Three Caravels

Lyman was 10-feet tall and made of plates of cast iron bolted together. He affected a violent impatience but had a great affection for Italian pants. A would-be nihilist junkie, he had a great deal to live for and a distaste for dope. To his embarrassment, his father was proud of his nimble intellect and creativity, as well as his prodigious strength. But he knew his father was disappointed that he’d dropped out of college and considered Lyman’s passion, punk rock, a preposterous affectation and his group of friends, half-wits. He respected his independence, though, and figured that he would find the lifestyle limiting in the long run and turn his attentions to something less restrictive.

At that point, though, Lyman was not worrying about his future. He had a band and a world self-contained enough to test out his aesthetic theories on and turn into a great experiment in performance art. Most giants with orange Mohawks at the time went to great lengths to avoid self-consciousness, but it didn’t intimidate Lyman. In fact, it made the experience more enjoyable to him. But that was before the incident that ended this part of his life, that would tie it off into an episode, and give it a memorial importance for that Lyman that would exist afterward.

Lyman was psychologically, though not socially, on the fringe of the group. He was always in the middle of things, but mentally distant. The group, six hillbillies with a native sense of the absurd, who lived their lives as though it were a cartoon, Lyman believed to be accidental geniuses. Les Chocolatieres, they were called. The name came from an incident when Lyman, who at the time worked at Feldman and Lear Chocolates, stole eight pounds of chocolate, which he melted in a soup pot on Thor and Reefer’s hotplate. He encouraged Les Chocolatieres to dip their spiky, filthy hair into the melted mixture and then marched the willing group to the Town Athletic Club, home, at the time, to a number of Olympic runners. There they sat on the front steps of the neo-classic building and ate each other’s hair.

When a newspaper reporter from the Tribune-Leader happened by on his way to the newspaper’s office several blocks down the street, Lyman told him it was a protest against U.S. support for the Salvadoran government. Les Chocolatieres were delighted the next afternoon when they discovered on the newspaper’s front page a large photo of the groups with the caption, “Chocolatiers Protest Support of Duarte’s Regime.”

That day Lyman was fired from the chocolate company, dropped out of the university and had Vodvarka shave his long hair, except for a foot-tall Mohawk, which Vodvarka helped him dye orange with dye he’d taken from his mother’s beauty shop.

The way Les Chocolatieres lived was an exercise in Western tramp and rail-bum resourcefulness. The necessary elements of Chocolatieres life were beer, rent and food,. Rent was obtained in the following fashion: One of the group, usually Lyman or Dunleavy, the two individuals most likely to have money at any given time, would get an apartment or, in flush times, a house. All the rest would show up with abandoned sofas, bedrolls, broken chairs and night tables and take up communal living. They would, thereupon immediately stop paying rent, unless they could put together a punk rock show in a basement or living room that would fleece the college kids of another month’s rent. The entry fee was frequently augmented by Reefer, who would take time out several times during the night to rifle through the guests’ coats for cash and jewelry.

There they would all hunker until such time as the intimidated hippy landlord got fed up enough to abandon his or her squishy liberalism and eject them with the help of the Sheriff’s department. Les Chocolatieres were responsible for the death of a great many hippy illusions.

Food consisted of food stamps, government cheese and butter give-aways and Hun-like raids on the city’s many public (and occasionally private) gardens. Beer, however, required a much more operatic approach, with the full compliment of divas, stage crew and supernumeraries. But that comes later.

The places they lived in usually wound up with names: Mutants West, for instance, was named in counterpoint to the city’s Athletics West, a club for Olympic runners; Sacre Coeur was named when Vlamminck one evening during a drinking bout in the basement, put a half-rack on his head, draped himself in an American flag and proclaimed himself Pope Vlamminck XIV. In an event that would come to be known as The Great Schism, he was quickly deposed by The Animal Garcia who declared himself – and was so voted – the true pope, moving upstairs to the porch and leaving Vlamminck and his papal court in Avignon (the basement) where he degenerated into a dark venality and was called Anti-Pope Vlamminck XIV the Unpantsed.

Soon after the white smoke was spotted at The Animal Garcia’s election, Simon, the landlord of the newly-christened Sacre Coeur, came over to upbraid the lads over non-payment of the rent and noise complaints. Simon was a man of indeterminate age, passive-aggressive, favoring plaid shirts, who drove a Volvo covered in political stickers and, incongruously, but tellingly, sported a Tom Selleck-style moustache. The previous day The Animal Garcia had discovered that Simon had run a power cord from the Sacre Coeur’s outdoor socket to run the brick cutter he’d been using on another property he owned next door, which he had been spending all summer renovating. The electricity bills for June and July had been $100 each.

“I will force him down onto a ghastly biblical gadget, lo! as unto one used by the Assyrians in Corinthians 9:14.”

The Animal Garcia was constantly inventing biblical verses. He sometimes ate Spaghetti-Os out of a headless plastic doll, which he referred to as The Sacrament and with which he blessed people, often strangers and frequently against their will.

(The Animal Garcia later wound up first at a Christian Identity youth camp near Hayden Lake, Idaho, as a peer Sunday School facilitator, then in thrall to a televangelist in Norman, Oklahoma, and then, finally, as a Franciscan lay brother, working with the Community of Sant’Egidio in the Trastevere, ministering to the needs of poor African immigrants in Rome. I saw him years later on the Piazza Castellani. As he smiled and embraced me I could see the Crucifux tattoo on his neck. He let me go, saying only, “Missa est” and making a vague, incorrect sign of the cross over me before disappearing up the Via dei Vascellari.)

“At any rate, he said, “some killing will be necessary.”

“Why haven’t you paid your rent?” demanded Simon.

“Why did you steal our Power?” asked The Animal Garcia in return.

“I didn’t steal your power,” said Simon, following the line of the extension cord with his eyes. “I’m very disappointed in you. I trusted you.”

The Animal Garcia had begun to roar like a lion, his mouth open wide an inch from Simon’s face. Simon blanched, then turned and bolted for home.

“I am the right hand of God!” screamed The Animal Garcia. “The one that does the spanking!”

When Lyman got home, The Animal Garcia told him what had happened. Lyman had a sense for these things.

“Summon the men, Holy Father. We’re going to need beer.”

The way Les Chocolatieres secured their colossal supply of beer was to implement a process called, “stewing.”

First, a store was found, usually a corner store, one with a back entrance. One Chocolatier, frequently Thor, would act as lookout there. Another, this was usually Vodvarka, would serve as a decoy. Vodvarka, with his army jacket and Mohawk, would ask the cashier, ideally a Korean immigrant with a limited grasp of English, or a student working the job part-time, “How much is your Bubble Yum?” and (holding up a pot scrubber or packet of batteries) “What are these? Are these for ladies?”

Aside from those stationed at the beer cooler, whose job was to grab as many cases and half-racks and 40s of Schlitz or Buckhorn or Rheinlander as they could, the last remaining position was that of the “stewer.” The Animal Garcia usually took this role, as he considered it to be a Calling. The stewer stood in the isle with the soups, stews and tuna. When the cashier could no longer be deflected by questions about the correct temperature to cook Chic-o-Stix and requests for single servings of aspirin, the lookout would yell “Stew him!” and the stewer would pitch as many heavy cans of Dinty Moore and Swanson Chicken Stock as possible at the shocked, and occasionally bloodied, cashier while escapes were made.

In just such a way were four cases of Olympia and seven 40-ounce bottles of Bohemian and three of Old English secured for that night’s chalk talk. Something needed to be done, something special, with the irony of a sinner’s punishment in Dante’s Inferno, something appropriate for the kind of man who would steal the power from his tenants and then turn around and chain himself up in public to protest the demolition of an “historically significant” movie theatre by a development company. (“All they care about is money!” wailed Simon as the TV cameras rolled. “What about the people? What about our community?” There were tears in his eyes.)

In back of the Sacre Coeur was an old gray Econoline that didn’t run. The front axle was fused. They had gotten it from Thor and Reefer’s father, who lived out in Charleston, a miserable coastal town, in a shack that sat out over Coos Bay on pilings. All Les Chocolatieres went out there once. Dunleavy said he never saw anyone drink so hard or shoot so much junk and not die as the Old Man and Dunleavy was from L.A. and used to hang out in Westlake Park.

The Old Man was a hardcore jailbird from a line of men who for too many generations to count only ever went to jail, got out, went back in, and died, fathering a child or two on the way to ensure that their way of life did not perish from the earth.

At the end of the night, when the Old Man passed out, Reefer stole the Econoline, loaded up with power tools from the rusting tin shed that passed for the Old Man’s shop, and all the remaining drugs and booze, which was not much. He wouldn’t be calling the police, Thor said, since he had stolen it from an Indian exchange student whose body he’d weighted down with truck jack and shoved off the jetty in Florence. Lyman said he made an anonymous call to the police later, but never heard anything about it, so he thought the Old Man, or Thor, may have been lying.

By the time they’d gotten the van home, it was making a sound like a table saw biting into a garbage can lid. They parked it in the back and used the battery to power the flood lights they used to put on outdoor concerts and never moved it again. Every time they turned it on to recharge the battery, it would discharge exhaust into the screen porch where The Animal Garcia slept behind a cord of wood with his snakes.

By the end of that evening, they had a plan and the Econoline figured prominently in it. The next day, Lyman went to his girlfriend’s house to use her phone to call Simon.

“Simon, I hate to ask you this,” said Lyman, “but could you stop by the house tonight? I’m not going to have time to run the rent over to you and I know it’s late. One of the guys was supposed to mail it and forgot. I found it under a magazine on the coffee table.”

“You think I’m going to come over there and deal with that freak again?” asked Simon, slightly panicky.

“What freak?”

“Some big freak talking about the Bible and how he’s God’s…something…”

“That guy. Listen. I don’t even know that guy. I mean, I know him. I went to high school with him. But we’re not friends. He started hanging around on the porch when no one’s home.”

“You’re saying he’s not living there?”

“No. There’s only three of us here, like we agreed. And that guy hasn’t been seen since the day you met him.”

At 8:00 Simon showed up at the Sacre Coeur and Lyman let him in. Peering around, Simon noticed the house had been cleaned. Somewhat.

“Have a seat. You want some iced tea? I’ll get the check.”

Simon sat down at the large walnut dining table by the kitchen, facing the front window. He was always hard pressed to say no to a glass of iced tea, especially herbal tea with hibiscus and there was a pitcher right there. As Simon poured some tea for himself, Lyman took an envelope from a magnet on the refrigerator and handed it to him. Earlier he had found a check from a long-cancelled checking account and made it out to Simon.

“Here you go. I put in next month’s too,” said Lyman. As Simon tore open the envelope, the sun went down in an orange ball over the butte through the streaked gauze curtains. The Animal Garcia crept from the stairwell behind the kitchen with a red service station rag in his hand. It was wet. Simon smelled something, looked up at Lyman, then tried to spin around, just as The Animal Garcia clamped the rag down over his mouth and nose.

“Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I-AM hath sent me unto you,” said The Animal Garcia.

Later that night, at approximately 10:00 p.m., Officers Dale Dell and Dell Dahlman responded to a 911 call reporting a gray van that, having careened unsteadily down 11th Avenue, crashed straight into the glass foyer of the Three Caravels Theater.

Simon was found, clad in a sundress with a pattern of blue cornflowers, in rope-soled clogs and a bonnet, hunched, insensate, over the steering wheel. He sported crudely applied eye shadow and lipstick and held a bottle of ethylene glycol monoethyl ether rammed between his thighs. A Vomit Launch cassette was playing at a distracting volume in the van’s tinny deck and the passenger seat and floor of the van were awash in gay pornographic magazines and videos with names like “Ass Master” and “Punishment Farm.”

Miraculously, two TV vans and the daily newspaper showed up as the cops arrived. Simon was charged with driving under the influence of intoxicants, reckless driving and destruction of private property and booked into the hospital wing of the county jail for observation and detox. Later he was briefly held for questioning in the murder of Prakash Deshpande, an Indian exchange student, missing for two years, whose van he was said to be driving.

Les Chocolatieres were investigated, of course, but all had airtight alibis from 6 p.m. until almost midnight on the night in question. A girl named Ivy, who worked at Tiny Ricardo’s Teriyaki Hut, said they had spent the entire evening eating chicken and wading through a suite of rice wines.

Simon told the police there had been a van, the same van he had been found in, parked out back of the Sacre Coeur. But Bruno had fixed the truck’s axle with one he and Vodvarka spirited away from Glenwood Salvage through a cut-away section of the chain-link Bruno had previously used to rescue the engine block of a 1960 Studebaker Lark and a 1979 Harley Davidson Swallowtail frame after he came to believe the owner, for whom he worked at the yard, did not give him a deep enough discount. He had subsequently parked his sister’s husband’s burgundy Dodge Ram Van on the spot the Econoline had formerly occupied and the police could not find anyone who remembered the van parked there being gray and not purple nor specifically a Ford.

The Three Caravels night was the last Les Chocolatieres would ever spend together. They departed the Sacre Coeur in the days following Simon’s arrest. They moved out quietly and separately. Lyman later told me he believed Three Caravels was the furthest and purest expression of everything they had each believed, separately and collectively. This was their “significant gesture.” Lyman said he and Dunleavy had spoken that evening after the event.

“This is it, huh?” asked Dunleavy.

“Yeah,” said Lyman. “This is it.”

“Suppose the others know?”

”No.”

“Be a shame to tell them.”

“It would be cruel,” agreed Lyman.

So they didn’t. They drank. They pulled out the bathtub and threw it down the stairs to the basement, destroying once and for all the Babylonian Captivity of the Avignon anti-papacy. Reefer showed up later and relieved himself into the bathtub from a considerable distance.

In the years that followed, Lyman wound up playing against type as a grad student at a Northeastern university. Afterward he became a professor at a liberal arts college in California, where he seduced students of both sexes, grew fat and went on anti-depressants.

Reefer was killed. No one knew how. They found his body on a gravel shelf by the river. His neck was broken.

Thor got shot in the knee during a drug deal and lost his leg then stabbed an undercover cop and got a life sentence and then got thrown off a walkway at Walla Walla.

Dunleavy became a stone mason and bought a boat.

Vodvarka got a job as a park ranger. Even he doesn’t know how that happened. And one summer at Crater Lake he rescued a movie star who was hanging by her pashmina from a whitebark pine 500 feet down the inside of the caldera after she turned her high-heel on a pine cone and plunged over the rim and he got his picture in the paper.

Vlamminck took to robbing banks until he caught a shot in the back. Last time I saw him he said he got real junked up, but kicked it after bit, and then he rolled away and a pretty woman with red hair leaned down to kiss him.

And you know what happened to The Animal Garcia.

 fiction, punk