A mid-afternoon text message from Wil has never been unexpected. Perhaps I’m sensitive to telecommunication emissions, that would explain the nausea House gives me, but I always seem to expect a call before it arrives whether vital or trivial. Little more surprising was the invitation to explore the Yellow Line MAX which Wil presented for the day following. Naturally, I accepted, being a man of quiet whimsy and casual adventure. I can’t imagine myself accompanying a friend on a backpacking trip through Central America, but I wouldn’t hesitate an offer to fly to Boise and drive a rented car three hours to find a reputed hotdog and pretzel stand, provided the tickets, rental fees, and lunch were all gratis. It’s the adventure of the semi-planned travels, the discovery of the already discovered, and the opportunity to weave grand epics out of mediocre threads that make putting my shoes on worth the effort.
Wearing my adventure shoes, I met Wil the next day for our exploration and mental documentation of the Yellow Line’s source and end. Former MAX adventures had been successful, so our hopes were fairly high. Already, we had traced the Hillsboro/Gresham Blue Line, finding ourselves lost for nearly three hours in Wil’s old haunts before dining at an Elmer’s, and the Beaverton/Portland International Airport Red Line, triggering a time-traveling alternate reality drama by commenting too loudly on the KY jelly in the contraband display. Ending at Portland’s Expo Center, the Yellow held untold potential, especially given the presence of a pasty man wearing a silk hat and twisted moustaches.
As we neared the line’s end, the suspected magician had already vanished by filing out of the train with other glum passengers and most of our excitement. The urban flash of Portland—where it exists—had been replaced by a sprawl of weathered houses and dirty dive bars, giving our adventure a depressing pressure upon its struggling heart. Though I used to frequent the raceway in the Expo area during youthful weekends, the sights we saw were utterly void of the bubbly anticipation I once experienced. It was like a supervillain from a public broadcasting cartoon had stolen all the color from North Portland. Even the MAX’s yellow badges became whitewashed the further we plunged into the void.
At the final platform, the train simply stopped without announcement, as though it ran on joy and the biological laws of diffusion had robbed it of its last rainbow-coated smile. The doors opened and a trickling of withered souls shuffled off into the depression. Wil and I sat quietly in stupefaction. He offered a mumbled snipe at the train, hardly audible over the sound of Time’s squeaking wheels, nearly frozen by the vacuum of stimulation. And then a devil came into our midst.
With words of agreement slowly advancing along my tongue, a cigarette-rough voice broke the stillness of the train and caused my comment to stumble in sheer bafflement. Scarcely had we been waiting for more than four minutes when stubbled man in a button down tee-shirt and an Adidas ball cap stomped onto the train, yelling into his cellphone. He sat behind Wil and I, holding himself in a practiced tuck to make his arms and chest bulge against his shirt as though he was intimately familiar with gym equipment. For another three, agonizing minutes, the man shouted out the details of his affair in sneering tones.
“When she saw the e-mail, I told her it was private and she should just leave it alone unless she wants to find herself back on the market,” he said with a choking laugh of pride and emphysema.
“Should we get off and look around somewhere?” I offered through “It’s a good thing she didn’t see the attachments, Vicky was practicing with her crop and camera.”
“Maybe the adventure’s just out there, waiting for us to find it?” I finished as the adulterous machismo manual behind described how Vicky made the crop disappear. I made a mental note to avoid any leather-clad horse trainers if I ever found myself at MagiCon.
Wil was beginning to incline his head for a grim nod when his eyes froze in an arresting stare. Masked by the inflated stories of Vicky the Equine Illusionist’s proud sponsor and saddle, a young man had walked onto the train and moved to sit across the aisle from us. Dressed in worn jeans, dress vest, and leather jacket, he carried a hardcase for a guitar and swayed to give his vivid red and purple hair a constant undulating shimmer. As he pulled a red acoustic from the case, I felt the tingling brush across the interior of my skull caused by an uncanny confluence of events.
I don’t know the devil, but he probably carries a guitar. For all the beauty and emotion that a guitar can evoke, it can also weave snares from the air’s vibration and forge sensuous silver hooks already placed in the listener’s ears and chest. So potent is this potential, that the guitar is the tool of choice for neophyte and master manipulators when extracting money, sympathy, or virginity. And given the sudden appearance of a guitar-equipped youth in the midst of the permanent doldrums of North Portland, I was suspicious of the instrument’s power in so amplifying an environment.
My suspicions were given a hearty squeeze of the crotch as the busker began to play a broken melody on six strings with two paired. As he strummed, his voice squeaked out a string of prepositions and adverbs through maltreated vocal cords.
“Sublimely at in over haltingly roundly flatly before under down,” he repeated with varying pitch.
Troubled, I turned to Wil for a glib remark, but found him transfixed by the invisible web being drawn around him. Mr. Vicky-lets-me-tape-everything was also impaled upon unseen needles like a specimen in a lepidopterist’s cabinet. Their eyes were soft and liquid, vibrating with the arrhythmic beat. They breathed in shallow breezes, more drifting with the pressure of the atmosphere than pumping by the lungs. Their mouths were lightly held in barely perceptible grins.
For minutes, I watched, perturbed and unwilling to break the spell lest it hold some greater demon in its notes. As the music flowed through the train and out its doors, travelers and passersby were swept up in the chaotic eddies and deposited in the seats and aisles. None heeded my inquiring glances, all stared in ocean-deep reveries. Eventually, the train noiselessly awoke and glided away from the platform, unlike its jostling brethren. Though the spell imbued the clattering machinery with organic fluidity, it didn’t fight the oppressive vacuum of North Portland. Color didn’t weep back into the train’s yellow badges and the gaping hole in my chest wasn’t knitting closed.
“W-what are you?” I asked the strumming enigma.
“Are you a magician?” I tried. “Can you get tickets to MagiCon?”
Like an arcane savant who sacrifices his senses to see the world beyond his own, the youth tumbled from preposition to adverb, unaware of my prodding.
We pulled up to the first station. Nobody within the train moved, but as the music splashed onto the dead concrete among the feet of those on the platform, a calm tide of people emptied into the waiting seats of the train leaving nobody behind. Silently, the doors closed and the train departed.
“Nicely up of absolutely free side dish with the purchase of any pitcher kindly after toward,” the youth sang.
I was dumbfounded. The words stood out by their grammatical purchase, but in the swells of the jumbled corpus, they were almost obscured. As he repeated the subliminal refrain, my quiet dread transmogrified into utter disappointment and disgust. The great chasm torn by the vacuum writhed and twisted into calloused revulsion.
“You’re no magician,” I protested. “You’re just an elaborate advertising campaign! Have you no pride in your craft? Have you no love for the art?”
My questions fell on deaf ears as the silver-string liar played his peddling music. A tear began to form in my eye. We were on the cusp of adventure, but some greedy shark and his overgrown street urchin had turned it into intermission at the drive-in. It was like Sir Edmund Hillary climbing Everest only to find a bed and breakfast with exorbitant prices and horrible toast.
The music stopped a few stations later. I wiped my frustrated tear as people came to, realizing their misplacement. Wil drew in a full breath and caught a lucid gleam in his eye a moment before the shameless advertisement started anew in different notes and plays at rhythm.
“Tickle shack figs nobody bucketing widest selection of imported beers in Chinatown factor grunt mint leaves.”
Again, the train was enraptured.
It wasn’t until Downtown that the music stopped again with a collective breath from the passengers. This time, the earache prodigy packed away his guitar amid a tumult of annoyance and emotional sniffs. I had taken to imagining the Magicians’ Collective discovering the soulless dream-rapist and turning his face the color of his hair, so I was staring off when Wil leapt for the aisle. He crowded around the blackguard magician with Vicky’s little man and an old woman who reached for the likely fake leather coat.
“Who are you, young man?” she trembled.
“Three percent of your bill in Chinatown,” I muttered.
“I’m called Jim,” the hellspawned busker smiled.
Jim strutted away with smug pride, I’m sure. The doors closed behind him and the train lumbered on with squeaks and squeals. At the next stop, a handful of people jumped train, reeling into Chinatown by the subliminal hooks Jim embedded during his forty minutes choking his guitar to death. Wil tried to follow, but a simple “We should get home” called from my seat pulled him away from the door as it closed. He stumbled back to his seat and mused for the remainder of the trip. I let him be.
Maybe Jim wasn’t so bad if you looked at him from within his spell. He clearly gave some pleasure despite making so many people late and drawing a few into the recesses of Chinatown to be fleeced by whatever restaurateur or barkeep enlisted the guy. That so few ran off to find him that day may indicate how little harm he’s done. But when I think about my ruined adventure, I’m glad I sent a letter along to the Collective. I also got a neat little brass pin for my trouble.
Your compelling lyrical descriptions effortlessly focused my attention.
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