Sky Diving Topless
Tales Of The Traveling Twins
I got my first job teaching English overseas at the end of a painful and pathetic period of my life as a drug-addicted degenerate barely surviving in Eugene, Oregon USA. I was 42 years old. My preferred pick-me-up at the time was methamphetamine, the down-market stimulant of choice for a slew of sad sacks like me who got hooked on uppers and pornography, the ultimate double whammy in the powerful and lethal world of addiction. I went to Eugene to be with my identical twin brother, Marlon, who had purchased a mobile home there and who, like me, had been traveling for many years on dead-end escape routes to nowhere. Wanderlust had seduced the Tanner twins long ago. It propelled us along our converging our roads of self-destruction, driving us to the brink of madness in the twisted twin tales we would forever share.
Eugene was a relatively pleasant and livable American city filled with plenty of decent people. Most of the ordinary folks who put down roots there must certainly have enjoyed satisfying lives in the serene and slow-moving community. As the second largest municipality in Oregon, Eugene offered its residents a splash of big-city culture mixed with a touch of small-town charm. The city boasted scenic parks, quaint neighborhoods, and trendy redevelopments in the uptown and downtown areas, but the sleepy burg would always be known first and foremost as a blue-ribbon collegiate town, with the University of Oregon football team topping the talk-of-the-town list. The Ducks provided a source of great pride and solidarity among the townspeople from bankers and barristers to bums on the street. The Ducks were their team. They belonged to college football and it belonged to them. On the surface, Eugene was the kind of place most of its respectable citizens could be proud of. But I had lost my own sense of pride and no longer felt proud to be an American. The mounting social ills of my country, particularly the crumbling infrastructures of cities like Eugene, made me feel angry and ashamed. The USA had become the most sinister and self-absorbed superpower on the planet. The abundant and propitious America of my youth - in the freewheeling 60s and high-spirited 70s - was long gone, and the quality of middle-class life in the states had been sliding downhill for decades. Life was good at the top of the food chain but going from bad to worse at the bottom. As an unfortunate yet self-made bottom feeder, I rolled into Eugene a week before the 9/11 terror attacks with a little less than a grand of cash in my pocket and everything I owned packed into the back of my '86 Nissan hatchback. I arrived late in the afternoon on a bright September day. Merging my way into the heart of the unfamiliar city, my restless mind flooded with an overwhelming sense of loneliness, fear, and despair. I was a middle-aged man oddly out of sorts with the world, a bum who had hit the road one too many times. In the wake of my final getaway from San Diego, California - the birthplace of the traveling twins and home to a mixed bag of our treasured and traumatic memories - I felt as though I was immersed and drowning in a liquid universe from which there was no visible escape. I was swimming for my very survival, like a lone shark in a dim, unfathomable sea, and I needed to keep moving to stay alive. Marlon had given me his phone number, but not his address, so I checked into the Franklin Inn and called him from my room. "Hello?" he said, his voice making me feel instantly less lonely. "It's me, " I chirped, "I'm back, bro." "Hey man, what's up?" Marlon said coolly. His lukewarm manner made my heart sink. "Marty T is in the house man, I made it to Eugene!" I jauntily proclaimed, hoping to spur him on. "Okay, glad you made it, man. Where are you?" "I'm at the Franklin Inn, " I sighed, "near the university." "Sure, I know where it is, be there in 20 minutes." By M.E. Lilly - I'm an American expatiate living, teaching, and writing in China.Saints Row: The Third - Topless Skydiving
28 Sep 2011 at 11:42am
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