by Jon Doughboy
Feeling low, a silverfish in life’s basement feeding on crumbs and the dander of the successful and anointed who pound the boards above in heritage footwear, low and sinking lower still, slumped in front of a snifter of Arrogant Bastard Ale at the Stone Brewing bar in the San Diego airport, watching the bustle and the hustle and the exhausted, bedraggled concourse shuffle while nursing the dwindling nostalgia I have for my twenties. Hopes aplenty I had then, along with every other hipster schmo in the thrall of Craft and Local and Artisanal. I was going to found a little brewery with my fellow beer bros laboring under the same malt and hop delusion, ready to ferment in the carboy known as the Great Recession and to pour forth triumphantly, when the time was right, with an ABV as high and intoxicating as our young hopes.
I work in sales now. I’m in San Diego on a beverage sales work trip, a work trip when you’re in the bottom percentile for sales this quarter and last quarter and the top distributors have blocked your number and the major retailers hang an “out to lunch” sign when they see you skulking around the corner and next quarter is a plummeting guillotine coming for your underperforming head and it’s 102 degrees and your wife back in Tempe hates you and herself for choosing to marry you and thus joining you as you descend the socioeconomic ladder rung by miserable rung and you wake up most mornings plotting in unsettlingly precise and actionable detail how to slaughter everyone who has ever wronged you—such a work trip is no holiday which is what I say to the man who’s probably my age—37—but could pass for 22 and looks like a cat burglar, a wiry white guy dressed head to toe in black—cap, shirt, slacks, shoes—and sidles up beside me on his stealthy cat feet, orders pulled pork nachos and whatever I’m having, and asks me: “On Holiday?”
No, I say. Work trip. He asks me what I do. I hate this question as much as the next failure but I tell him. He nods enthusiastically, sees me cheapskate-baby-sipping my beer and orders me another. I take this as advance payment for humoring him, the noblesse oblige of the well-to-do, extroverted traveler, so I ask him what he does.
“Department of Defense stuff. Security. I used to be in the military. Now I’m a contractor. Sort of. I wanted to be a lawyer growing up. I wanted to be Clarence Darrow.”
I tell him I wanted to be Ken Grossman. Wanted to make a fortune getting people drunk on well-made beer. People on first dates would see my logo on a tap handle, swig my brew, and let its bubbles tickle their noses as they tumbled gently into inebriated but no less enduring love.
“But I enlisted. I thought about law school, of course. Took the LSATs. Got a 178. But I really love my country, you know?” Here he taps my new full glass with his half empty own. The gargoyles etched on them kiss. “And I was in Afghanistan—this is off the record—and we were sweeping this village and this little kid came out with an AK so I opened fire and I’m a good shot, a lethal shot, the highest lethality in my platoon, you don’t get a 178 on the LSATs without having a precise mind, without being able to manage—hell, thrive—under pressure. Needless to say, the child was dead. The insurgent. But I checked his weapon and the clip was empty. I love my country but, in that moment—and the Moment is all there is, all these little moments chained together to make a Life—in those blood-drenched Silk Road mountains, I thought: what the hell am I doing? I kept thinking that for years. But I kept doing too. Dum spiro spero. Did what needed doing. Loading and firing. Plodding along. Then I met my guru.” He notices me raising my eyebrows and looking at my suddenly empty beer and orders me a refill. “And I’m not talking about some swami walking barefoot over coals or some Burning Man doofus with sloppy face tattoos of fake Chinese pictograms. My guru was a stout little Guatemalan guy dressed business casual who worked quality control for a big jelly and jam company. He traveled the country examining different jam factories, testing the flow of the jam, making sure the texture was consistent. And I said how do you do it? Find meaning in it? Year after year? And you know what he said?” I shake my head and spot the server bringing out the nachos. They look like hardened diarrhea. Little brown mounds of moss growing off a mountain of jagged tortilla chips. “He said I had to find my dharma. Had to find my capital W Way. He said Krishna told Arjun to fight. To kill. That quality control is his Way. Some Ways involve ensuring the jelly flows. Some involve bombs and suicide vests and bullets. Inveniam viam. So, there I was, sitting in the Atlanta airport after coming back from some particularly harrowing contract work in the Gulf dealing with those Houthi fuckers and really doubting myself despite all my success in the military and my even more lucrative career as a contractor saving American lives all across the world. Still weighed down by these doubts. By that little Afghani insurgent with his empty clip. Then, boom. This guy and his truth explode on to the scene of my life like an RPG of enlightenment. This random Guatemalan guy. Or not so random. Not random at all, really. Because he works with quality. Works to ensure things flow. Boom. Synchronicity. Boom, boom. It all explodes inside me, my doubts, my fears and useless pity. This is my Way, I realized. Ergo, I flow on over to Mali. I flow to Libya. To the Sudan. To Ukraine. Walking my Way, armed with my Truth, fortes in fide, doing my Work while God watches over me as I Fuck the World He Made for Us.” He pokes his middle finger into the largest pile of pork on the platter like he’s checking its temperature and sucks the sauce off his fingers with evident approval, with the tooth-licking relish of zealous faith.
“Like God is in the Cuck Chair,” I whisper.
He stares at me, into me. “God is in the Cuck Chair,” he says. “Exactly. He’s enjoying himself. Telling us to dig in.” He sucks his finger again. “It’s tangy,” he says. “It’s delicious.”
Tangee, tangeeeee, tangeeee—the last syllable reverberates in my mind. My Mind. Yes, I think. This state-sanctioned murderer, this Latin-squawking child-killer, might be off his rocker, Rocker, but he might be onto something too, Some Thing, because I’m Lost, in desperate need of a Way. I grab a handful of nachos and shove them in my mouth. A mouth which never took the LSATs or countered insurgents, never earned money or glory or infamy or even a second glance from anyone—except, perhaps, my wife in those early days of suggestive half-smiles across empty growlers and held hands where my whole world, World, turned on her second glance, in anticipation of that Glance—but a human mouth nonetheless. Human.
Above and behind this humanity, I feel the presence of the Divine, perched in His Chair, pleasuring Himself, watching.
The Prophet beside me nods watching me eat like he understands what I’m going through, this Conversion, knows it in his bones. We eat the nachos in silence, the sacred Nachos, shoveling them into our mouths by the messy handful like neither of us has eaten in weeks or months or ever. Baby wolves tearing into their first kill. Catholics at their First Communion. Devour the sumptuous, soul-nourishing airport bar Pulled Pork of Life.
The plate is empty. The beers too. He checks his watch, says “Got a date with some warlords in the Philippines. Where the Way leads, one must follow.” He hoists his black, tactical backpack on and rests his hand on my shoulder, conferring a blessing, performing a rite acknowledging me as an acolyte, pouring his energy into me to propel Me on my Way, before disappearing into the concourse throng.
My wife texts me about her steering wheel shuddering at high speeds and the mechanic telling her the rotors are shot. Brakes too. My boss texts a reminder to compile a full report tomorrow morning but I have no idea about what. I can’t walk their Ways for them. I google assault rifles. The Bhagavad Gita. The screen of the phone is slick, sticky. My fingers too, tangy. But how do you know your way, the way you’ve been shambling along your entire life or the new way forward, is in fact your Way? I forgot to ask the Prophet. My mind feels fuzzy from the high alcohol ales and the overstimulating buzz of the airport. I google migraines and nursing programs in Tempe and the average cost of new rotors and are MBAs worth it and the gun show loophole. Google whether 37-year-olds can enlist. How to keep your home after declaring bankruptcy. Are hollow point bullets legal in Arizona. Couples counseling in Tempe. Converting to Hinduism. Assisted suicide for people in sales.
New travelers descend on the bar. Soon, my flight will board. My phone feels heavy in my hand, so heavy I can barely lift it. God’s Eyes are on me. On us all. He’s waiting out there, up there, everywhere. Waiting and Watching. We’re just little specks of light dancing on His infinite retina, miniscule signals sent to His omniscient optic nerve.
I stand and look for my gate but the crowd refuses to part for me. No way presents itself. All I feel, ahead and above, without and within, is the engulfing presence of God’s Chair in the dark corner of the cosmos. The divinity of His rhythmic Stroke. The enormity of His Terrible, Terrible Smile.
Jon Doughboy is just one little scribbler dancing on Literature’s infinite retina @doughboywrites