at her, thinking that would make her blush and forget it, but she winked at me instead, and I knew that my moment of reckoning was here. We found a place in the shade, hidden from the path. “Should I stand up or lie down?” she asked. Her eyes were wet with excitement.
“Better try standing up,” I said. I was terrified about failing again. I heard the blood rushing in my ears. We fumbled around for a bit. I leaned her hard into the rock. She pushed back and after what felt like forever I finally felt myself getting hard. The tug of the erection was such a relief that I bit into her neck and ears with joy. She sucked in air through clenched teeth. I clawed at her hair. She kicked off her shoes and lowered her shorts. She used her toes to pull her underwear down from around her. She wasn’t nearly ready but I was afraid of losing it. She gasped.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” she said, though I could see she was in pain. She kept trying to find a foothold on the side of the boulder, to prop herself up more comfortably, but the rock was smooth. I doubt it felt very supple.
“I’ve never done this before,” she breathed.
“Me, neither,” I lied. I did it in high school with Isobel, my first girlfriend. We did it standing up in a corner of the supermarket parking lot during morning nutrition. I remembered the pride I felt the rest of the day whenever I glimpsed the stain on the back of her t-shirt and the gleam of shock in her eyes. I heard that she was getting married next month to an Associate Professor at Stanford. Married. Professor. Stanford.
Megan was still trying to find a foothold on the rock. It seemed to go on forever. I’m not bragging, I’d have rather it ended quickly.
“Maybe I should lie down,” she whispered.
“It’s rocky. You’ll hurt yourself.”
“I think I’m doing that already.” Her eyes were pink.
“My God, Megan, let’s stop, then,” I said.
“But I want you to finish.”
“And I want you to finish, darling.”
“I don’t think I can like this.” Her voice was strained. “I’m just a one trick pony.”
I began pulling out.
“But don’t you want to come?” she pleaded.
“Later, in the room. When we can do it together.”
She thought that was pretty gallant.
~~~
The sunset was tacky. It looked airbrushed into the sky, broad strokes of orange and turquoise curving like rainbows above the flat endless earth. You could put it on a t-shirt and sell it on the Venice boardwalk, three for five dollars.
Megan was resting in the room. I tooled around on my bike behind the motel, testing the springs on the seat by plowing over potholes in the asphalt. It was fun. Then I hustled over the gravel and pumped the right handbrake, trying to get the bike to skid out in a clean half circle beneath my feet. That was a big thing in elementary school, to skid out like Luke on the Dukes of Hazzard. I always chickened out at the last minute and slowed down right before the turn. I did now, too.
I was thinking about Gram Parsons. He was also twenty-six when he came here in 1973. By that time he had recorded two solo albums. Joined and quit The Byrds. Gotten married. Fathered an entire genre of music.
Megan popped her head out the door. “I miss you,” she called. “Come back inside.” Her hair was still wet from the shower. It reminded me of that joke: What’s the best thing about having a shower with a fourteen-year-old girl? Get her hair wet and she looks eleven. Megan saw me smiling at the joke, and she smiled shyly back, and in that instant, as the last drops of red sunlight trickled across the sand, I was filled up with wanting her. I locked up the bike outside Gram Parson’s old room and went into ours.
Later that night, she said, “See? Just a one-trick pony.”
“It’s a great trick,” I said.
It is, too—great shuddering orgasms. She has to be on her back and in a bed, but it happens nearly every time. Afterward, we usually sleep on our stomachs, but that night we remained together, even after my arm started tingling.
One day you’re stuck in maddening traffic and smog, and you catch your face in the rearview—the skin starting to toughen with age—and admit to yourself in despair: I am settling. My girlfriend is not beautiful. I write advertisements, not novels. I’ve put down roots in Manhattan…. Beach. But you don’t panic and run away. Whether from laziness or fatigue or a little bit of blind hope, you hold on. You work a little harder to maintain interesting conversations. You keep your criticism of her body to yourself. You take advice from your chiropractor. And it works, sort of, because there you are one night, marveling at how she, plainest of girls, fits into your arms very nicely. And there is beauty here, too. And you look forward to the next weekend at Joshua Tree. In the cool silence of the night you even find yourself entertaining the suddenly pleasant prospect of turning into one of those desert couples, middle-aged and middle incomed, with matching wrinkles, holding hands on a bus bench on Indian Road while the winter sun warms your aching joints. You hope you’ll still feel this way tomorrow.
“Should we stop in Palm Springs on the way home?” I asked. “There’s a Mexican place I know has cheap margaritas.”
“That sounds nice,” Megan said, her voice already thick with sleep.
I stayed awake for a while and watched the moonlight travel along the wild rows of purple flowers on the wall. I remember thinking, Gram Parsons should have held on.
